Brutal violence and loving tenderness are closely intertwined in the work of the Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo (1975). This often occurs in the visual arts, take painting for example Judith with the head of Holofernes (1567) by Titian. The murderer Judith presses the dish with the head of army leader Holofernes close to her, his curly hair caressing her naked arm. In Titian’s work it is a Biblical scene, set in a distant, fictional world. But with Danh Vo there is no such distance. In his work the mixture of violence and softness is concrete and inescapable.
On top of a 19th-century wrought-iron torture device, Vo placed a Roman marble boy’s head from the first century AD. Together they form a sculpture, held together by a wooden frame. ‘Delicati’ were girlish, enslaved boys who were sexually abused by Roman patricians. The torture device is a ‘bone breaker’, intended to break shin bones. It rests on a base with an iron base and can be tightened with a large screw.
Like an archaeologist, Vo excavates objects and fragments, things loaded with memories and historical connotations, and rearranges them into a sculptural whole. He wrenches them from the historical context in which we are used to seeing them and places them in a new context. In this way, new layers of meaning reveal themselves to the viewer.
Danh Vo in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Photo Peter Tijhuis
Displacement
Vo does not stop at this recontextualization, but goes one step further by adapting the objects to their new housing. He trimmed a 16th-century limewood relief depicting Salome with the head of John the Baptist (New Testament counterpart to Judith and Holofernes) to fit snugly in an old wooden crate for Campbell’s soup cans. The saw cut right across the nose of a bystander at the scene. This ignores the artistic gesture of appropriation: this is demonstrating that as the owner of an object (or person?) you can do whatever you want with that object. And it works, in an artistic sense. The image is strong, the tension between the relief and the crate is physically palpable and it is as if you are seeing the scene, well known in art history, for the first time.
Vo applies his method not only to ancient fragments and religious relics in marble, plaster, bronze and knotted wood, but also to photographs. In friends’ Berlin flower shop he photographed flowers, one variety per photo, with the Latin name carefully calligraphed underneath by his father, Phung Vo. Apparently these are lovely images, but then you also see the displacement here. Each flower has been carefully cut for display, sometimes pruning shears and a knife are still next to it.
Vo’s life itself has been radically uprooted. He escaped the war in Vietnam with his parents as a five-year-old child. The family wanted to go to America, but their boat was picked up by a Danish ship. He grew up in Denmark, in an Asian family whose father is a devout Catholic. The exhibition at the Stedelijk includes a bronze cast of a Spanish, 16th-century crucified Christ. The figure is lovingly supported by casts of Phung Vo’s hands, which simultaneously hold vases with flowering tendrils of Nasturtium.
Cutting out, cutting away, tearing, isolating, rearranging, reframing and showing again: isn’t this what art always does? Vo is a master at it. In the Stedelijk he made a varied exhibition trail from wooden slats. Sculptures are free in the main room or hang from the ceiling, and photo collections are displayed in secluded rooms. Each work has a precise place in this whole. A work of art is not static, but lives because it is seen and interpreted again and again. A Gothic scene of the crucifixion travels around the world in a silver Rimowa rolling suitcase that is carelessly parked somewhere.
Room overview Danh Vo in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Photo Peter Tijhuis
Beauty and vulnerability
In the exhibition, a crucified Christ enters into a conversation with a 7th-century Khmer statue of the goddess Durga. She is held together with large clamps in her back and stands with her face against the wall. A bronze cast of a Gandhara figure of the goddess Hariti from the 2nd or 3rd century is hung upside down between wooden supports, masquerading as a bench. Vo’s work, for example, refers to horrific histories of oppression and failed attempts at ‘civilization’.
Vo had the American Statue of Liberty (1886) exactly copied, according to the original technique. Of the 250 copper fragments of this copy, two from all over the world, including a gigantic ear, are in the Stedelijk. We the People the work is called, after the first lines of the American Constitution. A bronze plaque with a poem has been placed in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus (1883) by Emma Lazarus, with the incredible lines: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – the exact opposite of what is going on.
Vo’s work is about shattered illusions. But not only that. There is no bitterness or anger to be found anywhere, on the contrary. His art dances between the horrors and violence that people inflict on each other, light-hearted, full of beauty and vulnerability.
