impotent the flow of years...
hurt
The day before last week’s material was uploaded, I had an accident.
Shift
The Ancient Romans shouted
WATER! when there was a fire.
FIRE! shout the Romance speakers
When they most need water.
I slipped on a rock in the sand then my hand, when it went to break my fall, slipped over some oysters that slashed my right wrist. This week was meant to be high-philosophically about the violence implied in last week’s despoiling, but now I am just very plainly hurt and it’s not even anyone else’s fault. Seeing blood and having no-one to blame, I felt close to Nature:
studio view
in the Wild
​
thrown under, you get
a bird's-eye view
true to the sculptural
lines of lunch.
​
the gannets dive; only
hit-missing is regret,
forgotten in the feather-flurry
when the seen-again target
​
curls the air-whittled
white neck wave-ward
and tides the blood in
a downloading instant.
​
need is bold in the wild
it evinces.
​
​
My hand is nicely bandaged, more nicely than my sculpture “Arch: Boxer at Rest.” I added the bed-sheet bandage to add injury to insult. I had first set out to make some monumental forms look humbled, pooped, wonky, sympathetic, another kind of masculine. This was already anthropomorphising, and it was hardly a leap of genius to see the arch as a pair of legs, and at the bottom of those legs satiny athletic shorts. Embarrassing! Bandages have something of adornment; I feel the effect is related to the wearing of armour, which says strength and vulnerability at the same time. Naturally all of this is involved in the thesis I was writing.
Arch: Boxer at Rest | 2020-21 | tinted plaster, polyester and bedsheets | H 35 cm
Alexander Cigana
Photography Isabella Wild
Arch: Boxer at Rest | 2020-21 | tinted plaster, polyester and bedsheets | H 35 cm
Alexander Cigana
Photography Isabella Wild
When it joins 'Impotent the flow of years...', the arch changes costume from the shorts to a kind of tote bag made from a pillow case and bed-sheets. Sleep is extremely humbling—that’s one thing you could take from that.
Notebook pages
(2021)
The pyramid is an ideal form, stubborn, cursed. I think it was Michel Serres who said:
​
“It is obvious from looking at them that
no pyramid was ever built with love.”
Robotic glass-cleaner on the Louvre Pyramid
People love pointing out, to illustrate diverse political points, that the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves but I don’t mean this—I mean wherever and however the shape appears there is something stabbing and ungenerous about it.
​
It ignores you on its way to the sky—
it ignores the world on its way to the sky.
​
Pyramids are usually graves too. The Louvre Pyramids work because the Louvre was a royal palace, and from here along the ‘Historical Axis’ or ‘Royal Way’ you can walk through an arch to the obelisk at the spot where the king died, and then a second arch and a third one, all deaths but an impressive walk.
Fat Pyramid | 2021 | tinted plaster | H 45 cm
Alexander Cigana
Pyramids are harder than arches to embarrass. First I just made one very fat and blemished—lord, what does that say? It didn’t end up as part of 'Impotent the flow of years...' but he has many supporters. I also imagined tent-like pyramids that need some very visible structural support to stay erect—if ever I can do something huge it might be this.
