How not to announce your sexual affairs
Marc Quinn: Drawn from Life Sir John Soane’s Museum
You wouldn’t necessarily think of former Young British Artist Marc Quinn as a misty-eyed Romantic – after all, he came to prominence, in 1991, with Self, a cast of his head created from 10 frozen pints of his own blood.
Yet “Drawn from Life”, his latest exhibition of 12 new sculptures at Sir John Soane’s Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, tackles, seemingly without irony, the tender, tremulous, pulse-quickening theme of love.
He calls it love, though we might term it infatuation – specifically, his ecstatic obsession with the woman he describes as his “muse”: his partner of three years, the beautiful dancer Jenny Bastet.
Each sculpture is an exceptionally realistic fibreglass cast, set on top of a plywood packing crate, of Bastet’s naked headless torso and feetless legs, seen in various poses. In all the sculptures, which are subtle shades of grey, Quinn is present too – though only in the form of his disembodied shoulders, arms and hands, caressing Bastet’s body, cupping her breasts and embracing her possessively.
Every detail of Bastet’s body, down to her taut muscles, goose-pimpled flesh, even the subtle creases of her genitalia, proclaims that she is naked and not “nude”, in the idealised manner of smooth classical statues of the past. There is a pleasing, selfconsciously rough-and-ready quality to these sculptures, which helps to ward off accusations that they are retrograde. Inevitably, then, Quinn’s pieces feel at home in the Soane Museum, which is full of casts and classical artworks. Gold, for instance, spot-lit in the atmospheric Egyptian crypt, evokes the famous Capitoline Venus, casts of which flank it. As you can tell, they are straightforward to talk about: you “get” them quickly; seen in this setting, they “work”. So, why did I leave feeling uneasy? Well, for one thing, they blend in at the Soane Museum, in my opinion, too easily for their own good. Their “intervention” in this encyclopaedic collection is too reverential and polite. For another, I couldn’t help finding the mo motivation behind them a little queasy, and even slightly sexist. Classical rhetoric in art comes, inevitably, with baggage: purposefully or not, Bastet stars here,he not for the depth of her psychology and character, but for the glory of her body. Quinn, a likeable, clever man in his fifties, with children from another relationship, is clearly in love with Bastet, and good for him. But broadcasting his sexual affairs in such a public, and oldfashioned, manner? For me, that smac smacks of boastfulness, and – for all the tasteful elegance of his new sculptures – a touch of a mid-life “wobble”, if not a full-blown crisis.
Until Sept 23. Information: soane.org