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It is the printmaker in her that appears to
dominate. I do not mean that the prints are better than the sculptures, but
rather that the compulsive engraver that she is cannot but do violence to the
surface of her sculptures. One might describe the sculptures as 'engravings in
space', which is the name given to an earlier Sorel exhibition. This has the
advantage of suggesting how the engravings might float before our eyes rather
than be confined to a flat surface. Yet we would do better to think of the
engravings on the sculptures as tattoos, which after all are probably the
oldest kind of engravings of all and like the 'oldest profession', are as
raunchy and unrespectable.
What makes our hackles rise with Sorel's
sculptural tattoos is not, of course, the threat of moral turpitude but the
fear of aesthetic decadence. It is this fear that prevents restorers froin
returning classical sculptures to their former painted glories and makes us
cling to the purity of sculptural form. It is also a fear that the tattoo
reduces the human form into a rippling display board and turns the messenger
into the message.
Her Macho The Cock (watercolour, print and
sculpture) show us how touchy we are over our own bodily, and particularly
sexual, display. For though we are quite willing to arrange our appearance for
sexual purposes, we stop short at turning ourselves into a collection of sexual
emblems.
In the watercolour, we see a representation
of the frightful Macho standing on his motor bike, his hackles risen less out
of indignation, more in expectation of pleasure. In the print, it is still
possible to make out a transformed representation of Macho and the bike, the
hackles, small areas of red that fit decorously into the overall composition.
As soon as they appear in the sculptures as red perspex engraved fragments,
their status is changed from a trace, albeit of Macho's virile appendage, to a
sexual badge and what started of in the watercolours as part of a potent
messenger ends in the sculpture as a pathetic message of sexual
conquest. |
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Changes in status from messenger to message
and from sexual posture to sexual emblem mark out some of the emotional content
of Sorel's work, but such changes are brought about by what Max Ernst called
"the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance upon a plane
which apparently does not suit them." Though Ernst was writing about
collage, his words might equally apply to the engraving and three-dimensional
forms in Sorel's sculpture and to the colour and line in her prints.
In her Wise And Foolish Virgin, for instance,
we have two elegantly juxtaposed coloured figures, one yellow the other blue.
They are required to share the same plane with a group of scrawled lines out of
which emerges a sexually ferocious hermaphrodite with what appears to be a
serrated penis protruding from his/her vagina.
Yet this is not the theatre of abstract
expressionism where, in Clement Greenberg's description, the action takes place
on the curtain rather than on the stage beyond. It is Andre Masson's 'psychic
menagerie' in which images of distinctive types are brought forward into our
consciousness, to fight it out rather than simmer beneath the surface, drawing
or sculpture. (Oct 25 - Nov 24 See colour illustration)
Philip Hughes |
