axle in a sculpture by Heather B.
Swann. A spinning wheel runs between the legs, with the spindle apparently piercing the upper thighs, lower than the hip-joint, where the barrel of our anatomy hinges for locomotion.
A room inside at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.
Detached with high heels, the legs are pinned to domestic service. The woman will never move beyond her spinning wheel, her disembodiment and her sexual vulnerability.
Swann's work is symbolic and learned, reaching into dark archaic histories.
With black and leathery materials, Swann plumbs the body with uncomfortable associations. In the work Luxuria, a female gymnast bends backward in an arch, resting only on her toes and her elbows as in Rodin or Degas. Her neck stretches, however, into a giant arc, describing a circle that then returns to her body.
But at the end of the neck, the head has become a massive boa-constrictor-like penis; and it points to the vagina.
emblematic convention of the ouroboros, the snake that devours its oft expression make of Annual-Revolutions; and of things, Which wheele about in everlasting-rings; There ending, where they first of all begun."
return of penis to vagina, where the penis began.
But as the host for this allegory of eternity, the female grotesquely becomes the penis, with her own brain and person-hood stretched out of her and deposited in the phallus.
And for this, she is finally tainted with the title Luxuria, meaning wantonness, the pejorative antecedent of luxury.
condition; and beasts are also enjoined to flesh it out, as in antiquity.
In Dog eat dog, a pair of dogs' heads are locked in mutual biting, where the two open mouths are bitten even as they bite. This could also come from a renaissance emblem book, books, like Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, as in the figure of Jealousy.
