“I, for my part, wonder in what state of soul and what state of mind that man was who first touched his mouth to blood and brought his lips to the flesh of an animal.”
[Plutarch, On Eating Meat]
The idea at work behind the lines in the collaboration between John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff is a declination of the concept of «sarcophagy», that is, literally, «the act of eating flesh» which, for the two artists, represents much more than an eating habit. It is, in fact, remodeled here as topos of provocation and reflection. In exactly the way it is for the mouth, the sarcophagy also ceases to be only a place of devouring and becomes reconfigured as a possible place of vociferation1. From ingestion to conception and creation.
On the one hand, Carl Michael von Hausswolff presents us with the deadly side and the terrible power of sarcophagy, which is to say, the violent appropriation of the life and energy of the other, in a reflection on the definition of the human being as a social animal. The work Legacy (The Four Riders of the Apocalypse – Pestilence, War, Famine and Death), inspired by the homicide of Joan Vollmer by her husband William S. Burroughs, recalls a case of the violent appropriation of the life of another within a private context, not codified by the social contract and thus where each human being is the wolf for other human beings2 (even though the case is not devoid of its own macabre irony: the incident in fact happened during an attempt at replicating “William Tell”, the symbol of the struggle against the oppressor!). Nevertheless, as suggested by the work Legacy (Out, Demons, Out!!!), the terrible and devouring power innate to human nature proves to be even more dreadful when, in a play of mimesis, it assumes the forms of a struggle for military political power in which the sovereign transforms into the beast, the father into the wolf3, the divinity into Kronos. Behind the memorials and the real sarcophaguses, and behind all of their flowers, one can’t help but see an eternal and maniacal lament for a power gone astray, of being prone to the negative.
On the other hand – and on top of this – the works of John Duncan speak to us instead of a form of sarcophagy directed toward the positive, one in which the appropriation of the body and life energy of the other are forms of a power which is joyful and capable of giving life rather than taking it away. Here, the feminine is rendered homage: the value of the genital organ is transvaluated in its double function. As a Kronos in reverse, the ingestion is never definitive, deadly, but, on the contrary, is a carrier of life, of new worlds and new civilizations which, as in the series of works Monuments Scale Models, flourish from it and from all around it. The threshold that separates these two epiphanies of a single archaic and profound power is, thus, the distinction between masculine and feminine – between Ade and Persefone, Kronos and Gaia; yet, as the work The Black Door warns us, such distinction has nothing to do with the unavoidability of a chromosomal destiny, but concerns instead a free choice for a cosmogonic myth4.
“But you who live now, what madness and what frenzy drives you to thirst for blood, you who have everything you need and in such abundance?”
[Plutarch, On Eating Meat] Giacomo Matteo Miniussi
Translation: Laurie Schwartz