133 And then there is It almost seemed a lily (2017), Ovid's words to describe the flower Hyacinth turns into after his death, accidentally struck by a disc thrown by Apollo, his lover. And it is right from a bouquet of lilies about to wither, and from their drooping and decaying petals, that De Bruyckere moves her anti-rhetorical research using precisely the rhetorical figure of metonymy, a part for the whole, observing the resemblance of a petal to the texture of skin. So it was that De Bruyckere decided to transform skins into gigantic petals to be placed in imposing wall works, together with her other stylistic features, including gold dust as fertile pollen. This rendition is even more significant by virtue of her discovery, at the same time, of the enclosed gardens of the Mechelen monastery: small cabinets for private prayer, set up in their cells by the nuns of the convent. Mini wunderkammern filled with luxuriant silk flowers, relics, ribbons and polychrome sculptures, as their only form of worldliness and sublimation of sexuality, linked to the body of Christ not as ostia, but as husband. Purity and eroticism, the sacred and the profane, wrapped in a spiral. The archetype of the sacred in De Bruyckere recalls the same model taken up by Jean Clair in De Immundo (2005): «The sacer manifests the impossibility of separating the sacred, the saint, the sacrosanct just as it is commonly understood, from the impure, from the cursed, from the abominable. Sacer is that which, in a living being or in an object, simultaneously belongs to the field of the sacred and the filth, of taboo and untouchability, of consecration and outlawing, of a secret to conceal and the obscene to be abhorred». Let us then speak of disrespect. Let us speak of obscenity. «The artists, if they also take on ethics, must not necessarily be in the odour, but at least in the stench of holiness on the scene. They must feel like being in excess». It is through these words, a little traumatic as he had accustomed us, that Carmelo Bene described the responsibility of the artist and defined obscenity in art: ob-scene, outside the scene, outside the tyranny of the uniform mindedness, thus absolving obscenity in art with a full formula, as long as it is in the stench of holiness. I smiled in finding out that Berlinde De Bruyckere's first exhibition was a 1986 group show in her hometown, Gent, in a former factory renamed Fabriek voor Entartete Kunst, factory of degenerate art, a definition given by Nazism to denigrate the artworks it did not approve of – hence the free ones, the non-propagandist ones. Her chrysalid-bodies, Cronenbergian bodies with rough edges, are scabrous. They are offspring of Freud's Unheimliche, of the uncanny, which in the hands of the anti-artist becomes a tool to attract us through the familiar factor – the skin whose bluish veins still seem to pulsate, the dimensions of bodies 1:1, her blankets with humble patterns, present in everyone's home but preserving the disquiet of a latent repressed – to throw then us in front of the taboos of our limits, which we are called upon to elaborate; first and foremost, the taboo of death, which De Bruyckere sublimates through the ritual of her sculpture, wax and care, akin to the ritual of embalming (at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2015, her solo exhibition was precisely entitled The Embalmer). Innervating them of both the fetish paraphilia of the bodily fragment and the sacredness of the relic, from fetishism to sanctity, De Bruyckere's universal and disturbing bodies are conceptually monstrous – going along with the etymological root of monstrum which, like monumentum, derives from monere, to warn: monstrum is the sudden appearance of an anomaly that can be a warning for everyone, but which at the same time destabilises, upsets and scandalises. Yet scandal is a right for the artist, as well as a precise duty: «I think scandalising is a right, being scandalised a pleasure, and whoever refuses to be scandalised is a moralist, the so-called moralist,» Pasolini declared in one of his last interviews with Dix de Der in 1975.
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