The burden of memory
The locus of resistance is the gleaming skull in the centre. He christened it Very Hungry God in 2006 when it was first unveiled. Pots and pans were welded together to form the forbidding sculpture, its hollows and frozen grin (grimace?) representational of a god that devours, an insidious god. The steel defies corrosion and so is, in its way, an almost immortal work of art. The artist, meanwhile, is all too aware of his mortality. No stranger to hunger, to upturned and empty pots and pans. All too aware of the ironies and relentless inevitability of this moment, his epic work celebrated with a retrospective in a temple of European high culture. And his presence at a gilded dinner he plans himself, feeding rich and important Parisians, Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president,
