Diamond Member Pelican Press 0 Posted August 16, 2024 Diamond Member Share Posted August 16, 2024 This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Camille Henrot Is Tackling One of Our Last Taboos Henrot was severely bullied at school and often lonely; she has dyslexia and dyscalculia, and her teachers were dismissive. Even years later, “Every time it’s requested of me to give an answer where only one answer is possible, it always brings me into turmoil,” she told me. “It’s the same when people ask me my age” — she’s 46 — “it’s hard to remember … numbers change!” I thought of Henrot’s sculpture “Misfits” (2022), a bronze cube reminiscent of a child’s toy, with shapes cut out of each side to be filled with a matching shape. Here, though, a cylinder is jammed into a square *****, stuck. The work suggests the rage and frustration of childhood, but also how play can reveal new possibilities. “Two and two doesn’t have to make four, they can also be 22,” Henrot once said in an interview. It’s interesting to regress to a state “where all these counterfactual possibilities are still there.” We walked over to a worktable in a different part of the studio to look at images of her latest sculptures, some of which will be shown at Hauser & Wirth in New York next year. Henrot draws with the ease and pleasantness of breathing or dancing, but sculpture allows her to access aggression. When you make a sculpture, she explained, “you basically ***** somebody. Because you cut, you slice — it’s pretty violent.” In one of the works, “73/37 (Abacus),” which was still in progress, a bronze shape with an undulating corkscrew texture that could double as a torso of a horse or a pair of breasts is placed under an archway of a giant abacus made of brass with rubber beads — a nod, perhaps, to her ***** of numbers. It seems to be twirling in place — reminiscent of Bernini’s masterpieces of stilled, often violent, transformation. There’s a creaminess to the figure’s back, which almost beckons to be ridden or stroked. Critics have described Henrot’s sculptures as “haptic,” and she told me that she likes the idea of people touching her works, that they should “talk to the whole body and not just the brain.” Her art often explores questions of authority and control. All over Henrot’s studio are drawings and paintings of dogs and other animals being commanded to rise up on their legs by a raised arm or a whip; sometimes a humanlike figure comes down to the animal’s level, seeking parity or perhaps closeness. In one of the many binders in her studio, there was a picture of a dog that Henrot met on the street. “I like how relaxed he is,” she said, “looking like a big baby.” But she was also interested in the leash as “an illustration of attachment. Because attachment requires care, but care is also control and control is also surveillance.” During Covid-19, when Henrot; her husband, the Swiss musician and composer Mauro Hertig, 35; and their two sons found themselves for a time back at Henrot’s mother’s house in a small town an hour outside of Paris, the artist became fascinated by a few etiquette manuals that she found on her mother’s bookshelves. At first, she saw them as oppressive — synonymous with the constraint and sexism of middle-class ********* society. These manuals, and a dozen or so others that she has since collected, now live in her studio, and she showed me one from 1884 called “Don’t.” She laughed. “When you read, ‘Don’t do this,’ it actually makes you want to do it,” she said. The books became the basis for a body of paintings called “Dos and Don’ts,” large canvases that Henrot creates through a laborious combination of digital printing, paper collage, layers of painting and sometimes laser-cut aluminum and plexiglass, and that incorporate pages of text from etiquette guides, images of her home life, her own illustrations and screenshots of computer error messages. It’s hard to tell what has been made by hand and what has been generated digitally, reflecting the way that social media scuttles our sense of reality. The more etiquette books she read, the more she found them oddly comforting — the way they neatly break down the rules of social life, just as a parent might do for a child. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up #Camille #Henrot #Tackling #Taboos This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Link to comment https://hopzone.eu/forums/topic/100868-camille-henrot-is-tackling-one-of-our-last-taboos/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
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