The Virtual is not Immaterial (Plastic Sunset/External Anus), 2015
- Medium
- Concrete, galvanized bolts, galvanized nuts, Plexiglas, clamps, urethane resin, paint, oil-based Varathane, sock, wood, PVC tubing, India ink, and graphite
- Dimensions
- 78 × 32 × 43 in. (198.12 × 81.28 × 109.22 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2016.30
- Copyright
© Harry Dodge
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee
Dodge’s hulking, ramshackle, and anthropomorphic sculptural assemblage brings together a multitude of disparate materials and ambiguous forms in order to rupture our conceptions of what constitutes an idealized human body.
The artist’s linguistic and aesthetic summoning of a setting sun and an anus refers to The Solar Anus (1931), a surrealist and scatological text by French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille that presents the human body as nothing other than a sticky, seeping, and splintered form. Like much of Dodge’s work, this sculpture reflects the artist’s dark and delirious use of humor to explore the contradictions, absurdities, brutalities, and precariousness of having a body.