Europe, Europe

Info

Media

Concept

Info

2008

7 porcelain sculptures in custom Karelian birch display case

Media

Porcelain Figurines & Installation

Concept

Created in the direct aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis, Europe, Europe employs the aesthetic language of eighteenth-century porcelain figurines — recalling the saccharine, pastoral representations of Watteau or the ornate, erotic scenes of Fragonard — in order to address ethnic, interreligious, and socio-economic violence that plagues the heart of Europe, and portends a crisis for European identity. The project translates globalization, mass migrations, and social tensions in gallant couplets of amorous unions. Ethnic conflicts between Europeans and their guests, power struggles between authority and activists, or economic strife be-tween capital and labor are resolved through their antithesis — love — as figures of traditionally opposed groups are portrayed in positions of affectionate embrace or sexual satisfaction. Such represented moments of impossible bonds, passionate but nonetheless expressive of inherent and pre-existing conflict, are as fragile as they are vanishingly rare, and thus the choice of material reflects the delicate nature of the European experience, and any Union among these disparate, dissonant aspects that might be said to exist.

 

Minutely defined and purposely domestic, these porcelain compositions, preceded in their execution by a series of preparatory sketches, are contained in a Karelian birch wood display case with glass shelves. Designed as an installation, the work manifests an allusion to early-modern Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity—rooms dedicated to the curation of what were considered in that era wonders of the natural world, reflecting a desire on the part of their owner to identify, sort, and display phenomena. Often used to connote status, in this case the cabinet and its socioeconomic metaphor are literalized in the amorous vignettes stratified by social conflict. These new wonders of third-millennium Europe, scenes both marvelous and literally incredible, begin at the bottom of four shelves, with the portrayal of two scenes of almost impossible interethnic and interreligious union: a tattooed neo-Nazi man appearing in mid-embrace of a hijab-bearing Turkish woman, and a neo-Nazi woman gazing lovingly upon the ginger locks of the young Hasidic man lounging in her lap. Moving upwards, the next shelf addresses the growing and unsustainable differences in wages in the labor market by placing a Gastarbeiter, or guest worker (a term usually connoting an individual moving to West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s but also widely used in Russia to refer to immigrant labor from the states of the former USSR) dominating a business woman from behind in the moment before copulation, side by side with the manager of a toy factory surrounded by the unquestioning adoration of Asian female factory workers. The third shelf represents commentary on security and social control, featuring a policeman in riot gear flanked by two buxom, sexually available female protestors on one side and a bare-chested policewoman being courted by a vagabond Arab youth, with a rose in his hand and a bottle of Molotov-cocktail in his pocket on the other. The work’s socio-economic and political analysis culminates on the top shelf in a scene of exotic and sexual tourism as a gaggle of Thai children surround a tourist in a Rococo scene replete with an undertone of pedophilia.