Monday, April 25, 2022

Alighiero e Boetti at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

1993 was a very strange year for figurative sculpture. You've got the above (which "must have come as a surprise.") But then, same year, you have Paul McCarthy's Spaghetti Man (guess where the spaghetti is), Charles Ray's Family Romance, Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather as well as Mike Kelley's seminal survey exhibition (alongside the Boetti at Sonsbeek) The Uncanny. Kelley's "experiment took its cue from the rise of 'mannequin art,' a term he coined to describe artists like Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, and Jonathan Borofsky, whose life-size sculptures—not, in fact, all mannequins—evoked anxieties about the role of the human body in a time wrought by the AIDS epidemic, the growth of plastic surgery procedures, and advances in biotechnology. In addition to artworks, however, Kelley gathered religious statues, inflatable sex dolls, ventriloquist dummies, wax figures, and medical anatomical models into crowded clusters to eerie effect." 1993 being today.