Survey sector highlights: tackling the body in 20th-century art
From the erotic to the evanescent, the body as both form and lived experience was a focus of 20th-century artists
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The Queer Body
New Delhi native Sunil Gupta’s subversive photographs are both personal and political, making visible what it means to be a queer person in the world. His series ‘”Pretended” Family Relationships’ (1988), presented by Hales Gallery, was made in response to an oppressive bill enacted in the U.K. on May 26, 1988. The series’ title derives from Margaret Thatcher’s government passing Clause 28, which dictated that local authorities ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality’ or ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’ Taking interracial male relationships as its subject, Untitled #2 has three separate parts: on the left, a white man gazes wantonly at a Black man passing by; in the middle, a poem by Gupta’s then-partner Stephen Dodd speaks to memories of desire being satiated; and on the right, a black-and-white image shows a sliver of action from a protest against the bill in London. This tripartite structure and Gupta’s use of color suggest layered realities with overtones of what it meant to be gay at this time – the homophobic underbelly of society forcing many to live their lives severed from their truth.
Indeterminate Bodies
Exploring the ways in which women’s bodies move through the world, Faith Wilding considers identity in social, psychological, and biological terms. As one of the first graduates of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program at California State University in 1970, her interests highlighted the maternal, domestic, and often communal roles of women in society. The work on paper The Body Becoming Form (1980), at Anat Ebgi, envisions a shape in flux, somewhere between a leaf, limb, or mollusc. One scalloped form curves from another, a soft body licking its way out of a shell – or could this be a wing attempting to stretch into full span? The graphite on paper drawing represents the in-between, the indefinable; an ongoing transformation where flesh refuses to be pinned down or reduced.
The Body Contorted
In Juanita McNeely’s painting on paper, Eileen Haimowitz (1980), at James Fuentes, a woman sits contorted: hands and feet bent at odd angles, torso and legs turning away from one another in contrapposto. Paint spills from the heel of her right boot, the body bleeding beyond its boundaries. Depicting extreme physicality and margins beyond movement, McNeely drew upon her own experiences of illness, having suffered with cancer that resulted in excessive bleeding, as well as a spinal injury that put her in a wheelchair. Also touching on the issues of abortion and rape in her work, McNeely reminds us that control over one’s own flesh, form, and choices can always be marred by violence.
Body Fragments
The American artist Rona Pondick, on show at Steven Zevitas Gallery, has used fragments of bodies in her work since 1986 – either casts of her own body or others’ teeth. Theatricality pervades her oeuvre, the body seemingly acting out fantasies of mutilation with comedic aggression. Take, for example, Untitled Shoe (1995), a suspended sculpture of a leg with multiple mouths that are seemingly consuming their own flesh. The absurdity of the gnawing black gums and teeth is emphasized by the aggressive point of the high-heeled shoe. Simultaneously threatening and humorous, Pondick’s approach to sculpture expresses the ambiguities of our psychological space and the physical register of our inner lives, which can often have a self-destructive capacity.
Body of Fabric
Textile artist Barbara Levittoux-Świderska, whose survey exhibition is mounted at Richard Saltoun Gallery, reinterpreted a wriggling insect’s body with her installation Millipede (1974). At a vast 2.5 meters in height, sisal is delicately knitted together to form a netlike structure, suggesting an elongated skeleton that hangs upon the wall, pierced by branches that double as legs. Levittoux-Świderska’s weaving practice focused on materiality, often using forms in nature as a springboard to reassess structure and form through abstraction. As part of the post-war generation of artists in Poland, Levittoux-Świderska researched rural textile practices in response to the centralized government’s repressive ideological policies that sought to encourage a nationalist identity. Her rich aesthetics captured the sumptuousness of the body of nature, while also reducing it to its most essential elements.
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Louisa Elderton is the Curatorial Editor at Gropius Bau, Project Editor of Phaidon's 'Vitamin' series, and an independent art critic contributing to Frieze, Artforum, and Flash Art, among other publications.
Top image: Juanita McNeely, Eileen Haimowitz (detail), 1980. Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York City.