by Deborah Levy, 2008
In the Space Between Two People Having Sex, Gröting has
literally covered two actors in plaster from nose to penis to
vagina while they are having sex and then conceptually turned
them inside out.
What we are left with is the other side or "under side" of our
selves.
This trace of a sexual moment is both contemporary and
classical – a cross between a sculptural autopsy and a sculpture
by Michelangelo.
Uncannily violent and calm in the same moment, the
dramaturgy of this work rests somewhere between a staged
live performance, a sculptural investigation of inner space, a
conceptual and intellectual conversation about physical
intimacy.
We know from documentation elsewhere that Gröting's
experiments with ventriloquism (The Inner Voice) focused on
the dummy as a sculptural and performative instrument to
research the soul. The ventriloquist's illusion is to appear to
have a conversation between two people. In this way the
awkward or humiliating conversations we have with our selves
can be put into someone else's mouth.
If the dummy is a sculpture that is animated by the
unconscious of the ventriloquist, the space between two
people having sex is a de–animated space, its breath and
heart–beat frozen in time. At the same time it is also a
conversation between two people. A fragment of an untold
human story.
The space between sex is a concrete space and a fictional
space – sex is always charged with the fictions we make of
the other. A great deal of thought has passed through
Gröting's materials in this sculptural conversation about the
space between a physical choreography and its hidden
psychology. As a trace of an intimate performance, the work
asks us to consider the curious dynamic visited upon the man
and woman hired by Gröting to enact an intimate act while the
plaster froze around them.
Deborah Levy writes across a number of media; fiction, performance and visual culture. She is currently AHRC Fellow at the Royal College of Art, London.