Siobhan McGibbon’s work derives from an obsessive fascination with the extraordinary, in particularly the study of teratology; the analysis of perceived abnormalities in the natural world, both real and imagined, such as Congenital Hypertrichosis Languoniosa, a condition where the body is covered with thin Langua hair. McGibbon’s work explores society’s interpretation of conventional anatomy and questions the future of “normal”.
As part of ‘Dublin Contemporary: Terrible Beauty – Art Crisis, Change and the Office of Non-Compliance’ Dublin’s first major international exhibition of contemporary art since the last ROSC in 1988 Siobhan McGibbon speaks of a new generation inspired by Dorothy Cross whether acknowledged or not.
As part of ‘Dublin Contemporary: Terrible Beauty – Art Crisis, Change and the Office of Non-Compliance’ Dublin’s first major international exhibition of contemporary art since the last ROSC in 1988 Siobhan McGibbon speaks of a new generation inspired by Dorothy Cross whether acknowledged or not.
The exhibition curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jota Castro aims to be about engagement and an instrument for social thought and change for all. The venue, an old DCU building is pristine yet retains it's old style including room labels on the door reminding you where you are, fitting well with the medical aspect to Siobhan’s work. The wooden floors, the educational feel to the place adds an investigative dynamic scrutiny to the space and the works on show in room 245. Rather than trying to covert the work into a white cube space it takes on a reality similar to the Sixth Berlin Biennale chosen venues of 2010. The curators have retained the real aspect to the space with the paint marks, the scratches and the old radiators provide a ‘lived in’ feel to each room adding a certain beauty to the work on show by Siobhan McGibbon. Her new body of work went on show first at Occupy Space in Limerick, May 2011 as part of 126 artist-run gallery in Influx artist led collective group show from various spaces locally, nationally and internationally. For Dublin Contemporary the breast covered in hair and the chair with growths acquired a third object, the base of a rocking horse or rocking chair. She is letting her art take its chances in a bombastic "s"nippily way.
The objects are delicate quiet works and you can sense their presence in the room. As you walk around the space as a whole, it hits you with varying degrees of surprise and shock. Some artists overtake and dominate to create a labyrinth of mystery such as Alan Butler who is next door to McGibbon’s room. Nevertheless, she invites you into her room calmly using the natural light, old wooden floors and neutral colour scheme enabling the work to be absorbed into the space in a good way as it occupies or is swallowed up somehow which forces you to look closely. This creates a further element of surprise when you look closer at the work. The work of the infamous Dorothy Cross and her famous cow teats chair comes to mind here but McGibbon has cast like human nipples instead of the animal teats. On the rocking horse base there appears to be four flat male nipples, they are not pert. Why are their four nipples melted onto the wooden side frame and why on this rocking swinging base? It suggests two figures sitting opposite each other on a sea saw minus their heads, thoughts and ideas. They could sway back and forth (if touching is allowed) but for this show, they are stagnant and the sense of movement is withdrawn. So what does this mean and what can we gain from this experience? I believe they suggest an aggressive sexuality, abuse, illness or death.This represented within the art dimension gives it an edge allowing the world of objects, cancer and the spread of disease to come to the fore. They are like a fungi spreading slowly over the found objects.
Hair has been manually added to a wax cast of the artist’s breast. Hanging precariously from the wall there is a cheeky desire to run your hands over the delicate array of hair that twinkles with small dust particles visible if you look at it closely in the natural light. For any woman this condition is abominable and would be a savage destruction of their femininity, unfortunate and gross for their female sexuality and for a female audience. It is grossly perverse. Germaine Greer writes that the most prized curve of all for a woman is the bosom. This convex structure created by McGibbon represents a single breast detached from the body and the cleavage. The owner has chosen to display her left breast as a deranged disfigured art object. This ‘hairy boob’ has received a lot of attention combined with a lot of confusion about its current state. She plays with this fetishistic aesthetic object by representing it within an art context. Women must get anxious and unduly squirmy about this piece. It does not celebrate the full bosom and does not endear this piece to the male sexual gaze. This is not the intention. Men may have run from the room just at the sight of it. Breasts should not be like this, you can admire, touch and love them but now it is a disfigured hairy object. The nipple is present and not censored, female nipples in the media are edited outside a pornographic context. Men, I can imagine found it hard to come to terms with this monstrosity but would never say. The nipples on the rocking horse base are expressive yet non-responsive but suggest this and bring this piece alive only moderately so.
Extensive hypertrichosis carries an emotional burden and can cause cosmetic embarrassment.Germaine Greer wrote about curves and hair in her book entitled ‘Female Eunuch’ you read the curve chapter first and then the hair chapter after. For men of Greer’s generation they grew their hair as a sign of their unwillingness to accept the morality that cropped hair reality of the bureaucrats suggested. It became sexually significant to grow long glossy tussles and a male symbol of sexuality and strength. Today’s trend is the beard. While men built up the hair on their heads women began to strip off every blade of hair they could find from their armpits to their arms and legs. The fact here is that some men are hairy, some women are hairy, some are not, and different cultural groups of women have different levels of body hair. The French still adorn hairy armpits. For Greer the ‘Eradication of it is painful and time consuming, yet the more clothes they are allowed to take off the more hair they have to remove.’ This is crude thought but the fact is that sexuality is closely linked to an animal characteristic and she writes that in the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality and an indication of aggressive sexuality. Women forced to repress this just as they repress all aspects to their libido according to Greer. Yet the work suggests an illness or DNA degeneration that causes this. Hypertrichosis (also called Ambras Syndrome) is due to an abnormal amount of hair growth on the body. Extensive cases are informally entitled ‘werewolf syndrome’. Two distinct types occur over the entire body, and localised to certain areas. It can be either present at birth or acquired later in life. In this case, the breast is the highlighted area for McGibbon. The cause could be a mutation of the 8q chromosome. Historically, people with it found jobs as circus performers such as Wolfmen and Bearded women. They were the freaks in society that added a cynical underworld, and spoke of cruel spectacle times. We are in a different age now where medical science can easily change or rectify this for the individual. It is not that shocking due to the over saturation of the grotesque in films, the internet, newspapers and news headlines. Does anything truly surprise us anymore? Not in this incident as we know, this type of work exists already but that is OK. Nothing in art is new especially in today art’s scene. Every artist copies everything either intentionally or not which adds to a revaluation of this feminist dialogue. It is basic and subjective. This is not to dismiss the work but an attempt to find out where it fits within the art system.
So why is McGibbon preoccupied with this in this show? Upon reading more about her on her website she talks about her father who sadly died in a car crash and subsequently she was knocked down which had a profound impact. McGibbon explores the aftermath of this ''ultimate collision'' and the metamorphosis of the car/body. Creating this anamorphic form allows the mind to wander. The animal/machine that is almost gasping for breath and flesh and bodily hair melted together on the chosen form-wooden or metal. It is autobiographically close to the bone.
The objects are delicate quiet works and you can sense their presence in the room. As you walk around the space as a whole, it hits you with varying degrees of surprise and shock. Some artists overtake and dominate to create a labyrinth of mystery such as Alan Butler who is next door to McGibbon’s room. Nevertheless, she invites you into her room calmly using the natural light, old wooden floors and neutral colour scheme enabling the work to be absorbed into the space in a good way as it occupies or is swallowed up somehow which forces you to look closely. This creates a further element of surprise when you look closer at the work. The work of the infamous Dorothy Cross and her famous cow teats chair comes to mind here but McGibbon has cast like human nipples instead of the animal teats. On the rocking horse base there appears to be four flat male nipples, they are not pert. Why are their four nipples melted onto the wooden side frame and why on this rocking swinging base? It suggests two figures sitting opposite each other on a sea saw minus their heads, thoughts and ideas. They could sway back and forth (if touching is allowed) but for this show, they are stagnant and the sense of movement is withdrawn. So what does this mean and what can we gain from this experience? I believe they suggest an aggressive sexuality, abuse, illness or death.This represented within the art dimension gives it an edge allowing the world of objects, cancer and the spread of disease to come to the fore. They are like a fungi spreading slowly over the found objects.
Hair has been manually added to a wax cast of the artist’s breast. Hanging precariously from the wall there is a cheeky desire to run your hands over the delicate array of hair that twinkles with small dust particles visible if you look at it closely in the natural light. For any woman this condition is abominable and would be a savage destruction of their femininity, unfortunate and gross for their female sexuality and for a female audience. It is grossly perverse. Germaine Greer writes that the most prized curve of all for a woman is the bosom. This convex structure created by McGibbon represents a single breast detached from the body and the cleavage. The owner has chosen to display her left breast as a deranged disfigured art object. This ‘hairy boob’ has received a lot of attention combined with a lot of confusion about its current state. She plays with this fetishistic aesthetic object by representing it within an art context. Women must get anxious and unduly squirmy about this piece. It does not celebrate the full bosom and does not endear this piece to the male sexual gaze. This is not the intention. Men may have run from the room just at the sight of it. Breasts should not be like this, you can admire, touch and love them but now it is a disfigured hairy object. The nipple is present and not censored, female nipples in the media are edited outside a pornographic context. Men, I can imagine found it hard to come to terms with this monstrosity but would never say. The nipples on the rocking horse base are expressive yet non-responsive but suggest this and bring this piece alive only moderately so.
Extensive hypertrichosis carries an emotional burden and can cause cosmetic embarrassment.Germaine Greer wrote about curves and hair in her book entitled ‘Female Eunuch’ you read the curve chapter first and then the hair chapter after. For men of Greer’s generation they grew their hair as a sign of their unwillingness to accept the morality that cropped hair reality of the bureaucrats suggested. It became sexually significant to grow long glossy tussles and a male symbol of sexuality and strength. Today’s trend is the beard. While men built up the hair on their heads women began to strip off every blade of hair they could find from their armpits to their arms and legs. The fact here is that some men are hairy, some women are hairy, some are not, and different cultural groups of women have different levels of body hair. The French still adorn hairy armpits. For Greer the ‘Eradication of it is painful and time consuming, yet the more clothes they are allowed to take off the more hair they have to remove.’ This is crude thought but the fact is that sexuality is closely linked to an animal characteristic and she writes that in the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality and an indication of aggressive sexuality. Women forced to repress this just as they repress all aspects to their libido according to Greer. Yet the work suggests an illness or DNA degeneration that causes this. Hypertrichosis (also called Ambras Syndrome) is due to an abnormal amount of hair growth on the body. Extensive cases are informally entitled ‘werewolf syndrome’. Two distinct types occur over the entire body, and localised to certain areas. It can be either present at birth or acquired later in life. In this case, the breast is the highlighted area for McGibbon. The cause could be a mutation of the 8q chromosome. Historically, people with it found jobs as circus performers such as Wolfmen and Bearded women. They were the freaks in society that added a cynical underworld, and spoke of cruel spectacle times. We are in a different age now where medical science can easily change or rectify this for the individual. It is not that shocking due to the over saturation of the grotesque in films, the internet, newspapers and news headlines. Does anything truly surprise us anymore? Not in this incident as we know, this type of work exists already but that is OK. Nothing in art is new especially in today art’s scene. Every artist copies everything either intentionally or not which adds to a revaluation of this feminist dialogue. It is basic and subjective. This is not to dismiss the work but an attempt to find out where it fits within the art system.
So why is McGibbon preoccupied with this in this show? Upon reading more about her on her website she talks about her father who sadly died in a car crash and subsequently she was knocked down which had a profound impact. McGibbon explores the aftermath of this ''ultimate collision'' and the metamorphosis of the car/body. Creating this anamorphic form allows the mind to wander. The animal/machine that is almost gasping for breath and flesh and bodily hair melted together on the chosen form-wooden or metal. It is autobiographically close to the bone.
