Soldered brass, stone, wood, 14.5 x 12 x 7, 2017.
Agony and Ecstasy inherits its structure from Alfred Stevens’s Valour and Cowardice for the Wellington Monument. Stevens stacks an allegory vertically: a plinth, a vanquished figure wedged at its corner, and the victor enthroned above, leaning out with a raised staff. The moral relation between the figures is carried by their positions. The one who is crushed sits low and cramped beneath an overhanging mass, and the one who prevails sits high and open.
McCourt keeps that stack and abstracts the figures. The terrazzo block is the plinth. The brass bird lolling over its upper edge occupies the vanquished figure’s place, sprawled at the corner and pressed beneath the dish and plate that crowd in above it. A ring clamped into the disc on the block’s face fixes that lower mass to the support, so it cannot leave. Above and behind, the plate and the scalloped form rise as the seat-back and canopy of the victor, and the key and tubes shoot up and to the left on the same diagonal as Stevens’s raised staff. Agony is assigned to what is compressed, tethered and low, and ecstasy to what is elevated, unobstructed and projecting into space.
The move from Stevens is the removal of the face. In the Wellington Monument the reading depends on expression: composure above, contortion below. Without faces, McCourt has to carry that opposition entirely through vector and mass, clamping against thrust and weight against lift. The title then names two conditions that the viewer sees only as formal pressures, and the work asks whether those pressures belong to two bodies, as in Stevens, or to one.
The double plinth sharpens this. Stevens’s figures sit on a single monumental support. Here a moulded wooden base sits beneath the stone block, so the plinth itself is stacked on a plinth. A work under fifteen inches high adopts the full apparatus of the public monument, and the hierarchy of victor over vanquished is staged at the scale of a tabletop object.
