David Byrne: Metamorphosis Machine
Ever changing and ever challenging, David Byrne has metamorphosed his way far beyond the paradigm of the Talking Heads frontman that made him a rock star of his day.
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Marc Quinn: The Art of Blood.
Today the prospect of impending death doesn’t loom quite as large as it once did, when life was fragile and mortality something to confront on a routine basis. Disease rendered life fragile, and death was a constant menace.
Of course, life is still fragile, even today. One false step - some bad luck, a wrong decision - and everything can disappear in a second, switched off, terminated.
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British artist Marc Quinn’s iconic sculpture, Self (1991), is much the same. It’s a self-portrait, a traditional bust, but it’s made of blood surgically drained from his own body; nine pints of it in fact, enough to keep an average male alive. The blood is frozen, and the head never leaves the refrigerated cabinet it now calls home. Switch it off at the mains, trip over the cable and yank it from its socket, and Self is gone. It’s a powerful metaphor for the fragility of our own existence.
Quinn continues to explore life, mortality and science in his work. “In a way, art and science are the same thing,” he says. “Science is creating the alphabet and art is writing the words.”
Most sweat blood writing those words. Quinn just extracts his own.
Words: Oscar Powell
Images: Stephen White
©2010 RELENTLESS RELENTLESSENERGY.COM
01 February 2009
New World Order: Bat For Lashes
Lycanthropy, shape-shifting, the power of the moon, the tidal flow of blood. These are mythologies embedded deep in the female psyche, mysteries of flesh and soul connecting even the most modern woman to her darkest, primal self. Angela Carter knew this, creating feminist transfigurations of traditional fairy tales in her volume, The Bloody Chamber, later adapted into Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves. Natasha Khan knows it too. As Bat for Lashes, she weaves this dark imagery of transformation and possession into music.