Saturday, May 28, 2005

The Body as Creation

Luc Fierens sent me a nice little package back on April 24th along with quite a few of his little booklets. For now, I'm dealing with this as mailart posting, but I could just as easily have dealt with this a visual poetry. Fierens is a collagist and often works in concert with others to create his long-time series of Postfluxpostbooklets (now up to at least number 70), but most of his work is a kind of collage writing. He produces heavily visual collages with scraps of defining text: shards of dictionary pages, bold clippings that serve to entitle or direct the collage, and occasionally bits of text he's created himself.

His recent book, Living Sculptures is a good example of his technique. It is an insistent book, taking images of the human body torn from pages of magazines and newspers, and glueing them together in seemingly haphazard ways. But a direction is apparent. This is a book about the human impulse to modify one's own body in a vain search for a constant beauty. Mixing some French text with a bit of what I assume is Flemish (a dialect of Dutch) and much English, this book makes an interesting multi-national point about this tendency and its ultimate destructiveness.


Luc Fierens, Living Sculptures (2005)

un violon d'ingres

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