Human beings have always had an extraordinary talent for turning images into objects of belief. We carved deities from stone, cast them in bronze, gilded saints that shimmered in candlelight. We’ve painted monarchs larger than life and projected movie stars 30 feet high. Every civilization invents an image that carries its aspirations. The technology changes while the instinct remains.
Before Marc Quinn began making Siren, he’d spent years sculpting bodies historically excluded from the classical tradition. The corpus culminated in Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), a subversive break from the “statues of dead blokes who conquered the world,” publicly showcasing a disabled woman. Having considered bodies society did not traditionally idealize, Quinn then asked himself the opposite question: If society could agree on one perfect body, whose would it be? The answer, in 2006, was embarrassingly obvious: Kate Moss. It feels almost quaint now, the idea that an entire culture could more or less agree on one woman.
Photo: Courtesy Marc Quinn / IDEA
The pose itself refuses to settle into portraiture. It isn’t the Kate Moss from a Calvin Klein campaign or a paparazzi photograph. It’s often misunderstood as being a sexual image, but it hovers somewhere between yoga—a practice of people trying to connect their insides and outsides—devotion, and impossible elegance. It isn’t trying to capture Kate Moss’s body. By the time Quinn sculpted Kate, the image had already detached. That’s perhaps the strangest thing about images: we imagine they’re fixed, when really they’re collaborative. It is the audience that gives meaning to an image. Every generation remakes its icons by projecting something new onto them, which is why Siren feels more contemporary now than it did in 2008.
