‘David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.
‘‘A perfect object for me’, the artist has said, ‘is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time’. Decay exists in balance with regeneration, the exquisite in tandem with the grotesque. The sculpted heads that have been Altmejd’s recent focus provoke that shiver of the uncanny lifelike sculpture tends to induce, but skilfully realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur. They have a hallucinatory quality – vivid and startling. One head might sprout another, inverted, so that they they share a pair of eyes, or a face is split into a trio of profiles and half-a-dozen eyes, as if refracted by a kaleidoscope. In others the faces are gone, as if they have been scooped out, but the gaping wounds reveal cavities of dazzling crystal or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, as if to collapse the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is an immediate sensuality in the artist’s juxtaposition of finely-wrought realism with crude gesture; the proximity of crystals and delicate gold chains with fur and abject matter suggesting ever-present decay.
‘In counter-balance to the aesthetic of profusion is a sculptural impulse to containment and order, evinced in gridded forms and orthogonal mirrored structures recalling Sol Lewitt or Lucas Samaras. Some of Altmejd’s best-known works are his vast, labyrinthine vitrines built of Plexiglas, and often with mirrored elements. They play on the aesthetics of design and display as well as minimalism, but these structures are not simply a means to contain or protect the elements housed within. Rather, the entire structure is an organism or a machine, making visible the processes of growth and decay, generation and destruction that take place inside it. Movement is frozen, but sculptural elements are animated through repetition and incremental change, like the stuttering frames of stop-motion film.
‘Altmejd described himself early in his career as a ‘process artist’. His works not only reveal the process of their making, but suggest that those processes have simply been paused in their unfolding. His monochrome relief panels are austere in comparison to the heads, focusing our attention on the plaster-like material and the actions wrought on it − where it has fallen in wet splats, where a brittle, chalky surface is scratched or fractured, where hands have gouged and clawed. Hands themselves, in cast form, appear and multiply in some of the sculptures, fostering the illusion that the works create themselves. Monumental figures, such as the ‘Bodybuilders’ and the ‘Watchers’, are similarly engaged in their own making or unmaking, sprouting hands that clutch and mould the very substance of their bodies.’ — White Cube
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Further
David Altmejd Site
DA @ Xavier Hufkens
DA @ David Kordansky Gallery
DA @ Instagram
DA @ Twitter
Yeasayer + David Altmejd
Learning from Objects: An Interview with David Altmejd
David Altmejd, le prestidigitateur
Video: David Altmejd: The Heart is a Werewolf
In Conversation: David Altmejd
Video: Chaorismatique, David Altmejd sculpteur
La métamorphose dans l’œuvre de David Altmejd
Inside David Altmejd’s Crystal Palace
David Altmejd Creates Sculptures That Blur Concepts
David Altmejd’s New Busts Embrace the Real and Absurd
David Altmejd’s World of Pure Imagination
David Altmejd’s seductive yet repulsive sculptures
David Altmejd: la beauté du monstre
Dans les abysses mentales de David Altmejd
David Altmejd ou l’art du malaise absurde
Getting Lost in David Altmejd’s Hall of Mirrors
David Altmejd is Arresting
Ten questions for David Altmejd
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Extras
The Desert and the Seed, 2015
David Altmejd at MAC Montreal
David Altmejd at MAC Montreal
David Altmejd: Heads | Art21 “Extended Play”
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Interview
Philippa Snow: I wanted to ask you about how you got into using the werewolf motif.
David Altmejd: It was pretty intuitive. I think I just felt as though my work was a little too structural, very minimalist; I would use large light tables, I would use Plexiglas, so all the materials were pretty cold. I just thought at one point that these structures I was building needed to be infected with something. Then I started thinking, what would be the one object that would contrast with them the most? So I thought about a body part. Actually, I thought about a head, which I thought would be powerful enough, and would contrast with the coldness of the structure. I thought with a head, I could start creating a very particular energy.
But then I thought that maybe a human body part, the human head, was a little — not necessarily cliché, but certainly something that had become commonplace in contemporary art. Some of my favourite artists have been Kiki Smith, and Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober, and I love their work; but I did feel that following work like theirs, the use of human body parts in art had become more predictable. So I thought instead about referring to the body of the werewolf, which in my mind is the most humanlike monster: meaning the werewolf body part would be just as powerful to look at as the human body part. It’s possible for a viewer to identify with it. But at the same time, it’s weird instead of being familiar. And I really like that.
So that’s the reason I started using the werewolf body parts in my art. And very soon afterwards, once it found its place in my work, I started being conscious of ideas of transformation, and energy, and contrasts between light and darkness, and tension, and all these things, so I just decided to keep the werewolf as a kind of totemic figure in my work.
PS: It’s interesting that you mention the transformation aspect of it, because a lot of your work has the appearance of being…this is an odd thing to say about sculpture, but it almost has the look of something that’s in flux, or something that’s in development. It looks like an organic thing.
DA: Yeah, and it’s important for me to feel that the object, or the sculpture itself, is in the process of developing. One of the things I realised about sculpture that made it really amazing, and that gave it so much potential, is the fact that it exists in a real space. It doesn’t exist in the space of representation. So it exists in the world in almost the same way that a body does, or a person does, you know?
PS: Right. A photograph or a painting of a body that’s life sized is never going to be like a body in the same way as a sculpture of one at the same scale.
DA: And the body of a person is probably the most amazing thing that exists, for so many reasons. So the fact that sculpture inhabits the same space means that it has the potential for having the same kind of presence. Ever since I realised that, I’ve been trying to use the body of a person as a model; and one of the characteristics of a human body is that it’s constantly transforming. A person is never a finished object, and that’s part of what makes them amazing.
PS: And because a lot of the structures are quite dreamlike, there’s quite often the suggestion of a psychological transformation as well.
DA: Absolutely, yeah.
PS: Are there any filmmakers you’re particularly inspired by?
DA: There are certainly filmmakers whose work has excited me. Often I don’t like saying this, because I think that people consider it really, really obvious, but I love David Cronenberg.
PS: Oh, me too!
DA: But not necessarily because of his taste for the organic or the weird. I like him conceptually. I like the way he builds a movie. I like the way he understands — and this is my interpretation, I don’t know if it’s his, but I just have a feeling that he understands the film as being this independent object that develops its own intelligence, and its own language; its own logic, its own sexuality. I kind of like the fact that he steps back and lets the film develop by itself as if it was a body. Who else?
PS: I mean: David Lynch was the big one I was thinking of. But I’m always thinking about David Lynch.
DA: I would say that Lynch has been very, very important for me. Just as much as certain American visual artists from the eighties and the nineties are an influence — ones that still work today, but were very well-known then, like Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley — I see David Lynch the same way. They were very important for me at the beginning. I really admired that attitude; the space that they were exploring, which was somewhere between supercomedy and superdrama. You know how sometimes there are scenes in Lynch where you don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh, or to feel uncomfortable?
PS: I was thinking about it because of his being very interested in the fragmentation and the refraction of the human body — but especially in the head. There’s always a lot of stuff about head trauma, decapitation. Are you watching the new series of Twin Peaks?
DA: No, I haven’t been.
PS: Oh it’s amazing! I’m a Lynch obsessive anyway, but it’s really pulled me right back into the depths of that obsession.
DA: I do intend to watch it; I saw the first episode and I’m meaning to go back. I really loved the way the special effects are so clumsy, if I’m allowed to call them that?
PS: He loves that, I think.
DA: Because they could have been high-tech, but he obviously chose otherwise. That was amazing. That was completely his sensibility. Nobody else could have done that and actually pulled it off.
PS: No — it’s like the robin at the end of Blue Velvet. It’s an aesthetic decision.
DA: And so funny and not-funny at the same time. Personally, I like being uncomfortable. I think my favourite kind of laughter is uncomfortable laughter; and I think the best horror is the sort of horror that makes me want to giggle because I’m so uncomfortable.
PS: On an unrelated note (or maybe a related note, as we’re talking about uncomfortable laughter) — I read in an interview that you’re really into the Real Housewives?
DA: Oh my God! Yeah, yeah, absolutely!
PS: Because I’ve never seen the Real Housewives shows, but I did do a thing this year for which I had to watch every episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians ever broadcast in one month. There are thirteen series of it, so that was intense.
DA: I’ve never watched Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but my idea is that it’s one family, so they’re all sort of together in this, right? They’re not all rivals? But the Real Housewives are so great because they’re all rivals.
PS: Is that inspiring somehow, because you’re watching — I don’t know, humanity play itself out?
DA: I mean: it’s hard to see the humanity.
PS: Really? It’s just totally inhumane?
DA: Totally inhumane. I think that it’s totally human, because even the producers are human, so it’s technically a product of humanity. So it’s human in that way. But the set-up is so unlike anything you could understand or experience. I can’t start to think or imagine what it would be like to have a camera on you all the time, or have people there encouraging you to drink wine all the time so that you’ll be in a volatile mood. And producers who will make more money if there’s a fight! It’s a horrifying set-up. It’s like putting a rat in a maze, a labyrinth: of course they’re going to act like rats. They’re in a context that’s kind of indescribable. So it’s hard to understand them. But it’s exciting to see human beings try to survive in such a weird, extreme environment.
PS: We could tie it into our earlier discussion by saying that Real Housewives is a constructed take on the organic. And there are a lot of physically constructed bodies in reality TV, also! Certainly in the case of the Kardashians.
DA: Yeah, you mean facelifts and so on?
PS: And really extreme body augmentations. I find that fascinating, as well.
DA: And it’s funny, because with the Real Housewives there are different — they call them franchises, but it means there are spin-offs in different cities. And they’re usually groups of women who have transformed their bodies in very different ways. For example, the Real Housewives of New York are a group of women who are transforming in one very specific direction, and then you go to Beverly Hills and the Housewives there are taking a totally different transformative route. They end up looking like different species, in the end. It’s amazing.
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Show
First Werewolf, 1999
Untitled (Jane), 2003
Untitled (Black), 2003
Untitled (Blue Jay), 2004
Untitled (Swallow), 2004
The Lovers, 2004
The Builders, 2005
Untitled, 2006
Untitled, 2006
The New North, 2007
Untitled (Dark), 2008
The Center, 2008
The Egg, 2008
Untitled, 2010
Untitled, 2011
Untitled, 2011
Untitled, 2012
Untitled 3 (Rabbit Holes), 2013
Untitled 5 (Rabbit Holes), 2013
Untitled 6 (Rabbit Holes), 2013
Untitled, 2014
The Flux and the Puddle, 2014
Eye, 2015
Le Grand Theatre, 2016
The Vibrating Man, 2019
*
p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Or you might think, ‘Huh, that’s all?’ Negotiating omnipresent paranoia sounds noisy in the bad way. I think I just worry at worst? How does a paranoiac know they’re being paranoid? Isn’t that assumption inherently unreliable? If you can make others intuit that re: your new writing thing, you will be a literary god. ** Tosh Berman, My pleasure, Tosh, she’s worth a read for sure, I think. ** _Black_Acrylic, Even Sypha’s not curious? That’s something. Maybe you should start a ‘Shards’ Spy substack. Could be lucrative? ** Carsten, Hey. I have a strong aversion to Burning Man, and the religious-adjacent pontificating by its adherents doesn’t help, but I am tempted to watch that doc. It seems like a post-internet Rainbow Gathering kind of equivalent, and attending one of those back in the 90s was one of the miserable experiences I’ve ever had. But, yeah, I’ll try to watch the doc with open eyes. ** Don., Hi, Don.! I think I can imagine that transformative thing to some degree at least, and it does feel too deep and personal/complicated to get words to convey. Interesting. Aw, thank you for fighting for my talent. I’m not sure how to fight for yours, but if there’s a methodology, I’m ready. ** Uday, Déconfit is such a good word, isn’t it? The French do make excellent words. Even the simple ones. I think my favourite French word is ‘donc’, which comes out of French people’s mouths all the time. There’s something about it. Or how and when people say it, I guess. Interesting about veganism being the turf of the Hindu right. I guess a lot of people in the States who hate vegans think they’re snotty purists. ** Steve, The heatwave is creeping into being. Yesterday it started, today it’ll tick upwards, and tomorrow it’ll start blasting us full on for three days, they say. So the hatred of ‘ICM’ is mostly people scapegoating it within the general ‘AI is the boogeyman’ thing going on these days? I have a very faint memory of hearing a portion of that McLuhan album at the time. It was a thing in the late 60s to try to get hippies to think by slapping electronica or psychedelic jams behind the spoken words of relative brainiacs like McLuhan or Timothy Leary or Baba Ram Dass, etc. Same thing with Terrence McKenna especially in the early Rave days. ** laura w., After that frustrating losing battle, I think I’ll leave ‘Luigi 3’ to my imagination. I hate boss battles. When I lived in LA, I’d always make my gamer roommate win those fights for me so I could start wandering and poking at puzzles again. Thrilled that you loved ‘Four Nights …’. When I first moved to Paris I met and had a long, great conversation with the guy who played the main part in it. In real life, he was/is an astro-physicist. This had better be the last heatwave of the summer or I’ll … well, actually I can’t do a thing about it, can I? Smooth skies to you. ** HaRpEr //, ‘Nightwork’ is excellent. ‘Télex n° 1’, yes, that’s it. A friend of mine is the person who translated it. I guess it’s the most experimental by far of his novels, and my friend said it was a nightmare to get into workable English. Well, you can do like me and write an interconnected cycle of short books and have your cake and eat it too? Maybe? ** Thom, Cool. If our local fete foraine ever brings back its dark ride, I’ll hit audio record on my phone and send it to you. Week is looking scary scalding hot over here, but I’ll try to make it work. I hope yours is cloudy (but not humid). ** Okay. Today I decided to give David Altmejd a solo show in my galerie. Have a look around please. See you tomorrow.
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