The New Barbarians
In 1997, Tim Noble and Sue Webster commissioned a sculptor from Madame Tussauds to help them create a life-size sculpture of themselves as australopithecines. Called 'The New Barbarians' (left), the work is based upon a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, which shows a reconstruction of two early ancestors of the human species. The artists produced a version of these figures overlaid with their own facial features. The sculptures are installed so that they stand in isolation in an apparently infinite space. Their hairlessness evokes conflicting connotations; they could be the first humans or the last – cave people, or the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Thus, the work continues the artist’s concern with conflicting themes of impermanence and immortality. A year after beginning ‘The New Barbarians’ they made another version of the work, ‘Masters of the Universe’, 1998-2000. This uses the same sculptural model as the earlier work but is covered with hair.
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Famous quotes containing the words the new and/or barbarians:
“And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)