M HKA Ensembles

Painting, 125 x 125 cm.

Collection: Courtesy of Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerp.

Untitled is a painting that was found in the artist studio in 2019 after his death. The work refers to the sculpture The Aristocratic Hairline Machine, 1997.

The ‘aristocratic hairline’ has been a mark of distinction in western culture for over six hundred years. The man who sports the aristocratic hairline is widely thought of as being intelligent, virile and perhaps just a little more cultured than the average man. The man who can hold his head up high with an intellectual aristocratic hairline will also be considered artistic and elegant, insightful and perceptive, mature and dignified even.

A bicycle wheel whose rim is completely covered with books, is mounted on a welded-steel chassis. Seated on the chair, with the head inclined to the books, the viewer is invited to crank the handle that rotates the wheel, and begin the process of hairline recession that will give him or her the intellectual ‘look’ of the most famous hairlines in the history of painting. Clearly, Webb’s machines are not the rational offspring of the enlightenment but occupy the space of its non-rational other. They belong in a lineage of literary and artistic machines that include not only the early flying machines of Daedalus-Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Webb’s own Angel-Making Machines, or Panamarenko’s devices, but also the fantastic contraptions that have proliferated throughout the modernist period. Such as, Alfred Jarry’s perpetual motion machine (optimised performance through special sports nutrition) in Supermale; Franz Kafka’s ‘tattooing’ machine for the condemned prisoner in The Penal Colony, and Raymond Roussel’s elaborate language machine that produces its own nature in Impressions of Africa. Or, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (a virtual perpetual motion machine), … ,  and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring machines’.