Ariane Belisle
No. 109 – winter 2015

Rachel Kneebone: 399 Days


White Cube
London
July 18—
September 28, 2014


 

Hybrid body parts, severed limbs and phallic figures populate Rachel Kneebone’s 399 Days (2012-2013). Towering over visitors as they enter the White Cube’s 9x9x9 gallery space in Bermondsey (London, UK), the artist’s psychosexual hinterland takes the form of an erect column that soars towards the cubic room’s bright skylight. Porcelain tiles depicting erotic states of flux cascade towards the beholder’s feet, as organic outlines ambiguously morph into bodies. Unfolding in an infinite spiral narrative that purposefully lacks a cohesive beginning, middle and end, the ivory sculpture refutes both history and the passage of time. Instead, Kneebone chooses to focus on the now, or rather the viewer’s immediate visceral reaction to the anagrams of vehemence and violence that inhabit the porcelain chrysalis. Hence, recognizable shapes rub shoulders with the quintessentially bizarre; 399 Days simultaneously conveys familiarity and strangeness, beauty and horror, purity and adulteration, ecstasy and mortality, fragility and monumentality, playfulness and menace, and completeness and provisionality. It is through these acts of negation that the artist’s uncanny plot unfolds.

Seductively treading the line that exists between aesthetics, philology and philosophy, 399 Days is firmly anchored within the contemporary art canon. Yet, it seeps art historical references through its physical form, speaking of Trajan’s Column, the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and August Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Furthermore, for her oeuvre, Kneebone relentlessly engages with transgression, sin, existentialism, romanticism,


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