Notes

"This tension between creation and destruction, the high ideals of the super-ego and the dark undertow of the id, are compellingly evoked in Taylor’s darkly disturbing Burned Self Portrait, in which a charred and desiccated portrait bust is forced to confront a series of photographs spectacularly charting its fiery destruction. As the only remaining trace of this immolation the harrowing figure is not only a stark reminder of the fragility of its objecthood, but powerfully evokes notions of the chthonic forces at play in the creative process. The careful documentation of the fire in which it was all but consumed lends the scene the aura of a primal ritual; an orgiastic, Dionysian frenzy culminating in violent sacrifice, and calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s meditations on the nature of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy (first published in 1872). Nietzsche shows how, in their licentiousness, intoxication and violence, the Dionysian festivals of ancient times shifted attention from the experience of the individual to the experience of the group. Indeed, it is through the ecstatic dissolution of the individual (or – as implied in Taylor’s truncated, disfigured form – actual physical dismemberment) that re-immersion into a common organic whole is achieved. With Nietzsche, Taylor seems to suggest in this work that the destruction of the rational self in a violent, primal ecstasy, can offer redemption; that creation and destruction are two ineluctable parts of the same whole, and that “the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and bereft of reason” (Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, 1999). The transience of the object and its creator notwithstanding, the creative force that produced it, propelled by Dionysus and tempered by Apollo, remains: as Nietzsche puts it, 'when the will is most imperiled, art approaches, as a redeeming and healing enchantress; she alone may transform these horrible reflections on the terror and absurdity of existence into representations with which man may live'.” – Dr. Federico Freschi

Dr. Federico Freschi (2009) in Angus Taylor: Momentary Permanence, Johannesburg: Everard Read Johannesburg, pages 16-19.

Literature

Angus Taylor: Momentary Permanence (2009) Johannesburg: Everard Read Johannesburg, illustrated in colour on pages 16-19.