I like jewellery, perhaps more than many of the other practices now identified as crafts, precisely because it seems to me that its primary aim is to declare and fight the greatest, most awesome kind of war. Rather than simply ornament or fulfil a function or provide pleasure like other aesthetic practices—although jewellery also does this better than most—jewellery has declared a war on nature, on other jewellery, on itself. Jewellers who forget that their pieces are out fighting against time, evolution, sexual competitiveness, the body, ugliness, and so on, have forgotten jewellery itself, and have forgotten, too, what makes the strange inventive quasi-forms of jewellery quiver and grip with a force disproportionate to their size and supposed function, piercing lapels and earlobes and eyeballs, snugly gripping wrists and throats, weighing bodies down with the gravity of social oppression, or flashing out in mirror strikes of prestige. Certainly, jewellery without warfare can simulate appealing forms, produce interesting ideas; but, to my mind, without the sense of joy-in-warfare, or even what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘festive cruelty,’ I just don’t think it’s going to work. That’s why I probably like the jewellery of Otto Kunzli, Paul Derrez and Susan Cohn; but it’s also why I think I like the jewellery of Tiffany Parbs. All of these jewellers are happy to go to war—against the history of jewellery, against establishment forms and functions, against the bodies that bear and support them….
Tiffany, despite accusations to the contrary, has insisted that her work not be called ‘macabre,’ an insistence that seems quite correct. Perhaps, as Kevin Murray has called it in his catalogue essay, her pieces rather bespeak a ‘gentle violence.’ It’s certainly calm; it’s certainly quiet and elegant; it’s certainly violent; it’s certainly interested in doing things to you that you’ve probably never done before. Or even thought about. Or would even welcome. Because there’s no question that Tiffany’s work gleams with the innocence of festive cruelty: like other contemporary jewellers who know what they’re doing, these pieces don’t simply build on the old, very traditional bodily sites to which Western jewellery has characteristically been restricted: ears, throat, breast, wrist, finger. Nor do they move tentatively out to the crown, the ankle, the toes. Or even to simple piercings—such as through brows, nipples, genitalia. On the contrary, these pieces render the entire body a free space for their movement, and a free space for their intrusions and incursions—designed to be able to insinuate themselves and nestle into every involution, crevice, and fold in the skin. Or they may just squat like miniaturized alien temples, defying gravity, on new kingdoms of the flesh, creating, camouflaging, distorting or exacerbating the hitherto-overlooked or underestimated features that are yours and yours alone. If you don’t already possess—and who doesn’t?—scars, pimples, mottlings and discolorations, singular disfigurations, extraordinary and mutant hairs, Tiffany’s work can give you and your observers all this and more.
As such, these nomadic war-machines of jewellery—as Deleuze and Guattari might say, given that they quite explicitly associate the origins of jewellery with war—have to take different forms from the rings and bars that still provide the formal bases for all traditional jewellery, and even much of the new jewellery. The pincers, elegant and well-machined jewellery in their own right, are designed to pinch, punch and rip new shapes in your flesh; the skin stamps will impress transient and innocent flowers upon your body; the rack of pikes and hooks and wheels could tear through with ease but come out only with difficulty. And if you no longer trust the Rabbi after his last abortive ritual operation, it’s time to whip out the home circumcision kit and do it at home. Use the ice-tongs or salad-servers to peel that little foreskin back; the syringe for cleansing and anaesthetizing; the serrated cutting edge to excise the offending article; the snug little stainless bin to store the article discreetly, hygienically. Now that's taste. The prophet Elijah, keeper of foreskins, would surely be impressed; be sure to get in now, to beat the rush.
It's certainly not jewellery that offers the pretentious permanence of diamonds (diamonds are forever), but much faster and less fussy; it's jewellery that's much more intrusive and interested in you than any ring or brooch. Investigative, probing, exploratory surgery, experiment and adventure combined - the DIY medical aspects now all the more useful given the recent Aussie medical insurance collapse. Tiffany's is jewellery that does not pacify or avoid pain - but renders the differences between pain and pleasure, wearer and watcher, user and subject, skin and clothing, natural enhancement and artificial disfiguration subordinate to its own anarchic ends. Eroticism and aggression are turned upon themselves and spun into adventures in the skin trade.
By experimenting with the point at which a little light torture, science and ornament meet, Tiffany Parbs contributes to that great contemporary assault against the sites, function, techniques, and appearance of jewellery. I suggest you buy now and let Tiffany turn your largest organ—the living sack that divides the roiling interiority of your organs from the battering lights of the outside—into a gallery of imprints and punctures that undoubtedly feel quite different from the way they look. An art of small but intense sensations with a hook.
