“The body is obsolete.  I fight against God and DNA!” – Orlan

In this morning’s mail I received notice of two shows, sk-interfaces at Casino Luxembourg: forum d’art contemporaine (via e-flux), and ORLAN at the abbaye de Maubisson (via Art-Agenda), the press releases for which reminded me very much of one show in my exhibition-historical (thanks Hans Ulrich Obrist) vocabulary: Post Human (1992), Jeffrey Deitch’s most ambitious curatorial endeavor  (Here is the catalog essay by Jeffrey Deitch himself, for that exhibition).  The presmise for sk-interfaces is as follows: “Skin is our natural “interface” with the world – more and more, however, technological extensions are taking over its role; “interfaces” create both new freedoms and new constraints”. Without having seen the show yet, I know that the territory has been explored in artistic practice and interpreted curatorially, but the concept is not old hat: the imagery and tropes connected to transplantation, genetics, prosthesis, cosmetic surgery,  and, above all, morphing senses of self-perception are informed today by a wealth of realities that have, in general, matured artistic practices engaging the question of what it means to be human.  In 1992, gender issues, the subaltern, and cyberculture seem to have dominated the discourse surrounding the aforementioned area of artistic practice; today, those issues are to a degree in a benign state, and the discourse leans heavily towards genetics, environmentalism, futurism, biogerontology, and re-examinations of the sweep of human history.

The state of “post humanism” Deitch refers to is inexorably bound to technology, but he traces art’s representation of evolving notions of self-perception as far back as Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Erasmus, a progenitor to the genre of modern portraiture (concomitant with an emerging heightened awareness of self in the Renaissance), through Modernism and the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, Dadaism, Pop Art, the 1970s “me” generation, and into the chaotic present state of post-historical, post humanism:

Deitch continues his illustration of the succession of self-perception with the following:

Houdon's bust of Diderot (1771)

Gericault - Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (1819)

Edvard Munch - The Dead Mother (1899-1900)

Picasso - Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910)

Oskar Kokoschka - Selbstbildnis (1917)

Andy Warhol - Self Portrait (1966)

Jeff Koons - Ilona on Top (1990)

Kiki Smith - Untitled (1990)

Yasumasa Morimura - Daughter of Art History (1990)

(1990)”]

Robert Gober - Untitled [Leg

Charles Ray - Fall (1992)

Orlan - still from Nine Surgery Performance (1993)

Stelarc's Third Hand

Clegg and Guttmann - Matrimonial Portrait (1986)

To Be Continued Tomorrow…

Recommended Reading:

Suspending Life – SEED Magazine – 2008

The Aesthetics and Rhetoric of the Technological Arts Interface Machines

Post Human? All Too Human – McKenzie Wark