Text by Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria
La Petite Mort was an installation created as the final work for Wolfe-Alegria’s Masters of Studio Art at Sydney College of the arts. The paintings and installation of the La Petite Mort series explore the boundaries of eroticism, perversion and excess, framed through the lens of Rococo decadence. The work also explores notions of gender and the fragmented body. In La Petite Mort, the Rococo functions as a metaphor for human indulgence, wastefulness and hedonism, whilst simultaneously embodying unbridled creativity, expression (and as the French would say) Joiussance. It is this Jouissance that has formed the framework for the body of work La Petite Mort.
In his book Erotism – George Bataille states “Between one being and another there is a gulf, a discontinuity” – Bataille defines humans as discontiunuous beings, living in a state of isolation, ultimately separate from one another. He sees two facets of life as being our only means of overcoming our discontinuous existence” – death and eroticism. For Bataille both offer a key to transcendence, as both sex and death suggest “a possible continuance of being beyond the self.” In both erotic union and in death, humans can transcend their discontinuous existence and in turn experience continuity with the universe. Bataille sees the orgasm or moment of sexual plethora as a paradox key to this idea – in the moment of sexual release and procreation two human beings can experience a brief moment of continuity, a moment where they are no longer aware of their separateness from each-other. This moment of creation is paradoxically linked with death – it is in fact a little death – la petite mort. Death is our only other hope for a continuous existence and hence our jouissance, our orgasm is in fact a short lived, or little death. It is this paradox, the conflicting principles of life and death, beauty and the grotesque, that have been explored in the body of work La Petite Mort.
La Petit Mort was selected to be exhibited as part of Contemporary Works from Sydney College of the Arts at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery in October 2012. La Petit Mort was also selected to be installed in the window of Sydney City Council initiated art retail space Platform 72, coinciding with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in March 2012. Eduardo was also awarded a NAVA Ignition award for professional development for La Petit Mort and his associated post-graduate degree.