Quayola Laocoön

Laocoön
Quayola Laocoön
Lobby, One Canada Square
Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB
25 April – 24 June 2016
Daily 7am-midnight
canarywharf.com
@yourcanarywharf
Following his celebrated engagement with
Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ‘unfinished’ Prigoni
series, Davide Quayola turns his attention to
another incomplete masterpiece – the apotheosis
of Hellenistic baroque: Laocoön and His Sons.
Across sculpture, video and print, Quayola’s new
body of work marshals both emerging visualization
technologies and (art) historical source material.
The result is a hybrid vision – traversing model and
monument, code, the corporeal, and the hyperreal.
Within the post-digital cultural field, a tension
plays out. On the one hand, the modern scientific
gaze views any particular ‘higher’ arrangement of
matter as provisional – as a state of affairs holding
only a temporary licence to function, before
elements separate and – eventually – reconstitute
in different groups. On the other hand, our
advanced technologies allow for the preservation,
and proliferation, of information to an extent never
before imagined. Between archival dreaming and
cosmic sleep, cultural icons live entirely vigorous,
undead, lives.
Quayola’s current
project traffics in
this spectral
condition, to
spectacular effect.
Disinterred from
a Roman hillside in
1506, the Laocoön
group’s incomplete
form immediately
aroused conjecture.
Beyond academic
debate, over the
course of five centuries, there were numerous
attempts to ‘restore’ the sculpture to its original
composition – through the addition of new limbs,
Filippo Magi's restoration of 1957 of the Laocoön which removed Canova’s
restorations and adding the father's right arm found by Ludwig Pollak
Sculpture at Work
Laocoon and his two sons devoured by the snake, after the antique statue.
Engraving made by Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, 1506–1520
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Nadim Samman, 2016
affixed in various positions. Today, the piece bears
the scars of this retro-engineering, though the
additions have been removed. Quayola’s project
takes up the speculative-sculptural task, deploying
the full power of virtual and physical prototyping
technologies. In terms of sheer quantity of
experiments, the result may constitute the most
comprehensive attempt to complete the group
ever undertaken. It is, however, no mere heavy
lifting job. Today, interrogating the distinction
between the original and the copy is no longer a
most urgent task for artists. Instead, the
prominence – and utility – of the version demands
consideration. It is within this space that Quayola’s
art works through the most contemporary of
conditions. In the post-digital landscape, ‘final’
judgements and questions of connoisseurship –
once considered the core of aesthetic enterprise –
are eclipsed by the truly disinterested intelligence
of the machine, and a surplus of viable possibilities.
Against rest, conclusion, and completeness, the
robot keeps moving. Against the limited locus of
‘real’ time, material or energy, the virtual horizon of
the artwork stretches into the distance. The
Laocoön project explores this expanded mode of
objecthood, working through the almost infinite
number of ‘complete’ sculptural options for
Laocoön’s missing right arm – a kind of archaeology
from a manifold of future-pasts. At the same time,
this process demonstrates a number of ‘rules’ or
algorithms implicit in the sculpture’s composition.
Quayola’s work is an act of analysis, as well as
presumption.
According to Virgil, Laocoön was a priest who
was killed for nearly exposing the warriors hidden
inside the legendary Trojan Horse. His ill-advised
investigation – tapping the sculpture’s body with
his spear – called forth the wrath of the gods, who
sent a serpent to dispose of him and – for good
measure – his sons. It is interesting to consider
Laocoön’s fate in light of his trespass: daring to
entertain the possibility that, behind a seemingly
inanimate figure, hidden, intelligent, machinations
are at work. With this project Quayola places the
algorithm in the position of the legendary Laocoön,
testing the sculpture in question with a view to
unlocking its secrets or possibilities. Unlike the
priest, the computer can never know too much.
Nadim Julien Samman read Philosophy at
University College London before completing a
doctorate in art history at the Courtauld Institute of
Art. In 2012 he curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale
with Carson Chan. Projects in 2014 included
‘Antarctopia’, The Antarctic Pavilion, 14th Venice
Biennale of Architecture, and ‘Treasure of Lima: A
Buried Exhibition’ – a unique site-specific exhibition
on the remote Pacific island of Isla del Coco. Nadim
is Co-Director of Import Projects, and Curator of
the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art.
Captive Laocoön
Dr Adriano Aymonino, 2016
Plate from Girard Audran, ‘Les Proportions Du Corps Humain:
Mesurées sur les plus belles Figures de l'Antiquité’ (Paris, 1683)
Computer generated renders
No other work of art has received as much
attention as the Laocoön. Since its unearthing from
the soil of the Esquiline Hill in Rome in 1506, this
tour de force of Hellenistic sculptural virtuosity has
been reproduced in all possible media, copied,
measured and dissected by legions of artists and
imposed on generations of students as the
supreme model to assimilate on their path towards
artistic glory.
Simply, the Laocoön has become one of the
most enduring archetypal forms of European art,
as well as a metaphor for the creative power of
art itself, for the sheer virtuosity in the rendition
of pathos and the exploration of the human form
into space.
Quayola’s disturbing object is the last
incarnation in a tradition that stretches for more
than half a millennium. But it is more than just
another specimen in an army of copies and
variants: it is a meditation on the art of sculpture
itself, on the process of extrapolating forms from
bare matter. As in Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’ – in their
turn the result of years of reflection on the
Laocoön – the statue is here captive, trapped by
the matter that once surrounded its tormented
body. Quayola aims at stressing the dialectic
Davide Quayola was born in Rome in 1982. He has
lived and worked in London since 2002, gaining
a BA in Digital Media from the University of the
Arts, London in 2005. Through his work he
investigates dialogues and the unpredictable
collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the
real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the
old and new. His work explores photography,
geometry, time-based digital sculptures and
immersive audio-visual installations and
performances. Since 2004 he has exhibited and
performed his work internationally, including a
project for the 54th Venice Biennale at the Italian
Cultural Institute in London, and exhibitions at the
National Art Center, Tokyo; Pushkin Museum,
Moscow; BOZAR, Brussels; Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona; Victoria & Albert Museum,
London; bitforms gallery, New York; and SeMA,
Seoul. His most recent solo exhibition,
Iconographies, was in NOME Gallery, Berlin,
Germany in 2016.
In 2013 Quayola was awarded the Golden
Nica at Ars Electronica for the project Forms with
co-author Memo Atken.
For more information visit quayola.com
Credits
A project by Quayola
Fabrication: Factum-Arte
Courtesy of the artist and Bitforms Gallery, NYC
Computer generated render
Dr Adriano Aymonino graduated in History of Art
at the University of Rome, then gained an MA at
the Warburg Institute, London before completing
his PhD at the University of Venice. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art of Yale University in London
and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
In 2009–10 he worked as head of research for the
Commission for Looted Art in Europe, based in
London. Since 2012 Dr Aymonino has been lecturer
and Coordinator of Undergraduate Programmes in
the Department of Art History at the University
of Buckingham.
Hand-coloured lithograph, Plate 25 from Dr Julien Fau, ‘Anatomie des formes exterieures
du corps humain, a l'usage des peintres et des sculpteurs’ (Paris, 1845)
Plate from Girard Audran, ‘Les Proportions Du Corps Humain:
Mesurées sur les plus belles Figures de l'Antiquité’ (Paris, 1683)
Plate from Girard Audran, ‘Les Proportions Du Corps Humain:
Mesurées sur les plus belles Figures de l'Antiquité’ (Paris, 1683)
relationship between the inert rock and the meaning
that we impose on matter through form.
For Michelangelo there was only one meaning:
for him the sculptor was a tool of God, not creating
but simply revealing the form already contained in
the marble. His role was to chip away everything
extraneous to liberate the divine spark.
In Quayola’s
objects the
overarching
principle is the
opposite: artistic
creation is the
result of a single
choice among an
infinite number of
possibilities. The
relativity of the
creative process is
expressed through
the detached and
mechanical aspect
of Quayola’s
working method:
a computergenerated
logarithm opens an
infinite number of
variants in the
relationship
between form and matter. The game lies in
constantly shifting the boundaries between the
rough marble and the sculptural surface, that
crucial threshold between the world of nature and
the world of man. The eventual robotic milling
process is therefore not just a tool functional to the
realization of the final sculpture, but an integral
part of Quayola’s work.
But the merit of Quayola’s sculpture truly lies in
its visual impact. As it emerges from the
imprisoning marble, the ill-fated Trojan priest
violently struggling to free himself from the two
serpents becomes an ideal metaphor for the
tension between form and matter, man and nature.
We perceive at once how the ancient sculptor
found himself in the paradoxical position of freeing
from the trappings of marble a figure that was
itself trapped by different forces.
Quayola’s object is a meta-sculpture, a sculpture
that speaks about its own nature and at the same
time a strong reminder of the archetypal power of
the Laocoön to generate discourses about art, its
essence and aims.
List of Works
Laocoön #D20-Q1 2016
Sculpture
Pulverised White Marble
235 ¥ 130 ¥ 120 cm
Laocoön Articulations
2016
Prints Series
18 Black and White
Archival Pigment Prints
Format: A4
Captives #B04 Fabrication
2015
HD Video
3-min Loop
Designed by Tim Harvey
Photographs courtesy of the artist unless
otherwise credited.
front Computer generated render
Sales
For enquiries please contact [email protected]
or Canary Wharf Public Art Office at
[email protected]
Printed by Jamm Print & Production
Milling in progress using robotic arm
Quayola’s Laocoön designs are the result of
complex computational processes explored via
custom-made software. 3-D scanning and
modelling have been employed to bring the
sculpture from physical to digital form, where the
information is processed and translated into the
physical model by milling using robotic arms.
The sculpture has been created in a bespoke
material made from special resin filled with
pulverised white marble. This is the result of
research undertaken in Factum-Arte, a workshop
of specialist artists and engineers based in Madrid,
where Laocoön has been fabricated.