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Scupture and Movement |
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written
by joelnish / 10.24.2005 |
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| Sculpture and movement |
1 of 1 |
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Assignment |
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When I first saw the statue of Pauline I wasn’t aware that it was a portrait, only that it was half nude female lying with a kind of lazy intention. It seems the neo classical version of that “too sexy” advertisement on the Rome Center, the one with the dancing girl who has money stuffed into her pants. And in this sense it seems a hollow and empty chunk of stone—just another objectification of a sexy bare-chested woman. But oddly that seems to have been the whole point, Pauline tried to objectify herself and she did this in front of her friends, her peers and her husband.
One of those interesting tidbits that history gives us is that the statue of Pauline was originally designed to be mechanically rotated. Rotating in the middle of a lavish dinner party the statue was meant to be a spectacle that would grab you even if you defiantly sat in the corner of the room and pouted. Canova’s Pauline tries to grasp your attention far more than it asks to draw you in. I can only imagine that the statue rotated in a counterclockwise direction, so that one was first introduced to Pauline’s full bare back and the seductive hint of her buttock under a thin cloth. From this first glance one would then see her soft legs resting on the soft couch, then her bare chest and then her face. This face would then look at you and leisurely sum you up in a single word. Finally the apple that she holds with her left arm is completely revealed and the statement is complete. She changed herself into the sex idol, a god and hunk of meat, rotating on display.
It’s fitting that this nude idolatry was meant to help her secure dominance at the top of some petty pecking order. Personal power through being an object—does this seem an oxymoron to anyone else? Yet is our world any different really despite our best attempts to deny it? It seems the difference today is that we make it so much more colder. For Pauline her sexual objectification was a personal declaration, she tied it with her self conception, but today, it is more abstract. The “too sexy” girl is merely a symbol and her person is irrelevant.
Perhaps I have mistaken Pauline, after all the only thing I really have to work off of is her naked female body sitting in the middle of some room for all to see.
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