Two Postmodern Heads: some thoughts
Two heads, carved in marble in Carrara.,Italy, in 2023.
as centre-pieces for a one-man show in Lincolnshire, England.
Growing into adolescence in 1960s Northern Ireland was a bizarre trauma. As Ulster drifted towards civil war, energised by a new freedom in the air, a freedom we all now associate with the 60s, I moved to London. By the early 70s, I was at university, building upon and and processing all that had happened to me. it was only later that I realised that I had grown up in two worlds, not just those of Ulster and 'swinging' London, but of traditions loosely named Modernism and Post-Modernism.
The modernist in me loved those early 20th century art movements, such as Cubism, the radicalism of Dada, and abstraction. Artists across Europe were rethinking their understanding of life following a catastrophic world war and a new intellectual ferment that was challenging old certainties. By the 1960s, however, things had changed without my really understanding the significance. I saw this initial change in the new artists: Hockney, Warhol, Rauschenberg and Hamilton. And then went on to witness the release of artists from many traditional features of what we called art: from 'traditional media' such as painting and stone to performance and non-traditional materials of every kind. The 'ready made' of Marcel Duchamp became the tent and unmade bed of Tracey Emin. Something already present in Modernism had been renewed, and something was being lost.
The two heads: a significant modernist poet from northern Ireland, particularly active in the 30s, and 40s alongside Auden and Spender, was Louis MacNeice. In one of his most influential and characteristic poems, 'Snow', he wrote impressively of the world as 'incorrigibly plural', suddener, crazier, as he would describe it. In Portugal, across the same period, Alberto Pessoa was writing 'I have more souls than one./ There are more 'I's' than myself.' This was the poet who could write, 'look, there's no metaphysics on earth, but chocolates, Look, all religions on earth have nothing more to teach/ us than a candy store does.' This fractured understanding of the human psyche was to become one of the profound features of post-modernism, and an era when 'reinventing' yourself became a cliche, where multiplicity replaced stablilty.
The first of the two heads; 'Mind and Matter' was an initial attempt to present visually this multiplicity, with its variations at every turn, the multiple hairstyles, varying eyes, each side of the face cut away differently and with the veinings on the neck reminiscent, from my point of view, of a medical model. It is, in a sense, a shattered whole.
The second of the two heads: returning to the theme of multiplicity, I wished to create a head that had a clearer relationship with a traditional bust, but with varying sides to the head (including a heavily designed ear to the right that contradicted realism), with modern styled hair on the other, and eyeless. The world of 'Mind and Matter' had become purely 'mind'. The individual's vision of things was an internal construct, no more than a version. At the same time, I wanted to suggest an alternative with both heads: in Mind and Matter' there is still a coherence; in the eyeless 'Mind' there is a sense of the contemplative, a stepping away from an external world that is inviting chaos.
Finally, in contradiction to post-modernism, I am still using traditional media and referencing traditional forms.
A modernist and post-modern note: these thoughts are my interpretations, as one among many and after the fact. ref: T S Eliot.