
Marc Quinn’s seven sculptures that make up Emotional Detox (1995) occupy a white space. To walk amongst them is to encounter a Pompeii of torture, each body rendered not in volcanic residue but in the material of Roman curses, common lead. We intrude on physical pain, on torsos hacked from their lower halves, on hands hacked from their arms in the act of clawing their owner’s face, on heads detached and hastily placed back on (the right? the wrong?) neck and shoulders, where they threaten to topple.
They are casts from the artist’s own body, assembled deliberately flawed, seven to suggest the Deadly Sins – but if we stop before one and speculate “Is this Lust? Avarice?” it is because we want to divert our mind from the agony portrayed, put it to one side while we intellectualise. Far more honest to lose ourselves in the horror of coming back from an addiction that grips both the psyche and the body, to lose ourselves in each great pain that reminds us of, and calls up from the black well of memory, the ranks of pains great and small that we have been prey to. These pains could be natural, and thus forgiven, faced stoically, but for the fact that there are rectangular holes carved into the torsos. There is a four-square deliberation here! If there is catharsis here too, it is the fact that there seems to be no shame in the pain, it is not hidden, it is displayed in awful, blunt, beautiful candour.
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Images from marcquinn.com
