The Classical Testicle

"Marbles", a new series by photographer Ingrid Berthon-Moine, explores the aesthetic of the testicle in Classical sculpture.

Ingrid Berthon-Moine

Hrag Vartanian interviewed her for Hyperallergic, where she explains

I like to look at men … the way they look at women. There is no better place than a museum to look at perfect bodies (or a stadium during athletics competitions and football matches.) 

I wanted to go back to the birth of the representation of the human body perfection and it happened during the Classical Greek period when sculptors’ skills drastically increased and they took great care in their attention to anatomical details. I could have worked with the penis but I preferred focusing on these often neglected parts which secrete hormones, make and store sperm...

For some male viewers, exposing the most sensitive part of the male anatomy (although in rock solid marble) to the gaze, trigger a sense of vulnerability which until now was mainly reserved to the female body, an uncomfortable role reversal.
There is also a hint of irony in Marbles, it could suggest that a shift in masculine identity is happening and that the splendour of the past erodes. I leave it to the viewer to decipher what he/she wants to read in there and to take it seriously… or not.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Accidental Monuments: Saddam's Palaces, Repurposed

BLDGBLOG has up a great interview with Richard Mosse, a photographer who has recently visited, and photographed, a number of Saddam Hussein's palaces. He is especially interested in capturing the ways they have been repurposed by the American military units that now occupy them. Mosse has an interesting take on monumentalism:

my proposal was to make work around the idea of the accidental monument. I'm interested in the idea that history is something in a constant state of being written and rewritten—and the way that we write history is often plain to see in how we affect the world around us, in the inscriptions we make on our landscape, and in what stays and what goes.

Read the rest!

Library of Dust: Panel Tonight @ NYU

I really, really, wish I could go to this event at NYU tonight. David Maisel's Library of Dust is deeply moving and profoundly archaeological:

Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patient from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families.

The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial - the Northern Lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky.

There are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time. Perhaps the canisters, however, also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and, further, what may happen to our souls. Matter lives on when the body vanishes, even when it has been incinerated to ash by an institutional methodology. Is it possible that some form of spirit lives on as well?

Maisel's work meticulously documents material physical objects and the way time has transformed them. And he does it without rejecting their aesthetic and spiritual power, or their ability to tell us stories about who we are in this moment. To me, that's the essence of good archaeological practice.