Good Friday with Floyd Kuptana / by Richard D. Mohr - Video

Good Friday, 2020
“Good Friday with Floyd Kuptana”
by Richard Mohr (on April, 10th 2020, Good Friday)
Wishing you a good Good Friday with a little help from the Inuit artist Floyd Kuptana, who was born in 1964 one-hundred-and-fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle at the Cape Parry DEW Line station and who at age five was forced to attend one of the most brutal of Canada’s residential schools for Inuit children, one run by nuns. He knows a thing or two about Jesus.
In 2018, on Holy Tuesday, but with an eye to Good Friday, he drew, on a tau cross of black foam-core, a pastel of a crucified dancing bear, a work at once ecstatic and cynical.

(Image 1: Floyd Kuptana, “Untitled [Bear and Cross],” pastel on black foam-core, 30” x 20” (2018))

Good Friday had, as well, been the season of an earlier work. A collage from 2015 — titled “Torso” — broadly alludes to The Crucifixion, especially to its erotics as they have unfurled through art history, but it directly invokes an earlier hour on Good Friday — the mocking of Christ by Roman soldiers.

(Image 2: Floyd Kuptana, “Torso,” collage over acrylic ground on artist’s board, 16” x 12” (2015))

For its principle elements, “Torso” incorporates bits from three paintings by the French expressionist Georges Rouault (1871‒1958), one painting each from three of Rouault’s four favorite subjects — floral arrangements, faces of circus clowns, and stories of Christ, usually suffering.

(Image 3: Georges Rouault, “Decorative Flowers” (c.1953))
(Image 4: Georges Rouault, “English Clown” (1937))
(Image 5: Georges Rouault, “Christ Mocked” (c. 1932))

The collage clips the naked arms from Rouault’s “Christ Mocked” (c. 1932) and repurposes them as legs, while managing to retain for the ‘torso’ the general posture of Rouault’s Christ, who is slightly slumped even as his energy gently sweeps upward. The face in the collage, nearly identical to that of “Christ Mocked,” is cut rather from Rouault’s “English Clown” (1937), then tilted a bit and multiply collaged over with luscious blond locks and watch works for brains. The torso proper seems to have been pared from a pin-up calendar — or such. The fourth subject matter favored by Rouault is prostitutes. And something like this is what Kuptana has made as an amalgam from the other three.

(Image 6: Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863))

The collage alludes to the 19th-century genre the odalisque, in which a reclining nude courtesan is posed, spread out, with the very purpose of display and appreciation — call it salon porn. The posed posies at the side of Kuptana’s mocked Christ tactically point to that most famous of odalisques — Manet’s “Olympia” (1863). In each work, the nude is saying, “I am a flower plucked for your delectation.”
Kuptana’s mocked Christ, though not Rouault’s, has his arms and hands turned outward, causing his naked chest to be thrust forward, and so collectively, the torso’s elements seem to be inviting — exquisitely so — nail and lance. For Kuptana, the road from Column to Calvary is not never-ending, it is short — with, not heaven, but St. Sebastian, Cranach, Donatello, Dürer, Michelangelo, de Sade, Genet, and Burden just over the next rise.

(Image 7: Chris Burden, Trans-fixed (1974))