Bestial Elegance
- The Art Fart
- Feb 23
- 2 min read
Looking at the pieces in Stephanie Temma Hier’s latest show at Anton Kern, I can’t help but be reminded of a theme that has been running through the culture of late: that trope of the very rich hunting humans for sport on their vastly luxurious & isolated estates. Because there is something undoubtedly luxurious about a swan, & yet slightly hostile, slightly terrifying, certainly not to be toyed with (those black eyes). Hier bends them into strange shapes as stoneware chairs & frames for oil paintings, the paintings depicting silverware, sometimes a small amount of food. Someone is preparing to eat something, yet the act of eating never occurs, just the delicate accoutrements.
Which brings us to the ballet, that athletic art most slender. Another luxurious act of torture, the pains ballerinas go through to appear so effortlessly light are the stuff of legend, something Hier cues to with small moments of the iconic pink shoes beset in frames sprinkled with popcorn (surely a small, innocent snack for the very thin?) or beside stoneware slices of cake (perfect! It’s inedible!). The manic thrust of The Black Swan is here concentrated into the daintiest of hints, as if Hier has managed to capture the repression of the upper class, the labyrinth of manners they exist within (that we all exist within, for that matter), & the strange connection of feet to body to food to animal to luxury to beauty.
Swans were considered delicacies in medieval England, especially cygnets. To eat something so beautiful & young is surely the height of debauchery. Hier’s show seems to be preparing, in the prettiest way possible, for a bit of wicked butchery, poised at the moment right before a creature that we admire for its beauty becomes meat we admire for its flavor. That precipitous moment is gracefully suspended, like a ballerina on her tippy toes, kept out of reach. A swan depicted so lovingly in painting becomes almost a religious icon — Zeus once turned himself into a swan & forced himself onto Leda, you know. Perhaps, Hier’s swans seem to warn us, one of them is in fact Zeus, & the tables are about to turn on us, the violence directed not at the swans, but at the hungry viewers, licking our chops?
—The Art Fart
