ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

RENATA SALECL: “HELL & BACK”
Catalogue text. 2006

Stephen Shanabrook’s new work of melted plastic touches two fascinating and at the same time traumatic obsessions of contemporary society: the status of celebrity and death. Shanabrook has for a while been keen observer of our society’s dealing with death, especially with the fact that the latter is more and more perceived as one of the prohibited issues today. If in the Victorian times, sex was taboo, in today’s society death is becoming one. Parents, for example, often do not allow children to attend funerals in order to protect them from the traumatic nature of death and dying. However, as we know from psychoanalysis, what is prohibited and denied often becomes more traumatic than what is allowed. Shanabrook’s work has already in the past exposed the traumatic nature of death. His new work, however, makes death part of the new type of obsession with celebrity culture. The latter have today replaced old authorities as points of people’s identification. This obsession with celebrity culture, on the one hand, creates an impression that everyone can become famous if he or she is able to sell his or her image in the right way, and, on the other hand, it has also created the perception that everyone can become attractive and eternally young, if only one works on one’s image. In this celebrity obsessed world there also seem to be no place for death and decay.

What does it mean when Stephen Shanabrook burns celebrity dolls so that the plastic they are made of melts into horrifying squashed objects. First of all, Shanabrook shows what an object of attraction can easily turn into: from a sublime, inaccessible object of admiration or desire, it can become perceived as an abject, squashed object which provokes unease and anxiety. Melted figures Shanabrook is playing with illustrate very well the Freudian nature of the uncanny – the fascinating and at the same time horrifying nature of the object of desire. But when Shanabrook mixes new celebrities like Zidane, Bruce Willis or Tupac with old mythological figures he mockingly shows how mytholigization from today does not so much differ from that in the past. Both in their own way tried to offer a solution to subject’s problems with death and desire.

* Renata Salecl is the philosopher and sociologist, one of the leading representatives of Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis; professor at the Institute of Criminology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Cambridge University and London School of Economics. She is the author of “ Perversions of Love and Hate” and “ On Anxiety. Thinking in Action”.