"2 HEAD CASES"     

JIM SHAW  /   MIKE KELLY,   ETC.

 

March 2005, Metro Pictures Gallery

by Monique Laurent PhD

Jim Shaw / Dream Object (I was working

on a piece that was like a human torso, possibly real and I was placing objects in the head like a cupboard) 2001.

 

This catatonic "Dream Object" (characterized by delusions or hallucinations of a persecutory or grandiose nature) is a disconcerting and humorous sculpture of an unsightly individual with mechanical skeletons in its attic, bad posture, sagging breasts and rubbery arms, linked like a straight jacket around a protruding stomach.  As if to defend himself like a rubber ring from drowning. 

Or is he trying to center himself by rocking, shuffling and jittering while clasping his hands around his midsection, and feeling the side effects of too much thorazine or other psychotropic medication. This faceless person is staring vacantly into a Metro Pictures Gallery wall as if it were hebephrenic (characterized by formal thought disorder and flat or inappropriate affect) with what could be interpreted as a black Taliban burkha hanging from its head and moving as if an electric fan were blowing hot air from and through its mental veil. This vacuous soul seems to be confused and looks as if it was being reprimanded, like a disobedient adult child instructed to meekly face the wall or stand in a corner of a class room, alone, awkward and humiliated. 

Jim Shaw, Dream Object (I was trying to figure out how to do it when I worked on a version of myself from the shoulder up, sliced into pieces…) 2001.

 

This Neanderthal head and shoulders by Jim Shaw could also be interpreted as a humorous and disturbing representation, but this time made out of sliced wonder bread. Its face is disjointed and leaning forward and tilted sideways, with a Bellevue expression of  pouting apathy and resignation in a literal multiple RD Laingian divided self and schizoaffective (characterized by delusions, hallucinations or formal thought disorder accompanied by a depressive syndrome in the depressive subtype or a manic syndrome in the manic subtype).

It could also be interpreted as a mixed undifferentiated, a category for psychotic symptoms which do not fall into the preceding subtypes.  Residual, characterized by abatement of psychotic symptoms with persistence of some of the signs of the condition.