Concave Head, Susy Oliveira’s exhibition at the 2009 CAFKA biennial, explores ideas of illusion. A photograph mapped onto a convex, polygonal sculpture, it gives the illusion of convexity when viewed head-on. Following this year’s theme of “Veracity”, the piece forces us to question what is real when we come up against the limitations of our vision.
The subtitle of the piece, Have Everything and Die, puts me in mind of the theories of Ernest Becker. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death (1973), Becker puts forth the idea that the repressed knowledge of our own mortality is what drives much of human action: “… the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity” (xvii). We are paradoxically infinite and limited beings in that we have infinite capacity for imagination (as far as we know), but we are also aware that we are organisms and will eventually die. Oliveira’s sculpture, by showing us the limitations of our own body, acts as a reminder of our being as organisms. Have Everything and Die is an enunciation of the duality of being—we imagine ourselves as infinite, but we must face the reality of our deaths.
In our interview with Oliveira she notes that she intended for the piece to have a monumental look. Because we are driven to project ourselves into the world through our work, all human handiwork is a representation of the human, and this sculpture makes that explicit. This idea can be extended, I think, by noticing the similarity between the face on the sculpture and Jesus. Religion might be seen as both the ultimate in death denial and the ultimate monument to our humanity. It is an attempt to create a space for humanity in a world that is inhospitable to us; it is a reflection of our industry and our fears. The sculpture takes both human handiwork and religion to task, and asks whether they are just illusions created to help us deny our mortality. So again Oliveira channels Becker by creating a piece of art that acts as a monument to humanity and its paradoxes.
Source: Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1997.
