By Jillian McManemin
In the 1956 film High Society, the female lead played by Grace Kelly swims in a classic white bathing suit while her fiancé delivers these lines to her:
There’s a beautiful purity about you, like a statue to be worshiped.
She responds:
But I don’t want to be worshiped, I want to be loved.
And he quips back:
Well, that goes without saying, but I also want you up on a pedestal where you belong, where
I can look up and adore you.
Bad Posture, an exhibition by artist Luciana Pinchiero, traverses the dynamics between the corporeal and the sculptural about the female body—the vicissitudes of objecthood and subjecthood, of being worshiped and loved.
Two Greco-Roman myths are central in Bad Posture—Pygmalion and The Corinthian Maid, art-creation myths that act in tandem and as inversions of one another. Pygmalion encapsulates a patriarchal gaze, he sculpts the form of the ideal woman, and via Aphrodite’s magic, the sculpture animates into a woman for him to love. The Corinthian Maid, a more curious and mysterious story, is of a woman who renders her lover’s shadow on the wall as a keepsake while he’s away.
These two myths have been regarded by many as the origin of drawing, painting, and sculpture; Regnault’s paintings of them are titled, The Origin of Painting (for The Corinthian Maid) and The Origin of Sculpture (for the story of Pygmalion). The stories have been rendered repeatedly throughout art history to meditate on art making and desire—Pinchiero continues this tradition with collage, while focusing on the form of sculpture and the body—their divergences and merging.