Whimsical Entropy, Grissel Giuliano’s Carnivorous Being
by: Josiah Gagosian | posted: Jan 1, 2010
It is our own human transience that comes across as most central to Grissel Giuliano’s work and it is the loss of a close friend of hers to cancer that seems to be the catalyst for her exploration of mortality. Having graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Science in Animal Sciences, Giuliano is certainly familiar with the study of life and the processes by which one life ends and becomes the fuel for another entity, however the literal experience of her friend’s passing made those processes exceedingly real. She spoke of the reaction of his family to his death and its influence on her work, saying that what she saw from them was celebratory, even jubilant, rather than mournful. This moment then, was pivotal in her artistic examination of mortality and decay and, combined with her own childhood love of horror movies, it informed a body of work that is a complex and nuanced examination of the many emotions that can be associated with death. Even the comedic can be found there amidst the grief and grotesquery, as is shown in her dollhouse installation Four Clover, a child’s plaything converted into a blend of the macabre and the humorous.
The dollhouse, for Giuliano, represents the façade we present to the world, behind which crawl all the frightening, funny, morbidly comedic things we seek to hide. These she embodies as an array of strange insects positioned around the dollhouse in various poses to which can be ascribed any number of bizarre narratives, both amusing and disconcerting. The insects reenact scenes from some of her favorite horror flicks and also are intended to re-create various demons from her past, which when placed within the dollhouse are divested of their power to inspire fear, and thus stripped they can be examined in the light and might even elicit laughter.
Having been called “a carnivorous being,” and a self-avowed non-vegetarian, Giuliano is an artist for whom death is its own medium. She shies away from the notion that her work might be a political statement about the factory farming of chickens, pointing out that the success of her work often hinges on the death of an animal. Her freezer, she says, is full of dead chicks and various arthropods collected from friends and connections she made at the zoo where she worked. Employment at a zoo also helped to desensitize her to the universal abhorrence people feel for death and for the myriad crawling creatures found in nature. At the zoo, she often fed dead animals to the owls and then was required to mop up the gore. It is no surprise then that Giuliano brings to her art both candidness and an utter lack of squeamishness when dealing with a topic that some people might find shocking and unsettling. Her photographs of the contorted bodies of baby chickens present the tiny birds as both larger-than-life and seemingly graceful. They dance and cavort on a background of black, as if celebrating the very thing which renders them mute and immobile. Their eyes are empty and lifeless, and yet the bodies seem to move in a playful danse macabre reminiscent of a more Latin American understanding of death as embodied in Dia de los Muertos festivities in which death is something to be celebrated and even made light of. In this sense, the contortions of the dead birds seem more whimsical and less foreboding.
Giuliano herself comes from a Latin American background. With a Sicilian-Argentinean father and a Cuban mother it seems only fitting that she would migrate from her childhood home in Connecticut to a more Caribbean city like New Orleans, a place with its own ambivalent relationship with death, at times celebratory, at times sinister and gruesome. It is this unresolved exploration of loss and the inherent transience of all life that makes Giuliano’s work so compelling. Her usage of decomposition and the destruction of life as its own medium is never more evident than in her five-part work, which employs glue traps over time in order to ensnare various living creatures. The resulting panoply of lifeless insects and animals is then photographed, each organism in various states of decay. The photographs, when seen from a distance, appear to be abstract images full of organic patterns and brilliantly rendered color, but approaching them reveals their true nature. A specific instant is captured in each photographic print, the process of disintegration and entropy halted long enough for the work to evoke what it will, forcing the viewer to get up close and personal with the processes that will eventually overtake us all and in a sense holding up a mirror to our mortality. Thus, the animals she uses become metaphors for our own experience of life and death and serve to remind us of the underlying beauty and form that occurs even in the midst of entropy and apparent disorder.
The overall title of Giuliano’s show, “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” evokes images of childhood whimsy, combining them with an alternate, darker meaning that implies both the comedy and calamity of the human experience. Upon seeing Giuliano’s work, one is reminded of the Peter Greenaway film “A Zed and Two Noughts,” in which twin brother zoologists attempt to come to terms with the sudden simultaneous deaths of their respective wives. The brothers begin exploring the world of death and decay via time lapse photography, beginning with an apple and progressing through the alphabet, a dead animal for each letter, until they reach the letter “zed” and document the corpse of a zebra as it deteriorates. Whether it is the frozen corpses of chicks and exotic insects or the decomposing remains of lizards, spiders, and mice, Grissel Giuliano’s media conveys a paradoxical sense of stillness and motion, a moment frozen in the shutter of her camera, magnified, and given new life.
