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Lassalle's Post-Modern Male Torso
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Featured August 11 , 2006
 Lucianne Lassalle. Male Torso In the Post-Modern period it's again ok to create art that is "impure": to indulge in "imitation" and "illusion" and even to "feed and water the passions." And this fine torso by Lucianne Lassalle arouses various tensions: attraction and repulsion, illusion and denial: "This is, and is not, a human body." Almost terra-cotta in color, its bronze has been oxidized, painted or blow-torched to suggest both tanned human skin and terra cotta - reminding us that it was first modelled in clay, and only later cast in bronze. And to this tension, between the soft and the hard, which Rodin had pioneered to prove he had not, as critics charged, made life casts in plaster directly from the model, is added another: that we ourselves are made of earth and clay, and unto dust and clay we must return. Post-modern, and post-mortem, its corruscations and corrosions suggest both a freshly-excavated fragment of an antique bronze statue, and a just-exhumed human body. Thus, though still intact in the regenerative department, a price has been paid, since the top of the torso, containing its upper chest and shoulders, has been cut away, circum-scribed, then "circum-cised," so to speak, revealing that the torso is truly hollow, mere metal and not solid human flesh. Yet it seems to ask, like Hamlet, How solid - or sullied - is human flesh? As if in answer, its surface has been treated with an oxidizing agent or blowtorch to create disconcerting, disfiguring discolorations - ugly splotches that on real human skin would be twice as repellent for being caused by disease, or even death and decay, such as the bulboes in both still-living and rotting corpses - bodies ravaged by the millions centuries ago in the days of the Black Death, and again today in the Age of Aids. To paraphrase that art-loving priest and philosopher, Jacques Maritain: "an interesting mottling in a statue, perhaps, but a serious defect in a man." Ms. Lassale, who was born and raised in France, may or may not have recalled Flaubert's homeo-erotic tale of "St. Julian the Hospitaler," in which the saint, in the ecstasy of a dream or vision, embraces humanity in the person of Christ re-incarnated and disguised as a scabrous, foul-smelling leper. Yet in entitling her piece "Male torso (Jason)" perhaps she did want to remind us how Medea revenged herself on Jason by giving his new trophy wife a poisoned robe that burned her alive? Picture credit: Lucianne Lassale, ceramic sculpture; www.luciannelassalle.co.uk. 1st of April - 4th June 2006. Mosaic Seasons - Ancient meets Modern Thanks to Kallistos Alexandros for introducing us to this torso. This article is the first of three his post has inspired. The next two, sitill under construction, are on Rodin's torso, an offshoot or study for his St. John and Walking Man; and on Constantin Brancusi's utterly modernist torsos. |
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~ Table of Contents ~
TYCHE & OEDIPUS
Adonis & Aphrodite Fatal Boar Hunts, Fatal Loves: Meleager & Adonis A Valentine for Camille Flammarion The Met returns its Euphronios vase! Camille Flammarion: Romantic Astronomer The Fountains of Enceladus The Eye of God Is Ganymede the Boy from Marathon Bay? THE ANCIENT OLYMPIEIA FESTIVAL AT ATHENS Which satyr would you choose... The Marathon Boy and the Satyr Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy The Afternoon of a Faun The Dancing Satyr - A Lost Bronze of Praxiteles? Hermes, The Liar Who Invented the Lyre Inanna, Queen of Uruk Inanna Adored: The Uruk Vase The Moon-God Nanna-Sin Visits his Ziggurat at Ur Apollo Sauroktonos, or How the Romans Killed the Lizard-Killer Jacob's Ladder Inanna and the Harrowing of Hell Lilith: Wild Demon of Sex and Death DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP The Sun God in his Dragon Boat A Stairway to Heaven: The Ziggurat at Ur Brancusi on Men and Women: Take the Tate Test? Four Gods Greet the Rising Sun God Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo Culsu & Vanth Lead the Dead into Hades Aita, the Etruscan Hades Socrates' Apology: The Background A FATEFUL CHARIOT RACE: The STORY of PELOPS and OENOMAUS |
