the body, sex, anomaly

Maria Campitelli

the body, sex, transgression, anomaly, the crime story, the scene of the crime, degradation, soft, classical… this and more in Shock & Show.

The exhibition and exploration of the body predominates more than ever in the post-modern age. And it is eros that continues to trigger a censorship linked to a religious prohibitionist culture of catholic and protestant extraction. Films, for example, are still prohibited to minors 14 or 18 years of age if they contain erotic scenes, but not if they contain horrific scenes of blood and violence. The freedom intrinsic to art facilitates direct approaches, which aim at truth and are free of prejudices and attitudes of convenience. Depending on the message which the artist wishes to transmit, he/she will choose the crudest forms of reality in order to reveal an existential truth, or instead veil that message with filtering mediums of various kinds. Due to the taboos which have surrounded Eros for centuries, it is also an area which is quite susceptible to an exasperated voyeurism, to a shock and show which borders on the kitch and pornographic.

However, art never becomes pornographic because the aim is different and far removed from the banality and boredom of the pornographic product. Many of the artists gathered together for this occasion revolve around the pulsing theme of the body and sex, and their related transgressions, penetrating into that area of personal privacy which a conventional culture might keep us from approaching with naturalness. But the artist also seeks to deal with the body which is modifiable by bio-technology and new forms of scientific knowledge, treating it as a new area of creativity. Orlan has been doing this for some time now with his own body, implanting the artificial into the organic, with the aim of designing a new identity for the man of the future. The duo of Bachrach&Kriætofic´ reproduces in a giant blow-up bodies entwined in the act of making love, altered by a recomposition chosen by the artists and computer elaboration. These bodies are captured by a solitary and invisible camera which does not disturb their intimacy but, on the contrary, registers a corporeal physical-ness which assaults us with its disturbing close-ups. However, the purpose is not to astonish but to achieve an effect like that of billboards which are intentionally provocative for advertising purposes – publicity for underwear and swimsuits, for example. Such images, however, no longer elicit even a minimum reaction on the part of an inattentive public, while showing life, as in this instance, instead creates uneasiness, if not dissent.

The presentation of the private arrives at an exasperation bordering on exhibitionism in the stories made up of photos, collages, painting and performances by Elke Krystufek. Here we find an extreme need to confess what is generally kept private, the search for the definition of a female identity with androgynous aspects, often violent, and which flees and transforms itself. According to the critic Gianni Jetzer, this work represents the profaned ideal of a star of the 3rd Millennium. It is a sort of intimate visual diary, which rises up from the unconscious, and in which the embrace of art/life is reaffirmed. Eros becomes a suffering which takes the place of and becomes pleasure in the hallucinated sado-masochistic imagination of Goran Bertok. A tension which borders on the disturbed is fed by unsettling visions in b/w, in which the whiteness of the tormented flesh is exalted by the black of the background, while the thick shadows created by a shaving light add violence to the violence of chains, leather masks and horrendous devices for self-inflicted pain. Here, auto-eroticism becomes the desire for sacrifice and death, evoking certain medieval mystics who wished to emulate Christ’s passion with their own bodies The young artist, Fabiano di Cocco, doubles this effect. A perverse eroticism is linked to the idea of a game, a demented plaything, which in a closely-shot sequence of photos, also in b/w, recounts the onanistic variation of a forbidden tale. But if a deviated eroticism without love may lead to the idea of a sacrificial victim, the same concept can also be expressed through the ‘soft-core’ action and amused irony of Francesco Impellizzeri in the performance entitled ‘oooh’, like an orgasmic sigh, in which he impersonates the affected 18th Cent. gentlewoman, in intimate apparel, overcome by quaking love and desire. Here we find a bubbling sense of spectacle, ambiguously erotic, channelled into the artist’s vocation for constructing characters, from Lady Muc to Rokkodrillo, from Bodyguard to the Candied Angel, TangetArt, Unpopop and into which he enters with a surprising spirit of transformation. By means of these personages, he shatters clichés and mocks the world of show business, especially that of singing stars, and the ambiguity which we bear within us. ‘oooh’ is an invitation to voyeurism which continues with the Triestine videomaker and performer Paolo Ravalico Scerri.

The explosion of multiplied video events, supported by elementary musical phrases, which will intersect at the Miela Theatre on the exhibition’s opening night, presents us with an obsessive self-referentiality bodies rendered languid by amorous scansions and condensed into ‘Love Show’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Exhibition’, ‘Personal Love’, ‘Who-Man’ and ‘Gigolo’, here presented in unison and in a single, large location. The protagonist is the artist himself, whose body, in the soft, slow-motion movements, gives and asks for ‘love’, and which serves as counterpoint to synthesis of these images in a fine sequence of designs taken from the videos, with insistent and unmistakable blue/viola tints. The languor of an eros of sexual ambiguity is echoed by the celebrated duo Pierre et Gilles who present the work ‘Didier’. Here, their distinctive, fictional vocabulary is composed of a concentrate of lucid mawkishness, glamour which transcends into kitch, a glossy popular imagination often imbued with the allure of the Orient, sickening piety and mild blasphemy (where the tears and smiles of lovers of the ‘30’s abound), false, ecstatic raptures and excessive bloodstains on chaste, uncorrupted faces, and precious, antiqued picture-frames. With the addition, in recent works, of a nocturnal emphasis which creates an aura of mystery. But the body and the eroticism connected with it have other variants. Antonella Bersani has focussed her attention on a single anatomical apparatus (which, however, may be made to allude to other parts of the body): shiny, rosy, fleshy, with protuberances and a deep cavity at its centre (and which the author defines ‘bodies’). These ‘vulva’ are scattered everywhere, in precious boxes, between pillows, on a table among flowers, in a Sicilian cart. Clones of an ineluctable and ubiquitous reality and dominant thought, and the irony of a hyper-sexuality which is omni-evident and therefore devalued.

In any case, an amused commentary on a social behaviour which becomes paradox. The corporeal image also bursts forth in the works of the new performers, from Kulik to Zhang Huan. Oleg Kulik has gained his place in the history of contemporary art for his identification with a dog, and for having imagined a new form of interpersonal relationships modelled on the behaviour of animals, who are more spontaneous and instinctive than humans. The curator Rosa Martinez considers him ‘a delicate artist who reflects our animal capacity to love’. The dog is also unfailingly present in the photos, as both witness and collaborator in the artist’s astonishing demonstrative actions. Zhang Huan takes up the extreme experiences of Chris Burden and Carolee Schremann in the ‘70’s, with occidental conceptualism providing the scaffolding for his actions. The basic concept is that of appropriating the harsh suffering which dominates the world by experiencing it directly upon one’s own body; an experimentation with the limits of resistance, an openness to a knowledge of life which cannot be attained any other way. The photographs document these endurance tests and at the same time reveal the absolute detachment of the artist, in the imperturbable expression, entirely oriental, of his face. One of his most famous operations is the famous ‘12 square metres’ in which, covered with honey and fish oil, he allows himself to attract hundreds of flies, which even crawl into his nasal cavity and ears, while he remains seated immobile on a latrine in Peking’s East Village. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s approach to the body is completely anomalous: with the twin girls they focus on freaks of nature, monsters, where sexual obsession is to be found in the male genitals which protrude from their faces. However, blood, torture and horror are also present, culminating in Hell, the maniacal work shown in ‘Apocalypse’ in 2001, where it was the central work of an exhibition which could not repeat the success of the previous ‘Sensation’. The vocation for horror, the perfect simulation of ferocious cruelty, such as that of ‘Cyber Ironic Man’, which duplicates a Chinese martyrdom and echoes the atrocities of Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’, is the indelible trademark of the terrible bothers, causing the critic Wigram (co-curator, together with Rosenthal, of ‘Apocalypse’) to declare: ‘By now, shock has become a part of artistic materials. And this is so because its very concept has become a material’ (Flash Art, Dec. 2001 – Jan. 2001, n. 225). But the Chapman brothers – who do nothing other than transfer onto the symbolic level of art what occurs everyday around the world – thumb their noses at all this seriousness, and their works abound with the grotesque (such that the excess of tragedy becomes comical) and an irresistible irony. Erwin Olaf has also repeatedly traversed the landscape of the body, and uses it in his photographs in various contexts. Olaf’s work stems from a completely Nordic, specifically Dutch culture of photographing the things of this world with a lucid and pitiless objectivity. He enters into the various contexts with irony, from the famous and merciless ‘pin-up girls’ impersonated by individuals well along in years and endowed with trembling cellulite, to a fashion which is impregnated with a very different glamour and highlights the loss of identity among the famous names of haut couture, to the more recent, spectacular and phantasmagoric compositions of the ‘Paradise’ cycle and the portraits displayed here, where everything explodes ‘over the top’. There is also the artist who carries out a narrative process with the body, based on the comic-strip-like photo-story of the ‘70’s.

Lorena Matic has already taken this path, elevating herself to the protagonist of these stories. This is a means for multiplying one’s own identity, in an already proven area, while at the same time exploring the mutability of identity with a direct ‘take’ on existential events. There is no metaphor in ‘Psychadelic sequence’, which seeks to sum up the themes of sexual freedom that exploded with the feminist battles of the ‘70’s – or if there is a metaphor, it is that of a fiction which degenerates into splatter. It is reality itself which is placed into question, not without irony, in opposition to the ordinary madness and daily slaughter offered by the media. What instead permeates Giuseppe De Cesco’s ingenious artefacts is a biting sarcasm. The artist amuses himself by manipulating all conceivable materials, creating objects which are often self-propelled and emit sounds, or settings which upset the rules and the ethical-social structures which normally govern behaviours. It is a way of redoing things, often based on reminiscences of films, and projecting them fantastically onto a plane of renewed logical dynamics. The installation in this exhibition, with the disorienting and amusing title of ‘Double or nothing?’, is set inside a shower (Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’) where the gurgling of water, a large bubble suspended over the drain which is emphasised by an internal light and has hair suspended over it, not only serves to indicate the normal use of this domestic fixture, but also a possible crime scene and the investigative systems for collecting evidence. The ways to astound are infinite, and the Croatian Igor Kuduz has chosen the path of grotesque anomaly with his series of ‘Capricci’ (‘Freaks’) which definitely have little in common with those of Guardi. The cycle of photographs which appears under this title is a delightful divertissement injected with large doses of an irony (a constant in Kuduz’s production) that amuses itself at humanity’s expense. Freaks of nature, all strictly invented, are grafted onto a series of personages who are altered strikingly as a result.

Like Franck Lantini, stiffly erect in a military tunic, and provided with three legs, or the ‘prosperous’ lady with three breasts. Each figure comes with antiqued details as accessories, from the posing of the images, to the gold-painted frames with the metal plaque and title beneath. This project makes one smile, and is far removed from the black humour of the English. Robert Gligorov is a master of shock. His research insists above all on the possibility of transgressing every form of common sense and still astounds by means of a disruptive inventive fantasy, as if it were the last chance for an expression which has already consumed everything. The preferred territory for this exploration is the body, the site of natural and unnatural mutations: a body whose inevitable defacement is prefigured by the operation ‘Waiting I’ and ‘Waiting II’: a body inseparable from the definitive transformation of death, and which the artist documents (surpassing his own limits) in the video of the performance in which he hangs himself. Using the technique of morphing, the artist has already prefigured the possible contaminations among the animal, vegetable and mineral realms of a post-human and post-geological era. However, the new artists are not limited to only violent forms of expression. There are other, ‘softer’ ways to amaze, like those used by the photographer Fritz Kok, which represent the actuality of a typically Dutch current of photography that began with Inez Van Lamsveerde’s disturbing presentation of children forced to become adults. Kok’s vision is a surreal world of icy fiction which transports us into dream, however with the tangibility of apparitions strategically placed in real settings, similar to laboratories for scientific research, which resemble tubs or swimming pools.

The key figure is a mermaid, a seductive, sophisticated and ascetic hybrid which seems the result of laborious research in genetic engineering, and inspired by cover-girl glamour (Kok is a fashion photographer). She seems an alien fallen from another planet, with hyper- realistic connotations, subjected to continuous medical controls in order to verify her uncertain capacity for survival. The works of Genia Chef and Ricardo Cinalli emerge from an opposite terrain. The former, by means of photographic assemblies elaborated by computer, reflects on the loss of the world of beauty created by classical antiquity, re-evoked in a crepuscular and decadent fantasy setting, which also contains the real human presence reabsorbed in the suggestion of environmental reconstruction. For this exhibition, Genia Chef has created a work inspired by Arnold Boecklin’s famous ‘Island of the Dead’, painted a century ago. If Boecklin celebrates the decline of the Greco-Roman aesthetic, Genia Chef transposes it into the modern and contemporary eras, placing it alongside historical realities such as Lenin, Hitler, the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Old National Gallery of Berlin. The intention is that of identifying the constant human archetypes, in the historical-aesthetic recognition, which insist on violence, destruction or death. The basic shock in this instance is tempered by a symbolic vision through the aestheticconceptual filter. Ricardo Cinalli, from Argentina, is the powerful Michelangelo of the contemporary age. His knowledge and ability to reproduce the human body reaches spectacular heights. His landscapes populated by arms, feet and hands refer to the human muddle and morass of the world’s great cities. The obsessive celebration of the human body, still free of technological hybridisations, which in asphyxiated tangled heaps like ‘The Human Pyramid, Homage to the Millenium’ which is doubled in the mirror of water extending before it, alludes to dramatic, psycho/physical human cramming of the endless urban conglomerates. It is an unlimited revision of classical and renaissance culture and of De Chirico’s post-metaphysics, with the tension and linguistic freedom of the 3rd Millennium.

There is another terrain upon where one can find horror and create shock: that of social marginalisation. The Ukrainian artist, Sergej Bratkov, documents an ‘unaltered portrait of crude reality’, which we can situate in the current of the new photography coming out of Eastern Europe. The group of photographs, taken from the series ‘Bad Time Stories’, dates from the ‘Children’s Horror’ project of ’98. With a series of mise en scene and degraded locations it testifies to the dramatic reality of street children, orphans and homeless, the ‘losers’ of yesterday and today who are united by a common destiny under the Soviet regime and in today’s Russia. By means of an exasperated fiction it summarises the absurd rituals of the ‘young soviet pioneers’ when children were trained according to the Soviet codes. The grotesque irony precipitates the ritualistic performances into horror splatter. Rather than adjust to the banality and virtual stereotypes of B horror movies which infest post-communist Russia, it is preferable to reconstruct the real tragedy which has overwhelmed, in misery and degradation, a childhood abandoned to itself. The veiled denunciation or disenchanted constating of the state of things, both public and private, acts as a leaven in the works of Guillermo Giampietro. Daily rituals and superficial or profound sensations are superimposed upon one another in computer-elaborated visual compositions. The use-object is associated with the carnality which insinuates itself, in superimposed, complementary moments, with the rhythms of fiction, but also of the mobility of thought. The praise of disaster, echoing Blanchot (L’ecriture de le desastre), has become the ambiguity of meaning, in the enunciations, which constitute the subtle structure of a discourse open to different interpretations, with social-political references, in the awareness of the impossibility of capturing a definitive reality.

‘Despise the enigma of future terror’ is the sibylline title of the allusive work presented here, which forms part of an expanded project extended over time, which ranges from a radio programme to performance. Ennio Bertrand’s work ‘Under Attack’, identifies itself with the most incredible shock of the present time: the attack against the Twin Towers. For some time now, Ennio Bertrand has been using the most advanced technological media, with which he filters his knowledge and emotions. ‘Under Attack’ is, in fact, the first application of an interactive innovation elaborated by the artist himself. The technique, which makes it possible to interact with the video images, is called Remote Stills and establishes a direct, close link with the public by means of a computer and an ultrasound device which locates the position of the spectator, and is connected with a special software. Contrary to other interactive interventions in which it is the spectator who determines the modifications, here the spectator is, as it were, swallowed up and subjected to the images of the video which they find themselves commanding involuntarily. The observer’s movements change the order of the visual story being recounted. In moving forward or back, or standing still, the video follows us and makes us relive from within and as protagonists the tragedy of New York transmitted by CNN with the unforgettable title of ‘America under Attack’. Francesco Scialò’s shock is of a different nature. Attentive to the problems and devastating events which lacerate the world and humanity, he converts them into personal reflections/works somewhere between sculpture and installation. His is a response to the frightening chain of murders, rapes, paedophilia and destruction which television offers up on a daily basis. However, Scialò also dedicates himself to lighter themes, which he treats with an ironic touch. His distinctive characteristic (though less evident in recent works, where it has been replaced by structural methods that utilise reclaimed materials, primarily fabrics) is illumination, in a Christmas tree-like effect which transforms his works from grim tragedies to spectacles. However, the illumination produced by countless tiny bulbs distributed over the entire work also suggests an atmosphere of warmth, a sublimating and cathartic breath, which has the complicity of a playful smile. They overcome the reality of evil and ascend towards a reality of dream, as in ‘This is your sacrifice’, where the homicidal act of the hooded man (a satanic ritual?) loses some of its violence because bathed in radiant illumination. Sandy Skoglund is the queen of environmental transformation with her invasions of swarms of animals, cats, squirrels and horrible snakes while an unaware humanity continues to perform undisturbed its customary tasks. Her highly distinctive photographs are the result of laborious mis en scenes which compose the domestic nightmare that assails us unawares. Trauma-less symbols of malaise and phobias give substance to disassociations and incongruencies which in the most recent works are accented by the hiatus between real figures and fictitious images – clones or replicants from other worlds – as in ‘Breathing Glass’ (2000).

A further development is the rain of popcorn which covers real persons and dummies, transforming them into photographs of a freezing winter climate or concrete installations. Paul M. Smith is another enfant terrible of the English school whose choices are less death-oriented than those of his colleagues of some years before, and aim primarily at the thrillingly spectacular. The ‘Actions’ cycle of photographs enclosed in light-boxes appears as even more ascetic and unreal than the previous ‘Photoshop’, and replays the mythic filmic gestures of James Bond (while exploiting the artist’s experience as a British army photographer when he was young). With a marvellous head-over-heels effect he depicts himself (for he is the protagonist) flying through the air, from building to building, or leaping on us from a helicopter, an action which paraphrases ‘Jumping’, the extreme, deathdefying sport so popular today. Shocking images which can be traced back to the young Mathew Barney who scaled the smooth walls of galleries with the aid of strange devices, thereby bringing the reality of sport into the sacred confines of art. As we noted earlier, there is a coincidence here, symptomatic of our time, between extreme actions and the need for art to go ‘over the top’ in the (illusory?) attempt to galvanise a collective consciousness sunk into total apathy. Death, or rather the decomposition which awaits all organic matter, also forms the subject of Richard Crow’s performances. Since the late ‘80’s he has worked in various languages, from sculpture to video, film to audio production, and all these elements often converge and intertwine in his performances. The central node of his research is the concept of ‘Rot’, which takes its cue from Marx’s phrase: ‘in history, as in nature, the rotten is the laboratory of life’. This also recalls some of Greenaway’s maxims, especially in the ‘Zoo of Venus’, and produces objects-sculptures which, starting from the point of their decomposition, when their usecycle is over, can become something else. The state of death is thereby elevated to a new life, by means of an aesthetic itinerary. These found objects which contain stratified and real stories, in the aesthetic transposition maintain their evocative impetus and in performance become ‘performative objects’, that is, they have an active role which has the same importance as that of the performers. ‘Executor’, which the exhibition has brought to Trieste, implies a concept of ‘performative persona’, playing on the multiple meanings of the word which takes on different roles (from the executor of a will to the executioner), and especially that of the figure of the performer who executes an artistic project. The idea of death also circulates in Dean Verzel’s plans for large installations, though linked to life and knowledge, as in ‘The triumph of death, from the book to cosmic experience’ (’97).

Here, the accumulation of impenetrable books, each sealed by a stellar life, encloses a hidden knowledge which is revealed only by the book with P. Breughel’s ‘The triumph of death’. The symbol of the cross, a remote signal from the most distant past, is now the object of a more intense research by this artist which goes beyond the Christian reference. A symbol which borders on the most tangible forms of reality, like the project of the great cross of perspex filled with water in which the artist will immerse himself in order to renew a sacrifice. However, this performance is also a test of resistance, in the best tradition of body-art, an presents an amplified exploration of human potential, both physical and psychological. The symbolism of the cross appeared recently in the performance of the burning of a 17th Century cross, conducted together with Bertok, in Strunjan, Slovenia. According to the philosopher Mlakar who spoke at the event, together with the provocation tinged with protest before the obscure powers which govern men beyond their wills, the burning cross is the proof of God’s truth, who rises again from the ruins of the cross, which was burnt because a tool of extreme evil, and upon which Christ died.