Didier SeminLive in Your head

mighty power of memory and imagina-tion (certain works chosen by Szeemann, that today would fall into the category of conceptual art, only existed virtually, in the minds of participants invited to imagine, for example, one of Yves Klein’s

‘Zones de Sensibilité Immatérielle’ (Zones of Immaterial Sensibility), lent by the American artist Edward Kienholz). But the idea of ‘inhabiting a head’ or ‘living in a head’ is a phantasmagoria that has occurred to all of us and that art, not just modern, has repeatedly reflected: the head of Liberty Enlightening the World, erected in 1886 by Bartholdi and Eiffel overlooking New York harbour, can be

visited (unless terrorist threats or immi-nent storms prevent public access…). In 1934 Dali painted a fascinating tableau where the face of the luscious actress Mae West is portrayed as a plush living room. The three-dimensional version of

the work, produced in Figueras in 1974, does not perhaps live up to the strange-ness of the painting, but on the other hand Jean Tinguely admirably created a huge habitable head Le Cyclop, in the forest of Fontainebleau, comprising many maze-like paths. The installation was entrusted to friends and accomplices (Eva Aeppli, Daniel Spoerri, and Niki de Saint Phalle, creator of the famous Hon, a woman/house in Stockholm), and is per-haps the most stunning modern archi-tectural ‘construct’ that can be found in the Paris area – many such examples could be cited, with varying degrees of success, of attempts to indulge in the fantasy of the habitable head, since the giant in the Gardens of Bomarzo.

In the 1970s, the firm Prenatal used an advertising image with a child growing, not in the stomach of its mother, but in her head: if we all have, in effect, nine months generally speaking in the snug refuge of a body that was not ours, our arrogance