Guest Writer Justin Hoover on SYZYGY
October 2, 2009 at 1:00 am
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Life May Be Just a Fragile Occurrence
or
Life and All Its Minor Horrors
By Justin Hoover
What the hell does syzygy mean? Seriously. I’ve been trying for a week and still can’t use it in a sentence. I am told by the dictionary located in my F4 key that it means “a conjunction or opposition, esp. of the moon with the sun: the planets were aligned in syzygy.” Perhaps somewhat dubiously, I feel as if F4 has informed me that syzygy is the relation between the animus and the anima: the ‘masculine’ part of a woman’s personality and the ‘female’ - often introverted - part of a man’s personality.
Now, that clears things up right?
Well, I interviewed Liesa Litzske about her recent sculptures in SYZYGY to help me clear up this complex idea.
For SYZYGY Liesa has created two plush sculptures, named Breach, and Hang, both consisting of pink and pink-ish fabrics from a variety of sources, including children’s garments, stuffed toys, dress lace and what appears to be a form of latex. All the materials are stuffed and sewn together to make a corporeally inelegant and somewhat grotesque fleshy body-part assemblage imbued with a touch of O.C.D. and a palpable sexual tension. These pieces either hang from the ceiling in a paused state of descent, as implied by the lone disembodied digit dejected under the conglomerate pseudo bio-mass above, or bust out of the white wall of the gallery, literally breaking the sheetrock down in a rejection of the fixtures of contemporary culture (and by extension the fixtures of interpersonal relationships and practices of conventional socialization).
Liesa, in her own words, is trying to reveal all the “minor horrors” associated with having a body: the hairs we try to get rid of; the smells we scrub away; the blemishes, the diseases and eventually death; all the thoughts we try to downplay, disregard or elide. From these disfigured and abstracted bodily parables emerges the sense that the artist is driven by the need to untie and retie constantly the threads by which the objects themselves are bound and from which they receive their structure. Moreover, Lietzke cites the Kleinian psychoanalytic idea of reparation as a means of assuaging feelings of helplessness in the face of inevitable degradation, loss and destruction.
These works reframe anatomical sexuality through caricaturing our subconscious relationship to our bodies as adults and employ the tension we hold in our relationship to the biologically grotesque – and especially to the grotesque things we try to veil or hide. In this way her fluffy and ferociously corporeal sculptures fix the viewer in a place where she is thinking of the hidden parts of the human body, and her relationship to the subtle processes undertaken in order to fit into the package of “adult.” By creating abstracted toy-like parts Lietzke bring to light how we veil our own bodies, literally and figuratively. In her own terms she is making a characterization of the minor horrors associated with physical being and the performance of adulthood.
In the end the viewer comes away from the sculptures wondering about where they last saw one of those dolls that women cops in the movies use when speaking to children about the ‘bad man.’ But we walk away also wondering about what is happening to our own bodies, if we stink and if we cut our toe nails recently. The sculptures are explosions of psyche, a bit like the end of Akira the Japanese anime film by Katsuhiro Otomo where the protagonist Tetsuo loses control of his magic/techno body, which suddenly expands and engulfs the city of Neo-Tokyo and the ensuing psychic force turns into an explosion of silent mushroom cloud proportions. Cut away to a long shot of the decimated city in the distance and the ocean spilling into the massive crater.
I am left still wondering what the hell syzygy means, yet through investigating Lietzke’s sculptures I am experiencing an unconscious tension regarding my own Eros and Thanatos, i.e. the drive for life and its inevitable descent. Perhaps if we follow the lead of these pieces by Litzke, and if we fuss around for long enough with our bodies, we can repair enough of the damage inflicted on them by father time and stay our mortality even for an instant. In the end we are left thinking that life and all its minor horrors may be just a fragile occurrence.
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