Marc Quinn: Self, You, and the World

Four Moments of Intersection
Foreword by Jefferson Hack

Originally featured in Marc Quinn: Self, You, and the World

 

Part 1—Selfie

It was in the early nineties that I first discovered Marc Quinn, through the pages of Dazed & Confused, after the magazine’s brilliant then art editor Mark Sanders proposed we do a story on Self, the first instalment of which was made in 1991.

Self is one of those extraordinary, once-a-generation, epoch-defining artworks, where science, artmaking, and technology combined to allow Quinn to sculpt with the very essence of life: his own blood. Blood and art are ancient bedfellows—printmaking, oil painting, video, installation, and performance art have all had their fair share of splatter and gore—but this is fundamentally different. Frozen in time, his blood heads hold a mirror up to our own fascination with, and fear of, death, presenting the psychic taboo of our mortality as a silent, morbid, and fragile bust. Quinn is open about his dependency on alcohol at the time of making this work and how these cryo-portraits made from ten pints of his own blood are a metaphor for dependency, with their need to be tethered to a power source essential for their own survival. This would prove to be a theme he returned to regularly in his work.

 

Part 2—More Than a Plinth

One of my proudest moments in publishing was working with Alexander McQueen, who guest-edited an issue of Dazed & Confused in 1998. His “fashion-able” cover story, shot by Nick Knight and styled by Katy England, features a cast of models with different body types and abilities, each paired with a different fashion designer to display an alternative idea of beauty.

Alison Lapper, one of those models, who was born with shortened legs and without arms, due to a condition known as phocomelia, collaborated with Hussein Chalayan on an image called “Fragmentation,” where the designer projected the idea of clothing onto her naked body. When Quinn’s fourth plinth marble sculpture, Alison Lapper Pregnant, was unveiled, it demonstrated to me the vital and positive role that art and media can play in the cultural and social politics of representation. It made me see how, like McQueen and Chalayan, Quinn was attempting to de-territorialise his position. He stands as a white male artist within the canon of art history, and yet he was working hard to subvert that self-centred YBA position as an enfant terrible to find new perspectives to create from. He was alter- ing his position as author, as subject, as artist, to try and allow space for others in the work. He was shifting the conversation from the singular to the plural.

 

Part 3 — Infinite Scroll

“One is too many and a thousand is never enough” is the addict’s refrain. As we now know, the simple act of opening a social media app feeds into all our addictive impulses. One post can be triggering, an infinite scroll’s worth not enough to change the feelings, to alter the inevitable crash-and-burn effect on our natural equilibrium, that gives us a sense of well-being.

Quinn’s 2022 exhibition HISTORYNOW at the National Archaeological Museum of Venice saw ancient history mix with the present. Time collapses in on itself in these paintings in which Quinn reworks stories from his digital news diet into gigantic paintings that are proportionally representational of his iPhone screen. The results are familiarly shaped canvases that powerfully capture the surreal feeling of experiencing through our phones George Floyd’s memorial, BLM protests, Britney Spears’s legal battles, babies being rescued during the Covid pandemic, wildfires spreading fear as well as flames, and the rest of the overwhelming, overdosing cocktail of the many short-circuiting highs and lows that dominated the web of the previous year.

Quinn describes the screen as his “window to the world,” yet in his choices we see Quinn searching out art history archetypes in contemporary form as signs, symbols, signifiers, and splashes of paint that cover elements of text and collide to create new meaning. We see a layering of paint, and a shattering of glass, that is more of a window into the artist’s brain than it is into the social fabric of the world. Within the memory board of Quinn’s internal art history data bank, the circuits fizzle and pulse with pattern recognition, the nodes in the matrix reflected back to us in these hyperactive, energised paintings.

“I think it was just seeing that image of the protester in front of the burn- ing car, after Mark Duggan was killed, and recognising that it looks like a David painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps. But it’s just a guy in a hoodie crossing in front of a burning car—the grandiosity of the image, which was real rather than invented.” This is how Quinn explains the thinking pattern that goes into his History Paintings: the series of painstakingly detailed, hyperreal paintings that HISTORYNOW and, arguably, A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 eventually grew out of.

 

Part 4—Power Shift

It’s 4:00 a.m. in mid-July in 2020, and Bristol town centre is very quiet. An empty night bus hurries past us. A drunk man snakes by an empty plinth where the statue of seventeenth-century slave trader Edward Colston stood, before it was pulled down and ceremoniously dumped into Bristol’s dark harbour waters several weeks earlier. Such is the power of global social consciousness; such is the might of a group of protesters, who came together, enraged by the murder of George Floyd and buoyed by the very recent Black Lives Matter protests that had taken place across American cities, that they managed to lasso the neck of the 2.64-metre bronze statue and drag it a third of a mile down to the water’s edge.

The story made news all over the world. Parliament was outraged. “We can- not seek to retrospectively change our history,” said Boris Johnson, Britain’s then prime minister. The issue of this and the sacking of many other statues that commemorate the power of enslavers became so threatening to the established order that it resulted in a shutting down of any conversation—as if today’s social fabric, the very foundation of our contemporary society, is somehow divorced from the chains of empire.

And in the vacuum of that intellectual debate, one protester, Jen Reid, stood on the empty plinth and made a Black Power salute. It’s the image of this moment that Jen Reid and Marc Quinn turned into a sculpture. So now, at four in the morning in Bristol town centre, the giant crane we have been anticipating is lowering a life-size resin cast of Jen Reid in its place. Reid had recreated her famous pose in Marc Quinn’s studio, for a co-authored artwork titled A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020, in a gesture of solidarity with BLM and those affected by slavery, and one of defiance against the authority of history. Jen Reid’s story, her-story’s rewriting of his-story, now stood proud, totemic, a solid mass of women’s power, Black empowerment, and the power of art to unify people.

Car horns honk as Bristol’s morning commuters and parents taking their kids to school drive past in support. Crowds gather to cheer and take pictures. I am there as a friend of the artist to witness this moment, and I look on as Reid talks to the journalists and members of the public who have gathered, explaining how this artwork carries her message and the message of the original group of protesters even further than she could have imagined.