Sunday, March 19, 2017

French Likenesses in Terracotta

Augustin Pajou
Ideal Female Heads
before 1806
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Josesph Chinard
Bust of Juliette Récamier
ca. 1801-02
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

" . . . what happened was I came across some newspaper articles about people who saw ghost images on their television set after close-down. There was a spate of these articles, and I collected them and decided to make a work which dealt with something that has been said many times (it was said first by Marshall McLuhan), that the television set now exists in everybody's front room as the fire used to, where you had this moving image all the time. It was the focus; people could sit around the fire and look into it and see pictures, tell stories, regenerate imaginative, creative thinking on the basis of this eidetic imagery. Television is exactly the same thing. I'm convinced that one of the sources of pleasure in television viewing is not to do with the programme, it's actually to do with that moving thing. We go back to the cave and the fire, it was important for our species. I think people are using the television set for something quite creative and subversive and original, and these newspaper articles were really about that . . . "

Joseph Chinard
Family of General Guillaume-Philibert Duhesme
ca. 1801-05
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Joseph Chinard
Portrait of a man
1787
terracotta
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

" . . . what happened to the people in the newspaper articles was made peculiar by the cultural interpretation and by the denial of the unconscious and the denial of what's actually going on when they looked at their television and saw ghosts. All the interpretations which they got were either, 'It's a flying saucer beaming messages', or 'It's a hoax'; it was always empirical, they always wanted to explain these things by saying there's something outside you that's making a picture on your television set. At no point did anyone say, 'Oh, isn't that interesting, the moving imagery has triggered off your imagination, in connection with certain anxieties you may have, and you have seen a picture that has spoken to you and prophesied the doom of the planet, as in the Bible.' No one said that. There was this total denial. I wanted to recreate that situation, to make it possible for everybody, including myself, to have that sort of visionary experience. I made a video which consisted of a fire, and the fire is slowed down  people see things in the flames  and the soundtrack consists of a reading of newspaper articles. I read them in a whisper, as though this were a dreadful secret that I'm sharing with everybody. There is also some improvised singing that I consider analogous to the kind of automatic writing that I do, which creates a sort of uncanny atmosphere. When it was shown on Channel 4, they told me that aside from the flying saucer contingent who were very enthusiastic, they also had a number of other letters . . . "

 extracts by Susan Hiller from a 1991 conversation with Andrew Renton at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London

Jean-Marie Nogaret
Bust of a young woman
1802
terracotta
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Jean-Antoine Houdon
Portrait-bust of Denis Diderot
1771
terracotta
Louvre, Paris

Jean-Antoine Houdon
Portrait-bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1779
terracotta
Louvre, Paris

Philippe-Laurent Roland
Portrait-bust of Thérèse-Françoise Potain Roland
ca. 1782-83
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Fantasy-bust of veiled woman
ca. 1865-70
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Bust of Mary, Queen of Scots
ca. 1860-70
terracotta
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Louis-François Roubiliac
Portrait-bust of Francis Willoughby, FRS
1751
terracotta
British Museum

Aimé-Jules Dalou
Mother and child
terracotta
ca. 1873
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Clodion
The Surprise
1799
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Clodion
Offering to Priapus
ca. 1775
terracotta
Getty Museum, Los Angeles