A few of my favorite statues from Like Life

            Almost two weeks ago now, some friends and I went to an exhibition at the Met Breuer called Like Life. The theme was sculpture of the human form, spanning an extraordinary time frame and organized thematically rather than chronologically. It’s taken me a while to write about the exhibit, in part because it made such an impression and left me with so much to think about. It was going to be difficult to describe it to you as a series of sentences, rather than a series of questions. Secondly, because the exhibition has recently closed, you will not be able to verify what I tell you about this work. Instead, you will just have to believe me. Believe first, that there are unbelievable things in this exhibit, things you would anticipate more in one of the many sculpture-themed horror films than in the actual halls of a museum. A bust of the artist’s face made of his own blood. The skeleton of a famous philosopher within an innocuous wax likeness (I’ll spare you the ghoulish story of the missing head), Enough lovingly rendered penises on lifelike nudes that I’m beginning to believe that the organ has always been artificial and cis men have just been pranking us for centuries. Even the most ordinary sculpture is liable to contain a shard of bone or a bone-chilling backstory. And because it’s too late for you to decide to give the Met Breuer your money and see these amusements for yourself, this cannot be a typical review, but rather my attempt to recreate the experience for you and introduce you to some of my favorites.

1.     Rachel

Head with torso * contemporary * hairless

Rachel is acute angles, rib cage, scowling viper woman mouth, wombless mother. We all want to have been born from the venom that must drip from the fangs at the back of her throat when she speaks, and collect at the tips of her elaborate fingernails. The androgyny in her shrunken breasts and buzz cut scalp looks like a queen undressed or a Venus skinned. A rib cage is a cage, yes?

Let’s ask the placard what to think. It gives me words I can neither dislodge nor savor.

            The queerness of a body in extremis

Because you are emaciated, is that what they mean, Rachel? Is the starving body necessarily queer? Is the well-fed body, the healthy body, somehow straight(er)? Surely we do not have to skip our meals to live our truths?

Or do you allude to the body of the AIDS patient, The diseased body? The ACT UP, silence = death, fuck you Ronald Reagan, written across a body? Or what we imagine to be the body of the AIDS patient as played by Jared Leto or Andrew Garfield across town?

Or the beaten body? The blood/tears body?

And when you speak of androgyny and in extremis do you mean - - the body in transition? The body with top surgery scars? The dysphoric body? I don’t want to call that a body in extremis; I don’t want the center to be cis. Shift the center.

And what of my own body. The queerness of double-jointed elbows bending inward?

Why do we have to be in extremis, Rachel? Why can’t, for once, we shift the burden of survival?

(See what I mean about the series of questions?)

There has never been a body more normal than yours, Rachel, more proper, more authentic than yours, my new Venus. Not ordinary, don’t mistake me. But normal – unextermis – perfection.

2.     The Anatomical Venus

Full body * antique * vivisected

At first, I took it for her proper name, but in fact it identifies her type, her species if you will. She looks like a Carol or an Ingrid. She and her sisters travailed in some time period across some expanse (I didn’t pay attention to the details, let’s say forever and ever from Siberia to Brazil). By more serious scholars, she was condemned as “peepshow science.” And there is much to peep at. For those curious as to what hides within a woman, behold. Her breasts peeled back like an orange skin, revealing a panoply of discolored organs, sour blue and red. The mysteries of woman. She is a corpse made of wax, the most ghoulish of mediums, erotic morbid for the curious eye. It does not surprise me, the crafter’s desire to penetrate, to see. What surprises me is her own expression, glassy eyes staring upward, resigned, meditative, sightful.

She knows something more than guts.

3.     Shrine of the Virgin

Abstraction * antique * devotional

In prior times (let’s call them Medieval, for simplicity’s sake), this was a type of item that Christians might encounter and contemplate. The idea is, it’s a shrine that opens and closes. On the outside is an image of the Madonna with child on lap, on the inside is a hollow space where (absent in this version, due to entropy) you would find a crucified Christ.

Every woman is a vessel

It is not clear to me if this was a shrine in miniature or if there was a real, life-sized version that you could go inside of to pray. If you could stand inside her body, this symbolic womb with your savior, and be enveloped by her.

And I’m thinking, what more can you ask this woman, whether historical or myth, to not only hold and nurse her stoic infant in literally millions of artistic interpretations, to not only carry the burden of ultimate sacred womanhood, but to open up her body for all the pious and the devout, to carry the tortured corpse of her son inside her and still have room for you too. I’m no religious scholar and I’m not much for the spiritual, and I don’t know much about the metaphysical weirdnesses of ancient Christianity, but cut this woman some fucking slack.

Every woman is a vessel.

Here are some vessels. Ladies, tag yourself:

An egg-cup. A handbasket. One of those oval, eggish chairs they have at certain hip libraries. A hand-made vase. A test-tube. A beaker. A champagne flute. An airplane. Two hands, cupped together to hold water or a baby chick. A mouth.

4.     Bowl modeled after the breast of Marie Antoinette

Inverted * antique * functional

Ahem, speaking of vessels.

In case you thought you’d heard all the wild excesses the French monarchy had to offer, here’s a new one. A bowl, commissioned by Miss Let em Eat Cake herself, modeled after her own breast. Hollowed out and inverted, you could almost miss it’s anatomical significance – just another pretty ovular pearl-white trinket – until you notice the rounded edge of rosy nipple at the bowl’s base.

Which nobleman got the erotic pleasure of taking his morning tea from this vessel? Or was it for Marie herself, bringing her carmine lips to her own bosom?

Either way, Madame Tussaud made her death-mask, sadly not displayed here.

Drink up.

(On an unrelated note, my friend’s boyfriend tutors the descendants of the Bourbons. I haven’t asked him, but I imagine they drink from mugs and the occasional cocktail glass).

5.     Self-portrait with statue

Paired * contemporary * enraged

Halfway through the exhibit, it strikes me that (almost) all statues are singular and alone, isolated on their pedestals. Why not a paired statue? And then, since this exhibit is so fascinated by lifelikeness, that quality which distinguishes the human from the uncanny, why not a statue within a statue.

Around the corner, answer to my musings is this piece (name since forgotten and flubbed, my apologies). The (male) sculptor sits in contemplation of his nude (female) creation. Her skin is as rosy as his, she has as much life in her wrists, her eyes, her flesh. For a moment, I am convinced that he is a museum-goer, sitting on the floor, enthralled, before I catch the eyes that always give the statue away. (I am not as fooled by her, though she is no less lifelike – it’s the clothes, or lack of, that makes the difference).

Her expression, my god. At first I think she wants to eat him. But that would require more passion that she could muster for this fool. She is dismissive, and cruel, and captivating. She looks like she would rather just leave and never consider him again. Has he created his worst fear, the disdainful woman? The woman just as real as him?
Either way, she’ll walk away now, and make a better mate of wax and plaster.

6.     Shonibare’s ballerina

Headless body * contemporary * dangerous

There’s a Yinka Shonibare in the Yale Gallery of British Art, which at one point displayed a small exhibition of his work. His pieces are usually without heads and clad in historical European clothing – bustles and waistcoats – in his signature brightly colored fabrics. I admire his work – its stylistic consistencies, its intelligence, its appropriation of the canon.

Here is his take on Degas’ ballerina. She is headless, dark-skinned, garishly clad. Instantly recognizable as a Shonibare. She invites you to circle her (how wonderful that sculpture can be seen from so many angles). Behind her back, she holds a surprise.

A dueling pistol.

I gasped.

7.     The phallic girls

Full bodies * modern/contemporary * encrusted

One of these is made by a man, and one of these is made by a woman. If that’s the sort of thing that matters to you.

The former is called a demi-poupee. Half of a cartoon garish woman – one tit, one leg, etc. – a caricature of fem features superimposed onto the shape of a penis (it takes me stupidly long to notice the rounded head, I’m thinking – alien). Some kind of a commentary on how a man looking at a woman (like a doll, like a splayed plaything) is really a man looking at himself, his own desires, his own dick. Self-knowledge.

And then we have a fashion model, all eyelashes and hair and posed hands, covered in what the placard calls a penile encrustation (my new riot grrrl band, naturally). A woman trying masculinity on for size. A woman defamiliarizing the phallus like Duchamp’s shovel hung in a museum corner. These cocks are plush and felt; they transform to spikes or reptilian armor. The latest style?

8.     Leatherman

Torso * contemporary * kinky (duh)

A curved corset in leather, bound and strapped. Headless. No skin but this skin. A second skin. A costume on display like a flayed and stuffed person. Captivating in its simplicity.

So can we see the Costume Institute as an exhibit of human skin now please?

The placard would have me believe that this is some kind of feminist response to the femme fatale. And maybe it’s my softness for that archetype, but I reject that categorization. This is just what it is.

A costume for a titan in bondage, mighty submission.

9.     The human statue

Lifelike body * contemporary * silver

Now here’s a neat trick! A statue of a person pretending to be statue. Layers! Really makes you think, like:

            Why do people want to pass for statues anyway? Why are we so fascinated by it?

            So we can see a statue come to life?

I half-expect this one to blink his eyes, so the artist wins this round.

But the worst part is the veins. Have you ever seen a statue with veins? There’s a reason not.

I don’t want to imagine blood running through inanimate material of a statue with a beating heart.

10.  The lay figure

Full body * vintage * sinister

This is an artist’s dummy, used as a model when an artist wanted to paint a person. (Next time you see some anonymous portrait, or any ole painting with a person in it – that person may have been one of these lifeless, faceless things).  He is a standard human body.

Only one problem.
There is no such thing as a standard human body.