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Tom Dean
Desire

May 30 - September 15, 2001

Artist Statement

I used to think a lot. I thought the world was full of voices. I thought that things were events, information hurling itself down through time. I thought that separateness was the fundamental quality of things. I thought that anxiety, formerly distributed homogeneously through space, had congealed into lumps and rhythmic patterns, and provided the soil for more sophisticated and implausible anxieties, the flowering of anxiety into sentient forms. I thought that places were separate but miraculously linked, and that somewhere in the tension that occurs between places, space, time and pleasure had emerged. I thought that the subterranean quality of all things was random and content free. I thought about the fatal attraction of singularities, patterns and significances that attract us inevitably, like a magnet, but always sidestep gracefully just when we're about to gore them, because we don't live in God but outside of Him. So I thought So what? It doesn't make my baby's eyes bluer.

I would go home early from a hot date for the voluptuous pleasure of thinking these things.

I think now I've forgotten how to think. I feel like a hollowed out libidinous shell.

I feel like these swans, a fat flying snake, a meandering, labyrinthine thrust that has evolved a proud vertical architecture under gravity and the ambient erotic gaze. These swans, in their proud maturity, are hollowed out libidinous shells of an idea, erect in the posture of pride and dignity. They're magnificent dinosaurs, monsters, heroic, tattered, ramshackle and bewildered. They are confronted by the cherubs, seed and fruit of the erotic body. They arch their feathers and rise to their full stature, doomed dignity confronted by the insolent self-assurance of the future. They are aghast before the naked cherubs, horrified at the vulgarity of youth, beauty and accomplishment, disbelieving and incredulous at the tide of ignorance and vanity rising in their wake. They are brainless, addled by termites, threatened and besieged, appearances betrayed and abandoned by their own interiors, feathered shells out there on their own trying to make a go of it, wondering how many more times they will have to unfold their arthritic peacock tails.

Tom Dean, Desire, patinated bronze, 5 cherubs and 5 swans, approximately life-size