Below Zero:
Marc Quinn's Visions of Beauty, Art, and
Immortality
From the series Garden 2, 2000
Deutsche Bank Collection
In his
sculptures and installations, the British artist Marc Quinn lets blood
freeze and flowers perpetually bloom - suspended in silicone or conserved
in precisely engineered refrigeration units. The promise of eternal life
and perfect beauty in Quinn's works, however, contrasts with the
complicated devices required to support them, without which his still
lifes would rot or melt. Is Quinn pessimistic to suggest that life is as
fleeting as an ice sculpture and as fragile as the brittle stems of his
refrigerated lilies? On the contrary, the London-based art critic
Ossian Ward argues; the author describes why Quinn's worlds aren't
quite so cold as they might seem at first sight.
The Immortality Institute is an
organisation solely dedicated to facilitating extreme life extension, or
in other words, trying to discover how we may, one day, live forever.
Artists, writers, and politicians have long been accused of a parallel
pursuit, that of striving to leave their mark on the world in the form of
music, poetry, or a historical decision that outlives its creator, for the
sake of posterity. The achievements of artist
Marc Quinn lie somewhere in between these two groups. His already
significant career as a
YBA (Young British Artist) has undoubtedly left its legacy on British art
as well as on the history of sculpture, and his work continues a deep and
rich engagement in the fusion of science and art, or as he puts it, in
"the fundamental mysteries of existence".
From the series Garden 2, 2000
Deutsche Bank Collection
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Arguably, Marc Quinn’s use of science and technology is
unsurpassed in the field of art. The list of materials that might
constitute a typical work could include DNA strands, liquid silicone, the
artist’s own sperm, faeces, or chemicals such as vitamin A acetate, folic
acid and riboflavin. Indeed his studio more closely resembles the
cleanliness and order of a fertility clinic, complete with deep freezers
and sober white furniture, than it does an artistic or creative
environment. However, Quinn certainly recognises the creative potential of
science.
Self, 1991, © the artist
Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)
Aside from any philosophical concerns, the key to immortality is,
according to the Institute, the advancement of science through technology.
Cryonics, or the principle of freezing a body so that it might benefit
from future developments in medicine, is a theory that has been gaining
momentum since the 1960s, and one laboratory, the
Alcor Life Extension Foundation, now has 59 bodies in cryopreservation and
650 more people signed up for future participation. Perhaps the most
enduring work of art yet made around the issue of cryonics and
immortality, as well as one of the most iconic examples of late
20th-century figurative sculpture, is Quinn’s infamous refrigerated
installation Self of 1991, a cast of his head made from 9 pints of
his own frozen blood.
Rubber Soul, 1994, © the artist
Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)
By
gradually drawing off the approximate amount of blood that human beings
carry around (around 4-6 litres depending on gender), Quinn was making a
statement about all of us, despite the use of his own likeness. By
freezing his liquid life force, he left the twin possibilities that we
could live on forever or melt away at any minute.
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