Herod is dancing in Chambliss Giobbi’s, Tanz für mich, Salome!, inspired by Richard Strauss’ opera based on the Oscar Wilde play, Salome. Giobbi loved the music but turned the story around and had Herod do the dancing. This collage is filled with images of an aging, overweight, almost naked man—full of faults. He is incestuous, adulterous, and on his way to seducing his stepdaughter. For this piece, Giobbi used his own body as a model—a brave thing to do, since Herod was anything but handsome. artes fine arts magazine

Herod is dancing. His expensive robe open, showing most of his naked body. Head, arms and legs are represented in multiple images, as Giobbi uses this ‘cubist’ method to capture movement. The two heads clearly betray Herod’s indulgence in food and wine. In Wilde’s play Herod invites Salome to “Dip into it thy little red lips, that I may drain the cup” and “bite but a little of this fruit, that I may eat what is left,” but Salome refuses. Yet, Herod drinks it and eats everything else, too. In Giobbi’s image we see the remains of wine and food covering his face. He’s reached a point of drunkenness beyond reason, touching his right head in a moment of recognition of madness but can’t stop dancing just yet. Jewels cover his body, fingers richly ringed. One of his fingernails is badly bitten. He has worries, and no wonder, metal necklaces surround his body like snakes.

Herod dances on, his many arms and legs madly moving. “Something terrible will happen” is a refrain from the play and, in viewing Herod’s dance, that’s how we are made to feel. The music is there, visibly rhythmic, but it is not happy at all, more like the “beating of the wings of the angel of death.” Herod’s dance has an intensity similar to one of Giobbi’s musical compositions, Khe Sanh.

Giobbi was a composer of classical music before turning to the visual arts. He said, in music “time contains every move we make, everything exists in time, develops over time. I love the idea behind cubism. I love the brutality of it, the honest kind of brutality of it. These are like getting multiple moments of time; doing the direct opposite of (music), like compressing multiple moments in one cathartic image.” In that music is composed of single notes, Giobbi’s collages are created from thousands of little pieces. He takes portrait photogaphs of his models, sometimes as many as 300 images, from different perspectives, enlarges them on the computer (but doesn’t modify them), prints them and cuts them into small pieces to create his compositions. He uses boards as a base and covers the finished work with a thin layer of beeswax to keep the pieces in place, so they will also “smell good.”

However fascinating his method, Giobbi’s main focus is the character of his models: “I look for people with a free spirit and strong character; who stand for what they do with great conviction and passion.” This search often leads him to well-known personalities such as artists Joe Barnes and Alice O’Malley, filmmaker Fisher Stevens, performance-artist Penny Arcade or cult figures such as Indian Larry, the Chopper Shaman or the transgender Amanda Lepore. Modeling for Giobbi is a long-term commitment, since it takes about a year until he knows them well enough to get into, or more likely, under their skin. That’s when he finally gets to the actual work. When there are no secrets left, he recreates that person in his work—not as an idealized version but, rather, the “full truth.”

Joe Barnes’ blue eyes from a larger than life-size portrait look out at us from his distorted face. My first impression of him was that of a somewhat judgemental person, with his pouting second mouth, cold eyes and the fact that he seems to be talking. Not true at all. In his white loft, Barnes, a New York painter, creates opaque, monochromatic, meditative compositions with silent beauty. He is soft-spoken and very gentle. In Giobbi’s portrait, Barnes’ eyes are watery because the paint and light he uses hurt them, and cold because he is very driven and disciplined.

At first sight, you can see that Fisher Stevens is a nice guy, someone you would love to have a drink with. He seems to be a big dreamer, head in the clouds, surrounded by the artistic haze of cigarette smoke, while telling sophisticated, funny stories about the characters he brings to life in film. Stevens is an accomplished film persona with many movies to his credit including Short Circuit, Hackers, his documentary, The Cove and his debut as the director of Stand Up Guys. When he speaks of his work, his favourite words are: “it was so much fun” or an “amazing experience.” Giobbi got him absolutely right: a nice, amazing, funny person.

Herod is not the only one who’s dancing in Giobbi’s compositions. One of this subjects is the photographer, Alice O’Malley. She chooses her models from New York’s club culture, always stripping them down in order to recreate them in blinding whiteness. Inspired by this method Giobbi stripped down O’Malley as she dances in the collages depicting her. There is a lot of stripping down and nakedness in Giobbi’s works. His images of the seven deadly sins (Se7n), the embodiment of unfortunate passions, pregnant with evil. They show the aesthetics of the morbid, its cruelty and its beauty.

The Seven Deadly Sins are an old theme, depicted by artists through the centuries, Hieronymus Bosch among them. Once moral codes are established, sins come into existence as well. It seems that rules challenge people to the point that they finally break them, and can’t resist temptation, either. And, it doesn’t really matter if those rules are from the bible or a civil code since, as Freud wrote, “We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself” (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929). Humans are rebellious spirits. In our times, it is very difficult to rebel since there’s hardly anything left to rebel against. We don’t have any strong ideology to follow, any worthy morality to oppose. As we mirror the world we live in, our souls are fragmented and contaminated.

Giobbi’s sinners, just like their predecessors in George Grosz’s Ecce Hommo series from the 1920s, are ugly. The obese body called Gluttony is surrounded by fast food containers, while munching on a slice of pizza. But instead of satisfaction, this abundance causes only sadness as we see in the figure’s eyes. The man in Envy surrounds himself with walls for privacy, trying to escape his public image by ripping his clothes off. He turns his back to the world, hands held in praying position, his loneliness apparent. Faces fill the small window in the distance, preventing him from escaping the prying eyes of others. What do they envy in him? Surely, whatever position and richness he might have don’t make him happy. He is not the sinner, the onlookers are.

In Pride, performer Penny Arkade dances in front of a mirror with transgender celebrity Amanda Lepore. Arkade, who is famous for her intriguing solo shows like Bad Reputation, Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! and always makes the “weird to win,” shows her aging body here without regret. Lepore, whose perfect female body is considered the “most expensive body on Earth” according to the money spent on plastic, happily sings and dances like there is no tomorrow. In their need for exposure, Giobbi’s models become overexposed and sometimes too naked, transforming viewers into voyeurs.

Herod is still dancing in his Dionysian haze. Does he really dance for Salome? I don’t think so. His dance is no longer filled with desire but becomes a bottomless pit of lust, a burning itch, more like disease than pleasure. It is greed that moves him to wanting increasingly more, doomed to never be satisfied. This modern version shows Herod as consumed by his own needs. Giobbi’s characters are unmasked guests at the masquerade of our times, and Herod—this overfed, oversexed anti-hero—leads the mad cavalcade.

By Emese Krunák-Hajagos, Contributing Writer

The exhibition reviewed here was entitled, Go Figure, previously on view at De Luca Fine Arts / Gallery, Toronto http://www.delucafineart.ca/

This and other work by Chambliss Giobbi’s are now on view in an exhibit called, American Iron, at 101/Exhibit, in Los Angeles, running through March 29, 2014. http://www.101exhibit.com/