Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

188 — 189
Adam Budak
sudden appearance, where death and the possibility of a new beginning are confronted
by the relativeness of time and futility of any resistance. As such, Martin’s oeuvre is
immersed in a philosophical discourse that profoundly touches upon the major grand
narratives of humanity. The presence of history intertwined with the deep reflection
upon the abstract notions of space and time render a work that illuminates with the
strength of allegory and brings in a metaphysical dimension. Martin’s outstanding
and uncanny sculpture Mandi VIII (2006) is a mise-en-scene of failure and unfulfilled
desire, still yet another contribution to a series of works, conceived under the common
title Mandi, a title which originates from an expression the artist encountered in Italy,
where the departure boards are fabricated, a word which is a colloquial term for “good
bye” and whose etymology includes the melange of words mano (hand) and dio (God)
meaning to leave “in the hands of God.” As a powerful expression of lamentation over
humanity’s loss of certitude and clarity, Mandi VIII articulates human drives towards
emancipation and nobility. Based upon the classic Hellenic marble sculpture Laocoön
and His Sons (dated probably from the 1st century AD, excavated in Rome in 1506 and
acquired for the Vatican collections, where it still is today), depicting the Trojan priest
Laocoon and his twin sons, Antiphas and Thymbraeus, assailed by a fearsome sea serpent,
sent to punish him for his hostility to the will of the god Apollo, Martin’s Mandi
VIII is yet another exercise in the artist’s favorite strategy of appropriating diverse
readymades from the antique artefacts and masterpieces of literature to everyday
objects and even more ephemeral phenomena of nature, shifting the contexts and
traveling with the meaning, thus activating uncertainty, doubt and a desire for further
enquiry. A controversial subject of study and adoration from the Roman poet, Virgil’s
epic poem The Aeneid through the eighteenth century’s detailed scientific investigations
by the historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) who identified the
sculpture as “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and by the philosopher Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) who considered it from the point of view of a philospher
of asthetics and used it as a case study in defining the difference between visual arts
and literature, to Jacques Ranciere who in his The Aesthetic Unconscious praises the
sculpture for the expression of the victory of classical serenity over emotion, Laocoön
and His Sons has stimulated the imagination and was exposed to a multiplicity of
beyond-universal readings. Almost faithful to the original, rendered as its plaster
replica, Kris Martin’s version of the iconic statue, described by Pliny the Elder as the
greatest of all art works, is a slightly edited one, ironic if not sarcastic “intervention”:
the artist removes the serpent, leaving the group fighting against an invisible force,
thus significantly altering the sculptural composition’s sense, focusing now more on
the idealized beauty of the men’s struggling bodies rather than on the representation
of pain and suffering as well as violence, crime and punishment, the grand themes that
were attached to the reading of this sculpture for centuries. The artist tricks the spectator,
now left with a disquieting absence in regards to the historical reference, manipulating
his/her senses, unexpectedly opening the void – possibly an unknown aggressor
or an invisible source of suffering – to often overly paranoid speculations. Who are
we fighting with? The reason for struggle becomes abstract and phantasmagoric: in
spasm and convulsion we are left with ourselves and against ourselves. Fate and power
are (temporarily?) removed from a horizon of our existential experience. Mandi VIII is a
powerful, however silent hymn for humanity in precarious times of distress and anxiety.
The anatomist Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842) who studied Laocoön and His Sons in
his book The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression As Connected with the Fine Arts
empasized a silence in Laokoon’s suffering: “that most terrible silence in human conflict,
when the outcry of terror or pain is stifled in exertion; for during the struggle with
the arms, the chest must be expanded or in the act of rising; and therefore the voice,
which consists of the expulsion of the breath by the falling or compression of the