Embodying The Real
The original concept for the exhibition BODY was simply to present a realist view of the naked human body. In 1997 the Gallery will also present an exhibition of Orientalism: the high point of romantic, academic painting in the mid nineteenth-century. By way of contrast BODY represents a radical alternative starting with Courbet and following a realist thread through modern art to the present day. The process of selection brought other critical ideas into play such as: Realism versus Salon painting, empathy rather than voyeurism, gesture as a trace of the artist, art and life, and self-reflection.
The most apparent distinction between Courbet�s Realism and Orientalism, or other forms of nineteenth-century Salon painting, is the choice of subject matter. Realism depicts everyday life rather than fantasies of far-away places and legendary histories. This exhibition and the accompanying book will show that Courbet�s preference for modern themes not only entailed an intellectual embrace of modern political thought, but also frequently involved a significant personal identification with the model and with the natural environment. More generally, the themes of the exhibition bring out a distinction between empathy and voyeurism, where empathy is engendered through this emotional identification.
Empathy is usually precluded by certain cultural and artistic conventions that sanction voyeurism. Such conventions have provided an acceptable context for looking at bodies, even in the most prudish societies (at least within the West). One of the ways in which this has been done is through strategies which distance the viewer from the model. Orientalist and academic paintings, for example, which commonly appeared in the official French Salon exhibitions of the ninteenth-century, portray the nude as exotic, mythological or historically distant. Equally, the classical nude described by Sir Kenneth Clark is intellectually appreciated as an embodiment of classic ideals and proportion, rather than as a body amongst others. This distance secures an indemnity for the voyeur from the threat of a gaze returned: the odalisque will not challenge the viewer�s consuming eye. The voyeur may wish to possess the object of the gaze imaginatively, but not at the expense of forgoing the protection of anonymity. On the other hand, the intimacy of an empathic gaze may be confronting because it engages an erotic and bodily response, without the distancing filter of these conventions. It may also lead a viewer to identify with the body of the model, producing an imaginative merger of beholder and image.
The selection process began with extensive viewing of major public collections. The initial framework was based on the principals outlined above, but there was also an intuitive component. Some works seemed to support the concept of an empathetic gaze perfectly while others did not. In several cases these readings of individual works went against the grain of orthodox art historical classifications of the artist�s work. These intuitions therefore needed to be supported by careful visual analysis. One of the factors which emerged from my subsequent reflection on the work was the relation of eye and hand in the realist paintings that I had selected.
The ninteenth-century collection of the Mus�e d�Orsay in Paris is arranged with the Realists along one side of the main aisle and Salon and Orientalist paintings opposite. If the viewer inspects each work in the Realist section and compares the brushwork with those on the opposite walls they will find a surprisingly consistent distinction. Artists like Ingres and Cabanal not only project their subjects into an exotic scenario, they also brush away any trace of their hand. It is as if they distance themselves from the voyeurism facilitated by their art (fig 2. B/W The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel). Experiencing the Realist works, in contrast, entails a full sensory engagement because in tracing the form, the viewer�s eye follows the gesture of the artist. This is a process which brings the viewer very close to the artist and to the subject matter. In a way it is as if the viewer recreates the moment of production with each glance.
This idea of the work of art as a trace of the artist�s bodily presence provided an important link to certain twentieth-century practices, culminating in performance art in the 1960s. In many ways a precursor to performance art, Jackson Pollock�s dripped paintings can readily be interpreted as a trace of a physical action, an observation confirmed by Namuth�s famous film of Pollock in the studio confirmed. Later in this introduction I will outline how Yves Klein created his Anthropometries using his models as living paintbrushes and how the Vienna Aktionismus group moved from painting to performance, enacting rituals in which the body of the model and sometimes that of the artist no longer functioned as figures but as the field on which the paint was splattered. Such an emphasis on the artist�s could easily lead to solipsism and self indulgence. On the other hand it can be a means to engage the viewer more completely in the work. The body art of Gina Pane, Mike Parr or Marina Abramovic from the 1970s is so confronting precisely because the viewer�and not just the artist�is included within the work.
By replacing the objectifying and distancing conventions of academic painting with an emphasis on sensory and emotional engagement, the works selected for BODY lessen the gap between art and life. Making art which addresses the boundary between representation and lived experience is an important aspect of realism. Art which makes this border visible presents visual language as a kind of screen or veil which reveals yet separates and obscures the represented.
Another artistic strategy in this exhibition contrives to position the viewer in ways that focus attention on the specific nature of their gaze. The most dramatic example of this is Richard Baqui�s faithful reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp�s Etant Donn�s: 1� La chute d�eau; 2� Le gaz d��clairage (1981) henceforward referred to as Etant Donn�s (fig ??? colour. photograph by Rodde). In this installation, originally completed by Duchamp in 1968, the viewer is compelled to stoop and peer through a peephole to see the bizarre tableau created within.
The gap between art and life is further eroded by the substitution of objects and materials in place of images of the body. Doris Salcedo, for example, presents the shoes of those who have disappeared in the political violence in Colombia as attributes of the departed, in such a way that their presence is invoked more forcibly than any portrait could hope to do.
Many of the exhibitions and publications that have addressed the body in the last five years have considered it from an inter-disciplinary perspective. They have charted social and scientific visions of the body and traced the evolution of different perceptions throughout history. These exhibitions have been very informative and have brought together fine art with comparative cultural material, from scientific, medical and social history. Outstanding amongst these were the exhibitions l�Ame et Corps, curated by Jean Clair and shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1994, and Identity and Alterity: Figures of The Body 1895/1995 at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Also notable is Feminin Masculin, curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac at the Centre Pompidou in 1995. BODY shares some concerns with the latter project, which examined many aspects of sexuality in art. It differs, however, in its emphasis on the act of looking as a bodily function: to this end I have focused on artistic strategies by which the viewer is made aware of the particular quality of their own gaze.
The many intertwining themes of this exhibition reveal unexpected relations between the work of certain contemporary artists and their nineteenth-century precursors. In particular, many works selected emphasise an intimacy born of shared bodily sensations. The display of objects throughout the gallery spaces follows this thematic closely, beginning with an acknowledgment of the essentially voyeuristic business of peeking into private places.
1. Private spaces, voyeurism or intimacy
Many of the works in this first section conform to our expectation of an exhibition focusing on the nude. Luminous paintings by Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Suzanne Valadon, Cuno Amiet, Edward Hopper and Balthazar Balthus accord with our desire for an aesthetic vision of the human body. Two contemporary artists, Bill Henson and Tony Oursler, make images which raise critical questions about privacy. This group of works jumps ahead of the chronology for the exhibition which actually begins with Courbet in 1862. I have presented them first, partly because they meet a certain expectation but also because they raise the issue of voyeurism. Each image shows a figure engaged in personal activities, for example in the bathroom or the bedroom: private spaces in which we prepare our bodies for eventual exposure in the outside world. The artists take us into this private domain, thus parting the veil of discretion which allows for a reasonable distinction between private and public space. In most cases the artist seems to be an unseen watcher and the viewer is, by association, a �fellow-voyeur�.
(fig 3. B/W Helmut Newton Self-portrait with June and Models)
Not all of the images in this room leave the viewer unseen. Helmut Newton�s photograph Self-portrait with June and models (1981) is a study of gazes returned and deflected. The viewer�s eye is most likely to be captured by the gaze of the artist�s wife, who is actually looking at the artist as he lines up the shot. We stand in place of the artist although unlike him, we are not reflected in the mirror. This work clearly harks back to Velasquez� great composition Las Meninas where viewers find themselves standing on the spot where the king and queen--the probable models for the picture--must have stood. The royal couple only appear as a shadowy presence in the mirror on the rear wall of the artist�s studio.
(fig 4. Colour. De Andrea Allegory: After Courbet)
At the entrance to the exhibition John De Andrea�s sculpture, Allegory: after Courbet (1988), also shows the artist and the model, but as with Courbet�s great allegorical painting the model is shown watching the artist and not the other way round. In the Courbet the artist depicts himself sitting so close to the canvas, upon which he is painting a landscape with waterfall, that he appears to be merging with the painting. The artist in Allegory After Courbet is staring into a plaster mould of his own face. The mould acts as a sculptural equivalent to Courbet�s compression of the figure against the pictorial surface in the self-portraits and The Studio; it also introduces the concept of a trace or imprint of the body. George Segal�s sculpture too is taken directly from a living body. For Marcel Duchamp and other artists in the exhibition, such as Yves Klein, Julie Rrap and Arnulf Rainer, the mould becomes a marker of presence and absence and an indication of physical contact. (fig 5. Colour. George Segal Woman putting on an earring)
Degas is represented by a drawing and a sculpture, both of which depict a naked woman drying herself after the bath. He is one of the many nineteenth-century artists apparently obsessed with washing. This could be thought of as simply a convention for revealing nudity, as in traditional themes such as Susanna surprised by the elders. There are however more particular associations between modernity, washing and prostitution in the French nineteenth-century imagination which Alan Krell has touched upon in his essay.
(fig 6. Colour. Degas Woman looking at the sole of her left foot bronze)
Bonnard always seems to be disclosing a private world. The earlier paintings in this room, Siesta, the artist�s studio (1900) (fig 7. colour) and L�homme et la femme (1900), are at first glance charming domestic scenes with a strong hint of post-coital regret. In the latter, the man gathers up his clothes while the woman turns her attention to the kittens on the bed. Both paintings make much of the tumbled bedclothes which provide a luxurious opportunity for the painter�s brush and heighten the level of sensuality in the image. Courbet was a master of this use of fabric. In Sleep, for instance, he allows the hand of the brunette sleeper to dangle at the edge of the bed where the silky white slip parts to reveal a fleshy pink fold in the bed covers. Fabric easily translates into flesh in the hands of the artist and in the imagination of the viewer.
The Bath (1925) (fig 8. colour) and Nu de dos � la toilette (1934) by Bonnard return to the theme of the toilette. (fig 9. colour) Marthe de M�rigny, his partner for over 50 years, seems to have been a compulsive bather and the artist took every opportunity to paint her during her long periods of immersion. The shimmering colours of the tiled bathroom provide a luxurious bourgeois background to the figure, yet there is something sinister about this obsession with bathing which is conveyed by the lifeless pallor of Marthe�s flesh and morbid stillness of her body in The Bath.
Suzanne Valadon�s Nu � la couverture ray�e (1922), (fig 10. colour) by contrast, seems very straightforward. She also makes much of the fabric, but here the pleasure seems to be in the visual delight with no sexual overtones. Unlike the sickly flesh tones of Marthe�s body, Valadon�s figures are flushed with vitality. I have included the dressed odalisque in La Chambre Bleue (1923) (fig 11. colour) because it was made as a response to Edouard Manet�s Olympia. Unfortunately the Manet can only appear as an etching, but its echo in La Chambre Bleue reveals how time and taste move on. Manet was reviled in his time for exposing the everyday in the realm of painting which convention reserved for higher fancies. Valadon, in her turn, rejects Manet for simply modernising the objectifying gaze of nineteenth century male artists. Her heroine is self-absorbed, clothed and smokes a cigarette. Manet�s Olympia may have flaunted the conventional notion of beauty in the 1860s, but she was nevertheless desirable and available because implicitly a prostitute.
Edward Hopper is best known for his observations of everyday life in the public domain. The little study Nude crawling into a bed (1903) (fig 15. colour) is an exception. As in the self-portraits by Courbet, Hopper has brought the figure very close to the picture plane. The room is divided by the play of light and shade, creating a plane of illumination through which the figure passes into the dark recesses of the bedroom. This implied movement from the viewer�s space into the veiled interior evokes a movement from consciousness into reverie or sleep.
Cuno Amiet�s In the bedroom (1912) (fig 12. colour) depicts a family at ease under the artist�s stare. The trust between artist and models, mother and daughter is unmistakable. The mood is optimistic and the decorative furnishings provide an occasion for lively colour. The ease of the models and the straightforward quality of the artist�s treatment allow the viewer to feel comfortable in the presence of this child and her mother in spite of the intimacy of the moment. Balthus, on the other hand, depicts pubescent girls in erotic and mysteriously theatrical poses. The light falls from the side, as if from an open window, yet this only serves to heighten the intimacy of the acts which have occurred or are about to occur, within the privacy of the room. (fig 13. Colour. Balthus Nude with a cat) (fig 14. colour. Balthus le Lever)
Balthus� nudes are often accompanied by a clothed admirer or witness. He also makes use of fabric and other tactile materials to amplify our awareness of touch. Fabric hangs alongside skin, the hand brushes the breast or reaches out to touch a cat. These are moments in which Balthus suggests arousal through the medium of obsessively worked paint. This is handled in the manner of Degas, by layering pigments and rubbing them back until a skinlike surface is developed. This technique translates again into a tactile, sensual response and yet the models are children and unthinkable as objects of desire.
(fig 15. colour. Henson untitled 1994/95)
Bill Henson�s photographs purport to capture erotic rituals being played out by adolescents on an urban tip. The site is presumed to be away from the public gaze but the photographer, who has either commissioned the event or has been tolerated by the participants, allows the viewer to intrude. The images are collaged to re-situate the action in grand romantic landscape settings. The figure groupings in this scenery are suggestive of dramatic history paintings in the Baroque manner, and yet the source of the imagery is of abject and dysfunctional adolescent behaviour. The surface of the imagery is ruptured violently by jagged areas collaged from the white reverse of the photographic paper. This rending of the surface of representation exaggerates the contextual disruption of the collage, making it hard to focus on the pictures as a straight narrative. They acquire an abstract dynamic which reads across separate panels, transforming the whole wall into a dance. The viewer is compelled to move back and forth between a formal reading of the whole and voyeurism of its parts. Henson deliberately places compositional difficulties in the way of an uncritical gaze, thereby requiring the viewer to work hard at looking.
Towards the end of the exhibition we are invited to participate in an intensely private moment in the video installation, Stuck (1981) by Tony Oursler (fig 16. colour). A roughly formed rag doll of human scale lies in a corner, its face is a projected video image. The actress who has performed the portrait of the doll vividly simulates a sexual experience. Because we can not see the partner who is producing these gasps and grimaces we are left to imagine the particular nature of the act. By requiring us to visualise the invisible source of the doll�s experience Oursler involves us as active participants: the viewer�s response in effect completes the work.
2. Landscape, waterfall and hole: sexual allegories
The next group of works links nineteenth and twentieth-century images of the landscape as an allegory of the female body to reclamations of the land as a productive site by later feminist artists. Gustave Courbet was particularly committed to the association between female creativity and the earth. His best known paintings of the nude are intimately associated with nature: The Painter�s Studio, Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years in My Artistic Life (1855) and the two versions of La Source (fig 17. colour) (the version from The Metropolitan Museum is represented in this exhibition) are key examples which Michael Fried has analysed most provocatively. One feature of his interpretation is the intense identification Courbet is supposed to have demonstrated with his female models. Another is the artist�s identification of women with nature and the use of landscape features as metaphors for aspects of the feminine. The waterfall, the source, and the cave are obvious enough associations which can be reduced to banal sexual innuendo. Linda Nochlin supports this view, regarding Courbet�s merger with the female body as yet another instance of a male artist presenting �woman� as available for imaginative penetration. Arguably, however, there is an intense investment in this female presence in nature throughout the art of Courbet which seems deeply personal and empathic. These opposing interpretations are most dramatically exposed in Courbet�s specifically erotic compositions.
(fig 18. colour Courbet l�Origine du Monde)
L�Origine du Monde painted by Courbet in 1866 was commissioned by Kalil Bey, a wealthy businessman and Turkish diplomat. It was undoubtedly intended as erotic if not pornographic, but Courbet�s title would seem to be more than a nineteenth-century euphemism. The image depicts a woman lying with her legs spread. It is framed to focus on the pubic area, with the lower legs and the torso above the breast falling beyond the edge of the composition. Courbet transfers this anatomical meaning of �origin in a woman�s body� to the earth as the �source of all life� and, in doing so, he sexualises the landscape itself. Courbet�s landscape paintings often depict the rocky gorges of the river Loue which flowed through his home town of Ornans. The Source of the Loue in this exhibition�which has often been discussed in relation to L�Origine du Monde--shows the river gushing out of a cave towards the viewer.
The association of water welling up from the ground with human procreation is a common theme and the representation of the spring or source as female is a conventional allegory in ninteenth-century painting. In the case of Courbet, however, his profound identification with the land seems to arise more from his historical and political circumstances and his daily experience of the countryside. Courbet came from a rural community that had benefited under the Republic�s re-distribution of land between 1848 and 1851. For these middle-class land owners the land was a major political issue. For the first time in modern history those who worked the land also owned it, and participated in government. Later in his life Courbet served as a minister in the short-lived Commune of 1871 and was subsequently thrown into prison for his political activities. Much of his work is allegorical, not so much as an aesthetic device but because of the very real fear of political censorship felt by his class. The Painter�s Studio for example was intended as a satirical criticism of Napoleon III. It was submitted to the Salon in 1855 at the time of the Great Exhibition in Paris which had been initiated by Napoleon. Although Courbet�s criticism was encoded as allegory it was still not acceptable to the officials. He responded to rejection by creating his own pavilion near the official exhibition. While the allegorical nature of his criticism gave him some protection from the law his position with regard to the authorities was permanently compromised.
Courbet was an active naturalist and a member of the Societ� d�emulation du Doubs, a society formed to promote scientific studies to improve the land in his native region. He was also called upon by geologists to render rock formations for scientific publications. In other words, he was actively involved in the daily management of the environment and not just an objective observer. His painterly treatment of rocks and water is as obsessively rendered as his handling of skin and hair. He evolved techniques for handling paint that approached the concept of equivalence which was later articulated by English painters such as Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. When painting rock, for instance, he preferred to use a palette knife to simulate the hardness and angularity of the crystalline nature of stone.
In l�Origine du Monde the intimate detail of flesh and pubic hair is meticulously recreated so that the viewer�s experience is almost as tactile as it is visual. A consistent feature in Courbet�s compositions is a framing that brings the viewer very close to the subject. This adds to the sensation of merger and encourages the viewer�s imaginative projection into the picture. While contrived for figure painting, and most particularly l�Origine du Monde, this effect is equally evident in Courbet�s landscapes and his later studies of animals. The combination of this compositional strategy with the sensual paint quality produces a striking material presence for the viewer.
Michael Fried argues that Courbet attempts a quasi-corporeal merger with the subjects of his painting. By implication the viewer follows the artist as beholder, experiencing something of this sense of passage through the pictorial surface. In paintings such as The Source of the Loue (fig 19. colour) the flow of water out of the composition towards the viewer and the deep, inviting recesses of the cave initiate an imaginative movement in and out of the composition, binding the viewer in a sexual allegory. Passage through the screen of a pictorial surface may be thought of as a passage from the world of representations and language to the material world. This passage is made more explicit in some contemporary art such as Yves Klein�s Leap into the Void, Lucio Fontana slashing the �veil� of representation in his Concetto Spaziale paintings, and the work of performance artists of the 1960s and �70s who are discussed later in this introduction.
Landscape as sexual allegory is taken up in the exhibition by the proximity of Courbet and Baqui�, who has faithfully replicated Duchamp�s last great work, Etant Donn�s (fig 20. colour. photo by Ganet). In this work the viewer must look through a small hole in a wooden door to see the secret image. By stooping to peer the viewer becomes a conspirator with the artist and perpetrates an act of visual penetration. The view which meets the eye through the keyhole is an extraordinary tableau. Through a ragged hole in a brick wall there is a landscape which includes a waterfall animated by a crude lighting device. In the foreground a naked woman is seen lying on a bed of twigs. The framing of the figure is similar to that of L�Origine du Monde. She is holding up a glowing gas lamp which draws our gaze towards the waterfall in the distance. Auguste Rodin�s sculpture Iris, The Messenger of The Gods continues the theme of water, Iris being a water nymph in classical mythology. Another bronze by Rodin, La Figure Volante (fig 21. colour), is a closely related work whose pose could well have inspired Duchamp�s original study for Etant Donn�s in 1947.
Flanking the doors with their infamous peepholes is a body of small works by Duchamp to one side and Anish Kapoor on the other. Duchamp�s nine etchings entitled The Lovers selectively quote from erotic paintings including Woman in white stockings by Courbet, and Ingres� Turkish Bath (fig 22 and 23. B/W). The small collage A la mani�re de Delvaux (1942) (fig 24. colour) shows a cameo or detail from a painting by the Surrealist artist Delvaux of a woman�s breast reflected in an oval mirror. Duchamp has framed the oval within a further circle cut from a sheet of tin foil. The net result is a keyhole vision of a woman in the privacy of her bedroom. The keyhole effect relates to Etant Donn�s while the invasion of privacy reverts to the theme of the first room.
Kapoor�s five drawings are all highly material works depicting sexualised voids which are inevitably linked to the image of l�Origine du monde by Courbet and its connection with the grotto. This gallery wall with its actual peepholes and its many represented apertures paradoxically conceals more than it reveals for behind it there lies a cabinet of erotic curiosities. Further into the exhibition the viewer encounters the verso of Baqui�s reconstruction of Etant Donn�s. This room of sexualised fragments and Surrealist fantasies of the body lies unseen behind the gallery wall in Room 2, just as the fetishization of the female body lies behind the body as landscape.
The waterfall and the grotto are combined in the works of Courbet and Duchamp, but there are many other manifestations of the hole. While an orthodox psychoanalytic reading would ascribe negative connotations to the hole, it can in fact become the exact opposite of a lack. Anish Kapoor�s drawings of sexualised voids bring the vagina and infinity together in a powerful allegory of becoming at the threshold of being and not being. Kapoor has been influenced by Klein�s attempt to manifest the void; his Void Field, for example, creates a void within a stone which is visible as a �black hole� in the top of the stone. Noting Kapoor�s Indian background, McEvilley has identified the hole with the Hindu Goddess Kali whose womb gives life and subsequently devours it in a cycle of renewal. (fig 25. colour Anish Kapoor drawing) Lucio Fontana punctured the pictorial surface in his slashed canvases, bringing painting and action together in a decisive gesture, but he also returns us to the desire for merger and passage through the veil which was discussed in relation to Courbet. In one form or another this investment in the productive space of the void will be encountered throughout the exhibition.
3. Feminising the landscape allegory
Elsewhere in the exhibition, women artists respond to the male identification of the feminine with nature by claiming it as a site of power rather than a mechanism which silences or de-humanises. They may, for instance, place the figure intimately in the earth, reclaiming the association of femininity and the creative power of nature. In an unusual painting entitled The Earth Itself or Two women In The Jungle (fig 26. colour ), Frida Kahlo reveals two nude figures lying together in a pose which implies their intimacy. This composition parodies popular ninteenth-century erotic depictions of lesbians, in which the light and dark skins of the women implied the racial and class distinction of maid and mistress. The two figures could also be interpreted as representing culture and nature, where the exotic other is identified as primitive and close to nature while culture is the prerogative of the white coloniser. Kahlo may be representing herself as a post-colonial hybrid of Europe and the new world by acknowledging both aspects of her own identity in a double self-portrait. The figures are at the edge of a bank which also functions as a transparent screen, revealing roots below the surface. The effect is to make the women appear to be a part of the tropical luxuriance. Above their heads the vegetation writhes in convoluted knots suggestive of a sexual embrace. In the trees there is a black monkey staring intently at the resting women as if it were an alter ego, the watcher and the psyche of the protagonists.
Ana Mendieta is represented by the Silueta Series from Iowa, (fig 27. colour) consisting of video and photo-documentation of a series of actions performed by Mendieta in the Iowa landscape. In these performances she left traces of her body in the soil and vegetation. In the video we barely detect the human form as it slowly moves under the weeds in a swamp or the sand of a riverbank. The photos reveal her presence more emphatically, while paradoxically consisting of her absence. They were made by drawing her own silhouette in the ground or leaving an impression of her figure in the mud. Sometimes the trace of her presence is retained in selectively weeded fungus or flowers or by the effect of fire. In an earlier series of performances made in Mexico her presence is marked by rituals of Catholicism. Mendieta ended her life on a New York pavement after falling to her death from her apartment window. This hindsight lends these imprints of her form a particular resonance.
In the two series of photos by Laura Torrado represented in BODY (fig 28. colour), Red Inside and Island, installations in the landscape take the form of female genitalia. They lay claim not only to the productive power of nature, but also the creativity of culture associated with the transformation of the earth into pottery and bricks. The chief distinction between the male view of a feminised landscape and a woman�s claim to the earth is one of agency. It is very easy for the former to neutralise the role of woman by naming her as natural and therefore pre-cultural. For a woman to identify with the productive power of nature may, however, be empowering.
4. Anxious males
�Fearful desires: �Embodiments� in late Nineteenth-Century French Painting,� is the title of the essay by Alan Krell in this book which looks at the anxiety engendered by male bodies in artistic representations of the nineteenth-century. This section of the exhibition follows landscape metaphors of femininity and inevitably leads into the section dealing with tactility. Of particular interest is Fran�ois Sall�s, The Anatomy Class at the �cole des Beaux Arts (1888) from the collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales. The male model is half naked and is being examined as if he were just a piece of flesh. In spite of his cocky stance, his sturdy muscled torso and rough trousers attest to his lower class status thus rendering him available for objectification by the gentlemen at the academy. The model�s standing as a specimen is enhanced by his juxtaposition with a flayed figure, bones and anatomical charts.
The bare torso of the gentleman being examined by a doctor in Chesham Street (1910) by George Lambert, (fig 29. colour) is somehow an incongruous exposure only permitted by the notional discretion of the doctor�s surgery. Thomas Eakins uses the context of athletics to permit male body contact in Wrestlers (1899) (fig 30. colour). This image is accompanied by Edweard Muybridge�s study, Wrestlers, which later formed the basis for Francis Bacon�s lovers in paintings such as the central canvas of Triptych (1974), also included in this exhibition.
Auguste Renoir�s Young Boy with Cat (1868-69) and Paul Gauguin�s Breton Youth (1889) (fig 31. colour) are sexually ambiguous images of young boys. The two works are very different from each other, Renoir�s being a finely finished and elegant painting while the Gauguin is awkward with strangely blurred features. Both figures are disconcertingly androgynous. Young Boy with Cat (fig 32. colour) shows the youth from the back in a pose similar to one of the three graces in classical painting. His face is nuzzling a cat�s head while the cat returns the affection, yet the boy�s gaze is partly turned towards the artist or the beholder. The cat seems to function as a vehicle for sympathetic contact between the viewer and the model, just as it does for Bonnard and Balthus. Gauguin�s youth is self absorbed and on the edge of consciousness, his eyes half closed and cast to one side. The boy�s face and the hand resting upon his solar plexus are vividly coloured, combining reverie and touch.
5. Tactility and the trace of the artist
Jill Bennett writes in this book about tactility and vision, focusing on images that represent and engage all our senses without privileging the purely visual. In this way intimacy and even leakage between bodies is invoked. The images in this section combine such intimate visualisations of touch with the tactility of the painted surface. This tactile apprehension of the artist�s mark continues the theme introduced in my discussion of Courbet.
Egon Schiele�s preoccupation with erotic imagery finds expression in Eros (self-portrait masturbating) (fig 33. colour). Apart from the obvious references to touch, there are some more subtle indicators of implied contact in the drawing. The gown is pulled back to reveal a breast which seems sexually ambiguous, and the fabrics the figure is sitting on are draped to suggest female genitalia. Schiele believed that the marks an artist made could capture the way in which the outer form reveals something of the inner world of the subject. His use of watercolour paint is surprisingly tactile and is laid on in dabs and strokes which enhance the sensitivity of the image. Die Siegerin (1924) (fig 35. colour) by Gert Wollheim is an even more eccentric sexual image. The rather lumpen ballerina in her �Ned Kelly� mask appears to be tickling the deformed worshipper�s hump with a whip. The mask carries the connotation of carnival, when the normal relations between men and women are traditionally reversed; it may also signify the diabolic possession of the wearer. Alice Neel�s portrait Joe Gould (1933) (fig 36. colour) is ambiguous and extreme in its fantastic distortion, presumably revealing an aspect of Gould�s eccentric life. Neel remarks that:
Joe wanted this painted, and I was still imaginative enough to give him a whole tier of penises. I thought that was so clever, hanging that one set from a stool. He was uncircumcised. This could be a propaganda picture against circumcision.
Touching is a recurrent feature of Klossowski�s work. (fig 37. Pierre Klossowski l�nvraisemblable Entente de Tadzio) The figures are often ungainly and the poses stiff, making the points of contact, such as a finger resting on the top of a thigh or the simple holding of hands, all the more noticeable. The partially dressed figures of women in his drawings maximise the ambiguity of revealing and concealing. (fig 38. colour December: Two daughters and two mothers) series of 12 drawings entitled The Purification of The Twelve (1987) by Francesco Clemente are devised to express something about each of the senses, emphasising touch taste and smell over the purely visual. Each image represents a part of the body and also a month of the year, for example April: Left Eye, but the image has no obvious connection to the bodily part as such. April consists of a woman lying on top of an ant hill, being impregnated by a giant turtle with a crucifix on its back. Above the figures, ant-like demons wheel around in the sky.
Lucian Freud�s Naked Man With Rat (1977) (fig 39. colour) makes the sense of touch, implied by his visceral brushwork, even more acute by the inclusion of a live rat whose tail is draped across the thigh of the young man. This contact is an electric pointer to the sensation of bodily contact. The expressive brushmark not only hightens our sensation of the form but can also suggest the presence of the artist. In this section the artist�s incarnation in the trace becomes increasingly assertive and finally obliterates the image that is ostensibly being represented. This tendency is introduced by two early paintings by Henri Matisse and concludes with a photographic self-portrait by Arnulf Rainer where the figure is completely obliterated by the gesture of the artist. The Model (1900) by Matisse (fig 40. colour) is a classic modernist reduction of the body through the simplification of its planes, a process which eventually led him to the vibrant colour fields which characterise his later work (fig 41. colour. Matisse Reclining Nude). Like Matisse, Georges Rouault uses line to define forms. Whereas Matisse�s line gently contains the form leaving the colour as pure as possible, for Rouault line becomes the main force and energy of his compositions (fig 42. colour. Rouault Nude in Profile).
There are three sculptures in this room: Rodin�s small study for the nude, Balzac �Athlete�(study F) (1896) (fig 43 colour), Matisse�s study from the same model, The Serf (1900-1903) (fig 44. colour) and de Kooning�s Clamdigger (1972-79) (fig 45. colour). Each of these works uses the material in a way that parallels the gestural qualities of in the painter�s brushmarks. The clay carries the marks of the artist�s hand as much as it takes on the form of the model.
(fig 46. colour. Gontcharova Mermaid)
Natalia Gontcharova is represented by a painting that is characteristic of the convergence of primitivism and cubism which occurred in the Russian Avant-garde and particularly within the Jack of Diamonds Group. The energy of her brushmarks typifies this convergence. Expressionist paintings by Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oscar Kokoshka are also shown here and are discussed in the essay by David Bromfield. (fig 47. colour. Kirchner Two Nudes) (fig 48. colour. Kokoshka Zrani (summer) )
The two paintings by Otto Dix in this room are vicious parodies of the human form that satirise aspects of Weimar society. His painting of The Three Women (1926) (fig 49. colour) cruelly exaggerates the shape of the models. The attention to detail is obsessive, with veins and blemishes meticulously rendered. In spite of the undeniably grotesque appearance of the three women, the intimate attention Dix pays to the minute details of their skin and hair makes the viewer acutely sensitive to their vulnerability. The Odd Couple (fig 50. colour) is another gross satire which contrasts the shrivelled and varicose body of the old man with the plump perfection of the young woman on his knee. The contact between their respective bodies is loaded with pathos. We are caught between disgust for his desire and terror at her potential to consume him. The wind from the open window blows her hair and the curtain into serpentine shapes which suggest the head of Medusa or of a fearful Valkyrie. The juxtaposition of Paula Modersohn-Becker and Dix creates a dramatic contrast. Dix�s grotesque figures are set against the self-absorbed and rather tragic figures painted in almost classical purity by Modersohn-Becker. The paint is built up with sculptural attention to form in the rendition of these sad little girls. (fig 51 and 52. colour. Modersohn-Becker Young girl and Young Girl with Apple)
Another group of paintings in this room prefigures the works of the London school and in particular the paintings of Francis Bacon. The paintwork and colour in Walter Sickert�s Mornington Crescent (1907) (fig 53. colour) evoke a mysterious dark luminosity and brooding atmosphere in this intimate London interior which was to become a trade mark of the London Group. David Bomberg transmitted this influence to another generation (fig 54. colour. Bomberg Nude). Lucian Freud emerged from this tradition, painting highly tactile images. His brushmarks retain the freshness and intensity of the moment when they were first laid down. The viewer�s eye follows each stroke as it traces the forms of the body, but the brushmarks do not always follow the form: sometimes they are in jarring tension with it and this is what makes Freud�s paintings so disturbing. Because of this tactile �interference� we are unable to gain a seamless illusion of reality. We are constantly returned to the intractable quality of the paint itself and to the hand of the artist as it �sculpts� each fragment of the body (fig 55. colour. Freud Naked Girl Asleep).
(fig 56. colour. Bacon Study for the human body).
Francis Bacon�s statements about the immediacy of the artist�s gesture, which allows the paint to act upon the nervous system of the viewer, form a key to enjoying much of the art in this part of the exhibition. Bacon admired the work of Jean Dubuffet, in particular his earlier figures such as Gymnosophie (fig 57. colour), where the outline is scratched into paint like a child scratching in wet cement. Bacon felt that these images captured the urgency of feelings rapidly expressed, like the graffiti on the back of a lavatory door. Bacon articulated the principle that paint should be made to function as an equivalent to the sensations of the body rather than merely reproducing the body�s appearance. In his last filmed interview, with Melvin Bragg, at the time of his retrospective at the Tate Gallery London, Bacon said �I wanted to bring about the sensation of the thing without the boredom of its conveyance.� This is, in part achieved by the simple response which I am proposing between hand and eye that binds artist and viewer through the action of the body, and our response to that action.
Figure in a Landscape (Nude Washing in a creek bed) (1961) (fig 58. colour) by Arthur Boyd makes great use of gesture and thickly slashed paint marks. The figure is shown to be partly transparent against the bush, picking up on the theme of identification or fusion of the figure and the landscape discussed in section 3. In the background a black ram watches the nude washing. This presence of a mute witness recurs throughout the exhibition: in the form of the cats in the first room, Balthus� companion figures, Frida Kahlo�s monkey, the watchers on the edge of Francis Bacon�s triptych, and the gaze of the wife in Helmut Newton�s photograph.
(fig 59. colour. Pollock Naked man with a knife)
Jackson Pollock is better known for his Abstract Expressionist drip paintings such as Blue Poles. It would be possible to present these paintings in this exhibition as a transition from painting to performance, and indeed the Namuth film of Pollock at work in his studio will be a part of the programme. Naked Man With Knife, however, predates these action paintings. This is a violent image which exploits Cubo-Futurism and in particular Picasso�s more political works of the 1930s. Willem de Kooning�s Two Figures in a Landscape (1968) (fig 60. colour) is a particularly loose painting where the images of the two figures almost dissolve in the gesture of the paint. This kind of distortion may be considered misogynistic in its painterly brutality, but it is also a record of the artist�s body and a trace of his tantrum. (fig 61. colour. Georg Baselitz Akte Elke III) This sequence comes to a head with Overpainting-Totem (1983/84) (fig 62. colour) by Arnulf Rainer which is a photographic self-portrait that has been almost completely covered over with daubings of paint. The trace of the artist�s fingers has virtually taken over from the image.
Yves Klein was a complex and contradictory artist whose overall project seems to have been inextricably linked to aspects of transcendence (discussed in the next section), yet he was also a realist with a passionate dislike of solipsism and expressionism in art, particularly when it purports to be a revelation of genius. In the post-war years, Abstract Expressionism in America and Informel painting in France dominated the contemporary art market. A significant component of the meaning of this art was supposed to be the expressive quality of the artist�s gesture. The gesture was reported to reflect the inner world of the artist which was presumably more interesting than average because of their heightened state of consciousness. Francis Bacon was also scathing about Abstract Expressionism and constantly affirmed his desire to make work which would resonate with sensations of reality rather than express his feelings.
Klein�s view was that the internal world of the emotionally disturbed was best left where it was. He believed that an artist�s efforts should be directed outwards to reveal something in the real world. In Anthropometries such as Ant 118 (fig 63. Colour), Klein used a model�s body as a means of applying paint to the canvas. He claimed that these images capture the energy and the presence of the body. The Anthropometries are part of a series in which he �collaborated� with nature to produce the paintings. As a variation on the �living paintbrushes� of the Anthropometries he tried holding his prepared canvases up against grass waving in the rain and the wind to capture the vitality of the elements. Many of the Anthropometries were executed as performances intended for photographic documentation. The stage was designed by his photographers so that the documentation would most effectively show the performers, an orchestra playing Klein�s Monotone Symphony and the audience dressed as for a formal theatrical event. Klein himself wore a tuxedo and white gloves. The venue he chose was the gallery where the Informel artist, Mathieu, exhibited. Mathieu had given public displays of gestural expressionism inspired by the Namuth film of Jackson Pollock in his studio. Klein�s performance was a deliberate parody of Abstract Expressionism.
In the context of this exhibition a body print acts like a trace of the real model and the viewer has the sense of being able to reach out and touch the trace where the body touched the canvas. Julie Rrap also presents a trace of her own body in rubber moulds that carry the impressions of her skin and hair. (fig 64. colour. Julie Rrap) While Klein performed his Anthropometries in France in 1960, in Japan Gutai artists were also �performing� paintings. Shiraga made his dramatic paintings by dancing in paint over the canvas and in the case of The Wild Boar Hunt (1963) (fig 65. colour), a performance was enacted on a boar�s skin. The tactility of the boar�s hairy body enhances the sensation which these works generate. These paintings are traces of the artist�s dance rather than representations of the artist�s psyche. They are evidence of an actual event, and as such they have as much in common with Klein�s Anthropometries as they have with Abstract Expressionism. (fig 66. colour Hilton Dancing Woman December)
6. Leaping, puncturing and levitating
The traditional representational surface acts as a kind of screen on to which images of the world are projected. But when the surface of the painting becomes evidence of the artist�s actions rather than the site of an illusion we are made aware of the literal presence of the support. The visual penetration of this surface by the illusion of pictorial space may now become literal penetration. Courbet�s self-portrait, Man Mad With Fear (1843) (fig 67. colour) provides a graphic image of the desire to pass through this screen. Courbet has been discussed in several other places in this book in relation to quasi-corporeal merger. In particular his self-portraits show the artist pressing up against the pictorial surface or the frame of the composition as if he was about to burst through the viewer�s side of the canvas. This dramatic painting provides an extraordinary metaphor for the terror of representation because absorption entails a partial loss of self for the artist and the viewer. The surface of the painting may be thought of as a veil or screen which separates the material world from our understanding of it. The veil reveals, just as it conceals, because perceptions of the world can never be the equivalent of reality. For the painter the struggle to dissolve the border between representation and the real world may become obsessive, as seems to have been the case with Courbet. In this painting the figure of the artist leaps into the pictorial void�signified by the cliff at the lower right hand side--and into the viewer�s space. Michael Fried has argued that such voids at the margin of a composition are linking spaces which provide entry for the artist and the viewer. In Man Mad With Fear the void is �fortuitously� left unfinished: precisely at the point where the artist is about to leap through the pictorial surface the paint breaks down into an abstract scumble. Representation is seen dissolving in front of our eyes.
Bob Law painted a series of virtually blank canvases in the late 1960s entitled Nothing to be afraid of. They consisted of unpainted stretched canvas with a biro line that framed the space just inside the edge. In the corner were the words �Nothing to be afraid of� He said that this partly referred to the banal comfort people give to anyone mad with fear or having a nervous breakdown: �There there, there is nothing to fear.� But for someone who is in fact afraid of fear itself, nothing or the void is of course the most terrible thing. It is not reasonable to suggest that an artist in 1843 could have consciously depicted the breakdown of the surface of representation, an idea that comes into play through the investigations of twentieth-century modernism. For a contemporary viewer, however, the implications of this work are striking.
Juxtaposed with a reproduction of the Courbet is a photograph of Yves Klein�s Leap, 1960 (fig 68. colour). Klein tried to manifest thought materially by impregnating spaces with his psychic emanations as a part of his Immaterial projects. He practiced Judo, achieving a 4th Dan Black Belt from a Judoka school in Japan. He also studied Rosicrucianism under Max Heindel and practised spiritual exercises which would hasten the onset of the age of the immaterial. His leap from the second floor window of Iris Clert�s studio in 1960 was in part a demonstration of his achievements in this work, yet he deliberately set himself up to be caught faking the evidence. This photograph by Harry Schunk shows a cyclist on the road and a tram across the end of the street. This was the image Klein inserted in a simulated edition of Le Monde which he placed on news stands all over Paris immediately after the event. Within a short time he had the same photograph, but this time without the cyclist and tram, published as a poster for his exhibition in Krefeld. A careful study of the photograph shown in this exhibition reveals that it has been spliced, presumably to remove the image of a safety net.
The authenticity of the performance has been much debated. The interesting thing, however, is the fact that the photograph as an art work is authentic irrespective of the means of production. If we want it to be literal evidence we are not accepting its role as an art object. The viewer may be curious about whether Klein actually leapt, but they will see in the photograph a convincing image of someone flying upwards into the void with a fiercely determined expression. There can be no doubt that Klein wanted to fly and this photo conveys that as expressively as Courbet renders a man fleeing from fear itself. Anthropometry 118 has been included here because it echoes the feeling of levitation in Leap. This work also brings the skin of the model into contact with the skin of the paper, triggering an awareness of the connection between skin and the pictorial screen.
Suspension pieces by Stelarc and Ken Unsworth from the 1970s provide an Australian response to these issues (fig 69 and 70. B/W. Stelarc and Unsworth suspension pieces). These images continue the theme of levitation introduced by Klein. In the case of Stelarc, transcending bodily limits has always been important. In more recent times he has made use of medical technology to extend the performance of the body and to disrupt its boundaries. In the suspension works, however, Stelarc draws our attention to the limits of the body in another way: by attaching the wires which hold his body aloft to meat hooks pierced through his skin. Unsworth presented his body as an element in formal sculpture in the same way that he balances and props plates of steel and rocks in his Minimalist sculpture and installation. Balance and equilibrium were the constant themes of these works, yet the body is placed in highly uncomfortable positions sometimes reminiscent of medieval martyrdom.
These works introduce performance art in which the body of the artist becomes the site of the work, thereby conflating figure and field. Some of the issues associated with performance and body art in the 1960s and �70s are discussed in an interview with Mike Parr. In this section of the exhibition more theatrical forms of performance art, for example the rituals of the Vienna Aktionismus group, are contrasted with the direct investigation of bodily limits by Mike Parr, Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane and Chris Burden (Fig 71 to 82 Body art images to be selected).
Lucio Fontana, previously referred to in relation to sexual allegories, is included in this section of the exhibition with two paintings from the Concetto Spaziale series (1962) (fig 83 and 84. colour. Fontana Concetto Spaziale and Concetto Spaziale, Attese). These works entail the artist puncturing or slashing the picture plane. While there may be visual associations between these cuts and sexual orifices, they also rupture the veil or screen of representation at the brink of the void. Because this veil is metaphorically related to the skin which separates the body from its surroundings, the orifices created by Fontana naturally evoke the openings of the body itself. The paintings are also relics of actions more decisive than the gestures of painters discussed in Tactility and the Trace.
(fig 85. colour. Ettinger Euridice 2)
In her series entitled Euridice Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger creates fugitive and mysterious images in which presences seem to appear between and amongst the fragments of found images. These paintings are evolved from photocopies made from a particularly loaded source: photographs of naked women and children taken just prior to their execution by officers of the Third Reich. Fragments of these images are assembled and only partially fixed. Consequently they retain a fugitive appearance, having the quality of haunting and fragmentary memories. The surface of these images is finished with oil paint which is systematically stroked on, touching the surface like a divining rod capturing moments of intensity within the image. The artist is also a practicing psychoanalyst who is contributing provocative ideas within the orthodoxy of Freudian and Lacanian analysis. In essence she posits a matrixial border space resulting from early experiences of separation. These spaces are libidinally invested and act as a productive alternative to the absence proposed by castration theories. The paintings seem to be veils or screens that capture images coming from beyond the subject�s direct field of experience.
7. Surreal fragments and recombinations
The most disturbing quality of Etant Donn�s is the fragmentation and depilation of the model. What is not obvious from the original view through the keyhole is that the figure is incomplete. Baqui� has faithfully reproduced Duchamp�s installation which only provides as much of the body as the viewer could see through the hole in the bricks. Now that we are permitted behind the scenes, the image is revealed as the site of an atrocity (fig ??? colour. photograph by Adilon). The carcass, for that is how it looks, holds up the lamp as if locked in rigor mortis. Surrounding this bizarre tableau in the central part of the exhibition is a cabinet of curiosities including fragments and recombinations of the body.
First, there are Duchamp�s sculptures Objet Dard (fig 86 colour), Coin du Chastit� (fig 87. colour) and Feuille de Vigne Femelle (fig 88. colour), which relate to the process of producing Etant Donn�s. Although these appear to be casts of genital areas they remain visually obscure. Moulding and casting are the sculptural equivalents of the trace in painting. Duchamp uses the idea of the mould to suggest the border of matter and thought, where representation may be characterised as being like a veil draped over matter, concealing as much as it reveals. The mould shares this association with the Wilson/Lincoln effect where two possible readings of an image alternate perceptually (fig 89. colour. Villon after Duchamp�s Bride). Duchamp uses this effect in describing the horizon in The Large Glass. The horizon, which is also the bride�s dress, separates consciousness from its object just as it binds them together. The process of moulding is erotic since it implies the pressure of material on the body and in the case of Duchamp�s female fig leaf, on the genitals. Rodin�s Iris, Messenger of The Gods reappears in a smaller version in this room recalling Duchamp�s debt to this work in Etant Donn�s. As the messenger, Iris could pass between the material and the immaterial domains.
The theme of the fragmented body returns in a vitrine of works by Rodin. Rodin kept in his studio a vast collection of casts of fragments: arms, legs, heads and torsos. These casts were repeatedly recombined to produce the great array of figures in his compositions (fig 90. colour. Rodin Centauresse). This vitrine contains a small group of assemblages from such fragments. Joan Miro�s Tightrope walker (1970) (fig 91. colour) is a surreal figure composed of fragments including bones, a gourd and a dolly, all assembled and cast in bronze.
Hans Bellmer also used dolls. His Demie Poup�e (fig 92. colour) is one of a series of near life-size articulated dolls that he had fabricated to his specifications by craftsmen. He subsequently played games with the dolls where they were placed in various situations and photographed. Bellmer also produced drawings of the body in which it seems to be turned inside out. Sexual organs are enlarged in proportion to their sensory potential, creating images that represent tactile rather than purely visual experience. Distortion takes the form of mutant or morphed human bodies in the sculpture Doggie by Jake and Dinos Chapman (fig 93. colour). Fantasies of corporeal merger and of the doppelganger take on perverse form here, seriously undermining the stability of the body�s boundaries. These artists belong to a new generation who imbibed weird cartoons with their mother�s milk.
Pierre Molinier is represented by photographs of multiple figures modified to produce almost flower-like patterns of human bodies in complex sexual combinations (fig 95. B/W. Molinier). A delightful note is struck by Richard Hamilton�s Study of Leopold Bloom in the bath (fig 96. B/W), made as an illustration for James Joyce�s Ulysses in 1948. Hamilton is fascinated by the circumcised penis that floats on the water�s surface, making parallel notations of flowers and fungi all around the edges of the composition in an echo of this form.
Rebecca Horn�s Pendulum with Emu Egg (fig 97. colour) and Love Thermometer (fig 98. colour) are two erotic sculptures which play off Duchamp�s idea of the mechanical bride. Precariously attached to the wall by a small rod, the pendulum hangs like a javelin or pointer with its sharp end almost touching an emu egg. Suddenly the pendulum jerks into action, swinging wildly from side to side. It threatens to smash the fragile egg with each swing yet as it slows down before returning to the rest position it begins to seem more like a caress. The machine threatens but also completes the bride�s orgasm. Love Thermometer plays a counterpoint to this �blossoming of the bride�. The oversized glass thermometer rests in a lined case like a piece of precious jewellery or a violin. If the viewer picks up the instrument by the bulb the heat of the hand causes the red fluid in the bulb to be forced up the stem in an image of engorgement.
More assertively surreal and allied to the work of Bellmer are Cindy Sherman and Robert Gober (fig 100. colour. Sherman untitled 259). Sherman�s photographs reveal figures poorly assembled from prosthetics and rubber body parts. Robert Gober�s Man Coming Out of Woman (fig 101. colour) is a wax sculpture which disturbingly simulates flesh, although the waxwork quality lends it a macabre effect that jars with the subject of an improbable birth scene. This fantastic scenario seems to link the original object of fixation, the mother, with the artist�s sexual investment in the male body.
(fig 112. colour. Vettor Pisani La Tempesta)
(fig 113. colour. Gilbert and George Urinal)
8. Imagining the inside out
Imagining the body, and in particular representing the inside on the outside or recreating the feel of a body rather than its appearance, is also a critical component of this project. Louise Bourgeois� sculpture, Janus Fleuri (fig 102. colour), is a highly concentrated form which is based on female genitals framed by polished mounds. It does not simply present the visual appearance of the body, and is not reducible to a deformed fragment such as Objet Dard by Duchamp. It refers to the sensation of sex rather than depicting the outward appearance of organs. The wings of the form, corresponding to thighs, are smoothly finished and polished bronze. The central area which occupies the space of the genitals is, in contrast, roughly formed and ill defined. It seems more like an accumulation of fatty matter than an anatomical detail. The polished area becomes an outside or a skin while the contrasting unformed part seems to be the interior normally available only by touch.
Cathy de Monchaux also produces forms which convey sensation rather than imaging the body as such. She creates a world of fragments which partly suggest genitalia, but they are equally possible to read as independent entities, insects, fungal growths and elaborate jewels, all at the same time. The spiky fractal metal forms that clasp the soft folds of talcumed leather strongly suggest sexual pleasure as well as throbbing pain (fig 103. colour. de Monchaux tbc).
(fig 104. colour. Leonard Anatomical Venus ??)
Zoe Leonard is represented by a photograph taken of a medical Venus in a glass case. This is a beautiful and terrible image. The model is an attractive naked woman with long blonde hair wearing only a string of pearls round her neck. Her abdomen has been dissected to lay bare her entrails and organs. Francis Bacon has spoken of the beauty of a diseased mouth or a road accident, but it is more compelling to hear Orshi Drozdik describe her first encounter with an anatomical dissection when she was at art school. After the initial shock of seeing a beautiful woman lying disembowelled she discovered that the lining of her stomach was a gorgeous, lustrous purple material while the texture of the organs provided a wealth of exquisite forms and colours. From horror to aesthetic pleasure there is a short loop. To see the corpse as beautiful requires a suspension of our awareness of the circumstances of death and mutilation. Inevitably we find the outward appearance of the innards shocking because in everyday life we only experience this sight as catastrophe. On the other hand we are not normally repelled by the sensations of our innards unless we are ill, indeed it is in the hidden recesses of our interior that we feel warmth and comfort after a good meal, or experience sexual arousal. Confronting this paradox may simply be perverse but it is also part of coming to terms with mortality and overcoming the tyranny of appearances (fig 105. colour. Drozdik. Body Self??).
Mark Quinn has produced a second version of his �bloodhead� sculpture, Self (fig 106. colour). This work consists of seven pints of the artist�s own blood collected over a period of time and frozen into a mould of his head. Seven pints is the normal amount of blood in a body: for Quinn the fact that it perfectly matched the volume of his head was a compelling coincidence. The plinth for the work is a refrigeration unit which lends it a particularly medical or scientific appearance.
(fig 107. colour)
Zai Kuning is a young artist from Singapore who recently exhibited at the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. Kuning is a performance and installation artist and these objects can therefore be thought of, in part at least, as residues of performance. Kuning has created forms by layering sheets of wax or cloth around unknown objects. These bundles are suggestive of body parts or of the abattoir but they remain ambiguous forms. They have something in common with Christo�s wrappings in that they seem to be concealing something and in the process becoming some other thing. The idea of secret parcels relates to Duchamp�s ball of string within which Walter Arenberg has hidden an undisclosed object. These secrets also suggest bodily mementos, hence Kuning�s parcels have an affinity with Doris Salcedo�s shrines to the lost citizens of Colombia (fig 108. colour. Salcedo Atrabiliarios).
Doris Salcedo is able to take the empathic process to an exquisite level of pain. In Atrabiliarios she evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer�s response is, in turn, emotional�even visceral�rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes as relics or attributes of lost people donated by the families of those who have disappeared in the political and economic violence that has racked her native Colombia. The niches are then sealed with a membrane of animal caul which is literally sutured into the plaster of the wall. Barely visible through the membrane, the shoes are a particularly haunting evocation of their absent owners. The animal skin and the shoes inevitably recall the grizzly souvenirs of Nazi death camps.
9. Seeking reconciliation with nature
Antony Gormley represents his own body as a measure of the world. Through the image of his body he depicts humankind arising from the earth and coming to reflect upon its own mortality. In human form clay becomes aware and in this moment shares some of the understanding reserved for the angels thus bridging the material and spiritual divide. This double figure, Bearing (1995), (fig 109. colour) replaces the head of the standing figure with another body crouched as if in childbirth. It could also be an image of the artist returning to the womb. The figure bears and is also born.
Kiki Smith�s Mary Magdalen (fig 110. colour) is reminiscent of Donatello�s wooden Penitent Magdalen. Her body is covered in hair, half human and half animal. She drags a chain from one ankle like an escaped beast. When she was making this work Smith was thinking about French legends of the penitent Magdalen who wandered in the wilderness for seven years after Christ�s death. The stay in the wilderness carries with it many of the connotations of humanity�s search for reconciliation with nature, a theme which connects this work with the work of Ana Mendietta and Frida Kahlo in this exhibition. The hair is also a trace of the artists fingers clawing at the surface of the clay. Only the face, breasts, stomach and knees are polished and smooth, highlighting their erogenous nature as points of contact with the earth and with other bodies.
(fig 111. colour. Beuys drawing)
Joseph Beuys spent some years recovering from the trauma of his time as a fighter pilot in the Luftwafe and subsequently discovering the reality of the holocaust. During this period his own return to life was equated with the need for man�s reconciliation with nature. These early drawings of the figure deal with the pre-linguistic animal origins of humankind, prior to the separation or expulsion of humanity from nature. The Palaeolithic figure of the goddess, which Beuys has called Beast woman or Animal Woman in his earlier sculptures, reflects his dismay at modern humanity�s separation from nature: a moment of loss referred to in many of our key myths. In Genesis and in the Greek story of Prometheus, for instance, loss of innocence is linked with separation from the natural order. The relationship between humankind and nature is one of the fundamental problems of being, and is as central to art as it is to philosophy.
Empathy has been at the heart of all of these themes. Beuys�s ideas about reconciliation are both practical and metaphorical. They assume a responsibility for the world we occupy and promote a sense of inhabiting the world rather than accepting a scientifically distanced and objective or instrumental view. An empathic attitude to other people involving a degree of identification is in keeping with this idea and underscores the selection of works for BODY.
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