SAM Lecture Series Lecture 4 - The body in contemporary art

1. Art Matters: Illuminating Contemporary Art
Shepparton Art Museum
2015
LECTURE 4: THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

2. Hans Bellmer, The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace, 1937
What is a body?

3. What is a body?
An Object
-a machine containing our consciousness/self
-receives meaning
-Rene Descartes
-the body is a machine and consciousness is
immaterial
-Mind/body dualism
-The Description of the Human Body, 1647

4. What is a body?
A Subject
-we are nothing more than our bodies
-the mind is a physiological phenomenon
-the body has agency
-the body produces meaning

5. What is a body?
A Performance
-identity is not inherent, but acted out
-we don’t have a fixed, stable conception of the body
-ideas shift with changing social norms
-social conventions, performed daily, to reinforce identity
-eg. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990
-relationship between sex, gender and sexuality is
culturally constructed and socially performed

6. • An Object: receives meaning
• A Subject: produces meaning
• A Performance: unfolds over time

7. Cosmopolitan Magazine, November 2011

8. Leigh Bowery
Pregnant tutu head, 1994

9. Leigh Bowery, “Session VII”, Look, 38, June 1994

10. Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1967

11. Yasumasa Morimura,
Mona Lisa in its origin, 1998

12. Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Futago),
1988-1990

13. Fiona Foley, Native Blood (detail), 1994
SAM Collection

14. Richard Bell, The Pecking Order, 2007

15. Roy Lichtenstein
Shipboard Girl, 1965
Richard Bell
The Pecking Order, 2007

16. Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie, 2008

17. Vernon Ah Kee, Unwritten #3, 2011
SAM Collection

18. Allan Kaprow, Household (Women licking jam off a car), 1964

19. Gutai Group member Saburo Murakami,
Passing Through, 1956

20. Yves Klein
Le Saut dans le Vide
(Leap into the Void)
1960

21. Yves Klein
Le Saut dans le Vide
(Leap into the Void)
1960

22. Yves Klein, Anthropometry Performance, 1961

23. Yves Klein, Large Blue Anthropometry, c.1960

24. Yoko Ono, still from Cut Piece, performed 1965

25. Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, MoMA, 2010

26. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, theatrical trailer, HBO Films, 2012

27. Marina Abramovic and Ulay,
Imponderabilia, 1977
Reperformance
at MoMA, 2010

28. Kate Mitchell, Lost a bet, 2011

29. Brown Council, Performance Fee, 2012

30. Gabrielle de Vietri, Three Teams, 2013

31. Ash Keating, West Park Proposition, 2013

32. Agatha Goethe Snape, Every Artist Remembered (Laresa Kosloff), 2011

33. Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Imagining Structures, 2014

34. Santiago Sierra, 160cm line tattooed on four people, 2000

35. Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1
(Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997

36. Bas Jan Ader, Fall II, 1970

37. Bas Jan Ader, Fall II, 1970

38. Sam Jinks, Woman and Child, 2010

39. • The body could be thought of as:
• Object
• Subject
• Performance
• The body as a performance is the idea that we understand
identity as a cultural condition, not a biological one
• The body is a site of contestation over meaning
• Means different things to different people
• There is debate as to whether documentation is the same as
reperformance in contemporary performance art
Some Key Ideas from this lecture