Olivier de Sagazan’s claustrophobic clay nightmare
In Transfiguration, a man who begins a performance art piece looking like a meek office worker removes his glasses and shirt and descends into hell. It begins slowly, and he covers his hands in clay and rubs them together like he’s washing away all the normality. At this point, his movements are intentional and slow, building the clay coverage from his hands to the forearms to the chest. All at once, things become uncomfortably frenzied, and Olivier de Sagazan starts encasing himself in wet mounds of clay, clawing at himself as it clots around his eyes.
The French artist first performed it in 1998, and remains his most disturbing and well-known piece, having taken it around the world in over 350 performances. The reception is usually a mixed bag of horror and disgust, but once the initial shock wears off, you’re left wondering what it is he’s creating. As he heaps clay and twigs onto his face, he often takes to poking menacing eye holes through the mess that’s left sliding down his head. Left with something almost resembling a face, you think he’s done, but the process continues.
He repeatedly piles on clay, only to destroy it and start over, by which point he’s mutated into something subhuman. Sagazan is a biologist with no formal art training but with an inmate knowledge of the human body’s inner mechanics. In his work, he seems to be clawing at something beyond science, something soulless. All his materials are chosen based on their vague similarities to flesh and bone, drawing his audience back to the human body while distorting it at the same time.
On his website, he says he is: “flabbergasted in seeing to what degree people think it’s normal, or even trite, to be alive”.
He seems to be pushing that idea of sentience to an extreme by mummifying himself in the clay. He’s still alive underneath it, but all the humanity disappears. So what does that make him?
The brilliance of Transfiguration is you don’t know what it is he’s trying to create or destroy. The panicked need to keep piling clay on is distressing viewing; he chucks it on in fisted handfuls, his eyes and mouth completely covered by it, but there’s no arrival at a finished article, no relief. The piece is charged with possible meanings: greed, insecurity, repression, mortality. Whatever it is Sagazan is translating, it comes from the darkest pit of his subconscious.
It’s also interesting that he is entirely in charge of this transformation yet willingly blinded by the clay throughout. “I try to understand what makes an inert and blind matter become a living and seeing matter,” Sagazan told Vice. “This question is the same with the problem of giving life to a sculpture. What causes make a fetish active and charged – that is, emit a power to act on my brain?”
See the work in the video below.
