David Altmejd

The work of Canadian-born sculptor David Altmejd was a highlight of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, where he installed an elaborate tableau that functioned like a small multi-level stage in the round. Entitled Delicate Men in Positions of Power (2003), the piece is an amalgamation of platforms, plinths and pedestals, spiralling up from a base of large painted wooden boxes to ever diminishing blocks like a convoluted architectural model, a rock concert stage or an over-the-top boutique window display. The nature of the setting, whether intended for an experiment, ritual or performance, is as uncertain as its condition; it could be under construction, just recently completed or in the process of breaking down.
The main player on this stage is a werewolf lying across a broad platform as if on a morgue slab. Looking quite dead, seemingly decomposing and perhaps partially dissected, the creature also seems very much alive. The inertia of its board-stiffness and the entropy of decay are contradicted by the pervasive dynamism of crystalline outcroppings that seem to grow from the flesh and bone, as well as the tiny intricate cubic constructions of clear plastic and mirrors emerging from the carcass. Topping the piece – suggesting wig-shop displays, portrait busts, lab specimens or war trophies on stakes – are a pair of severed heads sporting lush mops of hair, their gutted faces filled with quartzite crystals. The scene sparkles with glitter, drips strands of pearls and sprouts faux flowers and little birds, all reflecting and refracting endlessly in the faceted mirrors and glazed surfaces.
Delicate Men in Positions of Power was accompanied in the Biennial by a pair of oversized decaying werewolf heads installed in Perspex cases in a bucolic, out-of-the-way hillock in Central Park – and is a grand display of Atmejd’s preoccupations. Werewolves and other monstrous human/animal/mineral hybrids populate the artist’s world, and the geometry of Modernism in its high and low incarnations, from Bauhaus to discotheques, lies beneath it all. Altmejd’s language of objects and styles was explored further in a trio of new works recently exhibited at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. The University 2 (2004), Altmejd’s largest tableau to date, provides a theatrical laboratory for the study of his creatures and scenarios.
The Lovers (2004) comprises a pair of spooning figures, all but skeletal remains, their feet jacked into a mysteriously glowing box, with one creature plugging its finger into the other’s rear end. The third piece, University 1 (2004), an elaborate cubic construction of mirrored surfaces, shiftingly transforms the world it reflects as the viewer moves around it.
The werewolf becomes the central metaphor. While it easily fits with a surge of interest in horror and all things Gothic among the current generation of emerging artists, this connection seems secondary. Horror and Goth preoccupations are born of a basic desire for there to be more afoot than we imagine, even if that unseen reality is terrible or sinister. Altmejd’s works do suggest a romantic search for the other-worldly, either for its own sake or, as seems the case with so many young Goths and horror fans, as a means of escaping ennui. But for all their suggestions of gore, Altmejd’s werewolves are actually rather bloodless and pretty. While they sport impressive pelts, it’s hard to imagine them with much hair on their chests. (They seem more likely to break into some fey soliloquy than go for your jugular.) They are perhaps only slightly more brash versions of the sort found in movies such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) or its update Teenwolf (1985), in which the monster as the personification of society’s discomfort with the collective id is replaced by the monster as a metaphor for the anxious awkwardness of teenage transition and sexual awakening. The werewolves seem to decay, but might well be caught like film stills pulled from a transformation scene in which they begin some other kind of metamorphosis. Even if decaying, Altmejd’s bodies and heads rot in the most lovely way, their decline giving rise to stalagmites and crystalline extrusions. Troubling and anxiety-producing as Altmejd’s scenarios may be, they are shot through with desire and hope.
Perhaps the most telling elements in his works are the hairy tresses and locks that crown his figures. It is in examining the terrific he/she shags adorning these creatures that one recognizes their kin to be less the monsters of Mary Shelley than the likes of Ziggy Stardust, Gary Glitter, Liberace or Siegfried and Roy. The werewolves are glamwolves, and the possibility and magic they embody – which comes perhaps with a howl, a snarl and a hint of dread and terror – is that of a glamorous transformation from the scripted life one is doomed to live into the force one imagines oneself becoming.