MEDUSA: JEWELRY AND TABOOS
One of the three Gorgon sisters, Medusa was originally a compellingly beautiful maiden but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena’s temple, the enraged
Athena transformed Medusa’s silky hair into serpents and made her face so deadly to behold that even the slightest glance toward it would turn the onlooker to stone. Medusa: Jewelry and Taboos
The mixed feelings of desire, fear and bewilderment elicited by this mythological icon seem to very well sum up the reactions of visitors to the ongoing exhibit named after her, with more than 400 pieces of jewelry on show, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. From the sublime to the outré, from ancient times to the digital present, from top contemporary jewelers and luxury brands of Place Vendome to anonymous, ethnic or costume jewelry, a good sampling from the history of jewelry can be found here.
It will require the better part of a day to finish everything if you had to closely examine each piece and description, not to mention related art installations, various photographs, documents and videos.
“Jewelry is one of the oldest and most universal forms of artistic expression and like the face of Medusa, it attracts and disturbs those who design, wear or gaze upon it,” according to exhibit curator Anne Dressen. But she says it’s not always readily recognized as a true art form, maybe because of its being at the intersection of ornament and sculpture and because of its connotations as “too feminine, too precious, too ornamental or too primitive.”
The exhibit seeks to unveil the taboos surrounding jewelry, building on themes of identity, value, the body and ritual. “It takes as point of departure the preconceptions that hover around it, to better deconstruct them and reveal its underlying subversive and performative power: the forces that jewelry embodies and invokes above and beyond its visible form,” says Dressen.