Bill Woodrow

1982

Installation, 70 x 71 x 100 cm, 22 x 59 x 62.5 cm.
Materials: metal, wood, plastic

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK5761_M86).

Out of the carcass of a discarded object, Woodrow constructs a new object with Christian references. In Bible Blood, we have two objects from out of which he cuts new artifacts. The one is an electric heater, with the metal plate from its front used to cut-out a two-dimensional form that he then bends into something three-dimensional: a pistol. From the heater’s rear, he creates a book with a cross in the same way. The other object is a red, artificial-leather armchair, the back of which he cuts-up into a two-dimensional, rather grotesque, rounded shape.

The new artifacts remain attached via an umbilical cord of its own material to the mother-object. Woodrow names the former ‘hosts’ and the latter ‘guests’, but there is also the connotation of the consecrated hostie, a body self-sacrificed. Mounted in the exhibition space, it seems like we’ve come onto the scene where some drama has just been played out. The heater and the chair are turned over, pistol and Bible lie spread on the ground, and – behind the chair – the grotesque red shape we mentioned above looks like a puddle of blood. The reader of these images can make his or her own story from them. As Woodrow himself says: "There is no such thing as wrong interpretation of my work." Woodrow brings about a change of focus: from a (once) useful object to an image, a presentation, from the thing itself to its apparition.