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Lust / Murder Book, The
John Laudenslager
1993
10 x 8 x 3 in
The title for this book is taken from a work by Kurt Schwitters, "The Lust Murder Box." The box is one of a series Schwitters constructed with the collaboration of a master craftsman in the art of wood inlay. The surface of the box is broken into abstract shapes resembling Schwitters' collage forms of the 1920's, rendered in exquisite wood veneers. Since the box is only known to me from black and white photographs, none of which shows the inside, there seems to be no literature on the piece, the lurid title applied to such a purely formal work has always intrigued me. I thought that for this exhibit I would create a book, which if placed inside Schwitters' beautiful box, (now languishing unseen in a museum collection in Los Angeles) would justify its title. Schwitters' title was probably used in the sense of a "sex crime" but I have inserted a slash between the two words to suggest a kind of dialogue between the deadly sins of Anger (Murder being its most extreme expression) and Lust. The collages in the book use found imagery from two cultures, Europe and Japan, that have been preoccupied with these particular areas of human experience, both cultures having developed highly refined but diverse ways of rendering them graphically. Classical European nudes from the 16th to 19th centuries confront astonishingly violent block images from late 19th century counterpart in comics that portray death and destruction pitched to a cosmic level. The book has no text, no logical sequence or development of images but instead presents an interplay of hybrid forms that suggests extreme violence and the sexual current that may or may not underlay it. Perhaps the effect on the viewer might be something like that of one of the rooms in the Metropolitan Museum containing the violent painted dramas of Caravaggio's followers that a friend once referred to as "The Screamers' Room."
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