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Servo, 2010-2012


                                                  
                                                     
               Servo* is composed of a dissected deer skull, screwed onto a thin 20 cm brass rod, which emerges, in a point of delicate balance, from a disc measuring 36 cm in diameter and 200 mm thick, made of the same material, highly polished and reflective. It is a work constructed to be placed on the floor, without bases or bulkheads, and is approximately half a meter high.

                The dimensions of the disc speak of a stretching of limits, since I needed to define the diameter at 36 cm so that the reflection of this image would appear inside the mirrored surface of the brass disc. Furthermore, the dissected skull itself should be affixed to the center of the disc, avoiding displacements that could add an undesirable extra compositional dimension to the work. Thus, the deer's sectioned bone box, in the case of this work entitled Servo, was positioned so as to have the jaw and the dental arch of its anatomical structure – the palate – reflected on the surface of the disc. I wished that the only movable bone in the head, the jaw, bearing the horseshoe-shaped teeth, reflected clearly on the polished brass surface. I also planned that this reflective, golden image on the brass could be seen from above, proposing another point of view in relation to the appearance of the reflected image, in this case, almost close to the ground.

                The brass disc was laser cut so that its sides had maximum precision, avoiding burrs. Furthermore, it was machined and extremely polished to provide a specific, golden mirroring, requested by the work. The Servo structure is dense, weighing around 40 kilos, considering that the brass plate from which the disc was constructed is 200 mm thick.

               There is, in the allegory of this work, the desire to deal with excess, tackiness, bad taste, ridicule, outrage, overflow. Hence the choice for the stridency of the golden color, its latent polish and shine, since the surface was subjected to an application of glossy varnish to prevent the material from oxidizing.

               In the duplicated image of the dental bone arch of the dissected skull there is something like a full-throated self-mockery, a laughter at his condition of self-insufficiency. At the time that I was involved with the production of Servo, I had come into contact with a classic work of silent cinema, The Man Who Laughs, from 1928, by the German Paul Leni (1885-1929), an important director of German expressionism cinema, whose silent film presents scenes that recreate London in the 17th century. The character from this film ended up influencing the creation of the Joker, the great comic book villain, Batman's arch-enemy.

              The joker, as we know, is the jester, the clown. This is the figure who ironically alludes to his own insufficiency – laughter as human insufficiency –, a kind of social antithesis. This jester serves the court and is represented on the playing cards as the joker, the one who can decisively change the game, and who also parodied attitudes and body and facial gestures of the entire court. He told extravagant stories that, through his dubious attitudes, tricks, half-truths, led to different directions, varied interpretations, alternating states of mind, which accepted opposite meanings. This controversial figure brings with him, mediated by laughter, the subjective allegories of pantomimes, the grotesque, the hilarious.

              According to some authors, Bob Kane (1915-1988), Bill Finger (1914-1974) and Jerry Robinson (1922), creators of Batman, a character from the comic book of the same name, invented the Joker character inspired by another clown, originally created by Victor Hugo (1802-1865) for the novel L'homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs), published in 1869 and which later inspired the film Das cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), from 1919, another classic of German expressionist silent cinema, starring Conrad Veigt – the interpreter of the sleepwalking murderer. The story of L'homme qui rit begins with the murder, at the king's command, of Lord Clancharlie, who had discovered that his son Gwynplaine had been sold by the monarch to a group of gypsies known as “Comprachicos”, who disfigured children to become circus freaks. The operation carried out by the “Comprachicos” in Gwynplaine gave the boy an eternal smile, disfiguring his face forever.

             Since the first studies that led me to the creation of Servo, I thought about focusing on the opening of the jaw of the dissected skull, revealing, through the reflection of the image on the polished brass surface, a static “laughter”. I believe that the emphasis on this static “laughter” suggested by the open jaw of the deer and the image it revealed – why not say, suggested, created –, from the reflection on the highly shiny and reflective golden surface, can be compared to the “smile” of this character from L'homme qui rit, Gwynplaine, whose face was permanently deformed by a smile.

             The same sound of the words deer and servant in Portuguese, which is the title of the work, emphasizes, on the one hand, due to the domestication identified in the positioning of the object, as a submission to the spectator, and, on the other, to the dissected condition of the animal's skull. 

              Due to the sound of the homophone words in Portuguese, I would like to draw attention to its dubiousness, which can also be problematized by the reflective echo of the image of the dissected bone arch of Servo's deer reflected in the polished golden surface of brass.

Thiago Honório, July 2011.


* Translator’s note: In Portuguese, the word “servo" means servant. The homophone word “cervo” means deer.