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.
