ORC: a series.

Life size. Polyurethane foam & filler onto steel. 2008/9/10

orc 1 orc back

Orc 1

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Orc 2

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Orc 3

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Orc 4

I set out to challenge our ideas about purity; to juxtapose the “purity” of whiteness, with the “impurity” of the aroused male figure. Our experience of Greek and Roman sculpture is of white marble figures (despite that many if not all, classical sculpture were originally painted) and white has come to express purity in western eyes. But the nude, particularly the explicit nude, is seen as far from pure. And yet they are just our bodies. There is nothing inherently impure about them, whatever may be in the eye of the beholder.

The reference is to William Blake rather than to J.R.R.Tolkien.

In Blake’s work “America: A Prophecy”, Orc is the embodied symbol of a disruptive power inimical to the established order, whose function is to rebel against … the status quo.[1] What was true for Blake: that the status quo was destructive and sterile, is fast becoming true again. For Blake, … Orc appears as a symbolic picture of the return of the repressed to the level of consciousness by the vehicle of political revolution; he is the inevitable result of sexual repression, which Blake, unlike Freud, regarded as inimical rather than necessary to civilized life. In the terms of Blake’s myth, when … the Id is repressed … it will break forth with terrible force as Orc … as political revolution.[2]

Our lives are increasingly circumscribed by legislation and new taboos. We live in a state of overt sexuality: apparently anything goes. But this so-called liberation exists within very strict limitations. Sex is now ‘out in the open’, but what is permissible is governed by a collective sense of what constitutes ‘normality’. Anything outside that, rather than being ‘brushed under the carpet’, as it was for Blake when much sexuality was at least concealed, is now actively persecuted, sometimes by mob violence; by an hysteria created almost entirely by a prurient, prudish and thoroughly hypocritical popular press. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that such collective ‘normality’ as we have is itself a product of that same popular press: a tabloid morality.

To be outside ‘normal’ is now, perhaps, a more perilous situation than it has ever been. And yet this view of normality is very recent, normality being whatever society deems it to be. Normality for many cultures was, is, and will be, very different.

For Tolkien, Orc was the goblin of war and modernity threatening his ivory tower. For Blake he was the spirit of revolution subverting the sterility of his times. Orc, for me, represents all the sexual potential that is repressed by the culture in which I find myself. It is as dangerous as it might be desirable.

[1] Randel Helms: Myth, Magic & Meaning in Tolkien’s World: Thames & Hudson 1974: Ch.4 “Frodo as Anti-Faust”

[2] Ibid