Like Horst Hutter, I maintain that images are a kind of food which must be properly digested like any other. Some things, like an ISIS beheading—child pornography or a drone bomb snuff film—are extremely hard to digest; so hard, in fact, that they can leave you with a species of spiritual indigestion, which manifests itself in bad dreams, generalized anxiety, and PTSD. The decidedly disturbing sculptures that comprise Bevan Ramsay’s Soft Tissue leave you with haunting images that take weeks to properly digest.
Like touring a sweatshop, a garbage dump, or a factory farm, Soft Tissue forces you to remember that we are indeed “sustained by what is greedy, insatiable, disgusting, pitiless, and murderous.” Even so, it would be a mistake to view Ramsay as yet another preachy moralist trafficking in the pornography of pain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ramsay is an artist and a philosopher—which means that his loyalties are deliciously divided: the artist in him wants to let us hang in “dreams on the back of a tiger,” whilst the philosopher in him wants to wake us up! This creative tension runs through all of Ramsay’s work, but it’s never been quite so obvious as it is in Soft Tissue. There’s something undeniably erotic and sensual about these sculptures. Yet, at one and the same time, we find ourselves—in equal measure—repulsed by them. In the Bible, this strange, ambivalent mixture of fear and wonder is known as awe.
—John Faithful Hamer
Committing Sociology 