Caspar Heinemann

Glorie #7

Glorie #7 by Caspar Heinemann is made from cardboard boxes in which the artist received deliveries at home during lockdown, as well as other materials that he uses in an improvisatory way. Initially, Heinemann began this project by wanting to make a series of birdhouses, an interest of his that derived from walking in parks during lockdown, when bird life was so much more present as a result of the reduction in traffic noise and the absence of aircrafts. Though birdhouses may be safe spaces to nurture fledglings, they are also inherently absurd, as human constructs projected onto bird life.

Creating a series of these birdhouses, Heinemann realized that there was a correlation between penetrating the boxes with his fingers and the sexual practice of fisting. Fisting is banned from pornography because it is perceived as violent, yet as a practice it became popular during the AIDS crisis as a means of having safe sex. As Heinemann puts it “queer care is perceived as violence.” Intricately symbolic, the work is decorated in painted daisy chains (a queer symbol of group sex) of fisting figures. The sculpture is also smeared in Hubbard’s Shoe Grease, which is popular with leather/fetish communities both for its smell and its body-safe composition for use as a sexual lubricant. 

Both kitsch and beautiful, the sculpture has a provisional sensibility—of having undergone primitive repair, of making do and getting by, of imagined encounters during a period of isolation. It emanates fragility, improvisation, and homeliness in a form that signifies care for others, while at the same time being an unnatural form that humans create for nature to inhabit. What emerges is an object that is imprecise and inventive; ‘poor’ in materials, but rich in meaning.