Free the Probe-Heads! Once More into the Uncanny Valley with Daniel Silver

Daniel Silver: Angel Dew (2024)

Statuario Altissimo marble and bronze (172 x 66 x 104 cm)  

frithstreetgallery.com

 

Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity - free the probe-heads!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery, is that it has given me a new appreciation for the astonishing beauty of that metamorphic rock formed from limestone or dolomite (and composed of calcite crystals) that the ancient Greeks called mármaros, with reference to its gleaming character, and that we know today as marble. 

 

Previously, I've expressed concerns with this material long-favoured by sculptors keen to work within a Classical tradition; concerns mostly of a political nature to do with marble's high-ranking status within what Barthes terms a hierarchy of substances [a].  

 

But, after seeing Silver's new works up close, it becomes impossible not to admire the grandeur of the marble sourced from an old Italian stone yard - particularly as Silver essentially leaves the rock as quarried, only lightly treating the surface or making sculptural marks upon it. 

 

Even without the bronze heads that sit atop them, one could spend many hours happily contemplating these rocks and their geo-aesthetic qualities.

 

But, talking of the metal alloy heads ...

 

 

II.

I'm pleased that Silver seems to privilege the head over the face; that he leaves the latter inscrutable and unsmiling. Because, like Deleuze and Guattari, I have problems with the face which has long held a privileged and determining place within Western art and Western metaphysics in general [b].

 

We like to think our face is individual and unique. But it isn't: it's essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, like a monstrous hood, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. 

 

The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. If men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming imperceptible. 

 

And how do we do that? 

 

Not by returning to animality, nor even returning to the head prior to facialisation. We find a way, rather, to release what Deleuze and Guattari term têtes chercheuses ...

 

 

III.

 

The primitive head is beautiful but faceless: the modern face is produced "only when the head ceases to be part of the body ..." and is overcoded, as we say above, by the face as social machine in a process "worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent" [c].  

 

But we can't go back: neo-primitivism is not the answer. As Deleuze and Guattari note, renegade westerners will "always be failures at playing African or Indian [...] and no voyage to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to [...] lose our face" [188].

 

But perhaps art can help us here: not as an end in itself existing for its own sake, but "as a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are produced only in art, and all those [...] positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless" [187].

 

In other words, perhaps art can liberate probe-heads that "dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of significance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity" [190] and steer inhuman forces and flows along lines of creative flight. 

 

 

IV.

 

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that Daniel Silver is on board with this project; he's a self-confessed Freudian after all and what we're proposing here is very much anti-Oedipus. Ultimately, I fear there's something a little Allzumenschliches about his vision. 

 

But, you never know: he clearly finds heads fascinating and there's definitely the promise of something vital in his work; something that "exists between the human and non-human, intertwining rocks with bodies, minerals with flesh, embodying multiple temporalities" [d].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the post dated 1 December 2012 - Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family - click here. And see Roland Barthes, 'Plastic', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paladin, 1973), pp. 104-106, where the phrase 'hierarchy of substances' is used.  

[b] See the post dated 13 September 2013 - The Politics of the Face - click here.

[c] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 170. Future page references to this text will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Paula Zambrano, Curator of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society, writing in a short piece posted on 6 December 2024: click here. 

Readers might be interested in an earlier post published on Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition  - From Victory to Stone (17 Dec 2024): click here. 

 

This post is for Poppy Sebire (Director of the Frith Street Gallery) for kindly sharing her insights into Daniel Silver's artwork. 

Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family

There are doubtless many reasons to love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family which, until recently, stood close to Speaker's Corner, challenging and subverting the arrogance and pomposity of John Nash's hateful Marble Arch. Indeed, it was the fact that these colourful resin figures showed such playful indifference to the history of the area in which they stood and seemed to mock said Arch with their post-Pop aesthetic that primarily appealed to me.

It's difficult to convey just how much I loathe Marble Arch. For one thing, it's intimately connected to the British Royal Family and is an open celebration of the violent power of the State. Secondly, it's made of a material which I don't much care for. The fact that marble retains its high-ranking status within a hierarchy of substances and continues to be a privileged medium amongst sculptors and architects keen to produce works within a Classical tradition, means nothing to me: I prefer plastic.

For plastic has none of the cultural pretension of marble and is, in its essence, not only the very stuff of alchemy, as Roland Barthes long-ago pointed out, but it also abolishes the above-mentioned hierarchy of substances, opening the way to a more democratic era. Plastic, if you like, makes free as well as joyful. For plastic affords us the euphoric experience of being able to reshape the world and endlessly create new forms and objects, limited only by our own ingenuity and imagination. It doesn't necessarily allow us to live more beautifully or more truthfully, but that's ok. We are so tired of these things posited as supreme values and of being bullied by our grand idealists who mistakenly equate them with the Good. Today, I prefer the cheap and cheerful over the eternal; the Top Shop mannequin over the Venus de Milo; and the Jelly Baby Family over the House of Windsor.