Courtesy of the artist
Alabaster, 2010, Archival Pigment Print
Phyllis Crowley
There is a Greek myth for any occasion. Take the story of Marsyas, a cautionary tale, particularly for artists. A satyr (later a stereotype for Picasso’s alter ego), challenges Apollo to a musical competition. He loses, and is flayed alive for his assumption that he could fashion something more beautiful than could the god. There is indeed a risk to assuming the role of creator.
When I first saw these photographs I thought, “This is Marsyas, certainly,” all that remains of him rendered transparent in sheets of light. We are out of the habit of encountering butchered meat hung in public, and are reluctant to imagine the drawn and quartered corpses of traitors impaled above the city gates of Renaissance London, or the cutouts of tattooed human skin discovered at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
We are tempted, instead, to evasions of interpretation; similes and comparisons guaranteed to make the subject charming and powerless: underground caverns or braided rope. But when we scrape away at the surface of this palimpsest, the lines underneath read like the paradox of Job when he proclaims, “And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.” Mortality glistens here, and these images invite us to look without flinching.
Courtesy of the artist
Tent, 2010, Archival Pigment Print
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