There's a giant ceramic squid in a New York art gallery.
Walking into the gallery, you encounter the 16-foot-long, beached creature, its opalescent, slick-looking flesh seeming to putrefy, lying in a puddle of its own ink. You expect its tentacles to quiver in a final death-throe.
Despite the distraction of seeing the singular form of "throe" for the first time in my life, that's still a pretty striking image.
And it's a pretty striking accomplishment. The artist, David Zink Yi, had to go to the Netherlands to the world's largest kiln (!) to fire the behemoth. As for the ink, apparently it's a mix of Japanese ink and corn syrup. (Did the ink need to be Japanese to get the right color or texture? Or was it a reference to the famous first photographing and filming of giant squid by Japanese scientist Tsunemi Kubodera? He doesn't say.)
Why a squid? Reading the philosopher Vilem Flusser, Mr. Zink Yi decided that with anatomical features so different from humans—like bioluminescence, a built-in flashlight for navigating the ocean’s darkest depths—it was the perfect image of what in cultural studies is referred to as “the other.”
So it's a commentary on cultural diversity? Or maybe it's more omphaloskeptical:
It is an artwork about the process of making artworks, and the very nature of sculpture itself, its symbolic potency. “What I enjoy,” Mr. Zink Yi said, “is this kind of alchemical situation in converting this garbage of nature, which is a huge metaphor for many things.”
WHAT.
Artspeak is not my favorite English dialect by any stretch of the imagination, but in this case, I don't even have a clue what he's talking about. Is the squid the "garbage of nature", and if so, what is it being converted into? Or is the "garbage" the raw materials, the clay and the corn syrup, being converted into sculpture?
And what, exactly, is it a "huge metaphor" for? Perhaps the importance of recycling. Or the waste intrinsic to fine art.*
Well, whatever it is, the artist--or the author of the article, I'm not really clear which--is insistent that it isn't a squid.
Could have fooled me.
* I feel compelled to add that I actually really dig (some) fine art and I believe that, like many outwardly "wasteful" human pursuits, it also has intrinsic value. I'm definitely impressed by the scale and realism of this piece.
