Wednesday 21 October 2009

The Tranquility of Solitude

"The tranquility of solitude" this line for me sums up the connection between the chaotic complexity of life and the peace one can find there. The lines is from the Jam song Thats Entertainment - "two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight". Or Damien Hirst's Tranquility of Solitude, a homage to Francis Bacon and his studies of his lover George Dyer.

The Jam song talks about struggling as an artist in the entertainment industry and the stark contrasts between perceptions of successs and the reality of attaining this. I think the Francis Bacon studies of his lover and the homage by Hirst talk of the same tensions between ideal and reality, between beauty and grotesque. For me one continously interesting element is the circus of grotesque that hides in the shadows of "ideal" and I have persevered to explore this through the beautiful freaks prototypes (ongoing).

The deformed and grotesque, the freedoms and benefits that imperfection guaruntees has been an increasingly penetrative motif for the past 20 years gradually creeping into contemporary representation of humans and the human condition. Inverted Darwinian principles applied to products and social Darwinism heralded as entertainment. This includes freaky celebs that congregate with the grotesque under the auspicious banner of "reality".

The celebration of the unnervingly different. This is an interesting element I see in Nina Saunders work,

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