CHANGE: Art and the Body as Battleground

“The white body, through its repetition in a history of art that is largely painted white itself, has become an easy and lazy signifier for a universal body, for a metaphorical body, one that becomes symbolic and slippery, that can always be more than its mere representation. The non-white body, I believe, has greater difficulty in attaining this metaphorical bounty.” - Ajay Kurian

“This isn’t just a narrative, it’s above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes. Porous material, one day I shall live the life of a molecule with its possible band of atoms.” - Clarice Lispector

Preface: Autopsy

In the experimental film, “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes [1],” Stan Brakhage holds the 16mm camera up to document autopsies in 1971. The frame continually pairs dead body parts with their living counterparts; a hairy forearm lying lifeless on the table with a jaunty akimbo hairy forearm of the examiner; a coroner’s hand holding a pale corpse hand. Through this visual language, we are told: we are the same, we are looking at ourselves, what we’re made of.

The film dissects the body, framing body parts individually as they are poked and prodded, measured and assessed. Long duration shots of a John Doe’s penis hint at Brakhage getting a good look at the most private parts of himself, mirrored by death. We are a sum of parts, measurable, able to be taken cleanly apart. Our body will tell the coroner the method and time of our death. We are an archive of how the external world impacted us [2]. 

A bra turns over in gloved men’s hands, and the camera, more shyly this time, reveals a woman’s pubis, framed between two standing men. Now we are looking at the other, the camera whispers; same but different, somehow. Are we allowed to watch this? Are we allowed to see ourselves here or is this violating the social contract? Is it wrong to take on the other as ourselves?

As the film progresses, the autopsy goes deeper as skin is unraveled and bones are broken. We see bodies unclothed and exsanguinated, stripped of their secret inner workings. We struggle to identify the precise point where the person becomes object and the body a mere pile of flesh. 

Though we see an eye (underscoring the act of seeing) and a slack open mouth, we never see a face. The anonymous body. The stand-in for ourselves. 

Fifty Years Later

Here we are, looking at ourselves; our own bodies, those of others, bodies of art work, and political bodies, often modulated by a screen. There are things about Brakhage’s film that seem universal, transcending time and place, and others that feel deeply rooted in his own identity as a white American artist-absorbed-into-academics. For one, the masculine urge to visually focus on individual body parts, to measure, to document; the positivist desire to discover and unearth things as they “really” are. The flippant and cheeky sentiment, “we are all sacks of meat underneath our skin tone, our hair, and our genitalia,” is an important reminder and yet also grossly denies the very “real” individual experiences we have, constantly being shaped by our everyday habits, products we consume, and the ways others treat us. 

There are ongoing debates in comment sections and court rooms surrounding people’s access to their life purely based on a visual autopsy. We are not collecting chromosome samples at the door of every bathroom to determine if someone is trans or intersexed or cis. We are not doing DNA tests and ancestral tracings to determine someone’s place of origin, their citizenship, or their race. Our only “proof” is a visual assessment, a perception shaped by a dense matrix of body memories [3]. This matrix tells us, “This person is x and not y. This person is like me and safe. This person is different and must be excised.” This matrix is constantly adapting and adjusting but since that is inconvenient and terrifying, we do all we can to stabilize it. We select a rubric, a “universal body,” and compare all others to that. 

Now more than ever our bodies are also simulated and projected through technology and screens. The new Frankenstein’s monster might just be a pile of digested and regurgitated family photographs - millions of users, trillions of datapoints, one body [4]. Of course this data is weighted and scrubbed to privilege the old universal body: the 6-foot tall white Vitruvian man or the thin white Cover Girl model, “a tacit admission that there is no such thing as a natural body, that merely to live is to actively shape how we look, that we are all artifacts of what we inject and imbibe.” [5] But I wonder what body would be created if the datapoints were equally weighted and they just globbed together to make an infinitely iterated monster [6]. Or maybe the universal body is just a loosely assembled conglomerate of organ-like objects [7], piles of evasive rot and jelly [8], a repeating body gesture [9], risen yeasty doughs [10], sore-riddled cake to be consumed [11], or an instance of animate domestic architecture [12].

Contemporary artists are seeking ways to abstract the body and to convey experiences and identity beyond a visual figurative representation, traversing the dangerous terrain laid out by critics and culture-at-large which demands work not be “too political” but also criticizes when work is “not political enough” (see Tatol’s “Biennialese Blues” [13]). A figurative self-portrait betrays the non-white-cis-hetero-male artist as other, but an abstracted body or a cultural narrative is apparently just “a mood” or “aesthetics.” The artist is saddled with the burden of finding the perfect middle ground which doesn’t exist unless you use the art world’s accepted definition of the universal body [14]. 

Perhaps the body in art, or bodies of art, are expected to be stand-ins for political bodies: “America itself is an abstraction—irrational, violent, and unable to adhere to its own boundaries or act civilized within the international order. Why should the country’s longest-running art survey, especially now in war time, pretend to be any different? Let the crowd offer its many voices. Or so the thinking seems to go,” says critic John Vincler in his essay on the 2026 Whitney Biennial [15]. Variation, multiplicity, and multivocality makes people uncomfortable (or at least a certain, cough cough, kind of critic). 

What is the ‘nature’ of the body in art today?

To ask ourselves and one another:

• What is the assumed universal body in art? Is there any escape of the binary a universal body sets up? If so, what are modes of resistance, self-protection, and/or evasion?
• Are abstracted bodies NOT political enough for the critics? Does abstraction deny issues of race, gender, age, and ability? Is a figurative body didactic?
• Is the body considered to be a “feminine concern” in art? In American culture in general?
• What happens when we consider the body an interface? Or the body as site? Or the body as archive?
• Is the ‘universal body’ unnatural? Are all bodies now ‘unnatural’? 
• Is there something between the universal and the individual? Is it cultural? Does a bodily spectrum exist?
• Is there something different about dissecting the body into sexualized parts (legs, breasts, neck) versus organs and blobs of flesh? 
• What is akin to a pound of flesh in the virtual world?