March 8, 2004
David Altmejd feature
My feature article on New York artist David Altmejd is included in the March-April issue of Flash Art. (The site isn't updated to reflect the new issue.) It just came out a few days ago and should make its way to newsstands around the country in the coming weeks. Here's the first paragraph:
New York artist David Altmejd’s grotesque sculptures, usually comprised of heads or other fragments of monster bodies, directly engage the repressed underside of our imagination and incongruously mix the things we dare not consciously consider with a certain sense of cheap glamour. His recent works, accumulations of small, sparkling found elements surrounding an incomplete werewolf body, spring from an intuitive process that serves as metaphor for peering into this realm of the unspoken. Altmejd rarely knows how a work will look when it is finished: he is an obsessive conjurer, bringing implausible sculptures into being as if he was in a trance or channeling spirits through the Ouija board. Often grouped with “new Gothic” artists, his use of the werewolf as horror movie cliché touchstone instead of, say, the knife-wielding serial killer, is telling. His is a morbid, Victorian-era take on the heinous (typified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein): the sculptures are absent any explicit violence, preferring the dread of the unknown or otherworldly to a forensic analysis of cruelty. It’s easy to imagine Altmejd’s monsters as protagonists in a cryptic narrative, yet Altmejd does not intentionally set any in motion. Instead, his creative energies are invested in the object itself—the artist likens his practice to process art—and the rest is left to the viewer. The sculptures are specimens laid out for us to examine, and they are dark, exquisitely beautiful (often employing eye-pleasing colors and seductive materials), compulsive, meticulously detailed without being fussy or perfectionist, shiny, and just a little bit sick. The intensely appealing layer of crystals, glitter, rhinestones, jewelry, and other materials that seem to spring up organically from the plaster heads defers the horror of beholding such monstrosities. Altmejd highlights the tension between the need to avert our eyes and to take in every gruesome detail; his bringing together of opposite worlds—the horrific and the glamorous—suggests that the distance between them may reside in our perceptions alone.
Check out the magazine to read the rest and see images of Altmejd's artwork.