Everyone knows how their body
is organized and how many of each part they have; this is
a given and is never thought about. To become aware of these
particulars, one must imagine oneself unwhole, cut into parts.
Deformed or Dead.
While studying the ancient sculptural ruins in Rome, Auguste
Rodin made a statement that was obviously meant to apply to
his own work as well. He said: ‘Beauty is like God;
a fragment of beauty is complete’. Each piece is a microcosm
of the whole, and each piece is a whole itself. Part and parent
body are linked together by some essential glue that makes
them a unit, a Platonic whole.
In recent art, the modernist notion of the fragment as a
microcosm has given way to a willingness to let fragments
be fragments, to allow partiality to exist.
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