At Home With His unfinished Aloneness —
by Andrew Litten

Description:

‘Although the title reeks of great significance, I am tempted to re-title the piece Homme Maison, in acknowledgement of the revealing comparison to be made with Femme Maison by Louise Bourgeois. Interestingly, when Bourgeois made her iconic paintings and lino cuts on this theme during the 1940s, and then again in sculpture in the 1990s, all the while the image depicted was of a fleshy female body with her head and upper torso replaced by a house. In the case of Litten’s piece, it is the head and upper torso that remains, whilst it is the lower body, the sexual and physically capable body that is replaced by house. Litten’s house appears unstable; it is not the heavy and durable weight as is presented in the work of Bourgeois. The man and the house exist together more awkwardly. They do not, whether negatively or positively so, marry organically to become the dual creature that Bourgeois called the Femme Maison. The combination of the man and the house is obviously more constructed, built to reveal the artificiality, even the danger, of a lone male figure hidden inside a home. Both the front, and the reverse of At Home With His Unfinished Aloness show that the man’s head and upper torso are to be viewed through the parameters of a screen. It is as though the figure feels only as present as a virtual projection, somehow untouchable and experiencing complex ideas that must be stored away in the closed draw of the assemblage. Overall, there is a frustration and fragility to the piece, the sense that the combination of home and a lone male is unsustainable, that the scene could be easily damaged or, on a whim, completely destroyed.’ By Rebecca Baillie