Interference
Liane Lang has spent several months photographing the plaster copies of classical
sculptures held in the Royal Academy collection. These sculptures, often cast
from already damaged originals, are yellowed with age and show additional
damage from generations of use as teaching material in the art school’s
past.
At first glance the artist’s interventions in these photographs seem
to point to performance art. A girl is draping herself across a section of
the Elgin Marbles, adding to the confusing and headless outline of the heavily
damaged Dione and Aphrodite. In another image a figure is snuggling up in
the arms of Theseus, who takes his name from the Greek word for Institution.
Theseus is also heavily damaged and missing his hands and feet. The figure
in his arms displays her limbs to the viewer almost provocatively. The artist
is seeking shelter in the arms of the crumbling institution.
The artist suggests that her work is “performance art without performers,
with no acting or self consciousness. The photographs are animation in a still
image, bringing dead matter to life convincingly enough to be unsettling.
An uncanny semblance of life can at times suggest more sentient depth than
the real thing, and can induce closer scrutiny in the viewer. In this series
particularly, it’s about dead art being resuscitated for a photograph.“
In Madonna and Children a young woman is wrapping her arms around Michelangelo’s
Madonna in a gentle embrace. The title invites the viewer to imagine Mary’s
teenage daughter. Fondling Germanicus, shows a pair of hands groping an effete
looking Roman nude from behind. But what is that tiny object hes holding in
his right hand? Ars Equina, is an erotic image of a naked girl with an unnaturally
tiny waist, modelling a horse’s bottom out of clay. Next to her is her
model, a flayed plaster cast of a horse, seen also from behind.
The figures look carefully arranged and sometimes appear incomplete and slightly
awkward. Clearly all is not as it should be with these performers. They look
a little limp and lifeless, their skin in places damaged and discoloured,
faces turned away or hidden.
The reason for their strangeness is that these figures arranged with the sculptures
are in fact sculptures themselves. Cast in rubber latex and silicon, these
bodies pose convincingly as human, but are no more animate than the casts
they adorn. The images are still lives, sculptural interventions, more about
formal composition than photographic storytelling. They are in fact the opposite
of live art.