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Home , Ana Mendieta, Charlotte Moorman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Sondra Perry

SEPT 6, 2019– JAN 26, 2020

YBCA.ORG #YBCA

THE ELECTRIC

“Long live the new fl esh,” events were “weapons to politicize art,” and his , in which TVs were utters James Woods’s character, Max routinely “desacralized” by being encased Renn, in the fi nal scenes of David in concrete or , raised questions Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), a about the role of technology in everyday meditation on the merging of human life.1 It is eff ectively a today, desires, TV screens, and mass media. but ’s TV Cello (1971) was Throughout the fi lm, fl esh and screen originally an instrument for Charlotte are one—at one point Renn’s chest turns Moorman, whose movements would alter into a VCR; at another a veiny skin the imagery on its screens. Paik’s TV Bra envelops a gun protruding from the TV for Living Sculpture (1969) literally fused set. Permeating Videodrome is a mindless the technological with the human fi gure. consumption of imagery and a constant cycle of violence, sex, and destruction—all pioneers and negotiated vis-à-vis the screen. Almost Ulrike Rosenbach frequently turned to four decades later, Videodrome gathers this exact interstice between technology renewed salience given the omnipresent and the performing body. Jonas’s Funnel screens of our lives—phones, tablets, (1974/2019) revisits the eponymous computers—and the endless stream performance, which was presented across of scrolling and swiping through media , Italy, and the , content that seamlessly blends images including at the , in of war, desire, and sex. What defi nes our 1974. During the event, Jonas sang, relationship to the space of the screen? created drawings on silk, and enacted How do we negotiate ourselves and others gestures aided by props including a white via technology? How do artists respond rabbit, spinning discs, and a leather belt. to a shifting technological landscape in Moving within a layered space arranged relation to identity and embodiment? with paper cones, hanging curtains, and a child’s desk, the artist also appeared on a Though not organized chronologically, nearby TV monitor via a live feed. The Body Electric is anchored in the mid- For Jonas, the installation is a “translation 1960s and such artists as Nam June Paik, of the performance,” a tableau of props , , and objects that harken back to the and , who were the fi rst to original event.2 Similarly, Rosenbach’s employ TVs as both the subject and the Refl ections on the Birth of Venus (1975/ material of their work. Given today’s 1978) references a performance of the continually cheapening technologies, it same title, visible in the life-size projection might be challenging to appreciate the of the artist posing in front of a slide radicality of this generation’s actions. showing Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of In the 1960s, US ownership Venus (ca. 1485). Accompanied by a reached new heights and the TV was at triangle of salt on the fl oor and a video the very center of home life, at once a of lapping waves within a shell-shaped platform for entertainment and a conduit object, the work explores female identity for ideology. For these artists, activating and, in the artist’s words, speaks to the TVs with ephemeral actions both “cliché for the erotic adaptation of women subverted their symbolism and broke down to the sexual needs of a male world.”3 the disciplinary boundaries separating By exploring the space between the performing and visual arts. For Vostell, performing body and its mediated image,

1 these artists opened new possibilities, not Excellences and Perfections (2014) brings least in regard to interdisciplinary practice, the vintage pinup into the contemporary but crucially in terms of representation. moment not via the format of a magazine, but using the social networking service For many of the artists in The Body Instagram, for which the series was Electric, the lens of the camera and the conceived. For this performance, Ulman space of the screen off er avenues to took on the persona of an urbanite beauty explore the politics of the mediated image. blogger, crafting a Pinterest mood-board- The exhibition draws on intergenerational worthy feed of lifestyle images (shopping- dialogue to reveal common ground, spree selfi es, champagne brunches, et especially in relation to shared concerns cetera). Social media users interacted with nationality, sexuality, race, and with Ulman without realizing the staged gender. Consider works by Lorna Simpson nature of her imagery, some lambasting and Amalia Ulman that investigate how a perceived vapidity, others dripping with the circulation of the photographic image fl attery. Whether turning to amateur shapes conventions of femininity and photography, printed magazines, or social beauty. Simpson’s 1957–2009 Interior media platforms, Simpson and Ulman #1 (2009) explores the pinup picture question how we understand the female by juxtaposing appropriated amateur self in relation to mass media. Martine photos taken in Los Angeles in 1957 with Syms has frequently cited the cultural Simpson’s self-portraits that faithfully historian Alison Landsberg in this regard, replicate the setting and poses of the in particular her conception of “prosthetic originals. The images dialogue over memory.”4 Landsberg’s term proposes fi ve decades to question how clothing, that in today’s media-saturated landscape, skin color, hair, and gender inform our we understand our own identity in relation understanding of identity. Ulman’s to a common “prosthetic memory” that

Nam June Paik TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969. Collection Walker Art Center, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991. 2 transcends the boundaries of social class, visualizing queerness (Paul Mpagi Sepuya), gender, or race. This sense of memory and race (, Lyle Ashton is rooted not in lived experience, but in Harris), speaking to how we negotiate our our shared familiarity with cultural texts sense of self in relation to media-driven such as fi lms and books, but also GIFs, systems of representation. Vine , and memes. Syms’s Notes on Gesture (2015) addresses this idea In 1986 the performance artist through the visual language of looped wrote, “Skin has become inadequate in GIFs. The video shows the artist Diamond interfacing with reality. . . . Technology Stingily repeating a number of authentic has become the body’s new membrane of and dramatic gestures that each relate existence.”6 While mostly clunky (think to African American women: “famous Google Glasses) or still in development women, infamous women and unknown (for instance the Cicret, a waterproof women,” as Syms has said.5 Inspired bracelet that projects your smartphone by English philosopher John Bulwer’s system onto your wrist, with the skin as Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the a stand-in for the screen), advances in Hand, a 1644 thesis on the communicative body hacking and wearables are seeking to meaning of hand movements, Syms’s video make porous the boundary between the off ers an inventory of gestures, questioning body and technology. Many of the artists the assumptions we make about a person’s in The Body Electric dwell on such blurring, appearance, behavior, and nonverbal moving from the world into the screen communication. Throughout The Body and back again. New technologies always Electric, groupings of artists demonstrate necessitate experimentation, and the shared engagements with themes of exhibition includes such milestone works as transgender identity (Rhys Ernst and ’s mid-1970s holograms and Zackary Drucker, Juliana Huxtable), ’s seminal Three Transitions

Aneta Grzeszykowska Selfi e #10, 2014. Pigment ink on cotton paper. Courtesy of Raster Gallery, Warsaw. 3 (1973), in which the artist uses chroma- —swirling CGI animations, the night key eff ects to layer video imagery to create sky, a bedroom—plays against pathetic, self-portraits. heart-wrenching , such as Elvis Presley crooning “Always on My Mind.” Several of the artists on view engage with Atkins has described Happy Birthday!!! avatars as a means to extend the self into as full of “terrible nostalgia,” an achingly virtual space. In ’s melancholic meditation on memory and fi rst interactive , Deep mortality.7 It is impossible not to empathize Contact (1984–89), viewers engage with with Atkins’s confused and dazed character, Marion, the work’s “guide,” by pressing who like Annlee is rooted in the real world. images of her body parts on a touch Its CGI likeness takes after a real-life screen, each corresponding to diff erent model and was purchased via TurboSquid, a narrative possibility. The erotic association website that supplies 3D stock models for of intimacy with technology promises an computer games, adult entertainment, and ambiguous and voyeuristic encounter that architectural renderings. raises questions about the objectifi cation of femininity in digital media. A more These works forge an uneasy relationship sorrowful tone fi lls Pierre Huyghe’s Two between a tangible real-world referent Minutes out of Time (2000), in which the and the infi nite possibilities of the screen. manga character Annlee describes her Trisha Baga takes her concerns with existence. Though originally likely destined embodiment and disembodiment to the to be merely a background character, she most cosmic and ethereal extent yet in has been “waiting to be dropped into a her immersive installation Mollusca & The story” and appears “animated . . . not by Pelvic Floor (2018), which originated with a story with a plot [but] haunted by your the artist seeking to train her Amazon imagination.” While at fi rst her voice seems Alexa virtual assistant to respond to the to be that of an adult, it quickly changes to prompt “Mollusca.” Crisscrossing between a tense tone of a young girl, who describes appropriated imagery from Hollywood viewing a of water lilies and movies (such as Ivan Reitman’s Evolution disappearing into a strange light (the voice, [2001] and Robert Zemeckis’s Contact in reality, is an altered recording of a fi ve- [1997]) and video shot by the artist in year-old girl to whom Huyghe showed the Sicilian caves and Filipino rice paddies, manga picture and asked how she might the installation densely layers physical respond if she knew that the character had and digital spaces, projected images, and only two minutes to live). handmade objects to ponder interspecies mingling, metamorphosis, contacting It is odd how tender characters such extraterrestrial life, and the future of the as Annlee, or the somewhat hungover human species. protagonists of Ed Atkins’s works, may seem. Atkins’s video Happy Birthday!!! The accelerated rate of technological (2014) features a highly realistic CGI change frequently outpaces the character voiced by the artist. Mumbling opportunity for ethical checks and through a seemingly arbitrary list of years, considerations. “Nosedive” (2016), an days, and time codes, he appears to be episode of the dystopian science-fi ction struggling to remember a signifi cant TV series Black Mirror, portrays a world past event. As he searches through his where every social exchange is rated and “memories,” various collaged imagery Continues on page 5 4 Continued from page 4

contributes to a person’s ranking. The episode shares much in common with the Chinese Social Credit System, a program set to be fully implemented in 2020 whereby artifi cial intelligence and mass surveillance monitors and scores citizens based on their social interactions and consumer habits. ’s Graft Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation SECOND SEX WAR ZONE, 2016. DICKGIRL 3D(X) in VR format, gaming PC, Oculus (2016) speaks directly to such questions of Rift headset, headphones, vegan leather beanbag. control and biases inherent in technology. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo Gallery, London / Piraeus. The sculpture consists of a modifi ed bike workstation fi tted with three TV screens. of certain acts (such as female ejaculation) Such offi ce furnishings queasily reinforce in pornography produced in the UK, the glorifi cation of capitalist productivity: Hansen created DICKGIRL 3D(X) (2016), the worker not only performs their role, but a work that features EVA v3.0, a royalty- also works out, toning their fi t body. A story free avatar that the artist purchased unfolds on the screens, narrated by Perry’s through TurboSquid. The hypersexualized own avatar, describing the limitations of CGI animation shows the character fi tted the software that rendered her into being: with genital props and interacting with an “It could not replicate her fatness. . . . amorphous fi gure, her movements motion- Sondra’s body type was not an accessible captured from pornographic fi lms. Hansen preexisting template.” Any humor inherent deliberately chose to generate DICKGIRL in the avatar’s deadpan delivery quickly 3D(X) in VR to engage with “post-human dissipates when considering the problems porn production from within,” harnessing that people of color face in relation to new the very technology that the porn industry technologies. Several studies have shown is currently most aggressively investing in.8 that facial recognition software used by US police disproportionally selects nonwhite Commissioned especially for The individuals, while even mundane appliances Body Electric, Zach Blas’s Icosahedron such as automatic soap dispensers are critiques rapidly advancing technologies unable to recognize darker skin tones. of prediction. These include not only The work of artists such as Perry, as well consumer analytics (for instance the as activist sites (such as the World White algorithms that generate suggestions Web, a website that draws attention to on your Amazon and Netfl ix accounts), the dominance of white bodies on the but also predictive policing (think of the internet), gathers a politicized signifi cance mutated human “precogs” of Philip K. given the rise of discriminatory and racist Dick’s The Minority Report [1956], who technologies. psychically visualize crimes before they happen). The installation, Blas says, is a Sidsel Meineche Hansen questions satirical take on what Peter Thiel’s work how new technologies are changing our desk might look like. Thiel, an entrepreneur approaches to sex and desire. Spurred by and venture capitalist, is the cofounder a 2014 ruling by the British Board of Film of Palantir Technologies, a data analytics Classifi cation that restricted the showing company that takes its name after a crystal

5 ball in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings the desk) to respond to visitors’ questions (1954), which allows its owner to both about the future. Though deeply engaged communicate from afar and see future with contemporary politics (at the time of events. The business also problematically writing, Palantir Technologies faces protests lays Tolkien’s fantastical geography over over their software contracts with US that of the real world, forging questionable Immigration and Customs Enforcement), correspondences, for example between Icosahedron is also a send-up. The work is the Middle East and the evil realm of purposefully infantile—given its limited Mordor, eff ectively vilifying a majority- number of source texts, the elf is actually Muslim sociopolitical context. Blas nods to quite dumb. It critiques, in Blas’s words, how such companies structure their work the “childish masculinity and bravado” of around play, magic, and fantasy through entrepreneurs like Thiel.9 elements in the installation: for instance a glowing philosopher’s stone (an alchemical Some of the most recent works in The Body substance that not only turns metals Electric explore health and treatment— into gold, but guarantees its possessor issues particularly pertinent today given immortality) and a crystal ball within which the ongoing politicization of health care, “lives” a free-fl oating artifi cially intelligent such as the wrangling over the Aff ordable elf that predicts the future of prediction. Care Act in the United States and the The work’s title—Icosahedron—references rising threat of privatization of the British the twenty-sided die inside the fortune- National Health Service. It is unsurprising telling Magic 8-Ball toy, and points to that artists turn to these topics at a time the interactive elf who has been trained of heightened institutional scrutiny and on a limited set of twenty writings by scandals such as those over Purdue such philosophers and fi ction writers as Pharma opioids and water contamination William Golding, Ayn Rand, and Yuval in Flint, Michigan. Made for Instagram, Noah Harari (their books can be found on Carolyn Lazard’s series In Sickness and

Marianna Simnett The Needle and the Larynx, (video still), 2016. Single-channel HD video (color) with surround sound; 15:17 min. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries, London. 6 Study (2015–ongoing) is informed by the views these changes skeptically. Through artist’s experience of living with chronic intergenerational and international dialogue, illness and autoimmune disease. Each the exhibition looks to common threads and image shows her holding whatever book shared concerns, despite each artist having she might be reading at the time as she access to diff ering technology at diff erent receives her biweekly intravenous iron times. Certainly Marshall McLuhan’s infusion. Whether making art, publishing, mantra “the medium is the message” rings or in her role as a cofounder of Canaries true—artists will always respond to new (a collective of cis women, trans, and contemporary technologies (photographic, nonbinary people living and working with televisual, digital) and seek to challenge and chronic illnesses), Lazard makes visible her subvert their logic. Yet regardless of how ill body to open conversations about how advanced technology might appear, The we understand “healthy” and “unhealthy.” Body Electric posits the perennial timeliness Hormonal Fog Machine (Study #1) (2016) of questions of identity, embodiment, race, by Candice Lin and Patrick Staff speaks gender, sexuality, and belonging, across eras to a related concern: how the substances and generations. we ingest have the capacity to shift our -Pavel S. Pyś hormonal balances. The sculpture consists of a hacked commercial fog machine Notes that vaporizes an herbal tincture made 1 Artist quoted in “Wolf Vostell,” Flash Art, March–April of licorice and black cohosh, which when 1977, reprinted in Flash Art, November-December 1989, consumed in large amounts may suppress 102. testosterone production. Unpacking the 2 Joan Simon, “Imagist: Joan Jonas in Conversation with associations by which our bodies become Joan Simon,” Art in America, December 2010, 164. associated with perceptions of gender 3 Ulrike Rosenbach, Videokunst (: self-published, underpins Lin and Staff ’s investigation of 1982), 13, my translation. botany through a queer lens. Marianna 4 Alison Landsberg, “Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance,” in New the Age of Mass Culture Simnett’s The Needle and the Larynx (2016) (: Columbia University Press, 2004). also considers the gendered body, but 5 Amy Sherlock, “25 Artworks: Martine Syms ‘Notes on through the format of a fantastical parable Gesture,’” Frieze, issue 181, September 2016, 132. told by a young girl who commands a 6 Stelarc, “Beyond the Body: Amplifi ed Body, Laser Eyes, doctor to lower her voice “so that . . . it is and Third Hand” (1986), in Theories and Documents of closer to the groans outside that keep me Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of turning in the night.” Shot in agonizingly California Press, 1996), 430. slow motion, the video shows Simnett 7 Ed Atkins speaking about his solo exhibition at Kunsthaus receiving Botox injections into her larynx, Bregenz, Austria, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ which paralyzes the muscle and lowers the watch?v=laVhwIV-Nyk. voice, a procedure typically undertaken by 8 Exhibition announcement for Sidsel Meineche Hansen, SECOND SEX WAR, Gasworks, London, posted March 14, men who perceive their voices as not deep 2016, https://www.e-fl ux.com/announcements/44577/ enough. For Simnett, the work melts “the sidsel-meineche-hansen-second-sex-war/. borders of what it means to be female”; it 9 Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee, “Toying with the Future: is a meditation on how to transgress the AI, Fantasy, and Zach Blas’s Icosahedron,” Walker Reader blog, June 26, 2019, https://walkerart.org/magazine/ conventions that shape our understanding icosahedron-zach-blas-jennifer-rhee. of the body.10 10 Jessica Heron-Langton, interview with Marianna Simnett, “Artist Marianna Simnett Explains Her While technology marches on at an Uncomfortable New Film for Channel 4’s Random Acts,” Dazed Digital, March 11, 2018, https://www.dazeddigital. irrepressible pace, The Body Electric com/beauty/body/article/42075/1/the-needle-the-larynx.

7 FEATURED ARTISTS

LAURIE ANDERSON SHIGEKO KUBOTA ED ATKINS CAROLYN LAZARD TRISHA BAGA MARK LECKEY SADIE BENNING CANDICE LIN & DARA BIRNBAUM PATRICK STAFF ZACH BLAS JAMES BYRNE HELEN MARTEN PETER CAMPUS PETRA CORTRIGHT CHARLOTTE MOORMAN ANDREA CRESPO ZACKARY DRUCKER NAM JUNE PAIK RHYS ERNST LETÍCIA PARENTE SONDRA PERRY SIMONE FORTI HOWARDENA PINDELL ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA ULRIKE ROSENBACH SIDSEL MEINECHE HANSEN PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA K8 HARDY LORNA SIMPSON LYLE ASHTON HARRIS MARIANNA SIMNETT LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON MARTINE SYMS PIERRE HUYGHE JULIANA HUXTABLE AMALIA ULMAN SANJA IVEKOVIĆ WOLF VOSTELL JOAN JONAS THE WOOSTER GROUP JOSH KLINE ANICKA YI

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The Body Electric is organized by the Walker Art Center. PUBLIC PROGRAMS The exhibition is made possible by generous support from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. OPENING NIGHT PARTY Additional support provided by Ellen and Jan Breyer and Fri, Sep 6, 2019 7–10 PM the David and Leni Moore Family Foundation. $12 in advance / $15 at the door YBCA Members FREE The Body Electric is curated by Pavel Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts with Jadine Collingwood, Curatorial Fellow, Celebrate the West Coast debut of The Visual Arts, Walker Art Center. The YBCA presentation Body Electric exhibition with an evening is organized by Susie Kantor, Curator of Exhibitions. fi lled with art, specialty cocktails from our resident cocktail experts, a photo booth by Support for The Body Electric is provided by the Changing the Ratio Circle of Advisors. Additional Shot in the City Photography and music by thanks to David Packard and M. Bernadette Castor. DJ Josette Melchor. YBCA exhibitions are made possible in part by Mellon/ American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellows ARTIST TO ARTIST CONVERSATION Program, with additional support by Kevin King and 3rd Thursdays 5-8 PM Meridee Moore. FREE YBCA programs are made possible in part by Bloomberg Join us for our monthly free programming Philanthropies and The James Irvine Foundation, with as part of the Yerba Buena Neighborhood- additional funding by National Endowment for the Arts, wide 3rd Thursdays. Enjoy free gallery Grosvenor, and YBCA Members. admission from 5-8 PM, local DJs, specialty cocktails, and our Artist to Artist conversation—a rapid-fi re discussion between local artists.

Each month we invite two artists to get to know one another better by asking three questions of their choosing. This short, 20-minute talk will be recorded and available for future viewing. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is one of the nation’s most innovative contemporary arts centers. Check back in each month at ybca.org to Founded in 1993, YBCA’s mission is to generate culture see who our featured artists, thinkers, and that moves people. Through powerful art experiences, culture producers will be as we explore thoughtful and provocative content, and deep today’s most important topics. opportunities for participation, YBCA is committed to creating an inclusive culture that awakens personal and societal transformation. YBCA presents a wide variety of programming year-round, including performing arts, visual arts, fi lm/video and civic engagement. YBCA venues include the Forum, Screening Room, Galleries and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. For tickets and information, call 415.978.ARTS (2787). Cover image: Juliana Huxtable 701 MISSION ST Lil’ Marvel, 2015. SAN FRANCISCO Color inkjet print, ed. AP of 3. CA 94103 Courtesy the artist and JTT, New York. YBCA.ORG