Bacon, Hyenas, & How to Wrap 5 Eggs
Here’s the plan: For 2021 I work to a 6-week begun-and-done production cycle. On the 3rd week I post my INSPIRATION for the piece I’m working on; on the 6th I post the PROCESS.
INSPIRATION for me seems to spring from 3 overlapping pools of interests and roughly corresponds to my perennial questions, why demons, why heads, why paper?:
The Fantastical: masks of all sorts, costumes, handmade parades and festivals, Hell Mouths, the Mutant Vehicles at Burning Man, myths and fairy tales.
The Psychological: identity issues -largely LGBTQ-related, but more broadly, knowing your insides to be different from your outsides, dual consciousnesses, peeling the multiple and contradictory onion layers of personality.
The Architectural: paper construction, primitive huts, Gaudi, theverymany and thin shell construction, theme parks, as well as the architecture of natural forms -shells, nests, skeletons, leaves.
Here’s what I found myself drawing from while modeling my current double head, HYENA:
Why Demons? Francis Bacon & his fantastical portraits
Francis Bacon/ L: Self-Portrait, 1969/ R: Study of Henrietta Moraes, 1969
I can’t do this, but it’s what I’m after. Much as I love his screeching beasts and molten wrestler/lovers, it’s the series of portraits I really go for. They are so moving to me. Sculptural and seemingly three-dimensional, they are also so much about paint and its handling. Cut paper as I’m using it is a fact; it can’t be as ambiguous or suggestive as fluid paint, and yet, as I mash and mold the organic model around in the computer, I’m thinking how can I really twist it out of realism and make it more alive, more mysterious, more real …and still make it hold together and stand up?
Francis Bacon/ Three Studies of Muriel Belcher, 1966
Francis Bacon/ Three Studies of George Dyer, 1969
One of a number of famous interviews with David Sylvester. Trigger warning: incessant smoking.
Why Heads? Hyenas & the Unclean
Hyenas in Medieval Bestiaries
Hyenas were thought to be hermaphrodites and change their sex regularly -one year male, the next year female -and were thus deceitful and unclean. Tore open graves and ate dead people, too, according to Medieval bestiaries. Along with hares (thought to grow a new anus every year, thanks to their own ambiguous genitalia) and weasels (thought to copulate orally), they were symbols of homosexuality in Medieval iconography. Don’t eat them, or you too will be afflicted.
Hyenas in the wild: truly hideous
There is some basis for the gender confusion. The females are somewhat bigger and more aggressive than the males… and sport a fully erectile 7” pseudo-penis made from an (amazingly) enlarged clitoris. There are even “testicles” where the labia are fused to form a lumpy pseudo-scrotum. Even researchers in the field get confused.
The poor females have to urinate, get pregnant, and give birth to a two-pound cub through this tube. Giving birth cannot possibly be pleasant; there are very high incidents of 1) the pseudo-penis splitting, 2) cubs suffocating on the way out, and 3) first-time mothers dying during delivery.
For more cringe-inducing descriptions -and pictures of the aforementioned genitalia, check out:
https://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/male-or-female-good-question/
Rainbow LaGuardia: 27 LGBTQ faculty and staff interviewed by students at LaGuardia Community College
Modern day hyenas: Do these folks look that fearsome to you? Amazing that even in our coastal cities, representation still matters, especially for young people who grow up badly isolated and without guidance. The oral histories at the root of this project are completely relatable as these folks talk about their bouts with religion, their families, their jobs, and relations with coworkers and even to their own community.
https://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu/EdPrograms/Shades_Landing.aspx
Think Pink from Funny Face (1957)/ You can see the whole silly sequence here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbxXA70gvrA
“Pink is for girls, blue is for boys” is just one manifestation of the male/female binary that many of us find awfully inconvenient and contrary to our lived experience, so I was pleased to read in The Secret Lives of Color (by Kassia St. Clair, 2016) that this hasn’t always been so. In the early years of the 20th century pink was actually suggested for boys as it was a stronger, more assertive color than blue which was more delicate and better suited for little girls(!)
This is making me think the inner beast in HYENA could be a hot pink/ molten fuchsia bursting through an icy pale blue human head. In some of my double heads, as in HYENA, the inner head is formed by twisting the surface making the outer head back on itself, sort of like a Mobius strip. You can see this in the more “organic” computer model below: it’s all one convoluted surface, but the darker inner form is the reverse face of the lighter outer form. It’s harder to see in an all-white paper model, but I do plan to bring this out by painting one side of the paper one color, the reverse side another. To me this acknowledges the binary, yet the two forms are indivisible and interdependent.
As they are in most of us.
Why Paper? The elegance of traditional Japanese packaging
How to Wrap 5 Eggs, 1967
This came up because someone was so astute as to see a Japanese influence on my work. It’s not in the forms but in my use of material. Nothing extra or tacked on. Extreme simplicity, clever use of the materials at hand. These principles are also at the heart of Bauhaus pedagogy which every architecture student has been immersed in. It all came together for me as a sophomore when I saw an exhibit of traditional Japanese packaging, which must have been connected to the publication of the second book in this series, How to Wrap 5 More Eggs, 1975. There’s a purity here, a cleanliness of spirit which is so appealing and so modern.
Funny I have it yoked to Hyenas.
“Organic” model of HYENA to be constructed in paper and painted
Hideous, yes, though not in the way I had imagined. We’ll see where it gets in 3 weeks.