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REBECCA WARREN (b.1965) The Twins Reinforced Clay, Perspex vitrine and plinth 200 x 132 x 36 cm Executed in 2004 Provenance: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Exhibited: Rebecca Warren: Dark Passage, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2004 Pas de Deux, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2005 Literature: Rebecca Warren, (ex. cat.) Serpentine Gallery, Koenig Books, London, 2009, p.15. Rebecca Warren: Dark Passage, Kunsthalle Zürich, Verlag, 2004, p.67. Neal, Brown, “Mad and Ugly, Parkett 78, 2006, pp.32-37, p.35. Martin Herbert, “Pressure Zone,” Parkett 78 (2006): pp.44-51, p.47. Stephen Maine, “Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks,” Art in America, May 2006, 183-184. |
A large rectangular saccharine pink plinth. Two disfigured bare-breasted dancing girls in shrunken tutus encased in an airless vitrine share the elevated pedestal space. The two figures, like twins, are similar but different. Each stands with her hands joined behind her back, right foot forward, body weight transferred to the back leg, in the manner of Degas', Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. But each has feet more like blocks than slippers, and they each have similarly distorted calve, thigh and quad muscles. Each has bulbous, oddly disproportionate hips, the width of which their tiny apron-like tutus fail hopelessly to cover. Both have unusually large rounded and strangely upright breasts and both their heads are disfigured and featureless. But they are not identical.
Rebecca Warren’s The Twins examines the sculptural support as a site of representation, a process which exposes the ideology of the autonomous object of minimalism and reveals a multiplicity of sub-sites both seen and unseen which function simultaneously within it; the site of identity construction and display, the site of illusionism and theatricality, the site of the monument, the site of authorship and self-expression, and the site of translation and transformation.
Rebecca Warren’s The Twins examines the sculptural support as a site of representation, a process which exposes the ideology of the autonomous object of minimalism and reveals a multiplicity of sub-sites both seen and unseen which function simultaneously within it; the site of identity construction and display, the site of illusionism and theatricality, the site of the monument, the site of authorship and self-expression, and the site of translation and transformation.
In Warren’s work Brecht’s "missing parts" or gaps are manifest in the strange translation that results from the attempted representation, resulting in objects which teeter on the brink between recognition and the unknown, exposing representation as a language written in difference. The Twins communicates Warren’s interest in what Martin Herbert has described as “an anxiety about that which resembles something, but isn’t that thing” – the abject doppelganger.
Degas had kept an anthropomorphic wax personification of a little fourteen-year-old dancer with him in his studio all his life and refused to cast it in bronze. Warren’s study of Degas' anthropomorphism and The Twins' engagement with the support structure as a kind of stage, are interpreted by Barry Schwabsky as lessons learned from minimalism. In “Art and Objecthood” Michael Fried suggests that minimalism becomes theatrical through anthropomorphism as the viewer engages the minimalist work, not as an autonomous art object, but via a theatrical interaction. Fried’s anthropomorphism connotes “a surrogate person-that is, a kind of statue” which he sees as existing in the “hollowness” of much minimalist work. This hollowness, Fried posited, contributes to the idea of a separate inside; an idea mirrored in the human form. Warren’s treatment of the plinth as literal stage and her double representation of an actual surrogate performer, both resonates with, and challenges Fried’s description.
Degas had kept an anthropomorphic wax personification of a little fourteen-year-old dancer with him in his studio all his life and refused to cast it in bronze. Warren’s study of Degas' anthropomorphism and The Twins' engagement with the support structure as a kind of stage, are interpreted by Barry Schwabsky as lessons learned from minimalism. In “Art and Objecthood” Michael Fried suggests that minimalism becomes theatrical through anthropomorphism as the viewer engages the minimalist work, not as an autonomous art object, but via a theatrical interaction. Fried’s anthropomorphism connotes “a surrogate person-that is, a kind of statue” which he sees as existing in the “hollowness” of much minimalist work. This hollowness, Fried posited, contributes to the idea of a separate inside; an idea mirrored in the human form. Warren’s treatment of the plinth as literal stage and her double representation of an actual surrogate performer, both resonates with, and challenges Fried’s description.
Warren’s exposure of the “strangeness” of the authored representation bears comparison to Foucault's notion of discourse which refutes the notion of truth in favor of a network of intrinsically linked utterances and fragments-of-utterances which in turn are connected to a larger network of statements which form the discourse. As Claire Colebrook has noted Foucault’s de-centering problematises the definition “of thought as re-presentation: the faithful image, copy or doubling of the present.” The association to discourse also operates at the level of Warren’s individual works; Schwabsky uses the term “concatenations” to describe the surfaces of the sculptures in which each inflection and gesture within the clay refers to another and back to another. This implication of mutability in Schwabsky’s notion is furthered by the materiality of the unfired New Clay which in essence, preserves its pliancy and potential for change. These concatenations are visible as finger indentations on the right feet of each figure, the enlarged, erect big toe alluding to the ideological preference for verticality in the act of presentation. The sculptural emphasis placed on the big toes suggests George Bataiile’s notion of seduction a reading supported by Magnani’s description of The Twins as like dancers in a peep show. Magnani notes the work’s installation in Warren's Zurich exhibition Dark Passage, where the figures were positioned facing the wall, literally turning their back-sides to the viewer, embracing their position as objects of the gaze and “ready to kick open the door and reveal Degas' embarrassing erection.”
Man has an obsession with verticality, writes George Bataille in his
essay "The Big Toe" (Documents in 1929) “he raises himself up
in the air like a tree and is all the more beautiful for his erection…
he has his feet in the mud and his head in the light.”
