Fractured Figure: Works from the Dakis Joannu Collection
DESTE Foundation
Athens, Greece
6 September 2007 - 29 March 2008

by Rea Cris

This exhibition is the third in a series about the figure.   The previous ones focused on the external body of fashion, plastic surgery, the figure, and the evolution of technology. This exhibit, as the name implies, focuses on the tense figure of a terrorist-threatened and discontented society.   As the exhibition curator, Jeffery Deitch explains, "if every period in art can be characterized by an approach to figuration that reflects the prevailing sense of the human condition, Fractured Figure represents a sense of cultural dysphoria, a state of dissatisfaction and anxiety, the opposite of euphoria. The new figural form is ruptured and deteriorating. It is fragile, just like real people."

This exhibition is characterised by a lot of wax, rubber and waste, which give connotations to fat, shit and dripping liquids. The show features Folkert De Jong's nightmarish sculpture in marshmallow colours, Urs Fisher's candle Graces, their heads melting, their shoulders slumped and their nipples vivid and hollow and Paul McCarthy's Pig with its prominent asshole and vagina.

The works on display are sourced from a sole collector.   The main protagonists are Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan and Paul McCarthy each featuring more than once, which creates too much repetition and eventual immunity to the intended discomforting value of the works as a whole. As well as not having enough variety in their choice of artists, the exhibition is confused, not defining whether it is mocking and taunting this individual metaphysical figure or whether they are sheltering it by addressing its attention to the 'bad guys' of society and politics.   We do not understand whether the fractured figure is a helpless and blameless victim as a result of these external forces or whether it is just as implicated in its own destruction as its supposed malefactors.

There are a few artists who do try to convey a sense of simultaneous anxiety and wasteful caprice, without the use of extreme and exaggerated materials.   Tim Hawkinson's "Penitent", a kneeling skeleton, almost execution style, its arms limp at its side, its internal organs a rudimentary mechanism wheezing away, its feet mangled and useless. Paul Chan's "1 st Light" is an apocalyptic Plato's Cave as material objects peacefully float up while people tumble to their death. Tim Nobie and Sue Webster's "Dirty White Trash (With Seagulls)" is a mound of one year's worth of their trash, which project a shadow silhouette of the artists blissfully oblivious to their waste and destruction.   And for the cherry on top?   Tino Sehgal's "This is Propaganda", a live sculpture in the form of an adorable operatic lady under the guise of a security guard singing 'This is propaganda, you know". We know, we know.

www.deste.gr

www.jeffkoons.com

Kiki Smith: www.barbarakrakowgallery.com

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