[SISEA 1990] Artist Statement: Simon Biggs — The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Artist Statement

“The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, a new video by Simon Biggs, has been inspired by Gustav Flaubert’s verse-novel and Heironymous Bosch’s painting, both of the same title. The video relates an allegorical scenario based on the story of the fourth century Egyptian desert-living hermit, battling his fears and desires with his faith in a deeper order – his greatest fear being that this order was the source of his problems. In ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ the world is a hybrid between the natural and the manufactered with deserts inhabited by creatures composed from human anatomy and machine parts, trees growing out of massive industrial fragments, laboratory equipment twisting itself into organic forms and vulcano’s giving birth to and consuming mysterious devices of uncertain function. It is a universe of deranged inventions where it is impossible to differentiate between the natural and the unnatural, the living and the dead.

ISEA Archives Video Channel:

  • Simon Biggs (Australia), SCAN, Groningen, NL