The Corporeal Body

The human body has always been an important (and often controversial) subject in art and other cultural media. In contemporary art and philosophy, particularly over the last ten years, the body has been examined in terms of the cultural systems that surround it, such as language, power structures and gender relations. Rarely has it been looked at directly in terms of its biological complexity and material reality — its corporeality.

In the 1970s, performance art and 'body art' utilized the body as a vehicle for expression. In the 1980s, Australian artists such as Julie Brown-Rrap, Jenny Watson, Fiona MacDonald, and Juan Davila created works that investigated various theoretical interpretations of the body. Until now, though, the corporeal body has remained peripheral to much contemporary art. The start of the 1990s is a significant time to exhibit art which looks at the physical properties of the body. The recent discovery of the AIDS virus has made people more conscious of the physical aspects of human relationships and sexual pleasure, and the general trend towards an improved understanding of health and fitness requirements means that the body now has a new priority in the eyes of the community.

The work of the artists chosen for this exhibition begins to chart this changing perspective. Although they retain elements of psychological exploration, works by these artists can also be seen as dealing largely with the physical qualities of the body. For artists such as Mike Parr, Bill Henson and Fiona Hall, the investigation of the body has proved to be a constant (but evolving) inspiration for their work. In the work of Dale Frank and Stieg Persson, references to the tangibility of the body point to overlying themes of structure and surface. The work of Anne Ferran, Louise Hearman and Stephen Eastaugh focuses on the body to create (in different ways) an intense awareness of material reality.

X-Rays and Inner Structures

Stieg Persson's X-ray photographs are the realization of an interest in scientific photography that began several years ago. In 1983, Persson produced a group of small charcoal drawings that investigated forms and structures reminiscent of scientific imagery of the nineteenth century — obscure organic shapes in black and silver-grey tones. The forms and tonal variations explored in these drawings were developed by Persson in his paintings and collages, where they also signified a host of bodily metaphors, like disease. Persson's X-ray photographs present a physical image of the body (in revealing the actuality of our bones and organs), while simultaneously alerting us to its metaphoric richness.

The discovery of X-rays in 1895, by Wilhelm Konrad von Röntgen, had an enormous impact on the way people saw themselves and raised fundamental questions as to the nature of matter. Among the artists believed to have been influenced by this discovery was Marcel Duchamp, whose early twentieth-century figures, such as his Nude descending a staircase, 1912, often appear transparent and expose their internal structures. Stieg Persson's X-ray photographs meditate on that which is beyond our immediate senses through their allusions to (and subsequent development into) abstract images. Like his abstract paintings, these photographs act simultaneously as images of the body's interior, and as purely abstract forms. Persson overlays light and dark tonal areas to create a 'collage' of bodily structure that is totally dependent on the material body for its visual effect, but which also suggests elements of mystery and hidden meaning. (He emphasizes this mystery by coating the surface of these photographs with a mixture of beeswax and lavender oil, to produce a deep, soft texture that refers to ideas of alchemy and magic.)

The nineteenth-century pathologist Jean-Martin Charcot believed that science and art are two manifestations of the same phenomenon— the search for knowledge. Persson's X-ray photographs use both science and art to reveal new ways of thinking about the body.

Anatomical Metaphors

Fiona Hall's Bruegel-inspired photographic series, Morality dolls — the seven deadly sins, consists of anthropomorphic forms composed of body parts (both external and internal) that play upon the metaphors historically applied to bodily organs. Her Avarice shows a creature with six limbs, all of which are arms with hands; Pride's chest is crowned with a puffed-up frog and the calves of its legs are inscribed with 'tendon of Achilles'. Lechery is composed of penis- and vagina-like parts and has curled tongues emerging from its legs. Gluttony is a body constituted exclusively of intestinal tract with a gaping mouth for a head. Wrath is composed of sharply skeletal bone sections and sharp teeth, one hand (actually the sharp 'roots' of a tooth) spears a foetal form, its genitals are like pincers (inscribed with the word ‘fang') and a sharp blade rests in the figure's opened abdomen, the point of the blade resting on its heart.

Although certain body parts have often assumed a 'maleness' or ‘femaleness’ Hall's Morality dolls are genderless. The body parts or organs assume significance according to their placement, for example, the part of body that is used in place of the head is read as indicating that figure's tendencies. Hence Wrath’s head a toothy screaming mouth, Avarice’s is a wildly staring eye, and Lechery's head appears to be a vaginal opening (although what appears to be a sex organ is actually the anatomy of the larynx). The profusion of anatomical parts is emphasised when the dolls are made to move by using a string that the artist has attached to their 'limbs'. The figures then assume an eccentricity that verges on the horrific and acquire the disquieting 'life' of eighteenth-century European articulated doll' or automata.

The Morality dolls speak of a body in which the organs, viscera, musculature and skeletal structure are each imbued with independent life. They present the biology and anatomy of the body as mechanical and threatening, where the corporeal, as divorced from the psychological, is seen as the essential driving force of the body.

Stephen Eastaugh's works also present the body in fragments. In one work a small figure stands with one of its legs torn away, dripping blood solidly drawn with thick oil pastel. Other works contain abstract forms that represent ambiguous pieces of the body and appear to resemble curiously misplaced internal organs. Eastaugh's use of tactile materials encourages us to imagine the feel of these objects— soft, dull or slimy, and unpleasant to touch.

This dismemberment and laying out of the body and its viscera emphasizes our lack of knowledge of our internal structures and processes (can we recognize, for instance, a liver or an appendix when it is removed from its bodily context?). Eastaugh converts human body parts into something ambiguous — simultaneously revolting and fascinating. He depicts real objects that are also visually arresting as abstract forms.

Attitudes Passionelles

Anne Ferran's group of photographs from 1988, I am the rehearsal master, was inspired by the photographs in the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtriére, published in Paris in 1877. The Iconography contained photographs of 'hysterics' at the Paris asylum, the Salpêtriére, used by Jean-Martin Charcot as teaching props in his lectures on psychology, which documented the emotive manifestations of aspects of hysteria. Particularly potent for Ferran were those that depicted a state of religious or sexual ecstasy, the 'attitudes passionelles'. Ferran states that photographs are 'troubling' for her because of their resemblance to other images in which beauty and suffering merge, as they do, for instance, in the historical depictions of saints or religious martyrs. Ferran states, 'It is their untoward beauty that troubles me'. Like the bodies represented in Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa, 1645-52, or Caravaggio's Conversion of St Paul, c. 1600, which are enraptured, Ferran's appear to be trembling with an intensity whose source is within the body itself.

In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes finds photography linked irrevocably with the body and asserts that it 'began, historically, as an art of the Person'. The presence of an object in a photograph, he states, is never metaphoric; a photograph implicitly captures what 'exists'. Even, in the case of photographing a corpse, if the photograph 'becomes horrible', Barthes states, 'it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse, it is the living image of a dead thing'. It is perhaps for this reason that Bill Henson's images are so powerful. The body in various states is a preoccupation that has been evident in his work since he began photographing in the 1970s. Through his photographs we may register the claustrophobia of being in a crowd, or the unease at witnessing the body stripped naked, almost as merely raw flesh. Henson's images make viewers recognize the unsettling fact of the mortality and physical weakness of their own bodies.

Bodily Sense

Louise Hearman’s representations of the body range from the beautiful or blessed to the grotesque. Her drawings and paintings dwell on the corporeality of the human body, focusing on the exquisitely beautiful faces of young girls, the strange coldness of corpse-like figures, or bodies that are actually torn apart.

Her images are about the sensation of being, that is experienced by and through the body; and they present the body as a vehicle for the realisation of its own sensual experiences, a notion originating in the writings of Freud. For Freud, any part of the body could have been seen as erogenous or ‘erotogenic’ (a dictum he extended even to include the body’s internal organs), however, he described the skin as the ‘erotogenic zone par excellence’. The surface of the body was also seen by Freud to be intimately linked with the mechanisms of the psyche to such a degree that he said the ‘ego’ itself is ‘ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body’. This suggests an essential relationship between the actual body and the internal workings of the psyche (a notion explored, for instance, in the work of Dale Frank and Mike Parr).

Interior/Exterior

Many artist’s in the 1970s perceived the body as an obvious focus for the dialogue about self, society, life and art. Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy were responsible for establishing the first 'artists' space' in Sydney — Inhibodress — which ran from 1970 to 1972. Here Parr and Kennedy performed their Idea Demonstrations. Performances by Parr, with titles such as Hold your finger in a candle flame for as long as possible, or Camera poem: Incise your finger, drip blood into the lens of a camera until the lens is filled with blood, centred on the body with an unnerving and powerful effect.

Because they capture the immediacy and spontaneity of performance art, Mike Parr's large-scale drawings are also powerful. Their size envelopes and physically overwhelms the viewer. Parr's drawings (and more recently his prints) evince his continuing preoccupation with the human subject and its structure. Throughout his performance pieces, Parr presented a body continually subjected to processes of disunity. The body was actively wounded, afflicted and torn apart. This commentary of subverted unity is developed, in Parr's works on paper, into a denial or negation of the body, which is never shown in its entirety. In Mike Parr's work the physical presence of the artist's body is displaced by (and represented by) the act of drawing, and the charcoal and paper itself, which occupies real space in greater-than-human scale.

For Dale Frank, like Parr, the surface of the work of art functions as that of the body itself. In Frank's drawings, the body is represented as a fluid mass of musculature and nervous systems that opens up and exposes the body's interior. The surfaces of Frank's drawings represent strained muscle or stretched skin, and he achieves this by using an extremely linear style of drawing. The act of drawing and the collapse of the divisions between interior and exterior have fundamental links with the philosophy of Surrealism. Indeed, in Frank's early drawings he adopted many of the protocols and marks of the Surrealist process of automatic drawing: making images without conscious deliberation, allowing the subconscious mind to direct the hand of the artist. For Frank, this points to a strong link between the body's interior (the subconscious) and its exterior, represented by its depiction. Like the automatic drawings of André Masson (who first explored the concept in 1923-24), Frank's works present a continuum of matter, in which interior and exterior merge, and where the visceral inner substance of the body constitutes its exterior surface.

The work in The Corporeal Body is a striking reflection of the way in which attitudes to the human body, both in the arts and in ordinary life have changed this century, and particularly over recent years. As has often been the case in the past, artists are documenting popular attitudes and perceptions while challenging orthodox beliefs.

Christopher Chapman

Department of Australian Art