Contemporary Art In New PU Exhibit Uses Body as “Subject and Apparatus”

Dilshanie Perera

During a gallery talk last Sunday about the current Princeton University Art Museum exhibition Body Memory, curators Kelly Baum and Joel Smith spoke of the body’s presence in modern and contemporary art, and its reemergence not as a form to be depicted, but rather as an “expressive device.”

The works in Body Memory run the gamut of media, from photographs and prints to drawings and video. Ms. Baum, who is the Locks Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art at the museum, explained that themes like “desire, power, and the grotesque arise almost necessarily when you organize an exhibition about the body.”

Describing the work of three artists featured in the show, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, and Yinka Shonibare, as “breaking with the classical ideal,” Ms. Baum explained how they use various images to confront racial and gender stereotypes.

Ms. Mendieta’s thirteen photographs are from a series documenting a performance that utilized the quality of grotesque, which Ms. Baum defined as “veering off from convention and designed to trigger feelings of disquiet and discomfort.” Pressing her face to a piece of glass Ms. Mendieta distorts her own image as a way of questioning gender stereotypes of “women as ideal objects of masculine desire,” Ms. Baum observed.

Mr. Shonibare’s 32-minute video depicting the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball uses bodies to tell a story, explained Ms. Baum. The choreography and costuming are precise purposefully selected, and even time is used to create a kind of “cognitive dissonance” as the video plays backwards mid-way through its run.

Ms. Baum mentioned that Mr. Shonibare is known for using Dutch wax cotton fabric in his work. The textiles are typically associated with West Africa, but are “anything but authentic,” said Ms. Baum, who noted that the cloth was first manufactured in Manchester and Holland and is based on Indonesian batik, and was then sold to Western Africans. “The fabric symbolizes the momentous outward political, cultural, economic, and social changes inherent in colonialism,” she said.

Explaining the choice to position photographs from various time periods alongside the contemporary artwork, Mr. Smith, who is the museum’s Curator of Photography, said, “The history of photography is a precursor of a lot of concerns that animate contemporary art.”

According to Mr. Smith, different kinds of photographs are present in Body Memory. Those of the “uncanny body” are related to what Ms. Baum described as the grotesque. One photograph, taken in 1863 by James Wallace Black, depicts a 26-year-old farmer with a thirty-one pound tumor on his shoulder. Entitled “Enchondroma of the Scapula,” the “photo gets its power from its dual nature: it’s a compelling portrait of a handsome face with an evocative expression, but it’s also a body completely other than what we’re accustomed to confronting,” Mr. Smith said.

The “individual body’s relation to the mass” was highlighted in a photograph created by Arthur Mole and John Thomas, who traveled to armed service training camps during World War I to make “mass novelty portraits.” The piece featured in the show is called “Woodrow Wilson: 21,000 Officers and Men, Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio” and as its title suggests, 21,000 men wearing light or dark uniforms assembled to form a pixelated image of Mr. Wilson’s face.

Ms. Baum described the artworks in Body Memory as pieces in which the artist’s presence is palpable, if not directly in the image, then through gestures and the impressions they leave.

Body Memory is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum now through January 4, 2009.

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