Absalom, Absalom! And All the King's Men

¶ … Absalom, Absalom! And All the King's Men represent a less traditional, more subversive version of history, and how they are also clearly male representations of history From Duchamp's analogies between humans and machines, to the traumatized bodies of dadaism and surrealism, to the gendered politics of horizontal sculptures, the body figures have had a prominent position in the art of the teens and postwar decades. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the context, cultural meanings and aesthetics of the modernist body, now gendered male, female or androgynous.

In order to do that, we will concentrate our attention on two statues made by Giacometti and Epstein respectively, called "Woman with her throat cut" and "Woman possessed." The choice is motivated for the important changes in aesthetics and the philosophical thought they reflect. The choice of a female gender is not a casual one and in the following paragraphs we will show why. One of the most relevant aspects that must be discussed is the absence of the pedestal.

The pedestal represents the context, the environment in which the piece of art is situated and which allows the viewers to recognize it as such. If the artwork tells a story, then it is the pedestal which orientates its direction. In addition, the pedestal implies a distinct separation between the environment of the viewer and the environment of the contemplated piece. The absence of the pedestal annuls this separation, with some important consequences. One of these consequences is the passage from verticality to horizontality.

Art critics have suggested that even in the case of a sculpture represented in a horizontal position, the presence of a pedestal gives it attributes which care associated with verticality. If the sculpture is place directly on the floor, this implies that the floor becomes part of the piece of art. This is striking under the circumstances in which the viewer and the art object are situated on the exact same floor. This means that the floor is activated and that the viewer is actually inside the artistic experience.

The contemplation acts have been usually laced in a world external to that of the contemplated object. In this case, the contemplating instance is an integrated part of the entire experience. This creates a completely new experience for the body of the viewer himself, who needs to find new, personal dynamics in approaching the art object. It must be mentioned that the horizontal and the vertical axes have underwent a powerful gendering process.

Taking a look at universal sculpture, we see that when the male is presented in a horizontal position, he is either dead, wounded or about to die. If the person in a horizontal position is a woman, she can be depicted in any kind.