For his solo show at Passages, Yan Tomaszewski has linked works from several of his projects. Usually working in large sets anchored in specific contexts, the artist creates sculptural worlds and films intertwining mythology with reality.
The exhibition Rivière de corps offers an unprecedented articulation of works extracted from their original contexts. Drawing on projects such as Tchouri (2018), Khthon (2019) and Gangnam Beauty (2021), Tomaszewski rearranges his works and produces new ones under the sign of corporeality.
Strange glass beings are displayed on stainless steel devices reminiscent of a laboratory or a surgery clinic. Questioning the body, be it social or individual, these organic, human and non-human forms have in common the dissection of existing or potential identities.
The title of the exhibition, “Rivière de corps” – taking as it is the name of a city bordering Troyes – evokes the fluidity of a fragmented and dispersed political body.
The Great Transparencies by Yan Tomaszewski:
In 1953, in a Chicago chemistry laboratory, Stanley L. Miller synthesized amino acids, the prebiotic molecules at the origin of life, in a small glass apparatus of his own design – including a balloon containing water and gases, a spark balloon and a conducting tube, all made of transparent glass. In just a few hours, he believed he had reconstituted, in vitro , the conditions in which the first albumin-containing protein organisms appeared, from which the human species descended a few billion years later. The “primordial soup” where life originated was soon referred to as the meeting of water, earth and air in the primordial earth. Thirty years later, astrophysicist Louis Le Sergeant d’Hendecourt, one of the pioneers of the study of artificial comets in the 1980s, which largely inspired Yan T.’s Tchouri , argued that life was brought to Earth by meteorites from the break-up of comets rich in carbon, i.e. organic matter. The Rosetta probe proved his view right, detecting glycine, the simplest amino acid, on comet 67P/Chourioumov-Guérassimenko in 2016. This reopens the question of how life might appear elsewhere in the cosmos, and not just on Mars, bearing in mind that, as it is impossible to have identical structures in the universe, we need to think of alternative forms of life to those on Earth.
The artist and the poet are, as much as the scientist, the visionaries of these alternative forms. Their laboratory is the myth; their experimental apparatus, the work of art. Surrealist André Breton imagined such beings as early as 1942. In Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non (June 1942), he first mentions the “Great Transparencies” : “Man is perhaps not the center, the focal point of the universe … Around us may circulate beings built on the same plane as us, but different, men for example, whose albumins would be straight.” Marcel Duchamp’sGrand Verre (1915-1923), painter Roberto Matta’s tapered figures (1938-1942) and Jacques Hérold’s sculpture Grand Transparent (1947), presented as one of the twelve altars of superstition at the Galerie Maeght exhibition in Paris in 1947, are materializations of these beings: they are made of glass, and the gaze passes through them.
I’m tempted to see Tomaszewski’s glass works as the surprising meeting of Miller’s scientific glassmaking and the Surrealist “Grands Transparents”. The three parts of his exhibition at the Centre d’art de Troyes – which correspond to three specific sets of works by the artist – are like three altars to contemporary devotions, as many forms of sacrifice to the great simulacra of our time: cosmetic surgery and the quest for ideal beauty (Gangnam Beauty), fascination with matter and non-human creation (Khthon) and, finally, exobiology and the quest for extraterrestrial life forms (Tchouri).
Installed on the tarmac of the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace at Le Bourget, Tchouri (2018) was a sculpture-architecture in the shape of the famous comet. Inside, as in a cave where stalactites shine, or as the 3D materialization of spectrographs or body X-rays, visitors discovered glass shapes similar to the apparatus found in scientific laboratories. Khthon (2019) imagined a post-human world, where the mineral kingdom would have hybridized with living species, such as the human species, that had become fossilized, into an unlikely form of life: a “geological life”. This life would be placed under the sign of Chtonian divinities, Gorgons who had the power to petrify bodies, to mineralize them. By a symmetrical effect, at the end of the mythological tale, the blood from Medusa’s head, cut off by Perseus, is transformed into coral in the sea. Finally, Gangnam Beauty (2020) is a film starring Oli London, a young Englishman fascinated by Jimin, the idol of the Korean K-pop group BTS. Not only has London resorted to facial plastic surgery to resemble Jimin, but he has even gone so far as to identify and appropriate himself as a K-pop star. In the film, Tomaszewski has Oli London play himself and a young sculptor from the village of Hahoe and his lover, borrowed from a 13th-century Korean tale. According to legend, this sculptor was the inventor of the famous Korean shamanic masks. He was supposed to make them without anyone being able to see him, on pain of death, but the woman who loved him transgressed the divine order, resulting in the death of both of them, and the unfinished chinless mask. The work shows the perilous temptation of transforming nature to achieve an artificial ideal.
The fact that the artist has used the image of the “river of bodies” – a surname born of the Trojan terrain – and a variety of glassmaking techniques to bring together these different sequences of his artistic research – scientific glassmaking (borosilicate, Pyrex), thermoforming and cane-blowing – reflects his desire to find a sense of flow in his work, without forcing its course, leaving the meanders of thought and practice untouched. The metaphor of the “river of bodies” is rich in multiple connotations: we think of the “primordial soup” where life is formed, but also of the precious liquids that flow through the vessels of alchemy dedicated to the Great Work, of the secretions of life and imaginative thought, of the scientific reveries aroused by the elements and the enigmatic beauty of the universe. Where Tomaszewski joins the most recent research in art history (Technical Art History) and anthropology (Carrier Bag Theory) is in the links he establishes between material and symbolic, the dialectic of the transparency of the image and the opacity of the material. Each of the materials used by the artist has its own meaning, but glass, which forms a vase, a container, a balloon for scientific experimentation, a test tube, which enables transport and storage, is one of the materials that underpin the “Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution” developed in the 1970s by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s work on the origins of human development. The “Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution” suggests that the main tool or “cultural device” of early humans was not the knife, spear or club, but rather the containers they used to carry food. This theory entered the art world with the catalog for the last Venice Biennale, thanks to the writings of Ursula Le Guinn and Donna Haraway.
Tomaszewski is fascinated by the science-fiction novels of James G. Ballard and the films of David Cronenberg. Thus ExistenZ (1999) and its strange “pistol” are not unrelated to Khthon, nor are the glass organs created for the Troyes exhibition – brain, heart – with those produced by body-artist Saul Tenser in the recently released Crimes of the Future (2022). The artist builds his works from a narrative framework or a simple outline of a story, taken from life, pure imagination or scientific speculation, which he develops into constellations of films, sculptures, devices and varied installations. If the guiding thread of the Troyes exhibition is the body, it appears to the viewer through the multiple mediations of the genesis of living bodies, their control and their potential for evolution. These include surrogate organs (blown-glass masks or kerosene prints), scientific devices and vessels known as “cow udders”, “hearts”, “Vigreux columns” – described in catalogs and repertories – transformed bodies, new écorchés whose organs are blown into glass from Renaissance anatomical plates, organic chains linking man and creative matter, optimized, idealized, dematerialized or, on the contrary, highly materialized bodies. In short, the exhibition leads the viewer towards a beyond of the human body, an other-body forged in the laboratory and in the artist-researcher’s studio. This post-human body is both the matrix and the direction of flow of the “river of bodies” into which visitors slip.
He may feel as if he’s in a biochemistry laboratory: the stainless-steel fasteners that connect the glass organs to the walls will then appear functional to develop – according to a preconceived diagram or scheme – a virtual body in space and operate on it to transform its state: solid, liquid, gaseous. He can even feel as if he’s in the operating room of a facial surgeon who’s offering to make him look like his idol. The pieces Tomaszewski has created for his exhibition in Troyes extend the elements of the Gangnam Beauty story film: the chinless mask, the jawline or the “V”-shaped chin correspond to the V-line, a veritable beauty line in this district of Seoul, South Korea. Nothing will seem closer to the tradition of mask theater and the mythology of the sacred sculptor who gives the gods their material face. After all, doesn’t the surgeon attach to the shoulders of men who suffer a thousand deaths the mask made of a little of their flesh, a lot of synthetic material and a metal frame, which will make them resemble their idols for the rest of their lives? The tenons and other stainless steel fasteners will remind him of the instruments of the surgeon and the sculptor, often so close to each other, and both first cousins of instruments of torture: their intervention in flesh is not without violence. At other times, he sees himself walking through an alchemist’s lair, or a cabinet of curiosities – the artist confided to me that he had visited La Specola in Florence, where he saw the anatomical waxworks of Clemente Susini and the Baroque wax dioramas of Gaetano Zumbo, as well as the museum of the anatomist Honoré Fragonard in Maisons-Alfort – or even a mineralogical museum: it’s the body of the earth that seems to him to sparkle with sensuality and gleam like a river of diamonds. The 3-finger forceps, stainless steel structures and instruments become the display units for a spectacular display device. The next thing you know, you’re strolling through the halls of a space museum, and the impression you’re rubbing shoulders with another kind of life becomes unsettling. After all, if the materials that come from comets like Chouri are carbon and amino acids, not inorganic rocks, then the space agency laboratories that preserve them are our first extraterrestrial zoos.
Each person, each civilization, each generation has its own Grail. Yan Tomaszewski’s exhibition presents us with one. Let’s not stand before this Grail like Perceval le Gallois in Chrétien de Troyes’ famous text Perceval ou le Conte du Graal(late 12th century). Let’s recall: as a guest in the castle of the Fisher King, Perceval sees a young man enter, holding a dazzling white spear in his hand. From the iron tip of the spear bead drops of blood: “a valet of a room came, who a white spear held … the white spear and the white iron, sat a drop of blood …”. He also sees two young men holding golden candlesticks and a damsel holding a grail, a sparkling vase set with blood-red rubies. But Perceval is unable to ask questions and fails the “Grail test”. This vase, the Holy Grail, is the container in which Christ’s blood was collected, after the centurion Longin had pierced his side with a spear. Longinus, faced with the miracles of Christ’s Passion, converted and died a martyr for his faith. The Grail, a shimmering vase, evokes the idea of a quest as well as a simple container, a vehicle for conveying meaning: this is the enigma unfolding in the procession imagined by Chrétien de Troyes. It’s up to us to find out!
With “Rivière de corps”, Tomaszewski poses three questions for our time: what sacrifice does beauty demand? what is the life of living matter? what is it that comes to transform us within ourselves, and yet is not us? Let’s ask our own questions! The exhibition already provides answers. Art is one of them.
