Witkin's Backwoods High Art Freak Extravaganza

In Joel-Peter Witkin’s 1992 photograph titled “Cupid and Centaur”, the viewer finds several different animal skeletons, one of them human, combined to create the illusion of two unnatural creatures. The human skeleton is complete, down to the base of the spine, at which point Witkin has attached it to the body of an ostrich, in the middle of its neck. The length of the combined vertebrae is similar to that of an ostrich’s natural neck, so the viewer can more easily perceive these mutilated bodies as a single mythical beast. On the back of the ostrich sits what appears to be either a complete ape skeleton or else a human child’s skeleton with a baboon skull—the legs are long enough to rouse that haunting suspicion. The ape-headed creature, whatever it is, also has a large, fully-feathered bird wing fixed to its back, and sits slumped with its arm dangling, staring lazily off to the side like a sub-moronic jockey.
Witkin seems to intend the surrounding set to resemble a turn-of-the-century artist’s studio (the skylight, the large stained curtain, etc.)—or else Frankenstein’s laboratory—and goes further to impose this phony antiquity onto the photograph by physically distressing the surface with scratches and smudges when printing. These tactics come across as cheap ways to hide the irrefutable goofiness of Witkin’s whole project. All he’s really done is had the stomach and, I suppose, audacity, to work and play with the creepy-crawlies—bones, heads, fetuses, the like. However, his combinations of these things hardly bring anything to light. The viewer confronts his images like any circus-goer would: with a dull sense of wonder and a brief pang of disgust. At least, in this particular piece, Ringmaster Witkin is not directly exploiting the oddities of living human beings, as he does in much of his other work.
Perhaps the most obnoxious thing about this freak show science project is Witkin’s title, in which he designates his forms the two familiar mythological figures, Cupid, and the centaur. Although he does not even accurately recreate the figures as the legends call for—obviously Cupid was no monkey, and centaurs were part horse, not part ostrich—he seems to long for this connection to Greek Mythology as a way to pirate its legitimacy as high artistic source material. Besides, any recognition of combined animal forms calls back to mythology anyway, so there is no need for Witkin’s reiteration. Either he must think that the intelligence level of his audience is equivalent to that of a second-grader, or else he’s spotlighting the difference between all the “mainstream” mythology paintings and his outrageously radical combines with snotty sarcasm.
In general, what is irritating about Witkin’s work is the distance he goes to ensure his work a sense of fine art authenticity. I find his amalgamations in “Cupid and Centaur” interesting objectively, however, the excessive layers of artsy motifs (the black and white film, the faux smudges, the artists’ drop cloths and dried flowers on the stage) wind up absolutely smothering the minimal uniqueness that Witkin’s project might have had going for it in the beginning.

Playtime at BCAM!

In Robert Therrien’s piece No Title 2003 (Table and Six Chairs), the artist presents just what the parentheses indicate: a table, and six chairs. However, the simple description does not give away the fact that this otherwise mundane dining room set is in fact ten feet tall and nearly thirty feet across. Therrien had each piece professionally fabricated with metal, which was then painted to look like the dark wood of the original set in Therrien’s kitchen that he used for inspiration. Every detail of the furniture has been attended to, from the aged metal hardware under the table to the subtle overlaps in the hand-made joints, to the round plastic feet on the bottoms of the chair legs.

The fact that Therrien went so far to accurately replicate the particulars of this ordinary furniture set makes the viewer’s experience of the piece entirely determined by its scale. He has made sure that no differences between his mammoth sculpture and the original set will attract a critical eye, besides the obvious. Upon encountering Table and Six Chairs, the viewer instantly recognizes the objects and overlays his memories of similar furniture onto his present experience with Therrien’s piece. In other words, the sculpture is a table and six chairs in the mind of the viewer, they just happen to be very large.

Once this recognition is achieved, the experience of Therrien’s work becomes more about the viewer’s experience of himself in its presence. The conscious understanding that the table and chairs are big, is outweighed by the viewer’s own sensation of feeling small. The artist is intending to trigger such a sensation because viewers are encouraged to walk between the legs, stand underneath, peer up at the bottom of the table, and so forth. From this bizarrely familiar vantage point, the work activates the memories of childhood, and incites the imagination to conjure up all the possible conditions of having such a vantage point. As I stand beneath the table I imagine whose legs would be jutting out from those chairs…there’s my mother, then my grandfather at the head, then perhaps my aunt with her black high-heels and crossed legs. As I continue to mill about below, I come to imagining that I am my cousin’s cat, China, rubbing up and down on all the various ankles, looking for a hand to pet me or perhaps smuggle me a piece of chicken skin.

The fertile imaginative ground in and around Therrien’s piece is the result of a profound sense of dislocation one feels when next to such fantastically sized objects. The piece is so large that when underneath it, everything beyond the legs of the chairs might as well be in another museum. Therrien’s use of scale in this piece is even more complicated than that, however. Each piece is not in fact fabricated directly to scale. Therrien based their measurements on how the original set appeared when photographed from the floor. And since every viewer is guaranteed to share that perspective, no one would ever think to question the objects’ dimensions. In this way Therrien in infusing his piece specifically with a child’s perspective (or for that matter, a cat’s, or anyone besides an average adult’s,) so that the jump to that childlike, imaginative state of mind is all the more immediate.

There is also something to be said for that fact that experiencing Therrien’s Table and Six Chairs and taking his imaginative cues is fun. Fun isn’t often the outcome of looking at art, though it should be recognized as a rather significant transportive device. There have been many artists who work with humor, making viewers smile with their clever jabs at the establishment, et cetera, but rarely does an artist harness the power of what is fun to us as children. There are no waterslides or pillow fights or costume chests to be found at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. In adult life, seeing the world in any way but the way it is, is usually deemed unproductive, inefficient, and even insane. Robert Therrien however captures in his piece the significance of the fun in pretending. His huge, uncanny objects are so other-worldly, that they instantly authorize the viewer to leave the world of the museum, and wholeheartedly engage in the invention of a world all his own.