FICHA BIBLIOGRÁFICA:

Nombre del Autor o autores: O'Reilly, Sally

T[tulo del libro: The body in contemporary art

Tema:

Editorial:

Pa[s, Ciudad: Estados Unidos Año:

Cap[tulo: ... .... Páginas: 2 - 47

 Sally O'Reilly

The Body in
Contemporary Art

251 illustrations,202 in colour

Thames & Hudson wortd of art

 For the curious . . .

Thank you to galleries, artists and photographers who provided images,

and to artists who engaged in discussion on their work Big thanks to
Heather Galbraith andVineta Kaulaca for their advice on artists in the
Southern Hemisphere and Eastern Europe. Much appreciation and
admiration to everyone atThames & Hudson fortheir guidance and
input. Hats off to ali at the British Library. the Live Art Development
Agency andTate Library. who keep the research engine ticking over.
And, since no book is grown in a vacuum, warm gratitude to good friends
who weathered the process with patience and wisdom.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by

Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181 A High Holbom, London WCI V 7QX

thamesandhudson.com

Copyright© 2009Thames & Hudson Ltd, London

Ali Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold,
hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition includingthese words being imposed on a
subsequent purchaser.

British Ubrary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record forthis book is available from the British Ubrary

ISBN 978-0-500-20400-9
Frontispiece:
1. Ursula Martinez, 2009. Printed and bound in Singapore by CS Graphics
 Contents

lntroduction 6

Chapter I Representation and Presence 16

Chapter 2 T he Body in T ime and Space 48

Chapter 3 Difference and Solidarity 78

Chapter 4 Nature, Myth, Technology 1 12

Chapter 5 Monstrous Bodies 148

Chapter 6 Over To You 1 88

Further reading 216

List of illustrations 219
lndex 223
 lntroduction

The body in contemporary art is a bewilderingly vast subject.

There are as many bodies as there are artists and viewers, after ali.
In fact, if you think about it, it seems improbable that there is any
art that does not involve the body, since making art and relating to
it are rooted in the material world of encounter. And if we take
the mind to be the seat of intellect, the body is our interface with
the world, and our senses its line of communication, so that even
the most dematerialized, conceptual work must take the body into
account in sorne way.
This pedantically inclusive definition is not helpful when it
comes to writing a book such as this, however. Parameters must
be drawn that can accommodate both clarity of argument and
the complexity of such a vast subject. The Body in Contemporary
Art proposes a number of routes through this expanded field,
identifying themes central to the production, reception and
interpretation of art, as well as the wider cultural, political and
philosophical phenomena that inform it. Six chapters offer an
overview of broader issues by analysing individual artworks;
the examples chosen by turns bolster and contradict one another,
covering a wide expanse of ground and showing the nature of
the subject rather than forming an exhaustive survey. The works
selected, as well as the chapters' narratives, may well follow
current art practice and thinking surrounding art; but this does
not preclude the consideration of alternative individuals and ideas,
and the reader is encouraged to make his or her own connections
throughout.
But why the body as a delineating theme? The topic has
been somewhat reappraised over the last two decades or so,
re-emerging as a credible subject and medium after a period of
association with earnest ideologies or didactic methods. Following
the important body-oriented work of the feminists in the l 970s,

2. Amy Cutler,
a retreat to post-modern irony, cerebral neo-conceptualism or
Army ofMe, 2003. heroic formalism rendered the vulnerable body irrelevant or even

7
3 and 4. Oskar Schlemmer,
Figure and Space Delineation
and Egocentric Space Delineation,
both 1924.
According to Schlemmer, the body
relates to its surrounding space
through geometry and mechanics,
which also connect its invisible
inner functions of heartbeat,
circulation, respiration, brain
activity and the nervous system.
The human form, then, becomes
the point at which physical space
and interna!, emotional forces
meet and are expressed through
movement.
embarrassing. After time, however, it seems that the readmittance
of humanism into art has validated the body's appearance once
more: after the cool detachment that persisted throughout the
Modernist period and even beyond, the visceral and vulnerable
body is now a potent signifier of lived experience as well as a
medium of formal and aesthetic inquiry. In popular culture, too,
the body has become more visible as a challenge to constricting
social codes, through the adoption of piercings, tattoos and other
modifications. The body, then, has become recognized as the
principal arena for the politics of identity, as well as a facilitator
and marker of belonging.
One important ambiguity to clear up before we plunge any
further into the subject is how the body has been defined for the
purposes of this book. The boundary between the human body
and the world at large is blurred and shifting,and often difficult
to identify. lt is not simply the physical barrier of the skin, since this
would overlook both the psychological sphere that exists beyond
our basic corporeal boundaries and the reciproca! relationship
between self and context. The lines that demarcate the individual
must be established with reference to social circumstance as well
as to non-human factors. At one instance we must consider
nature - the fabric of the world that appears to exist beyond
human consciousness and control - while at another we should
reflect on technology as a product of human endeavour,which
in turn affects how we conduct ourselves and perceive others.
A number of the artists discussed here are working along these
fault lines,ascertaining the limits of the human in relation to myth,
technology,spirituality and psychology.
For the purposes of this discussion, a stance has been taken
on the notion of dualism, or the mind/body split, whereby the self
is perceived as a synthesis of mind and body rather than one being
a container for the other. In classical dualism,the clean, rational,
masculine sphere of the mind is contrasted to the visceral,
intuitive, female characteristics of the body. In contemporary art
practice the body is more likely to be considered the place where
rationalism, psychological disarray, natural functionality and
cultured desires converge. lt is possible, therefore,to view the
body along cultural, social, emocional and intellectual lines at the
same time - to view it as a formal entity that is forever in thrall
to its many contexts.
Art naturally tends to reflect such multiplicity through its
fluidity of meaning and many formal approaches. And just as
contemporary art continues to elbow its way through traditional
8
9
media-defined boundaries to become almost freeform,the body
continues to be employed for new types of artwork and artistic
intent. As well as the manifold potential the body offers artists
on account of the range of roles it can fulfil or the effects it can
produce, it does not preclude any of the diversity of available
media, from drawing and painting to video and participatory
events.The works presented here, therefore, have been selected
not according to medium or genre, but simply on the basis of
whether the human body - be it the artist's,subject's or viewer's -
is absolutely essential to the work. The Body in Contemporary Art
is less about reducing art to tropes or trends, and more a
reflection on its miscellany.
One point should be clarified, however: the difference
between the body and the figure. The distinction is subtle but
important, and best elucidated by example. In Amy Cutler's
Army of Me (2003) [2], the artist's self-multiplication can be
thought of in two ways: as the repeated image of a single
individual, or as representing a reduplicated person. We can
consider the painting either as the depiction of an impossibility,
or as the expression of an experience - that of being outside
oneself or psychologically fractured. Of these two options,the
former is an instance of figurative play, the latter a fiction of
the body. Figurative artwork tends to reside in the realm of
the optical, whereas that involving the body requires a wider
consideration. There are artworks, such as Cutler's, that could be
construed as either, but the book prioritizes those in which the
experience of inhabiting a body, rather than simply regarding it,
is paramount.
The chapters in this book enable the discussion to move
between performance and painting, installation and photography,
drawing links between artists with apparently very different
concerns. Chapter I discusses the increasing complexity with
which the body is represented, while Chapter 2 considers how
the body is employed in relation to time and space, and how it
can itself become a tool of representation. lt also relates how
photography could be employed to produce not documentary
clarity, but relativistic ambiguities, as the live body is momentarily
held still. The other chapters are concerned with subjects
ostensibly outside the artistic sphere,such as technology and
collectivity. The common factor here is not necessarily an artist's
approach to art or to the human form, but the wider implications
of the body in the world at large. Chapter 3 develops the idea
of representation as a political tool, with bodies that challenge

JO
received ideas or highlight the problems of marginalized or
oppressed societies or subcultures, through confrontational
or empathetic means. Chapter 4 examines the hazy and often
moveable boundaries between nature, the body and technology,
and Chapter 5 discusses the point at which certain sensibilities,
such as abjection and transgression, tip into monstrous aberration.
Chapter 6 considers the impact of the body in social and
commercial situations beyond the gallery.
Throughout the book, artists have been included on the
grounds of how particular artworks, as well as their practice
in general, sit in relation to these broad themes. Many could
have appeared in more than one chapter, since artists' aims and
interests are seldom singular. Of course, there are also a great
number of omitted artists whose work would have been just as
apposite or interesting. The Body in Contemporary Art is written
from 'within the thick of it', at the time the work is being made
and shown and before its position in history has been established.
lt is important to point out that this book is not intended as a
formal, fixed account: it is rather a series of discussions to which
the reader might bring his or her own references and examples.
The aim is not to pin art and its discourses down, but to open
them up.
The timespan that the book covers, from 1990 to the present,
is long enough to chart sorne interesting shifts and yet recent
enough not to require much historical scene-setting. There are
occasional references to earlier artworks or to artists whose
historical importance is illuminating or relevant in sorne way;
and it is essential to bear in mind how the seismic historical
developments of the 20th century underpin much of current art
practice. The canon of art history is far from irrelevant- indeed,
all of it is available for reassessment by artists who are engaged
in quotation, appropriation, reference and reconstruction. The
artist can pinpoint images and ideas from any moment in history,
using them to develop a useful methodology, ideology or critica!
stance.The resulting tangle of historical motifs and tactics can be
difficult to navigate, but this book attempts to identify underlying,
persistent themes that link current practices with art history at
the same time as siting them within the wider contemporary
cultural landscape.
But although artists tend to relate to history by means of
personal preference and irreverent cherry-picking rather than
viewing it as a hierarchical framework of true significance, there
were nonetheless distinct moments and movements in the

11
5.Allan Kaprow,
Drag, 1984/2008.
In 2008, students from the
University of South California
'reinvented' severa! of Alfan
Kaprow's Happenings, including
Drag, which was first created
in the mid- l 980s. Kaprow has
been credited with coining the
term 'Happening' and, far him,
performance comprises both
planned acts and chance
occurrences among participants
and audience alike.
20th century that had immense implications for the body in
contemporary art. Following on from l 9th-century Realism,
in which the image of the female nude as dreamy goddess or
supplicant childbearer was supplanted by the self-aware subject
(in Manet's 0/ympia, for example), the 20th-century avant-garde
produced further, ever more complex shifts.The insubordinate
actions of the Dadaists, for instan ce, introduced an anti-art
that denied the supremacy of the hallowed art object, instead
admitting the immediacy and lunacy of the music hall or circus
ring as viable media for expression. Russian Constructivist
and Bauhaus theatre adopted the idea of the total artwork, in
which all art forms were engaged in the production of meaning,
and the Happenings of the l 960s drew the audience into the
arena too, eradicating not only the distinction between image
and action, but also between production and reception [S].
Contemporary artists, and live artists in particular, have been
much influenced by the claims made for Happenings: that they
exist in the moment only, to be experienced by the whole body
12

6. Kazuo Shiraga,
Chal/enging Mud, 1955.
Shiraga belonged to the Japanese
artists' group Gutai, who
considered the image a mere
residue of the event that produced
it.The prioritizing of process over
outcome has been a prominent
trope in 20th-century performance,
although the members of Gutai, like
many who followed, were careful
to preserve these residues for
gallery display.
in the here-and-now. In non-performative work, too, the shift
of emphasis onto process, taken up in the l 950s by Jackson
Pollock in the United States and the Gutai group in Japan [6],
also continues to resonate, as artists still look for ways of moving
beyond a predominantly optical art history.
Perhaps one of the most influential episodes for the body in
contemporary art, though, was the feminist work of the l 970s,
when the traditional nude completed its metamorphosis from
objectivized or metaphorical image into a confrontational and
self-conscious subject. The body at this time was regularly
employed in aggressive acts of self-definition and audience
provocation, as in the work of VALIE EXPORT, who trashed
13
numerous social niceties with the aim of readdressing gender
imbalance and misrepresentation throughout society. In Action
Pants: Genital Panic ( 1969), for example, she wore crotchless
trousers, toted a replica gun and prowled through a busy cinema,
challenging the audience to deal with the real thing instead
of cinematic clichés. lt is perhaps this legacy of protest and
transformation that attracts many artists to live art and explains
the diversity of practitioners working today.

14
7. Steve Haworth,
Model Iza shows offher new orray
of scars, 200 1.
Body modification, from tattooing
and piercing to scarification and
subcutaneous implants, is often
taken to be a cultural signifier.
Positive readings suggest that it
marks solidarity or independent
thought, while negative
stereotyping evokes more
combative or even nihilistic traits.
In the last few years there has been a discernible revival
of performative practice, in which the body is immediately
and actively present. This signals a shift in artists' attitudes
and intentions that has yet to make itself entirely clear. In
sorne instances it marks a renewed drive away from materiality,
for reasons of anti-commodification or to foster convivial,
socializing events centred on experience, while in other instances
it heralds a gritty realism or a resurgence of romantic sensibilities
in which the human figure is aestheticized and infused with
allegorical meaning. This book aims to fold performance and
studio-based art practice back together, to lessen the distinction
that has been drawn in recent decades between live and
object-based work. Representational painting and presentational
performance obviously possess essentially different qualities,
and yet similar ideological, theoretical and aesthetic currents
flow through both.While future art histories may well interpret
the re-emergence of the body as tied to an era rather than to
a medium, for now the reasons for its resurgence appear to be
multiple, contradictory and consequently exciting. The Body in
Contemporary Art sifts through these reasons, holding them up
for consideration and, as with bodies, attributing them with
individual and collective significance.
15
 Chapter I Representation and Presence

Over the course of the 20th century, profound developments in

art's relationship with the human form have overturned centuries
of convention, radically repositioning the body of the subject, the
artist and the viewer.The main thrust of this development has
been from passivity to active agency, so that the body is no longer
a static, optical phenomenon, but the embodiment of dynamic
human relations and even a medium of change and influence within
the artwork itself.
Until the l 9th century the body inWestern painting and
sculpture traditionally assumed one of two roles: it either stood
for an idealized mythical, biblical or historical figure, such as Venus,
Eve or Lord Nelson, or it was presented as the likeness of a
contemporary person of importance - a general, a rich merchant,
or an earl's daughter, for instance. But even in the latter case,
the artist would be required to paint the client's likeness with a
sympathetic eye, perhaps playing down or even obliterating faults
and blemishes.The history of the body's representation in art,
then, has been more occupied with expectations or aspirations
than with veracity.The female nude in particular has been subject
to objectifying processes: cast as a symbol of classical beauty
or as allegory, or pictured revelling in nature or in sensuality,
it became little more than a vehicle of voyeurism for the male
viewer. However, the encroach of realism during the l 9th century
transformed representations of idealized womanhood into
images of lifelike and cultured individuals, shifting the emphasis
of aesthetic interest from what was being depicted to the way it
was being represented.
Although gender equality has become normalized and
8. Melanie Manchot,
absorbed into the ethics ofWestern liberalism, women have
With Mountains /, 2000. battled long and hard to seize control of their own representation,
A series of photographs of from the suffragettes of the late l 9th and early 20th centuries to
the artist's mother challenge
the historical genre of the
the women's lib movement of the l 970s.And yet today, the passive
idealized nude. totem of sexualized womanhood is still visible in pornography and

17

9. Marlene Dumas,
Fingers, 1999.
In contrast to the objectifying
images of pornography, Dumas's
subjects seem to be in control of
their own representation, inviting
us into their private world on their
own terms.
advertising, suggesting an ongoing need for artists to engage
with the nude and to challenge ingrained conventions. Melanie
Manchot's photographs of her mother posing in landscapes, for
instance, contravene the widespread tendency to relegate aging
flesh to invisibility [8].A middle-aged woman whose body does
not conform to preconceptions of sprightly youthfulness or
ample fecundity, and yet who stands emboldened in front of a
London landmark or a mountain range, pulls us up short.The
naked woman is still regarded differently from the artful nude:
the latter is not uncommon in the public sphere, while the former
is still very much relegated to the private realm. Manchot's
photographs typify the efforts of the late 20th century artist to
demolish the dispassionate, disconnected edifice of Modernism,
instead imbuing imagery with human content and connecting art
to lived experience.As a result, the autonomy of the monumental
nude has been ali but eradicated, and the figure has become
acknowledged as a social, emotional, fallible entity rather than a
formal focus or token of utopian ideologies.
/8
 The rejection of Modernism as the aesthetic expression of
history-as-progress instigated an attack on traditional hierarchical
structures, and painting in particular endured a battering.The
medium has re-emerged not as an expression of historical import,
but as an articulation of the plurality of human experience.
Figurative painting in particular has readmitted the emotional and
socio-political subjectivities banished by Modernism, and its formal
criteria have been adopted as ways of creating meaning rather than
as an end in themselves. In Marlene Dumas's paintings,for instance,
the body is displayed as if we were being invited to view an intimate
moment, her more sexually explicit paintings presenting a study
of the body as an instrument for experiencing and expressing
pleasure, pain and desire [9]. Dumas's often unrealistically charged
palette mingles flesh tones with blue,green or purple, suggesting
emotional weather that is in turns livid and pallid, exaggerated and
realistic.Also evoking a heightened emotional pitch, the frenetic
brushwork of Cecily Brown's large canvases agitates a maelstrom
of paint into releasing visual clues to erotic subject-matter [ 1 O].

I O. Cecily Brown,
Half-Bind, 2005.
Half-buried in paint, Brown's
figures merge with the landscape,
drawing together several historical
genres of painting, from pastoral
to Expressionist.

19
1 1. Rebecca Warren,
Come He/ga, 2006.

Brown reclaims the macho Abstract Expressionism of the

mid-20th century for the emancipated female who is not reticent
to draw parallels between painting and sex. Her own sensuality
becomes the subject-matter, and the paint evidence of her
bodily movements, so that the depiction of an eroticized other
is overshadowed by the active, almost present subject-artist.
Feminist artists developed self-assertion as a central
methodology in the l 970s, when simply declaring oneself a woman
and an artist was a challenge to the male-dominant art world.
Since art had previously progressed along a-political lines, content
to cross-examine its own formal and theoretical issues but not its
position in society at large, women's voices rallied in a radicalizing,
collectivizing cry. Artists such as Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler made
a case for the recognition of domestic tasks usually performed by
women as equivalent to the work of men, as well as for the equal
legitimacy of their claims to self-actualization and self-fulfilment.
Now, however, in a cultural context that may be described as

20

1 2. Sarah Lucas,
Try lt, You'/1 Like lt, 1999.
Sarah Lucas gives us a helping hand
with the Freudian process of
finding sexual insinuation in
everyday objects.
'post-feminist', female artists often boldly proclaim their femininity
rather than campaign for gender equality. RebeccaWarren uses
traditional clay with an almost feral negation of virtuosity, revelling
in the sensuality of her medium and the pulchritude of the female
figures she coaxes from it [ 11 ]. Her erotic scenes are sometimes so
engrossed with their own materiality that they take time to declare
themselves, but from the voluptuously tactile forms we soon tease
out classical and pop references to figures such as Degas and
Robert Crumb. These disparate historical points of reference,
applied with exuberant disregard for their original connotations,
shuntWarren's clay bodies back and forth between positions of
debasement and emancipation. Sarah Lucas also distorts historical
and contemporary mechanisms of sexual depiction in Try lt, You'/1
Like lt [12], in which pumpkins and meat stand in for the breasts
and pudenda of her reclining nude, their gross approximation
wickedly parodying the pornographic reductions of the female
body to mere form for the purposes of consumption.
21

13. Édouard Manet,
Olympia, 1863.
The name Olympia was commonly
adopted by prostitutes in the
l 9th century. lts use here
exacerbated the scandal
surrounding the painting: not only
was Manet's nude obviously
sentient and actively recurning
the viewer's gaze, she was also
a 'type' that was usually
considered unrepresentable.
The politics of'the gaze' - or the question of who an image is
made by,to be looked at by whom - has undergone fundamentar
reconfiguration since Manet's 0/ympio,painted in 1863 [13].
The self-conscious prostitute who returns our gaze asserts that
differentiation works both ways: two people are different from
each other;one person alone cannot be 'different'.This radical
act of reciproca! interrogation was at the root of the scandal
surrounding 0/ympia, which was considered vulgar on account
of its subject and her contravention of codes of humility and
compliance.Almost a hundred and fifty years on,the hegemony
of the white Western male continues to be challenged by
those excluded,marginalized,stereotyped or otherwise
misrepresented.Annie Sprinkle,for example,calls herself a
'multimedia whore,a sexual revolutionary and a pleasure activist',
countering the titillated voyeur with her empowered candidness.
Sprinkle's auto-erotic new-age performances suffuse lowly
pornography with unexpected complexity,as she introduces
motifs and methods from tantric healing rituals,yoga and
meditative breathing. In her Post-Porn Modernist show [ 14] she
invited the audience to view her cervix,made visible through the
use of a speculum and a torch,as an explicit celebration that
demystified the female body and revitalized the sexual individual.
22
14. Annie Sprinkle,
Post-Porn Modernist, 1989-96.
In this long-running performance,
Sprinkle invited the audience
to experience the ultimate
demystification of the fe mal e body.

Conservative taboos and associated hypocrisies are displaced

by the artist in control of the presentation of her own body as,
taking the challenge behind Manet's 0/ympia to another level,
Sprinkle returns the gaze of the viewer with the interna! eye of
her sexuality.

IS. Ursula Martinez.

Hanky Panky, 2009.

23
16. Shirin Neshat,
Allegiance with Wakefulness, 1994.
That the text is written on the
surface of the photograph rather
than on the woman's skin adds
another layer of illusion to an
already complex system of
signifiers and barriers.

Ursula Martinez works at the cusp of performance art, theatre

and burlesque, producing full-length narrative theatre pieces, as
well as short cabaret stripteases, such as Hanky Panky [ 15]. Here,
Martinez adopts the sassy vernacular of erotic dance, overlaying
it with a narrative are that demonstrates her subjective autonomy
and creative intervention. The removal of clothing seems less
acquiescence to male heterosexual desire, more a knowing
comedy of manners in which the female body is mysteriously
instrumentalized. In Shirin Neshat's photographic self-portraits,
the veil interrupts the gaze as a marker of cultural difference,
at the same time as intimating strategies of power based on
viewpoints and concealment [16]. In a potent statement on
lranian womanhood and its stance against oppression, weaponry
and chador combine to arrest and obscure our view, while
contemporary poems written in Farsi on the exposed skin indulge
those who can read them and exclude those who cannot. Sonia
Khurana, on the other hand, places herself in an overwhelmingly

24
 vulnerable position in the video Bird, turning the camera on
herself as she flaps around on a podium as if trying to fly [ 17].
This intimate portrait of a naked, overweight body attempting
something it is not designed to do replaces canonical beauty
with a charm and humour borne of the artist's self-conscious
fragility.There is an essence of slapstick to Khurana's failure
as alluring classical goddess, the strains and shudders of the
artist's body revealing the tension implicit within the constructed
ideal. Dorota Sadovská, meanwhile, bares her breasts to even
17. Sonia Khurana,
Bird, 2000. less romantic ends in Corporealities [18], denuding them of
Fallibility and frankness displace sexual potency by treating them as sheer sculptural matter, and
grace and illusionism in Khurana's
performance.
reminding us of the medical necessity of self-examination.

18. Dorota Sadovská,

Corporalities, 2003.
Here, breases are both demystified
and abstracted.

25
19. Gilbert & George,
In the Piss, 1997.
Gilbert & George often present
themselves as the butt of their own
jokes, performing generic roles
within iconoclastic imagery.
The history of the male nude is similarly varied, even if its
political focus differs from that of the female. ldealized Adonises,
as measures of beauty and reflections of the ideal, and portraits
of heroic archdukes and other types of Übermensch gave way to
depictions of the noble savage and to the proposal of naturism as
an ideology in the late l 9th century. These pastoral ideas of the
male body were eventually disrupted by the overtly sexualized
Neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, in which
male sexuality becomes a matter of personal exploration and
expression rather than a universal embodiment of dominance or
26
 grace. The self-assured matter-of-factness of Gilbert & George's
huge images of themselves,clothed, naked or reduced to effluvial
essence,plays further convoluted games with representations of
the individual and the archetype. Gilbert & George often present
themselves in large, gridded pictures surrounded by magnified
images of blood, shit and sperm samples,at once singular artists
and anonymous biological entities [19]. Often digitally mirrored or
of a ghastly yellow hue, Gilbert & George's vaudeville parodies of
solemn stained-glass windows invite ridicule,acting as a laxative
for a society generally intent on holding in or masking its difficult,
muckier aspects.
In Gilbert & George's early performances of Underneath
The Arches ( 1968), the pair declared themselves 'living sculptures' ,
both of them fused into a single unit of artistic production that
took itself as its subject. Far from the august military leaders or
potent demigods of statuary, they proposed a new type of falli ble
hero. Similarly, MarkWallinger's Ecce Horno [20] replaces the

20. MarkWallinger,
Ecce Hamo, 1999.
Wallinger presents Christasan
•
everyman, smalland vulnerable.

27
21. La Ribot,
Panoramix, 2003.
The everyday gesture becomes
a focus of consideration through
repetition and isolation from
purpose.
monumental Christ figure with a man of average, even puny,
stature. The unassuming sculpture, cast from an ex-art student
who worked at the fabricators where it was made, stands in a
loincloth fashioned from a towel, with a crown of barbed wire on
his bald head and his arms tied behind his back. Unmajestic in the
extreme, and diminutive on the grand pedestal in Trafalgar Square,
London, where it stood, Wallinger's saviour of mankind looks
more vacant than suffering. And yet most of us are more likely to
identify with the physical lassitude of a patient model than with
one resignedly awaiting his death.
The life-size stature of Ecce Hamo in a grandiose square is
not only a democratic reclamation of public space, but of history
itself, elevating the everyman to a position of importance. The
anti-spectacular body, presented in all its glorious mundanity, is
meaningful in a way that the idealized body could never be. La Ribot
takes a similar approach in her performances, overturning the
28
 conventions of dance and rejecting grandiloquent gestures and
hyperbolic displays of skill in favour of fragments of movement
imported from everyday life [21]. Her unshowy yet absorbing dances
are sparked by the fleeting, inconsequential endeavours of the body
and restaged as a point of extraordinary commonalíty; De La Mancha
(2000), for example, developed from a failed attempt by the artist
to multitask when, one evening at home, she wished to carry on
knitting while reading Don Quixote and smoking cigarettes . In Chair
(2000), La Ribot uses a common folding chair- the type often used
in parks and other public spaces - to evoke the masses, and then
breaks with behavioural conventions,performing repetitive actions
that go against the chair's normal usage and the comfort of the body.
The elevation of the mundane in art is partly a consequence
of developments in 20th-century science and philosophy, which
rendered the notion of physical stability and metaphysical truth
implausible.As a reaction,artists scaled down their subject-matter:
now rarely concerned with the big questions of God or death,
they concentrate instead on the everyday flux of our psychological
make-up and the leakage between interior emotional life and
exterior physicality. The objectivity previously attributed to
photography has come under particular scrutiny as a result of this
reappraisal, the medium's association with documentation and
truth forever compromised by a recognition of the subjectivity
inherent in framing, editing and composition.
In his swimming pool series [22] Roland Fischer expresses the
idea that the body is neither entirely matter, nor entirely thought.

22. Roland Fischer,

Chinese Pool Portrait,Zhu Zhu, 2007.

29
23. Bettina von Zwehl.
Afina /, 8, 9 and / I, 2004.
In this series. each woman adopts
a slightly different version of the
prescribed pose. yet all involuntarily
look downwards as they listen to
the same piece of music.
Photographs of individuals submerged in blissfully turquoise pools
withhold the individuality of the subject, and yet hint at endless
divergences of bodies, moods and relationships with the camera.
Fischer's shallow depth of field, carefully contrived with natural
light and a lot of patience, creates a contained place of visual
contemplation,and yet his sitters give nothing away. Our incursion
into the life of the individual stops abruptly at their skin.
30
 For Bettina von Zwehl, portraiture can never hope to impart
the subject's inner life, although when in series, with the same
conditions imposed on each sitter, it can enable us to perceive
differences in their responses. In her Afina series [23], each
woman sits at a table in a darkened room, listening to Arvo Part's
Für Afina, a single flash illuminating the instance of the shutter
release. While the controlled nature of the experiment (each
woman wears a white vest and folds her arms) magnifies slight
anatomical differences, the set of faces tells us nothing of the
specific associations and emotions that this stirring music awakes
in each woman. Their interior life remains a mystery. In another
photographic series, Rain [24], von Zwehl subjects her sitters to
a sudden downpour, again demonstrating how the representation
of profound subjective experience is nigh impossible without
resorting to metaphorical or symbolic means, and yet the body
provides a good yardstick for comparison and differentiation.
No matter what our social, physical or emotional state, or political
or religious allegiances, our common physiological experience
enables us to empathize with the bodies of others.
24. Bettina von Zwehl, In the portraits of Rineke Dijkstra, on the other hand, the
Rain No. 5, 2003. human form cannot help but transmit emotions. Although her

3/
25. Rineke Dijkstra.
Tecla, Amsterdam, T he Netherlands,
May 16 1994, 1994.

subjects may attempt to adopt orthodox poses that reflect

received ideas of identity in an attempt to mask their self-doubt,
we can detect traces of this tension in their faces. Dijkstra's
photographs of bullfighters and young lsraeli soldiers after
their first manoeuvres show faces smeared in gore that belie
the effects of physical exertion and novel or traumatic
experiences. In a series of portraits of women who have recently
given birth to their first child [25], she again captures moments
of vulnerability, this time made complex by expressions of pride
and relief, as well as the surgical wounds and traces of blood
that debunk a cleaned-up image of childbirth. And in a series
of portraits of teenagers on beaches around the world [26],
Dijkstra locates a tension between the subjects' classical
poses and the awkwardness many of them betray, perhaps on
account of their beachwear or maybe the broader discomfort
of adolescence.

32
26. Rineke Dijkstra,
Ko/obrzeg, Poland,july 26 199 2,
1992.
In Dijkstra's series of images
taken on beaches, the clothed
body often gives away clues to
nationality. Shot against neutral,
featureless seascapes, many of
her subjects appear to fall into
national stereotypes, dressed in
sassy opalescence swimsuits in
California or prim dresses in the
south of England.

This reciproca! influence between individual and context runs

counter to the traditional role of portraiture, which proposed
to establish the identity, reveal the temperament and delineate
the character of the individual. The conventional portrait stops
time and removes the sitter from his or her everyday context,
compounding the rarified status of the art object, whereas
contemporary artists are generally more interested in the sitter's
body as the point at which art and life converge. Portraiture, then,
has become increasingly mindful of the fact that there is no fixed,
sovereign identity, and of the way one's sense of self is formed
in relation to the world and to other people - to immediate
circumstances as well as to history and socio-political ebbs and
flows. Like a visual language, the semantics of gesture and pose
relate messages, describe attitudes and communicate social
dynamics. Zwelethu Mthethwa, for instance, works with his
subjects over time, revisiting them in their own environment to

33
27.Zwelethu Mthethwa,
Untitled, from the Sugar Cane series,
2003.
Mthethwa enters into discussion
with his subjects to find a scenario
that suits their self-image.
28. Pushpamala N.
and ClareArni,
The Ethnographic Series, 2000-4.
Pushpamala re-enacts the
construction of archetypes in
an attempt to explode the myth
of ethnicity.
discuss the eventual portrait, so that the result is as much an
indication of the sitters' idea of themselves as an externa!
observer's view [27]. His approach contravenes established
methods of photojournalism in South Africa,and introduces
a process of interna! negotiation in instances where the
construction of meaning would usually be imposed from without.
When they are made evident,the artist's construction of,
or mediation in,a photograph revea! it to be as freighted with
signs as a painting or any other type of work. For Pushpamala N.,
this capacity of photography to fictionalize is a central political
issue,particularly in relation to cultural and ethnic typology.
The Ethnographic Series comprises sorne forty reconstructions
of clichéd images of lndian womanhood,enacted by the artist
as rather unconvincing renditions of the 'authentic' colonialized
subject in her natural environment [28]. By reclaiming such
34
35
29. Katy Grannan,
Austin, TX, 2000.
The strange clash of behavioural
conventions in Grannan's work
alerts us to the social incongruity
of nakedness.

misrepresentations and pushing them to the point of pastiche,

Pushpamala N. exposes ethnography as an invidious process
of colonialization, which historically has cut the subject off from
the rational, technological and cultural narrative of Western

30. Phil Collins,

how to make a refugee, 1999.
The connivance of the press
is revealed by Collins's frank
documentation of journalists
instructing a refugee how to
appear more physically vulnerable
for their cameras.

36
history, instead marginalizing him or her as an anonymous
exotic specimen.
Pushpamala N. subjects the body to ironic treatment in order
to highlight these processes of distortion and isolation, which
are far from limited to ethnography. Whether consciously or not,
the language of the representation of the body influences our
behaviour in front of the camera, as Katy Grannan demonstrates
in her portraits of middle-class Americans [29]. Soliciting for
sitters from the public realm either through advertisements in
the Poughkeepsie Journal or by approaching people in public parks,
Grannan invites them to pose as nudes. Her subjects then reveal
their aspirations and perceptions of 'art photography' by arranging
their bodies according to received codes that uncomfortably and
self-consciously marry classical and photojournalistic conventions.
The induction of the cinema into our cultural psyche has also
had an overwhelming influence on the portrayal of the self, as
made apparent in Phil Collins's they shoot horses (2004), for
example. During an eight-hour dance marathon in Ramallah, a
group of teenagers effect a self-mirroring to camera, projecting
their ideas of self in a way that imitates received perceptions of
media celebrity. Here, the body becomes the meeting point in the
relationship between those who watch and those who perform.
More sinisterly, in Collins's how to make a refugee [30] we witness
a group of British reporters arrange a young male refugee into the
perfect image of suffering, requesting that he remove his shirt to
display scars from bullet wounds and lift his broken leg, at the
same time urging his family to stand around in a pageant of despair.
The ethics of looking and being looked at are evidently fraught,
since direction and misdirection of imagery often compounds the
plight of the oppressed and displaced.

37
31, 32 and 33. Nikki S. Lee,
The Hip Hop Project, 2001.
The Schoolgirls Project, 2000.
The Seniors Project, 1999.
By spending time among members
of various subcultures or social
groups, Lee adopts their looks and
lifestyle to blend in seamlessly.

38
 By revealing the backstory of an image in how to make a refugee,
Collins reminds us of a significant moment in 20th-century art
history when the relationship between process and result was
reappraised. Jackson Pollock in the United States and the Gutai
group in Japan were making paintings in which the action was
as important as the eventual artworks.The stills from Hans
Namuth's film of Pollock executing his drip paintings, made in
1950, are probably as well known as the canvases themselves.
In contemporary practice this often translates into a project-led
approach, in which the image-based outcome acts as evidence of a
convoluted experience or intervention orchestrated by the artist.
On the surface Nikki S. Lee's photographs [31-33] may appear
to be casual snapshots of protagonists from various social groups
and subcultures; in reality, though, each piece requires extensive
research and great efforts at cultural assimilation, since before
taking the photograph Lee adapts her lifestyle and accoutrements
to become an accepted member of the group. Over the last ten
years she has manipulated her bodily peripherals, such as hair,
clothes and make-up, to mimic a tourist, senior citizen, Ohioan,
hispanic, schoolgirl, exotic dancer, skater, hip-hop chic and member
of the bourgeoisie.
Lee regards the individual as potentially pluralistic and her
self-presentation as a creative medium. She does not attempt to
find or to impart her own identity, but to discover how many
characters can reside within a single person. In contrast,Yasumasa
Morimura's reconstructions of well-known paintings are critica! of
the Western canon and of its Euro- and North American-centrism
in particular. In Portra it (Futago) [34], Morimura plays both the
servant and the prostitute in Manet's 0/ympia, blacking up or using
digital enhancement to achieve the requisite skin tones of the
original figures [see 13]. Through his Se/f-Portrait asArt History
series - in which he appears as Frida Kahlo, Leonardo's Mona Lisa
and Velazquez's Infanta, among others - the plasticity of his own
body, altered through costume, make-up, set design and digital
manipulation, demonstrates the instability of orthodoxies. The
ease with which he can adapt to type warns us of the imprudence
of making assumptions.
Morimura's confrontation of social norms is a strategy that
had been employed by feminist artists of the 1970s, who
considered the body as the point where nature and culture meet,
where difference is both inherently biological and culturally
projected, and therefore viewed it as a site of struggle. Lynda
Benglis's Untitled ( 1974). for example - a photograph in which

39
34. Yasumasa Morimura,
Portrait (Futago), 1988-90.
In restaging a series of Old Master
paintings, Morimura slips into
various historical, social and
racial roles.
35. Franko B,
I Miss You, 2005.
The body is used as a direct and
malleable medium in Franko B's
pursuit of beautiful imagery, which
is witnessed by a live audience.
the artist posed naked with a large di Ido - was placed as an
advertisement in Art Forum magazine to rehearse debates on
overt sexuality, the power of mass image reproduction and the
commodification of artistic identity. In his ongoing interdisciplinary
practice Franko B seeks beauty in the image of the statuesque
body, in the sensuality of flesh and in the viscerality of blood.
Until 2005, many of his performances, in which he presented
his body as a canvas and his blood as paint, carried associations
of the maligned and marginal, as the artist's form was at once
commanding and vulnerable [35]. To be confronted with startling
images of a bleeding body punctures many of our received codes
of behaviour; Franko B hopes they will spur the translation of
patterns of carnal shame into an emotional immediacy based on
empathy and intimacy.
To purposely wound oneself can be a physical release for
psychological suffering; and because the body provides a means
of performance over which the artist can exert complete
control, such behaviour can constitute an act of liberation from
prescriptive, authoritarian constraints. Kira O'Reilly redirects
the transgressions of the self-harmer into metaphor, using her
body as a landscape that retains the effects of her actions. In
Succour [36], O'Reilly applied a grid of masking tape onto her legs
40
41

36. Kira O' Reilly,
Succour, 2002.
O'Reilly confronts the
audience with the reality of
a very prívate discomfort.
and torso, made a nick with a scalpel in each square, and then
removed the tape to revea! her body patterned with small cuts.
The literal wounding can read as a metaphor for tenderness and
disclosure, and the skin as analogous to social guardedness,
clothing and other modes of concealment.
Since the 1960s live performance has been associated with a
challenge to traditional media and with the dematerialization of
the artwork as a stand against the commodification of art. While
sorne artists still consider live work to be politicized in this way,
others, such as Vanessa Beecroft, have absorbed it into a
commercial framework. Beecroft's installations of 'girls', as she
refers to the models she employs, offer us a novel view of idealized
42
 beauty in real time and space. By opting for immediate presence
she appears to be drawing on the feminist dematerializing
strategies of the 1970s, although here the outcome is encapsulated
in the form of commodifiable nudes. In fact, performances such as
VB.56 (2005) and its accompanying series of photographs, in which
long-limbed slim beauties lounge among Louis Vuitton handbags,
would raise the hackles of feminists and anti-capitalists alike, since
Beecroft appears to be in league with both the fashion and beauty
industries and the art market [37]. However, over the course
of these live installations, which often last for hours, the models
37. Vanessa Beecroft, wilt perceptibly, giving the líe to their image of perfection. The
VB.45. I Oldr, 2001. constructed ideal cracks so that the real body becomes apparent.

43
38. Regina José Gal indo,
Who Can Erase the Traces?, 2003.
Footprints in human blood that
mark a trail around Guatemala
City become a temporary visible
metaphor for years of political
violence.
The unpredictability of'liveness' can be used to resist logic and
lawfulness;when combined with the exposure of a vulnerable
body to the vicissitudes of the world at large, sorne artists suggest
that it could act as a spur to a complacent society anaesthetized
by mediated imagery. Regina José Galindo, for instance, subjects
her body to gruelling tasks as a metaphor for the horrors
witnessed and suffered by Guatemalans: she has injected herself
repeatedly with valium, thrown herself out with the rubbish at
the municipal dump, and journeyed for five days, from Guatemala
City to Lima, blindfolded. In the performance Who Can Erase the
Traces? (2003), Galindo dipped her feet in a bowl of human blood
and left a trail of footprints from Guatemala City's Constitutional
Court building to the old National Palace [38]. These marks
formed an ephemeral but powerful monument to the thousands
of civilians murdered by the army during thirty-six years of civil
war in Guatemala.
Galindo's action was designed as a metonym for an entire
society, the plight of a singular body signifying a more extensive
and gruesome situation. The performance and video work of
Marina Abramovic also positions the individual in the wider
context of the human condition, with particular reference to
Eastern philosophies. Abramovic aims to remove the wedge
thatWestern science has driven between the body and the soul
(or consciousness) using Eastern ideas of connectivity and
contemplation. In 2005, she re-enacted influential performances
from the l 960s and l 970s at the Guggenheim Museum, New York,
in her Seven Easy Pieces series. Among them was one of her own
works, Lips of Thomas, in which she carved a star into her stomach
with a razor blade, lay on a crucifix of ice and then whipped
herself [40]. Subjecting her body to uncomfortable symbolic rites,
Abramovic approached the thresholds of pain and endurance -
a process she discovered to be common among Tibetan monks,
Australian Aborigines and Sufists in their attempts to eliminate
the fear of death, suffering and other limiting phenomena. Since
the l 990s, however, Abramovic's focus has shifted away from the
testing of the body; in the art world in general, such shamanistic
practices have lost currency, the result of a discernible discomfort
surrounding spirituality in art. The transcendental properties of
drugs,on the other hand, might be considered an equivalent,
facilitating a loss of self through externa! stimuli. In Narcoturismo
[39], Francis Alys concentrated on the corporeal aspects of
drug-taking rather than the cerebral fantasies of the earlier LSD
generation, exploring the various altered states of mind and
45
 sensuality through drugs available on the street. He walked
around Mexico City for a week, each day under the influence of
a different substance - spirits, hashish, speed, heroin, cocaine,
valium and ecstasy - and recorded his experiences on a
typewritten sheet of A4, describing sensations in a curiously
analytical, detached tone.
The representation of the body in art, then, is more various
and more closely allied to our sense of self than ever. Far from
consisting merely of its own visible surface, the body has become
inseparable from the social and psychological processes that
perpetually influence it, as well standing for the plurality of our
reciproca! relationships with the physical and epistemological
universe. As an immediate presence, the body can counteract

39. FrancisAlys,
Narcoturismo, 1996. aARCOTOURlSlol / KBB 5-11 W.Y 1996

For this project, the artist

documented the effects of taking
I will walk in tba 1:U,J
.. O'i'er the eourse ot seven dayo, under the
a different drug every night for
infiuence of a different dr\16 •a.eh <lay, Uy tri¡, will be recorded
a week.
throu;;h ú&tegHplley notes, and ony othcr medio that become relevant,

• tbe pro ject 1 s nbout l>eing physicall y ¡,resent in n place,

wbile mentall:r eloewbc-re.
,. " dosage: drugs ,rere consumad in order to maintain a continuous
effect for 14 h. a day.

>1ay 5 •.•.••.••••...•••.•..........•.••.••.••l:>pirits (11

!!� 6 ••••• , , •••• , , • , , , , , ...., ... , • , •• , ••• , , ,!lashiah (2)
May 7 .......................................:speed (})
!.lay 8 ............ , .......................... tteroin (4)
Uay 9 , .•.............•....•. , ..•........•••.Cocatn (5)
!.!ay 10 ....................................... valium (6)
11.a:, l1 , ................................ , , .••• llestaey l7)
(8)

�I) :;pirits.(due to ptactical problema in findin¡,; tbe s.uff,

l decide to start with local liquora and alcohol), Diffi­
culties in connecting mcntally with my physical state.ln­
ner resistance. 1nahili ty to trust my refler.os or sight.
l walk clumaily among many strall8e occurences.
\2) Hashish .. ::iolow motioa. A•areneso of every muacle in action.
i,verything is enormously tµnny. :,ou.ndless apeech. 'ifalking
with m.y eyes closed. A pastrac1 sandwich tastes beavenly.
O) Speed. Deambulatory paranoia. Cold teet. 1 fear the signa
of oy own preeence, and avoid encounters on the street.Ao
I walk, l al.ways keep a familiar spot in sight •
\41 iforoin. ,eel1ng of inner •armth which helpa me break t:ce
:ice and feel attuned to the place. A sequence of frozen
u,ag"s ae l walk olong tbe llanube. ·rhe effecta fade faot,
but they returi. at tbe end of the day. Difticul ty brenth1ng
at n:1ght.
\5) Co:,aiue. Awai-eneac of a chlil'lge o! atate, but not !ollowed
by a visual echo, Auditory acu1ty enhanced, Appetite gone
Smoking dioiniahed, At nigh� nausea and thtrst,
(6) Valiua, nearinesa, Aesthen1a, lndif!erence to context.
rtegular S!IIOking. •·r�uent piaaing and occasional vomiting.
óhile walkin¡¡. bittersweet cemoriea pop up at regular
intervalo.
( i) Ecstasy. Visual brightening nnd erotic ic,pulsea. !.!y ahoes
,:¡ove and l feel the urge to •nlk out. everything l turn to
movea, not phyaically but conceptually.

,8, The journey was follo,,ed by " period of depresnion.

1 t.
1 undoratood 1 t but could not bel¡, sinking 1nto

46
40. MarinaAbramovic,
Lips of Thomas, 2005.
In a restaging of an early
performance, Abramovic publicly
subjects herself to ritualistic pain as
a challenge to social conventions
and unjust political realities.
the intangible nature of an increasingly image-saturated world,
shocking an audience into reaction or coaxing us into a state of
empathy; and yet it can also become a representational tool that
enables a return to the primacy of the image. While this chapter
suggests how representations of the self developed in depth and
complexity, the next examines the myriad ways in which the body
is used as medium or metaphor.
47