This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in Earthlines. To access the final edited and published work see http://www.earthlinesmagazine.org/earthlines-issue-14/A short essay contextualising and exploring the sculptor Peter Adams's piece 'Ovum d'Aphrodite'

Rees, Emma L. E.

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  Sea Change: Peter Adams’s “Ovum d’Aphrodite”  University ofChesterDigitalRepositoryItem type ArticleAuthors Rees, Emma L. E.Citation Rees, E. L. E. (2016). Sea Change: Peter Adams’s “Ovumd’Aphrodite”. Earthlines, 14, 71-2.Journal EarthlinesDownloaded 6-Nov-2017 13:41:19Item License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Link to item http://hdl.handle.net/10034/603555Sea Change Emma L. E. Rees  In the first act of William Shakespeare’s last solo-authored play, The Tempest (1611), a spirit leads a young man, Ferdinand, to Prospero, the mystical master of the island on whose shores Ferdinand has recently been shipwrecked. ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, sings the spirit – his ethereality suggested by his very name, Ariel. ‘Of his bones are coral made’, he continues: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Ariel’s song – the lyricism of the spirit of the elemental air – evokes the remarkable potency of a second element: water. In the natural order of things, and certainly in Ariel’s imagination, nothing disappears: in the words of the Aristotelian mantra, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. The death of Ferdinand’s father has led not to an absence (‘Nothing of him that doth fade’), but to a radical and exquisite transmutation. The oceans embody both serenity and rage; their supremacy is surely Nature’s antidote to humanity’s hubris.  Ariel’s evocation of ‘richness’ and ‘strangeness’ gets to the core of how it is only Art (not least his own song) that has the capacity both to echo and to give meaning to what Prospero later so achingly beautifully calls ‘our little life […] rounded with a sleep’. The ‘sea-change’ bestows on human beings a variety of aesthetic immortality. The idea of eyes metamorphosed into pearls is at once repugnant and gorgeous. But that is precisely what a pearl is: it is the irritant parasite, the invader, neutralised inside the oyster’s shell by the slow, steady accretion and coalescing of layers of nacre (‘nacre’ also goes by the far more pleasing, and perhaps familiar, name of ‘mother-of-pearl’). The pearl thus robustly emblematises the process by which an ugly battle might ultimately result in something beautiful and flawless, or, indeed, something ‘rich and strange’.  ***  In April 1492, one of the most powerful and charismatic figures of the Florentine Renaissance, Lorenzo de’ Medici, died. His death was somewhat prosaic, if painful, as he succumbed to the gout that had afflicted him for years. He was forty three. A clerk (actually, there were almost certainly several clerks, given the enormity of the task) was hired to produce a record of the late Lorenzo’s many and varied possessions, and the result is an almost unimaginably extensive inventory of equally unimaginably – but incontestably very real (for the inventory makes sure of that) – opulence. It will come as little surprise that this consummate Italian statesman, born into the wealth of Croesus, and educated with the guile of Machiavelli (Machiavelli’s Il Principe, or The Prince, is dedicated to Lorenzo) amassed numerous, sumptuous household furnishings, objets d’art, and books. The American Professor of Art History, Richard Stapleford, has produced a remarkable translation of the 1512 manuscript of the Medici inventory, and it is in its pages that we learn that, at his death, Lorenzo owned, among many other items: ‘Three pearls on a string […] One pearl of 6 carats […] One pearl on a ring of about 5 carats […] A mother-of-pearl shell within which is a nascent pearl [… and] A little coral branch with a mother-of-pearl Agnus Dei and a canine tooth’. Also among Lorenzo’s possessions, but most probably at his summer villa when he died, is the huge (more than 5’ by 9’) and well-known canvas by Sandro Botticelli, commissioned in the early 1480s, and called ‘La Nascita di Venere’ (far better known in the Anglophone world as ‘The Birth of Venus’). The title of Botticelli’s masterpiece is misleading: in fact, it depicts the arrival on dry land, and by means of a large seashell, of a fully-grown, and certainly sexually mature Venus. The sea behind Venus, its breakers suggested by wispy white brushstrokes, has delivered her safely to its shore where, as Ariel awaited Ferdinand to lead him to safety, so one of the Horae, or goddesses of the seasons, Spring, awaits the naked deity. But all is not as it seems, for, as we’ve seen, the oceans are an arena of contestation and transformation: this apparently serene goddess has a brutal genealogy. Her emergence from the seafoam (the name of which, ‘aphrós’, or ‘ἀφρός’, is forever linked with Venus’s Greek counterpart, Aphrodite) is more of an expulsion – the seas have spewed her forth, the offspring of the amputated genitals of her father, Uranus, which were flung into the waves by his own son, Cronos. From grotesque violence emerges the beautiful, tranquil Venus. I’ve already mentioned Venus’s oyster-like shell, on the edge of which her delicate white feet are precariously balanced. She is a littoral figure – leaving water to step onto land – Botticelli captures her at this precise moment of elemental transition. Her gaze almost – but not quite – meets that of the viewer: she is not connected directly to the viewer, but is self-contained, and autonomous. She is both the pearl – rare, and literally born out of violence: the rage of Freud’s Thanatos – and she is the oyster, Eros: the vulvar creature that, unknown to the Ancients, and to Botticelli, is capable of the ultimate autonomy, parthenogenesis (each oyster’s body houses both eggs and sperm). The sexually suggestive nature of the shell is further emphasised when we look at the folds of the cloak in Spring’s right hand: a vulva is clearly represented here. And when we look at Venus’s own hands, we see that the ring finger of her left hand, the sinistra, is captured by the artist in the moment of slipping between the flame-like locks of the hair that curls down from her scalp to her mons veneris, and below. Venus is touching herself. In 1956 the aristocratic British art historian Kenneth Clark published his seminal (and that word perfectly evokes the book’s patriarchal essence) work The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. ‘It is the strength of Venus’, wrote Clark, ‘that her face reveals no thought beyond the present’. In Clark’s imagination, though, this enigmatic gaze was not symbolic of the self-assuredness I read into it. Rather, Clark was suggesting that passivity and mindlessness are the necessary prerequisites for ‘beauty’ and, more than that, for a specifically ‘feminine’ beauty. It was what the feminist writer Susan Brownmiller came, in her 1984 work, Femininity, to call ‘the tyranny of Venus’. But – once again – the ocean transmutes; it does not destroy. Botticelli’s Venus is not the vulnerable ‘nude’; she is powerfully ‘naked’. Where we might have read her as exposed and weak, we can come instead to read her as defiant: she knows precisely what she’s doing with her fingers. Like the two halves of a clamshell, the female genitals touch and caress one another, taking pleasure in multiplicity, or, as the French philosopher Luce Irigarary put it in her classic 1977 text, This Sex Which Is Not One: ‘her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two – but not divisible’.  ***  The idea of the ‘tyranny of Venus’ may thus be reimagined and usurped, and Peter Adams’s 2011 sculpture ‘Ovum d’Aphrodite’ is a powerful intervention in this process of rendering a sea change in how women’s sexual power might be portrayed. As the name (‘ovum’ / ‘egg’) suggests, at the heart of the wooden ‘shell’ is a large, black, pearl-like object; an ovoid shape, over the surfaces of which the great sculptor Constantin Brâncuși himself would have loved to have run his hands, smoothing the already-smooth surfaces. This is not a human shape as in Botticelli’s vision, but, rather, a human immanence. And the ovum is self-sufficient. Cradled in the labial folds of the chiselled and sanded wood, it’s the ultimate visual metaphor for the self-referential, closed, autonomous power of the female spirit. In Botticelli’s painting, Venus is on the verge of leaving the shell; in James’s sculpture, Aphrodite snuggles deeper down into it in a sensual demonstration of her independence. An egg, when fertilised, enters the realm of the immanent. Adams’s sculpture is, like the sea, at once calm, and capable of a sudden and violent tempest. The stylised uterus promises to deliver something powerful and transformative to the viewer. The sculptor himself expresses this contradiction in words, as well as in wood: ‘Aphrodite’s immense, overpowering beauty and her ability to love with deep passion was the result of the union of the masculine (sky god Uranus) and the feminine (earth goddess Gaia)’. ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ sang Ariel. The black pearl of ‘Ovum’ offers to the viewer new eyes; new ways of thinking about that tension between Eros and Thanatos; and a new angle on the powerful autonomy that inheres in female sexuality. In Botticelli; in ‘Ovum’; and in any pearl-oyster, there’s an absent present: a potential or plenitude. In the flowing curves and dips and layerings of the labia there’s not a lack, and there’s no envy, despite the Freudian master-narrative. Instead, there’s an energy that’s inextricably entangled with the tides and tempests of our little world – a world where Art can begin to reveal to us what’s truly ‘rich and strange’. 

Sea Change: Peter Adams’s “Ovum d’Aphrodite”

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