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| Big Time Sensuality | I can sense it. Something important is about to happen. I turn an object over in my hand, in my head, in any part of the body that will receive it. It's familiar, but I don't care if or how I might have once kept it close. I don't care to remember. It is more likely that "I" am the "object's" memory anyway. The object probably once had an arrangement with someone my attendance recalls in some way. But I'm sure it doesn't care either. It takes kindness to enjoy it. This is love, between me and Quinn's objects: a forgetting of what we were in order to joyfully embrace the present assemblage. Gentle, big time sensuality.Let me slide into the pants, run my tongue across the teeth, and groan along with a sputtering corpse. I'm always surprised when people describe Quinn's sculptures as disgusting or abjectional. I don't see the horror, but I guess love is blind and you don't get many blind people in art galleries. |
Dr Quinn's Economic Theatre |
Economists don't ask whether a given industry is good or bad, in itself. They ask what it is that appropriates the thing, exploits it, takes possession of it: what are the forces that make its meaning? Economists are like detectives, piecing together clues and working backwards to hypothesise about what grips the situation. But they are also like artists, since their ultimate aim is to create new styles of existence that express a different future (as unfathomable as that might be). They like to give another impression of course, suggesting that they know what happened in the past and how that effected the present, in order to logically direct us into a better future. But in essence, economics is experimental theatre. In his own way, Quinn also assumes the theatrical role of a detective-artist. He collects signs from our cultural economy (shoes and fashion accessories made from exotic animal skins, pants that might belong to the rich and leisurely) and formulates the equation for a fantastic future. |
| The Artistic Territory | Quinn's installation surrounds me. I feel like a super-molecule caught up in the movement of some larger indeterminate whole. My identity is pulled in different directions, between the visual fascination of undulating fabrics, the aural repetition of gurgling aerators, the tactile seduction of functional objects. Sensations run through the body, dispersing the faculties. There is a certain lightness of being in the aesthetic density of the exhibit. But in the midst of this sensual chaos I become an attractor, distributing an existential territory. I become a rhythmic subjectivity at the intersection of the forces that create me. It is no longer a matter of looking at sculpture, but of passing into it, of entering a modulation with non-organic bodies so that I might reinvent my life as an artistic territory. The aestheticism invoked by Quinn's work heralds the dawn of a new millennium, freed from the endgames and nostalgia of the late twentieth century. There is a joyful affirmation of new possibilities in these works, a willingness to peel back flesh and be eaten out by the future. |
| Flowering Flesh | With a certain amount of irony, George Bataille considered all creatures to be evolutionary variations on the worm. The body is essentially a tube, with a buccal orifice and an anal orifice, discharging its energy through the extremity which poses the least resistance. When the anthropoid became upright, losing the expressive protuberance of its anal region, the vital thrusts of the body were thrown back in the direction of the head, transforming the face into a flower, blossoming with the most delirious richness of forms: spitting, crying, laughing, belching. The creative power of this metamorphosis can be terminated in a civil conversation or a face-to-face missionary coupling, but Bataille implores us to let orifices emerge like feral vegetation, creeping across the earth in search of unthinkable copulations. Flowers are remarkable in this respect: a bird, a bee, a nose, the wind ... any of these things and more can be incorporated into their sexual assemblages. I think of Quinn's rubber air hoses as the tubular bodies of post-human life forms, sprouting silicon pulps and furry fronds like bouquets of transsexual organs. |
Felching the
Third World
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Quinn's trousers look like they've been designed for that unfortunate character, "the man who couldn't stop shitting", in Chester Brown's comic book Yummy Fur. Having blocked up the toilet he goes searching for the rim of a canyon to hang his butt over, but his pants bulge and split reeking havoc on the street. It turns out that the man's arsehole is a cosmic gateway to another ension, where a sewerage problem is temporarily resolved by pumpingsurplus shit into this mysterious black hole. When the miniature people of the parallel realm venture through Arse-Gate to explore our world they find their equivalent measure in Third World pygmies that live in the sewers eating rats. I can imagine a sequel, Yummy Fur II, where Quinn's rubberised teeth are effluent outlets used for discharging the plethora of the First World. The plot would involve overblown Westerners, fattened up on Third World resources, deafening developing countries with crappy advice and slowly mauling them to death with blubbery gums. |
| Quinn Fashion Inc. | The cartography of skin is a labyrinth
of pores, clefts and passages. We can refold the
intricate origami that makes skin look like it
circumscribes a volume: Judge Schreber turned his rectum
into a love-hole for God, Luce Irigaray unfurled labia
all over the female physiology, Lynn Margulis and Dorian
Sagan have proposed chlorophyll treatment that would
allow humans to soak up nourishment through a translucent
kin-membrane. But people are reluctant to experiment with
their own flesh. We cautiously refashion surface affects,
wrapping ourselves in exotic animal skins and wearing
accessories like detachable organs, but we could go so
much further. Quinn Fashion Inc. caters for the tastes of
adventurous dressers. Smiling shoes and gristly handbags
take on a life of their own. To wear them is to live with
them; to make them part of your community of organs.
Shimmering fabrics and body tissue glisten like the
discarded skins of post-human evolution. Dress to kill
the human inside! Stephen O'Connell |
