Having a body is weird. You have to feed it and groom it and move it around, all while remembering people’s names and acting appropriately in social situations and trying to forget that, at every second, it’s decaying and readying itself for its final resting place.
No wonder filmmakers and visual artists are so inspired by the body’s pleasures and horrors. Cinema can offer parables about the strangeness of corporeal experience, while sculpture and performance turn to materials, from plaster and urine to the body itself, to generate powerful new understandings of skin, bone, and everything in between.
On the cinematic side of things, David Cronenberg is perhaps the American filmmaker most linked to the genre of body horror, which focuses on bodily traumas, mutations, and grotesqueries. He makes films that literalize the monsters inside us and our most self-destructive desires. Among them are The Brood (1979), which features a woman who sprouts growths that turn into violent new beings, and The Fly (1986), which centers on a man who slowly transforms into the titular insect. As Cronenberg explores technology, violence, and sex, he keeps his focus on the intricacies of the flesh.
If you’re interested in Cronenberg’s films, here are seven visual artists whose work explores similar themes.
John Chamberlain
B. 1927, Rochester, Indiana. D. 2011, New York.
Suede Dog Peas, 2000
John Chamberlain
Rosenbaum Contemporary
Kroll, 1961
John Chamberlain
Art Resource
Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, based on a 1973 J. G. Ballard novel of the same name, features characters who get turned on by car wrecks. The allure of the automobile, and the appeal of its contorted metal, are similarly elemental to the work of 20th-century sculptor John Chamberlain.
The artist began using the material in the mid-1950s. His constructions feature intricate arrangements of crushed steel, which appear to dance around each other or huddle into giant masses. Chamberlain often painted his metal in bright hues, which linked his work to the large-scale canvases of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries.
Chamberlain served in the Navy during World War II and cited his years on an aircraft carrier as a major inspiration for his ideas about perspective and scale. A sense of industrialism and violence remains in the artist’s choice of crushed material. Yet Chamberlain insisted he had a simple reason for using it: It was around.
Chamberlain is just one of many artists inspired by the car, that ubiquitous symbol of American materialism. But it’s Chamberlain whose name is synonymous with bashed up, reconfigured car parts that evoke both brutality and seduction. The artist himself suggested the relationship between his work and sexuality; he equated the fitting together of metal parts with the conjoining of bodies.
Jes Fan
B. 1990, Scarborough, Canada. Lives and works in New York and Hong Kong.
Jes Fan finds new aesthetic uses for substances associated with race and gender. His materials have included estrogen from his mother’s urine, hand-blown glass injected with melanin, and depo-testosterone.
Throughout his oeuvre, Fan refuses smooth edges in favor of suggestive shapes and textures that simultaneously entice and repel. His recent sculptures resemble unusual shelving units adorned with biomorphic forms that bulge and droop. Sometimes, the pieces appear to be hung with carapaces or skins. Silicone was a favorite material early in the artist’s career; Fan shaped it into weights and phallic tubes of various skin tones.
In Fan’s hands, his substances are no longer restrictive or oppressive markers of identity, but objects for experimentation and play. Like Cronenberg, he asks: How can art undermine received ideas about the body’s limitations?
Pierre Huyghe
B. 1962, Paris. Lives and works in Santiago.
Camata I, 2024
Pierre Huyghe
Esther Schipper
Pierre Huyghe investigates the relationship between human and non-human forms, from animals to AI. His oeuvre creates new fictions about sentience and what might persist after humans are gone. Throughout his career, the artist has collaborated with bee colonies and the natural landscape in installations that often live, breathe, and change throughout the duration of his exhibitions.
Huyghe’s 2024 piece Liminal, which debuted in an exhibition of the same name at Punta della Dogana in Venice this past summer, is a cinematic simulation that resembles a woman without a face. It uses AI to evolve as it digests data about shifting environmental conditions. The piece hovers between humanity and the digital realm, between the natural and the artificial.
Cronenberg’s 2024 film The Shrouds similarly investigates what lies beyond the limits of human life. The plot features a man who can’t accept his wife’s death and creates a new technology to commune with the dead. Transcending mortality is a potent theme for both aging artists.
Tishan Hsu
B. 1951, Boston. Lives and works in New York.
Man and screen merge in the multimedia work of Tishan Hsu. The artist studied architecture at MIT and film at Harvard, then developed a practice that integrated elements of both disciplines. Throughout the 1980s, Hsu constructed aluminum-on-wood paintings that feature biomorphic ripples and holes as well as gray gradients that could evoke TV static or fuzzy X-ray images.
In subsequent years, the artist has diversified his materials while continuing to explore the convergence of the corporeal and the digital. New York’s High Line recently commissioned two sculptures from the artist, who made resin-wrapped foam “cars.” Their surfaces feature patterns and screens with images that suggest orifices of skin and building material. Viewers may scan QR codes to play videos that feature shots of grass, soil, and the body.
Analysis of Hsu’s works often features references to Cronenberg and his 1983 film Videodrome, in which violence on TV may be less of a fiction than it initially seems. Hsu’s work similarly asks viewers to reconsider their mediated experience, with all its dangers, horrors, and allure.
Carolee Schneemann
B. 1939, Philadelphia. D. 2019, New Paltz, New York.
Interior Scroll, 1975
Carolee Schneemann
Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art
Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973-1976
Carolee Schneemann
P.P.O.W
Carolee Schneemann used her body to make provocative statements about the pleasures and grotesqueries of women’s corporeal experience. She remains a major figure of early feminist art.
Schneemann’s infamous 1975 work Interior Scroll featured the artist unraveling then reading a scroll that had been situated inside her vagina. As in The Brood—in which a woman’s rage sprouts into tumors that develop into small monsters—the artist birthed something potent, new, and unnatural. Her film Fuses (1964–67), which aimed to reconfigure notions of power in heterosexual relationships, captured the artist having sex with her partner, as seen from their cat’s perspective. Schneemann pushed performance art toward orgy with Meat Joy (1964), in which the artist and seven other performers lathered their half-clad bodies in paint while playing with raw fish, chickens, sausages, and each other.
Liberation and violence similarly coalesce in Snows (1967), a performance that featured movement, films, and many images of atrocity in Vietnam. While Schneemann’s own body was at the core of her work, she used it as a tool to consider larger political forces and events.
Alina Szapocznikow
B. 1926, Kalisz, Poland. D. 1973, Praz-Coutant, France.
Lampe-bouche (Illuminated Lips), ca. 1966
Alina Szapocznikow
Loevenbruck
Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptural engagements with the body were derived from experiences with real horror: The mid-century Polish artist survived concentration camp internment during the Holocaust and in 1969 was diagnosed with breast cancer, which killed her four years later. In her brief 46 years on Earth, she left behind a vigorous record of what it’s like to have a body that’s both vulnerable to external violence and liable to betray you.
The artist began to cast her own body in plaster in 1962. Leg, from that year, is a nearly surgical examination of the titular appendage, bent at the knee. It appears both ready to spring and entirely lifeless. Lips are another common feature across Szapocznikow’s work. They evoke surrealistic fantasies of feminine features severed from their hosts. Turned into sculptural lamps, these forms become simultaneously sexy and disturbing.
Towards the end of her life, Szapocznikow found inspiration in her illness and made a series of “Tumor” sculptures. She succeeded at the ultimate creative act: transforming her ailment into meaningful, enduring forms.
Candice Lin
B. 1989, Concord, Massachusetts. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
System for a Stain, 2016
Candice Lin
Hammer Museum
Candice Lin reconfigures histories of art, colonialism, and nature into elaborate sculptural systems and multimedia installations. She often undermines notions of contamination, especially as they relate to the non-white body.
The artist’s 2016 work System for a Stain resembles a complex science project, or perhaps the laboratory of a healer. It features a series of jars connected by tubes that ultimately feed into a leaking, blood-tinged pool. This living, porous work—whose materials include microbes and organic pigment—spill into the gallery, creating a sanguine pool on the floor. This sort of spillage recurs in the artist’s work: She once collaborated with P Staff on a testosterone-inhibiting scent that filtered through the exhibition space.
Other works consider the legacy of imperialism. In 2021, Lin mounted “Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping,” which mapped trade routes for colonial goods, at the Walker Art Center. The exhibition centered around a tent-like structure that featured textiles dyed with indigo—a cash crop with a fraught history—as well as sculptures of cats and larger forms that resembled deities. It also included stone sculptures resembling slabs of flesh that viewers were invited to touch while looking at each other, grounding the exhibition in corporeal sensation.
With a practice that also includes paintings, drawings, and ceramics, Lin refuses to limit her materials, just as she refutes divisions across bodies and cultures. Cronenberg’s work might be said to examine whiteness and its attractions to violence; Lin’s art carefully examines attendant harms.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/yWgkdOQ
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