Dan method draft

This year began with a black clad man. He wasn't exactly me.

I was interested in proxy bodies, and so was he. But he became one for me. He was the first figurative sculpture I ever made.

For some time before moving to Rotterdam I had been making sculptures that visually referenced juridical and penal furniture, that left such a gaping hole where a human body should be that they represented it by its absence. These were made as rickety modernist design, looking like prototypes for objects that never went into production. I was interested in the tyrannical control of the artist, especially the male artist. Interested in his propensity for the observation and representation of bodies. When these sculptures were activated in performance I was always uncomfortable about whether or not the present body being my physical body was conceptually necessary. Since they were usually uncomfortable to activate the pragmatic ethical necessity that it be my own body became an alibi.

When I started trying to put a work together upon arrival here I realised that the gaze that looks but doesn't touch, that attempts to radically disembody itself, does so in order to stigmatise the very fleshiness of the bodies it examines. I realised that one way to get out of the cycle of representation that I had inherited was to figure the gaze rather than satirise the representations it produced. In this sense I don't regard this black clad man that I have become as a representation — the gaze itself is unrepresentable because there is no first presentation to re-present. It is neither me, the man behind nor, nor his products. It needs to be figured in the first place. This is how I came to be a terrible sculpture of myself.