The Beasts of Intimacy's Burden
John Edmond
John Edmond
Anastasia Booth’s tiles are a series of facts. Her work re-casts the totem of the fetish into a diffused environment of newly suggested relationships. A trial of metallurgical purity, an assay is a term now subsumed into the foundation of science as a systemic measuring of chemical compositions. Booth’s tiles are tests of varied concentrations of gold dust and their impact on a stable body of formula plaster. In a manner similar to how laboratory bioassays measure the potencies of pharmaceutically active substances on living cells, with each test tube a unique indexical witnessing of the agents’ purity and impact, here each tile bears a mottled mark or gaping wound as an index of the varying purity of the gold dust. The respective lines of research are then set into their particular relationships.
These two processes, scientific and artistic, bear a similar interest in ‘construction’ prowess. An assay or tile alone is a minor fact of elemental witnessing. Scientists and their institutions bring scientific or laboratory prowess to the distribution of a fact, their fiscal capacity being used to set standards of credibility whether through reifying concepts into new testing apparatus or setting higher minimums of assay sampling numbers. Artists and their institutions bring conceptual prowess to the exhibition of work, similarly setting standards and expectations through the expensive translation of concepts or requirements of transportation, builds and technical riders. Anastasia’s assay tiles suggest both forms of construction prowess; as evident aesthetic objects, and visualisation of a research process, the work operates in a manner whereby this dynamic can be scaled as relationships required.
These two processes, scientific and artistic, bear a similar interest in ‘construction’ prowess. An assay or tile alone is a minor fact of elemental witnessing. Scientists and their institutions bring scientific or laboratory prowess to the distribution of a fact, their fiscal capacity being used to set standards of credibility whether through reifying concepts into new testing apparatus or setting higher minimums of assay sampling numbers. Artists and their institutions bring conceptual prowess to the exhibition of work, similarly setting standards and expectations through the expensive translation of concepts or requirements of transportation, builds and technical riders. Anastasia’s assay tiles suggest both forms of construction prowess; as evident aesthetic objects, and visualisation of a research process, the work operates in a manner whereby this dynamic can be scaled as relationships required.
When you first see The Beasts of Intimacy’s Burden it is not the tiles but the beasts that first stick out: sheaths of latex as if fleshy curtains, a glass gag shifting in the light, a black steel and leather suspension frame of bull or insect. These are a different sort of fact. As they meld art tactics with kink design, they also meld two types of fetishism—animist and sexual—both vexed descriptions of the seemingly irrational linking of unknowable power and value systems to totemic, often mundane objects. Their synthesis makes sense. If feitiço is about the charm of imbuing everyday objects with power, whatever the source, then Anastasia’s infusing of BDSM iconography into art makes apparent the transfusion of power into them.
This iconographic instilment offers other entry points into The Beasts’ work. In one direction, there is the votive suggestiveness to the pieces. Though not as not explicitly Baroque Catholic as Booth’s Teresa or Greco pagan as her Portrait of Artemis, both 2016, the associations of religion are potentially how Anastasia suffuses power into her materials. On another pathway, the works can be understood as playing off value systems—design versus art, but also masculinity and femininity, and black and white—which are carefully kinked, so that the potential white of femininity does not soften the work, but gives it a certain cruelty of harsh fluorescent lighting and exposure of a hospital, laboratory or gallery space. In either direction, this interplay provides a confounding tactility to the exhibition. These quite dainty objects suggest a pushpull with ones’ fingers: fragility and resistance, critical distance and hard use, and functional steel and the malleable skin surrogacy of leather and latex.
But these beasts are clearly art. And this in part, is why the tiles become keys to the broader exhibition. For design to maintain the integrity of its ‘designness,’ it requires a minimum of functionality and appropriateness of context, and in the contemporary tradition of art this element is filled by the build. Watching artists develop their build language reveals the confidence of theme and materiality required to produce a simpler lexicon that can be scaled, be readily executed by others, and negotiates the artwork’s relationship to its surrounds. Anastasia’s tiles are akin to votive trials, like assays each purposively unique in their research and yet obtaining their power from their massing of witnessing, rather than production, into fact. It is within the tiles—as they create not a binary but a spectrum of art, build, construction and design—that Anastasia infuses animism into her environment.
On the floor, a nippletile starfish and the last of Anastasia’s beasts, seems to crawl across the concrete, but instead it and its friends’ arms fill the negative space of her tiles. Their outstretched limbs, like the holes that repeatedly perforate her sculptural beasts, suggest the potential energy of intermingling. In one sense, they show how the tiles could become an encompassing build or installation in a manner that makes manifest Booth’s animating research process. But also, more softly, these loops, holes, and suggested patterns become suture points for threading unseen psychic energy through the objects. Fetishism sets a series of value relationships between individual and environment. Anastasia Booth’s work, in its binding and blurring of material and conceptual relationships, reads the fetish not in terms of our transformation of navigable environment into portable object, but transformation of personal object into environment.
This iconographic instilment offers other entry points into The Beasts’ work. In one direction, there is the votive suggestiveness to the pieces. Though not as not explicitly Baroque Catholic as Booth’s Teresa or Greco pagan as her Portrait of Artemis, both 2016, the associations of religion are potentially how Anastasia suffuses power into her materials. On another pathway, the works can be understood as playing off value systems—design versus art, but also masculinity and femininity, and black and white—which are carefully kinked, so that the potential white of femininity does not soften the work, but gives it a certain cruelty of harsh fluorescent lighting and exposure of a hospital, laboratory or gallery space. In either direction, this interplay provides a confounding tactility to the exhibition. These quite dainty objects suggest a pushpull with ones’ fingers: fragility and resistance, critical distance and hard use, and functional steel and the malleable skin surrogacy of leather and latex.
But these beasts are clearly art. And this in part, is why the tiles become keys to the broader exhibition. For design to maintain the integrity of its ‘designness,’ it requires a minimum of functionality and appropriateness of context, and in the contemporary tradition of art this element is filled by the build. Watching artists develop their build language reveals the confidence of theme and materiality required to produce a simpler lexicon that can be scaled, be readily executed by others, and negotiates the artwork’s relationship to its surrounds. Anastasia’s tiles are akin to votive trials, like assays each purposively unique in their research and yet obtaining their power from their massing of witnessing, rather than production, into fact. It is within the tiles—as they create not a binary but a spectrum of art, build, construction and design—that Anastasia infuses animism into her environment.
On the floor, a nippletile starfish and the last of Anastasia’s beasts, seems to crawl across the concrete, but instead it and its friends’ arms fill the negative space of her tiles. Their outstretched limbs, like the holes that repeatedly perforate her sculptural beasts, suggest the potential energy of intermingling. In one sense, they show how the tiles could become an encompassing build or installation in a manner that makes manifest Booth’s animating research process. But also, more softly, these loops, holes, and suggested patterns become suture points for threading unseen psychic energy through the objects. Fetishism sets a series of value relationships between individual and environment. Anastasia Booth’s work, in its binding and blurring of material and conceptual relationships, reads the fetish not in terms of our transformation of navigable environment into portable object, but transformation of personal object into environment.
