Marc Quinn : Just a load of shock? (2000)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 15 September 2009
This interview was previously published in Sculpture magazine, 19(8), pp. 15-9; and in G. Harper & T. Moyer’s Conversations on Sculpture (2007), pp. 52-57. (International Sculpture Center Press: Hamilton, NJ, USA; distributed by University of Washington Press).
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Marc Quinn. Peter Hull (foreground), (1999). Marble, 33.2 x 18.9 in. Jamie Gillespie (background), (1999). Marble, 70.9 x 24.25 x 20.2 in. Installation view, Kunstverein Hannover (1999).
Marc Quinn continues to shock the uninitiated with his materials—including his own blood and excrement. From unconventional materials and processes, he creates figurative forms such as Self (1991). Made by pouring nine pints of his own blood (extracted over a five-month period) into a silicone model of his head, then placed inside a refrigerated and transparent perspex cube, the piece has raised questions about mortality, time, material, and self-portraiture. First exhibited in London in 1991, Self was included in the media-saturated tour of “Sensation,” which started at London’s Royal Academy of Art in 1997 and moved to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. Over the years, Marc Quinn’s work has been dismissed by some as just a load of shock, and headlines such as “Invasion of the Body Sculptures,” “Bad Blood,” and “Severed States” haven’t helped.
While Marc Quinn acknowledges that his work may be shocking, he does not consider himself to be a “shock artist”; instead, he is interested in unveiling a certain reality and using science as a means of facilitating a personal artistic statement. His 1999 solo show at the Kunstverein Hannover in Germany continued some threads within his work, as in Paranoid Nervous Breakdown and Final Nervous Breakdown (both 1999)— and initiated new ones, as in his contentious marble sculptures. Most recently, Marc Quinn had his first one-man show in Italy at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (reviewed in this issue). Previously, his work has been exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in New York; Jay Jopling/White Cube, the Tate Gallery, and the South London Gallery in London; and in Amsterdam, Athens, Paris, and Washington. His works are in the British Museum, Tate Gallery, Saatchi Collection, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
R. J. Preece: In some of the press clippings about you and your work, it has been said that you don’t consider yourself to be a shock artist. But surely you understand that your work can be shocking for some viewers.
Marc Quinn: I just think that if you use materials that have an ability to communicate directly, you open up a channel and you can work through that. So you are using the power of materials. But by “shock” I mean that somebody uses that for no other reason but to use it, whereas I would use it to make the work communicate a different idea more directly, not to use a material for its own sake.
R. J. Preece: With the marble sculptures exhibited in your solo show at the Kunstverein Hannover, the first thing I thought about was how the Gillespie piece (1999) responded to antique sculpture.
Marc Quinn: It’s more about looking at something, and what you bring to it from your knowledge of the context of art. And so, what is acceptable and aesthetic in art is very shocking and different in real life. I was in the British Museum, and I thought, “If you took these [marble sculptures, many of them missing limbs] literally, what would the modern versions look like?” But the sculptures are also celebrations of the sitters—they are heroic sculptures of these disabled athletes.
At first, these pieces appear to be fragmentary modern sculptures, and, then when you see them close up, you realize they are not fragments, they’re wholes—literally portraits of people titled by their names, Peter Hull and Jamie Gillespie (both 1999). They’re made of really white marble—from life casts. I made molds of them in my studio, and then I took the casts to Italy and worked with carvers in Pietrasanta (the center of Carrara marble) who did the carving.
Mark Quinn interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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