continuous profile (head of drumpf)

Exhibition view
High-resolution digital rendering

specifications

  • date 2016
  • media orange gold leaf on hydrocal plaster cast from 3D print
  • size 13.5 h 11 w 11 d
  • exhibition history CRUXspace, Philadelphia PA, 2016 | published in Learning From Fascism, Ara H. Merjian, Art in America, 1 April 2019

description

Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini) [Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini)]: A continuous profile of the face of Benito Mussolini. © IWM. Original Source

The work is a spoof on Bertelli’s famous Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini) of 1933. It replaces the fascist dictator with an open-mouthed profile of a former President of the United States, and changes the material from a burnished black terra-cotta to a polished orange-gold leaf. The work is produced, not by a manipulation on a potter’s wheel, but rather by rotating a bezier curve about an origin axis.

These changes of content, material, and technique shift the metaphor from an all-knowing, all-seeing superman-machine in the Italian Futurist mode, to an all-consuming, idiocentric blowhard screaming at everything, seeing nothing.