Lucas, 2001, © the artist
Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)
While
the inevitability of death cannot yet be kept at bay by subzero
temperatures, the traditional path to prolonging one’s life and legacy is
having a child, a form of immortality by proxy. Fatherhood has been a key
theme in recent work by Quinn, starting with a plaster model that he
sculpted three days after his son Lucas was born, which he later cast from
the mother’s liquidised and frozen placenta. "It’s about where the mother
ends and the baby begins". For his latest exhibition at
White Cube Chemical Life Support, he presented a new sculpture of
Lucas called Innoscience, 2004. While not refrigerated, the child’s
body looks cold and lifeless, similar in patina to Quinn’s ongoing series
of Carrara sculptures
The Complete Marbles, which include portraits of disabled sitters such
as Alison
Lapper. However, the sculpted baby is actually made from the same
cocktail of chemicals (suspended in a milky-white wax) that have helped
keep Lucas alive ever since his allergic reaction to milk was discovered
at an early age.
Innoscience, 2004, © the artist
Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)
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The list of ingredients in the dairy-free substitute that
fed him through his infant years constitute the materials for this
sculpture, the list of which reads like a periodic table: "...tripotassium
citrate, calcium phosphate dibasic, copper sulphate, L-tryptopha..." and
so on. Also in the new series is a portrait of Silvia Petretti that
appears similarly cool, calm, and dormant, but hides the ravages of the
anti-viral drugs that float around her body, fighting off her HIV
infection. A third work portrays Carl Whittaker, a multiple-transplant
patient whose pale body is also dependent on medicine to stop it rejecting
his new organs.
These concealed life-support mechanisms of
chemicals and drugs supplementing our natural bacteria, nutrients, and
toxins are no less finely balanced than the flowers in their perpetual
blossom or the frozen placenta head of Lucas that rely on the
umbilical flexes of electricity to maintain their fragile status quo.
From the series Garden 2, 2000
Deutsche Bank Collection
Is Quinn pessimistic
to suggest that life is as fleeting as an ice sculpture and as fragile as
the brittle stems of his refrigerated lilies? At the height of the YBA
phenomenon, artists such as Damien
Hirst, the Chapman
Brothers,
Sarah Lucas, and
Richard Billingham produced unremitting depictions of death, violence, and
squalor, but Quinn’s intensely beautiful works, especially The
Garden, have bucked the trend for doom and gloom. The concept of
immortality is ultimately one of optimism, even if the current prognosis
for being laid to rest in a nitrogen bath for countless years is less than
rosy. Quinn’s work is life-affirming, not depressing. For example, his DNA
portraits, cloned from plants and humans in bacteria or agar jelly and
presented on petri dishes or in test tubes, merely remind us that the
secrets of life are contained within a few molecules. This in turn sows
another seed of thought in our minds that if all living organisms share
99.9% of their DNA, then it may not be such a cold world after all.
[1]
[2]
[3]
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