“The Temptation of Saint Anthony” by Simon Biggs

Title:

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

1990

Medium:

Digital Video

Duration:

4 mins, 20 secs

Artist Statement:

Inspired by the book of the same title by Gustave Flaubert. Here Anthony is every one of us, the temptation our capacity to change the world and reshape it, through technology, in our own image. A surreal and disturbing work. Computer animation produced by Simon Biggs, 1990

The video “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” by Simon Biggs, has been inspired by Gustav Flaubert’s verse-novel and Hieronymus 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 manufactured 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 volcano’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.