June 18, 2007, 6 pm, opening and reception
In the artpavillon-st-urban: "Lust and Desires" - Erotic sculptures in resin and bronze by Carole A. Feuerman
June 18, 2007, opening speech, Prof. Peter Frank, art historian, curator, author, Los Angeles
Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Gentile Signore e Signori, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you all for coming this evening to the inauguration of this display of Carol Feuerman’s art. As you have seen, Carole Feuerman has taken a consistent formal approach to the figure in her sculpture for more than three decades. But the sensations she provokes can be very different from sculpture to sculpture. Her bathers embody the freedom of movement and the ecstasy of contact with water, that most nurturing of elements. Her other sculptures of the human body play with social conventions and sexual mores. And when she decides to make explicit the implications of eroticism that course through her oeuvre, Feuerman makes a display of our bodies’ sexual characteristics and of the way we hide and reveal those characteristics. Even as she celebrates the natural lustfulness of the body, she invites us to fetishize it.
When she produced her erotic sculptures in the late 1970s, Feuerman wanted to bring to the surface the tensions that lie beneath the viewer’s relationship with the depiction of the figure. But she was also exploring how these tensions could be expressed in the context of a narrative. Small as they may be, each of the erotic sculptures gives us a glimpse of an intense encounter between two people – if not more. As importantly, every one of the sculptures includes clothing of some type. Unlike many of her other sculptures, Feuerman does not celebrate the human body itself in these pieces; she celebrates the human mind, where sexuality resides, and looks at how the body becomes the instrument of the mind as it reaches out to other minds through other bodies.
The minds to which Feuerman reaches out are ours, of course. These objects are capable of inspiring desire in us, even though they are as absurd and theatrical as soft-core pornography – or maybe because of that. But they inspire an aesthetic response to us, too, thanks to Feuerman’s technical skills and her sensitivity to framing and abbreviating the erotic encounters. Indeed, they readily reveal their sources in classical statuary. Their fragmentary nature suggests the shards of figures that turn up in Greco-Roman ruins.
Installed as they are in the large clinical bathroom here at art-st-urban, Feuerman’s erotic works assume a new depth of intimacy. Their social edge is softened somewhat, their basic allure enhanced that much more, and yet in the clean white environment these voluptuous episodes seem all the more fantastic and intense. The vast clinical space of the rest of the building frames Feuerman’s other sculptures in a similar manner. Conversely, we can say that Carole Feuerman’s sculptures bring new dreams to a place where people once dreamed and were cured of their nightmares. Danke, merci, grazie, thank you.