Untitled 無題
2018
These two works belong to a recent group of sculptures Danh Vo has been producing from ancient or medieval European statues that he sourced. In Untitled (47), the weathered marble sculpture is the torso of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and sexuality. Vo worked with artist and mountmaker Eric Araujo to create a brass stand to position the sculptural fragment upright and make it stable. The stand reaches beyond its functionality, however. It snugly and sensuously hugs the goddess’s buttock, ample hip, and hourglass-shaped waist, and, rather suggestively, penetrates the upper left thigh; the stand becomes a brace, which in turn becomes a torture device. From the sculpture’s right shoulder sprouts a cross-shaped mounting device that holds another work: L.H.O.O.Q. rasée (‘shaved’) by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), a modified version of the artist’s notorious 1919 ready-made L.H.O.O.Q. In the earlier work, Duchamp took a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), painted a mustache on the sitter’s face, and inscribed in the bottom margin five letters, which, when pronounced in French, sound like a rather vulgar joke. Duchamp often revisited his own works, and he made several versions of L.H.O.O.Q. In L.H.O.O.Q. rasée, he simply presents a colour reproduction of Mona Lisa and claims that her mustache has been shaved off. This irreverent work parodies the prime symbol of feminine beauty and grace in Western art. Vo’s Untitled (47) sets up a constellation of forms, materialities, and ideas, causing a range of subjects—including the female body and its representation, the male gaze, and devotion and iconoclasm—to converge and ricochet.
Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, 16 November 2018–22 April 2019