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| Body Jackie Dunn |
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 Francis Bacon, Study of the
human |
This month
Australia saw a range of extravagant reactions to
representations of bodies and bodily functions, from the
closure of the Andres Serrano exhibition at
Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria to the
theft of a condom-covered Virgin Mary sculpture from Pictura
Britannica at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary
Art. Yet it seems quite extraordinary that the only
opposition to the ambitious Body exhibition at the
Art Gallery of New South Wales came from conservative
critics antagonistic to attempts at redefining the roots
of contemporary practice for a wider audience. Suspicion of the body, both depicted and felt, is a commonplace within late twentieth century cultural attempts to rehabilitate the corporeal, the tactile and at times, even the abject. Although the tradition of suspicion is well-enough documented - from Plato’s hierarchies to Aristotelian distinctions between matter and form, from Cartesian binarism through to the technophile purists of the early machine age - perhaps the counter-position, intent on revising optical/rational denials of flesh, has by now its own clear traditions, positions and widely aired concerns. Body, curated by Anthony Bond, fits comfortably into this new(ish), and no doubt welcome, tendency to develop another history of modernism in the west, one that topples the usual hierarchy of the senses and articulates not the visuality of formalism, but a corporeality once neglected. Tracing a line from Courbet to Mike Parr, while investigating an occasionally perversely idiosyncratic take on Realism, Bond presents a rich collection of bodies and posits them as somehow "empathetic"; as somehow representing more than a merely objectifying relationship between artist and model. We are told here that our eye follows the artist’s hand, feeling the body it paints (Courbet, Bonnard, Eakins, Bacon) and later our gut wrenches at the thought of bodily mutilation in a sort of visceral transference (Parr, Acconci, Nitsch, Pane). Unfortunately this notion of empathy is as spurious as it is ill-defined, and is set crudely against a somewhat simplistic understanding of voyeurism, now common in contemporary art-historical discourses which are alert to the critiques of feminist and other voices. Bond distinguishes his selection from other recent attempts to foreground the corporeal (Fémininmasculin: le sexe de l’art at the Centre Pompidou, Identity and Alterity: Figures of the Body 1895/1995 at the Venice Biennale, amongst others), by focusing on "artistic strategies by which the viewer is made aware of the particular quality of their own gaze". While this seems a laudable attempt to move on from the historically important but ultimately limiting feminist critiques of the "objectifying male gaze" which dominated 1970's and 80's theory and practice, there are inherent problems. Distinctly teleological, a line is created from Courbet on, with all the resultant exclusions and overvaluations becoming glaringly obvious. Body’s climactic finish is set somewhere in the mid-1970s with the Vienna Aktionismus group and locally with Parr in full flight. What happens after that seems blurry and downright post-coital, in the same way that Bond reads one of his beloved Bonnards. The frame setup by Bond is such that many of the historically important works from the 1980s and 90s (Sherman, Gober, Kiki Smith) seem slotted in as support material for the only work judged truly radical and transgressive. Bond's itinerary is quite selective, taking us on a voyage to Balthus, Klossowski and Clemente, through Mendieta, Gontcharova and Salcedo, via important stops at Schiele and Dix, then on to Duchamp/Baquié, Pollock, Bellmer, Henson, Schwarzkogler and Bacon. In a collection which stresses that these artists are doing something other than just rehashing the old active-male-artist/passive-female-model binary, you could ask why a David Bomberg nude is in the middle of a room titled Tactility and the Trace of the Artist. That is until it becomes obvious that it is only there to help join the dots between a Sickert and the ultimate destination, Fancis Bacon. This kind of retrospective justification, while often making individual rooms seductively cohesive, does a disservice to other works that could have very strong and fascinating connections drawn between them. Perhaps this is pettiness in the face of such an ambitious project. Body is, after all, really about a certain rewriting of Realism, one linked to that "empathy" already mentioned. In a feat of self-reflexivity and analysis, the viewer (or better, the beholder, as much is made here of Michael Fried’s readings of Courbet as obliterating the distinction between seeing and being seen) becomes "implicated", somehow easing the object/body’s "vulnerability" implied by objectifying gazes. This is curious. In a key section of the exhibition, called "Anxious Males", we see François Sallé’s Anatomy Class and a weak Klossowski, The improbable Understanding of Tadzio and Aschenbach II from 1987, thrown in with Gauguin’s Breton Youth and Renoir’s Young Boy with Cat. Although these make for engaging readings of changing perceptions of the (particularly male) body from the end of the 19th century, what becomes increasingly apparent is the anxiety running just below the surface in the exhibition as a whole. Much of the work barely expresses a suppressed homoerotism, thoroughly denying an overt one. Sure, a great Robert Gober leg (Man Coming out of Woman) pushes out from a wall at one point, and at others there is the delightful camp of a Pistoletto singing a song for Meret Oppenheim. Yet there is little save a rather disquieted hetero-gaze at work here. The question is whether it was felt that much of the gay and queer work of the last decade has been too overexposed to reappear in this exhibition. Work crucial to much of the contemporary understanding of what we mean by such things as "desiring bodies" and "slippery object choices" was overlooked. What this suggests is an inability for the curator and various contributors to acknowledge their own specific positionality. There are other instances of Body anxiously exhibiting some kind of denial. Bond has given the show a satisfying formal and aesthetic coherence, but, while not wishing for inclusions to the point of redundancy or incongruity, it remains to be asked to whose body he refers. It may well appear unsophisticated, but I was prompted to ask some very basic questions about the specificity of the "bodies-in-question"; a question for both artists and those depicted. Questions of race and (non-male/hetero) sexuality were largely kept at bay, while a peculiarly sketchy batch of feminist work was reduced literally to a "no-thing" within a set of discursive parameters that spoke of the female unproblematically as hole and void. At the same time it developed apologias for Courbet as a kind of feminist-in-spite-of-himself. Perhaps we should be grateful for a show that did not try to be all things to all people. Or perhaps not. What happens to Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios (Melancholy) in this context is symptomatic of what can and does happen within such vast and unwielding projects. Here, women’s shoes are sewn behind membranes set in a false wall, alluding in part to Colombia’s brutal political history. Specific bodies, specific histories. In Body it seems impossible to read the work as such, and all we get is a wall of faintly sinister and rather fetishistic objects whose obscurity speaks as much of their silence now, here, as it does of those who disappeared. It should perhaps be remembered that Body begins with Courbet and leads us here, and maybe we lose as much as we gain about Courbet too. The selection of his works circles the provocative The Origin of the World, and while the work of contextualising him in relation to new modern bodily models may yet prove valuable, we have little political context for the Realism of Courbet, and his ground-breaking socialism ends up being displaced by a relatively spurious, exclusively phenomenological notion of empathy between subject and object. Among the countless examples in the show, and the excellent performance film program, perhaps it is Lucio Fontana who provides a divergent problematic. Once best known for the formalism of his work, Fontana can be reevaluated in light of these emerging histories. His work that slashes through the picture plane, in this context, makes it plain that his project was other than a simple refusal of pure visuality, or extension of representational space. That we can see both his conceptual references and the dramatic corporeality of his canvases (and not only pushing painting as surface in both space and time, but also as the penetrated and wounded postwar body) is a bonus of the exhibition. That we almost miss it is perhaps the inevitable result of such an ambitious project, one that assumes a continuity of bodily experience that denies just a few too many differences. Jackie Dunn © The artists and |
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Mark Quinn, Self,
detail, |
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 John
De Andrea, Allegory: |
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 Thomas
Eakins, Wrestlers, o/c, |
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