The Body •Read blurb from syllabus •Focus for today: Contexts for understanding works of art (Artist/viewer) Zhang Huan? Fen Ma Liuming? Zhang Zeduan, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, 11th century Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889 Mona Hatoum, Van Gogh’s Back, 1995 Photograph “I wanted it to appeal to your senses first maybe or to somehow affect you in a bodily way and then the sort of connotations and concepts that are behind that work can come out of that original physical experience. This is what I was aiming at in the work. I wanted it to be experienced through the body. In other words I want work to be both experienced sensually and intellectually rather than just one dimensionally if you like.” - Mona Hatoum “I don’t think art is the best place to be didactic; I don’t think the language of visual art is the most suitable for presenting clear arguments, let alone for trying to convince, convert or teach.” - Mona Hatoum Yasumasa Morimura, Olympia, 1999 Photograph Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1963 Painting (oil on canvas) “Throughout history artists have drawn, sculpted and painted the human form. Recent art history, however, reveals a significant shift in artists’ perceptions of the body, which has been used not simply as the ‘content’ of the work, but also as canvas, brush, frame and platform. Over the course of the last hundred years artists and others have interrogated the way in which the body has been depicted and how it has been conceived. The idea of the physical and mental self as a stable and finite form has gradually eroded, echoing influential twentieth-century developments in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, medicine and science. Artists have investigated the temporality, contingency and instability of the body, and have explored the notion that identity is ‘acted-out’ within and beyond cultural boundaries, rather than being an inherent quality. They have explored the notion of consciousness, reaching to express the self that is invisible, formless and liminal. They have addressed issues of risk, fear, death, danger and sexuality, at times when the body has been most threatened by these things… …Since the 1960s artists using their bodies have explored the constructed visual and linguistic identities of gender, sexuality and race, offering up these representations as hierarchies of power… …The body is a fluid signifying system, which in the twentieth century is continuously undergoing challenging and liberating transformations. The boundaries of the individual shift constantly as the boundaries between public and private, and the notion of the individual change. The idea of a hermeneutic, essentialist self – what Amelia Jones refers to as ‘the Cartesian subject’ – is no longer simply accepted.” - Tracey Warr - Artist’s Statement, 1977: “This planet is crushing my cortex. I’m tired of my 141-lb weight, I’m tired of this gravitational conspiracy, I want to unplug my body from this planet… We inhabit a planet of data and documentation. Data has become destructive, content has been consumed by complexity. The role of information has changed – information is now so fragmentary, so conflicting and so overwhelming that it tends to confuse rather than clarify… In this age of information overload, only physical commitment is meaningful. In this age of information overload, what is significant is not freedom of ideas, but rather freedom of form… In this age of vicarious viciousness symbols are no longer adequate. Modification of the body is the ritual for its ultimate mutation. Conscious modification and mutation compresses evolution in time. Conscious evolution will not be evolution of the mass by chance, but rather evolution of the Exoskeleton, 1999 individual by choice. Evolution by the individual, for the individual…” - Stelarc Stelarc “The human body is obsolete” Extra Ear on Arm, 1992 2006 ”…the body is mass produced but at the moment it doesn't have any replaceable parts. OK, we're making artificial organs. But this is just a medical approach. What we really need is a design approach. If you have a heart that wears out after 70 years, this to me is an engineering problem. We should start to re-engineer the body.“ Orlan, plastic surgery works “Orlan has trafficked in notions of an ambiguous and constantly shifting identity. Her actions call into question whether our self-representations conform to an inner reality or whether they are actually carefully contrived falsehoods fabricated for marketing purposes - in the media or in society at large.” - Barbara Rose Strongly influenced by Duchamp - body as readymade. “My work is a fight against nature and the idea of God... the inexorability of life, DNA-based representation. And that’s why I went into cosmetic surgery; not looking to enhance or rejuvenate, but to create a total change of image and identity. I claim that I gave my body to art. The idea is to raise the issue of the body, its role in society and in future generations, via genetic engineering, to mentally prepare ourselves for this problem.” - Orlan My New York, 2002 Whitney Biennial “Something may appear to be formidable, but I will question whether or not it truly is so powerful. Sometimes such things may be extremely fragile, like body builders who take drugs and push themselves beyond the limits of their training on a long term basis, until their heart cannot possibly bear such enormous stress. In this work I combine three symbols: migrant workers, Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, doves, and body building. I interpret My New York through concerns of 1994 identity, through the Buddhist tradition of setting live animals free (to accumulate grace), and through man's animal nature and machinelike qualities. A body builder will build up strength over the course of decades, becoming formidable in this way. I, however, become Mr. Olympic Body Builder overnight.” – Zhang Huan Family Tree, 2001 Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting, 1965 Perpetual Fluxus Festival Important early video artist (see EAI website) Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964 “Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material… 1975 It's propulsion is toward the ecstatic…." Interior Scroll "I thought of the vagina in many ways—physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of Sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.” - Schneemann “There were many reasons for my use of the naked body in my works: to break into the taboos against the vitality of the naked body in movement, to eroticize my guilt-ridden culture and further to confound this culture’s sexual rigidities—that the life of the body is more variously expressive than a sex-negative society can admit.” - Schneemann Context Fluxus, Happenings - merging of art and life – collective action -“art is the total event…a merging of elements so that life (man) can be art…A Happening is direct art in a cathartic sense: realization of raw experiences…” Yves Klein, Anthropometries, early 1960s Judson Dance and Merce Cunningham - dance that focused on expression through collective interaction of bodies, rather than bodies as vessels for predetermined actions Jonas, Mirror Piece I (Reconfigured), 2010 Guggenheim Museum Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece I, 1969 Fragmented image of the female and women’s shifting roles -gender, identity, the self, representation, real vs. illusory, mediated imagery -reconciliation of body as subject/object, image/self Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series 1974-82 Commentary on codes of glamour Wilke, Intra Venus Series, 1994 “earth body sculpture” transitory, ephemeral Silueta (silhouette) series Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Cosmetic Facial Variations) Mendieta, Tree of Life, 1976 1972 Mendieta, Isla, 1981 “…carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence.” - Mendieta Bruce Nauman, Art Make-Up, 1967 YouTube Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 Nauman, Art Make-Up, 1967- 68 Piper, Mythic Being series, 1972-76 The Mythic Being was ”a street performance I did over a four-year period, from 1972 to 1976, in drag as a young male of color. I wore Afro, shades, moustache, and smoked a Tiparillo. I visited certain culture-related locales around the city: art gallery openings, concerts, films, plays, etc., as well as took the subways and buses and walked the streets at night in different neighborhoods. In order to focus my attention and maintain my composure during the performance, I focused on a mantra: a passage from the personal journal I have been keeping since pre-adolescence…In content, I selected passages expressive of some personal issue I was grappling with at the time. Repeating the passage was a way of defusing and transcending the issue.” Video on-line Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1987 For Smith, the human body, even more than human consciousness, is “our primary vehicle for experiencing our lives.” Pipilotti Rist, Sip My Ocean, 1996 “The road to excess leads to the place of wisdom for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” • Opie images of Ron Athey from ICP catalogue, The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Risk and Healing, 2006 Cathy Opie, Self Portrait/Cutting, 1993 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills 1977-82 Constructed identity of femininity – staging images of feminine stereotypes Yasumasa Morimura Self Portrait – After Marilyn Monroe 1996 Photo.