124 as if it were a prosthesis. Naked bodies, logs, horses, everything that could evoke a virgin, wild nature, take their place on an artificial stage, that of their habitats, with the full knowledge that there is no other world outside this one. Tables, sideboards, disused beds, but above all vitrines, are embraced by her sculptures as an integral part of the work, as she herself explains: «For the series of wax sculptures Into One-Another, inspired by the cinema of Pasolini, I started from three vitrines that had previously been used in a natural history museum and are fully recognizable as such. It allowed me to address, in a brutally honest way, a very complex combination of topics I found in the work of Pasolini: the beauty and vulnerability, but also the destructive side of desire, the hunger to be absorbed by the other and the impossibility of it. Contorted bodies with rough edges, some hunched over as if consumed with pain. It’s not something I would have achieved outside the protective atmosphere of the vitrines. The vitrines, as you mentioned, are codified objects, they generate a specific perception, they define the communication with the audience, which allows me to be freer in the sculpture itself. The pillows have a similar effect: they soften the blow. A wounded or deformed body has a different impact when it’s gently supported by a soft cushion, or celebrated by placing it in a vitrine». Berlinde De Bruyckere's use of the vitrine is thus part of her anti-rhetorical strategy, because her vitrines hold a diametrically opposed meaning to the current social, selfie, vernissage and various event showcases, please enter miscellaneous photo opportunities. The contemporary pathological eagerness to showcase oneself often entails a kind of shamelessness that razes to the ground that sense of modesty, of awe, which in a way is the basis of respect between people – for, please allow me, I do not agree at all with the broken record that one is worth one, tag-line dripping from a distorted post-democratic rhetoric, and I have this habit of tending to respect and listen to those who have proven to be more competent than me. Instead, although nude, De Bruyckere's bodies in vitrine testify to a high dignity, a touching modesty, a fertile silence that overcomes any vulgarity overflowing from the contemporary imagery, doped up with exhibitionism and sick with what Bret Easton Ellis, in White (2019), called likeability: the like-addiction, whose prices to pay are the spread of a canon of mass pseudo-beauty, and the lack of respect towards the non-conforming to that lobotomising, imposed and impostor canon, whereby you only write say or wear something after having filtered it through the supposed approval of others. Respect for authenticity, crudely bartered with dummy thumbs-up and hearts. Imperfect bodies full of dignity in vitrines that protect them; vs. perfectly fake bodies in showcases that flaunt them. Respect for truth, for the depth of slowness, for reflective silence, for a suspension of judgement pregnant with wherewithal; vs. the frenzy of fiction, of the fake Instafilter despotism, of the speed of the virtual, of ferocious and unsolicited judgements – words are very unnecessary, Depeche Mode sing in that warning that is Enjoy the silence. Sculptures of silence, De Bruyckere's ones have been called. Of that fertile silence that guards the respect of doubt. Creating contemporary art means a question mark, not three exclamation marks and a fixed caps lock. Openness, not closure. Creating contemporary art means fighting in the trenches on the side of doubt, against the army of serial labellers, those with certainties in their pockets, because as chance would have it, fundamentalism and hardlinerism always go hand in hand with the defining arrogance of those who presume to be the keepers of the truth. Nobel Prize winner Goffredo Parise teaches us this: the cipher of the world we live in is complexity, and the most fertile attitude of those who respect the world is never to stop cultivating doubt.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=