Collection Study
Huma Bhabha, What is Love, 2013

Text by Barbara Casavecchia
January 2017

What is Love is a polystyrene, cork, acrylic paint, oil stick and lipstick sculpture made in 2013 by Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Kharachi, Pakistan). Its dimensions are 203 x 30.5 x 36 cm.

The artwork was first exhibited during the eponymous exhibition What is Love at VeneKlasen/Werner in Berlin (2 May-28 June 2014) along with other works Bhabha produced during her residency at the American Academy in Berlin (autumn 2013).

What is Love (2013) was acquired for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection from VeneKlasen/Werner on 14 May 2014. The work went on loan for the exhibition Atopolis, produced by WIELS, Brussels, Belgium within the framework of Mons 2015, European Capital of Culture and held at the Manège de Sury, Mons, Belgium from 13 June until 18 October 2015.

The sculpture is carved on all sides, requiring the visitor to move around it in order to appreciate it fully. The main materials Bhabha employed in this work – cork and polystyrene foam – are typical of her practice. The relative ease with which the materials can be handled and carved allows Bhabha to create the works entirely by herself.

At DRAF the work is exhibited along with a selection of works by Huma Bhabha from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection and a loan from Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK.

For Collection Study: Huma Bhabha, What is Love (2017), DRAF has commissioned a text by the Italian critic and curator Barbara Casavecchia.

Study

She is intimidatingly tall, I think, the first time I see her, standing like a bodyguard at the entrance of David Roberts’ office. I’m short, you see – or vertically challenged, as a petite friend once described me – so my perspective tends to be from the bottom up. The location is perfect, if the intention is to make you feel as if you’re entering a sancta sanctorum. An archaic guarding goddess, evoking the monumental chryselephantine (gold for the peplum, ivory for the skin, over a wooden framework) Αθηνά Παρθένος, the virgin Athena created by Phidias to protect the Parthenon temple and the city of Athens: a bicolour statue with a pallid head, like the one looking down on me.

‘A recreation in modern materials of the lost colossal statue by Phidias, Athena Parthenos by Alan LeQuire (1990) is housed in a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park. She is the largest indoor sculpture in the Western world’ (Wikipedia). The Nashville Athena has enormous blue eyes, wide-open, golden eyelashes and pouty lips lined with red lipstick. She’s a diva in drag.

While taking notes I instinctively applied the feminine pronoun but now I quickly lose my certainty. The more I move around the figure and inspect it, the less I seem able to define its gender and species. Big, ripe breasts, long arms and fingers, robust hands, narrow hips, round and firm buttocks, strong legs, a genital area open to interpretation, constrained within the geometric borders of a four-sided shaft tapering inward – like a Greek herm, whose protruding genitals passers by used to stroke for luck.

The armature is built by staking, one piece after the other, glued together and then carved, scratched, painted and coloured. All the blocks that constitute the figure are raw and visible; its structure is unmasked and exposed. It is, evidently, matter in progress.

This is also a body in progress. Later on, when I ask Huma Bhabha how intentional is its gender liquidity, she explains that her sculptures are ‘usually hermaphrodites, multigendered, multifaceted… they are in flux’.

When first exhibited in Berlin at Veneklasen/Werner, in 2014, this work formed part of a group of sculptures of the same size (It’s Me, Tourist, D.M.C.M.) equally hybrid, in brown cork and partially painted white, and equally hard to label, like fluid variations on a theme. With ancient Greece in my frame of reference, a sphinx comes to mind: a she-monster, with a woman’s head mounted atop an animal body; reason and instinct, posing a riddle to travellers before letting them proceed: ‘What is love?’

I remember a 1984 song with the same title by Howard Jones (refrain: ‘What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?’) but Bhabha redirects me to Haddaway and his 1993 dance hit:

What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me
No more / Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me No more
What is love?
Yeah / I don’t know why you’re not fair I give you my love, but you don’t care So what is right and what is wrong?
Gimme a sign /What is love? Baby don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me
No more /What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me
No more / Oh, I don’t know, what can I do? What else can I say, it’s up to you
I know we’re one, just me and you I can’t go on /What is love?
Baby don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me
No more / What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me
No more / I want no other, no other lover This is our life, our time
We are together I need you forever
Is it love? / What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me
No more / What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me
No more

Consider this as an interference or an echo – a different material, another building block of our reminiscences. In Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, lyrics and melodies of songs learned at a young age are typically among the last memories to fade…

In the opening sequence of the Haddaway video clip a fake marble bust falls into the singer’s arms. He walks amid fake neoclassical sculptures and chandeliers until a sexy, scantily clad she- vampire kisses him and turns him into a dancing king, or maybe queen – hard to say. Our gender- specific clichés assign different roles to different bodies. We categorise by regimes of typification; iconographic conventions ensue.

But here everything is mixed. Mixed media: cork, polystyrene, acrylic paint, oil stick and lipstick. ‘I let the materials dictate… till I am satisfied. I spend a lot of time looking,’ Bhabha says. And mixed iconographies: a collection of possible art historical references, ranging through monumental Greek kore and kouroi, African fertility statues, Indian dancing figures, and the formidable, wrestler- like Japanese wooden twin Kongōrikishi statues protecting Buddhist temples, like the Tōdai-ji in Nara, representing alpha and omega, birth and death.

I’m just guessing, anyway. Bhabha claims to have no specific model – ancient or contemporary – >in mind, whenever sculpting, so that each artwork fully retains its right to opacity and autonomy. When she was asked by 032c magazine to reveal the inspirations behind her work, one of her picks was David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), so that a film still with the infamous exploding head was published next to a detail of the head of What is Love.

I’d be tempted to add to the list Star Wars’ Princess Leia and her iconic buns – amusingly enough, allegedly inspired by a 2500-year-old limestone image in Madrid’s National Archeological Museum: the so-called Lady of Elche, an Iberian princess (or priestess), associated with the Punic goddess Tanit. How many images can we associate with a form? How precise or arbitrary can we afford to be?

In an article on the so-called ‘Morelli method’, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg revises the forensic protocol invented by Italian 19th-century connoisseur Giovanni Morelli in order to identify authorship of anonymous paintings and sculptures or to rectify their wrong attributions. Art history, in Morelli’s time, was a new discipline, still in the making, so that his ‘scientific’ approach sought to reduce arbitrary interpretations and the fabrication of false masterpieces. ‘One should concentrate on minor details, especially those least significant in the style typical of the painter’s own school: earlobes, fingernails, shapes of fingers and toes’, Ginzburg recalls. At the same time he emphasises how Morelli ends up assigning equal importance to ‘low intuition’ and conjecture in his construction of knowledge, be it formal or informal.

What is Love is a painted sculpture. On the side of the head-and-shoulders block, made of a very light green polystyrene, there are green and blue rough sketches, like signs impressed by the artist’s hand on the body of her creature. One might think of them as ‘signatures’. Our analytic compulsion to read everything, if possible to understand everything, is a form of self-reassurance.

In the same article Ginzburg draws parallels between Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud’s ‘diagnoses’, based on the interpretation of existing evidences as symptoms. They are also tools for ‘understanding society though clues’, he argues. ‘In a social structure of ever-increasing complexity like that of advanced capitalism, befogged by ideological murk, any claim to systematic knowledge appears as a flight of foolish fancy. To acknowledge this is not to abandon the idea of totality. On the contrary; the existence of a deep connection which explains superficial phenomena can be confirmed when it is acknowledged that direct knowledge of such a connection is impossible.’

Iconographies, like myths and legends, travel in time way beyond the limitations of human life and ability to remember. They absorb each other, in an endless cycle of cannibalisation and rebirth.

Among the superheroes and superheroines of the Marvel cast – our contemporary pantheon – there is Mystique, a centuries-old mutant shapeshifter, who can subsume the identity of whomever she decides. Ancient deities had boundless metamorphic powers, often applied to their own bodies as well as imposed upon the fragile bodies of mortals, turning them into plants or animals in revenge or punishment. For instance, Mètis (‘intelligence, wisdom’), first wife of Zeus and mother of Athena, could change appearance at will (which didn’t end well, as her husband tricked her into becoming a fly so as to swallow her up and dominate her). In the Hindu epic Ramayana the supernatural power to change form, from minuscule to giant, belongs also to the Vanara, a forest-dwelling population of ape-like humanoids.

Looking up at the face of What is Love, I start wondering if Planet of the Apes could be another key. In recent years, Hollywood mainstream cinema has obsessively re-embodied in different actors the same comic heroes and sci-fi heroines, as if the appetite for their ‘real’ presence were insatiable.

I ask: ‘Is What is Love human or non-human?’
Bhabha answers: ‘Somewhere in between.’

Fascinated by the Nachleben der Antike (‘survival of antiquity’), Aby Warburg worked to map the eternal migration of images across time, and to decipher their traces and clues. As Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, Warburg’s crucial journey to New Mexico in 1895 was a ‘voyage vers les survivances’ (‘journey towards the survivals’).¹ He conceived time not as a linear sequence but as an accumulation of layers, strata, returns, resurrections (renaissances). Anthropology, art history and psychoanalysis crossed paths in this area of research. ‘The “good God” who, according to the famous phrase, “hides in the details” was for Warburg not the guardian spirit of art history but the dark demon of an unnamed science whose contours we are only today beginning to glimpse’.²

¹ Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 2002, p 52.
² ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1999, p 90.

Finally, warburg defined as Pathosformeln (‘pathos formulae’) the expressive ‘morphological configurations’, rich in emotional content, engraved in our collective memory both consciously and unconsciously. Such atemporal/anachronising formulae retain the magic power to move us, as well as to upset chronologies and to voice complexity. The nymph, Warburg’s favourite, is one of them.

Could What is Love be a modern nymph? (Ninfa moderna is the title of Didi-Huberman’s 2002 study on the subject). Nymphs are the migrating goddesses of the eternal return, who lost their draped peplums in the contemporary world. Giorgio Agamben identifies the nymph with elemental spirit, both human and non-human, and with inbetween-ness. ‘The nymph is the image of the image, the cipher of the Pathosformeln which is passed down from generation to generation and to which generations entrust the possibilities of finding or losing themselves, of thinking or of not thinking.’3

Bhabha is a master at Pathosformeln. Her ability in appropriating and hybridising different formal traditions and traditional ways of making sculpture allow her to evoke these ghostly images and to embody them in the present, so that they can elicit again our emotional responses – fear, joy, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust – and feed on them. She uses leftovers, pre-existing objects, scraps from the fields around her studio in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, and usually fairly mundane materials, such as cork, wood, wire, polystyrene, metal. She dresses her nymphs in rags, makes them up and moves them to the realm of the unverifiable and unspeakable. They can be macabre and menacing, or uncanny. And they can be funny, too, since irony is definitely a force at play in Bhabha’s world.

I ask: ‘What is the role of humour in this work?’
Bhabha answers: ‘There is no obvious punchline but humour is there… the work is very expressionistic and emotional.’

Cultures meet across borders. People migrate too, obviously. Pop culture progressively globalises its sphere of influence. Bhabha’s approach to the world’s aesthetics reminds me of Edouard Glissant’s ‘creole garden’, a space for the horizontal coexistence and blooming of different species. It’s a place of rhizomatic disorder, stockpiling and gathering, very different from the Euclidian geometry of monocultures and monoculturalism – a place where things can exist and yet avoid being in contradiction, or in opposition, or organised by genealogies.

Art Histories, like identities, are plural.