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 happenings, 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 buried, 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 sculpture today, desires, TV screens, and mass media. but Nam June Paik’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 Performance pioneers Joan Jonas 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 Germany, Italy, and the United States, content that seamlessly blends images including at the Walker Art Center, 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 video 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 Charlotte Moorman, Shigeko Kubota, and objects that harken back to the and Wolf Vostell, 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 television 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 (Howardena Pindell, 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 videos, and memes. Syms’s Notes on Gesture (2015) addresses this idea In 1986 the performance artist Stelarc 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 Simone Forti’s mid-1970s holograms and Zackary Drucker, Juliana Huxtable), Peter Campus’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 music, 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 Lynn Hershman Leeson’s melancholic meditation on memory and fi rst interactive video installation, 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