OUT OF BODY

 

 

 

 

The body is our general medium for having a world. 

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty¹

An artist’s body is a tool, an inherently political, socially charged site. The body is a malleable medium presenting possibilities for self-representation and mark marking—the corporeal surface serving as canvas or instrument.  

Bodily art, in which the creator is both artist and subject, seemingly allows direct access both to the artist’s body as the root of creation and to the artist’s persona as the locus of meaning. Yet such works raise questions of the instability, intersectionality, and incoherence of visual enactments of selfhood.

In 1970s, the Body Art movement was often clouded by essentializing assumptions that physical characteristics indicated identity and individual experience. Yet corporeal art allows us to consider how individual artists channel the body to explore multiplicity, fragmentation, ambiguity, and perplexity through the framework of the self.

 


With transparent shafts of blue, green, and magenta light segmented diagonally, this Copy Art creation captures the artist’s face alongside her left hand pressed against the surface of a photocopy machine. Her hand, its index finger outstretched, contrasts vividly with her face, which appears more grainy and washed out, her eyes closed and brow slightly furrowed.
Sonia Landy Sheridan (American, b. 1925), The Magic Finger (Self Portrait with Pointing Finger), 1970 , Copy art; 3M Color-in-Color I on paper, Overall: 8 1/2 × 10 7/8 in. (21.6 × 27.7 cm), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Gift of the artist; MIS.2004.84.565.

Technology not only mediates but produces subjectivities in the contemporary world.

—Amelia Jones²

Long before self(ie)-representations through Snapchat filters and Facetune effects, Sonia Landy Sheridan pressed her skin to the screen of a Xerox copier to collapse the distance between human and machine. An innovator of Copy Art in the 1970s, Landy Sheridan conflated her skin—the boundary between self and other—with the filmic glass, reproducing her instantaneous likeness in a mechanized form. According to the artist, she harnessed emerging technology to explore the limitations of her lived bodily experience: “The machines seem to extend my awareness on so many levels.”³ Landy Sheridan also observed, “The machine is not an ‘it’ to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.”


In black ink on white paper, the artist has drawn a tombstone inscribed, “JAN, 1978. HERE LIES SONIA’S LEFT THUMB. . . . / BURIED FOR MURDEROUS / INTENT / The fingerprint is / a repeat of the brain’s / structure. When the print is thus [symbol] an aberration / occurs and murder may / result. Why? See my left / thumb print.” Outlined by a faint blue tint, the line-drawn headstone is imprinted with an ink drawing of the artist’s thumb print, positioned above an ink spiral. The lower portion of the grave, outstretched on a barely suggested ground, consists of a rainbow-shaped drawing of concentric half-circles, surrounded by a faint green aura.

Sonia Landy Sheridan transcribes her fingerprint—an authoritative, identifying mark—as a sign recording her direct, bodily intervention on the page. The physical body of the artist is absent, yet her past-presence is signified through this bodily trace, in addition to her handwritten inscription and signature, which reiterate her role as both author and subject. In describing the thumbprint as “a repeat of the brain’s structure,” Landy Sheridan suggests a link between the surface of the body and the internal landscape, dissolving the distinction between exterior and interior self. Despite the indexical function of the thumbprint, this bodily trace is not an indicator of embodied presence, but rather, like a gravestone, is a marker of absence.

Sonia Landy Sheridan (American, b. 1925), Here Lies Sonia’s Left Thumb . . . January 20, 1978, Ink and wash on paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Gift of the artist; D.2004.84.420.

At the center of a white page, the artist has affixed a shrunken plastic replica of her handprint using strands of green and red thread. The handprint appears as a negative, visible as a white print in a cloudlike background of black pigment. Below the fastened object, the artist has inscribed in ink, “IRON OXIDE ON PLASTIC BAKED AT 400 [degree symbol] F / SONIA’S HAND (97.77) / REDUCED FROM HAND SIZE TO ABOVE BY / ACTION OF HEAT ON THE PLASTIC. / ‘A TRACE OF SONIA IN TIME’ . . . SHRUNKEN HAND PRINT.”

Operating at the intersection of art and science, Sonia Landy Sheridan distorts her handprint—a symbolic encapsulation of the self “in time”—to preserve a moment of her ever-changing body. 

The handprint suggests a link to the “real” body of the artist, yet the manipulation of her “shrunken” handprint, which is a “negative” visible only because of the ink around it, disrupts the tie to her corporeal existence, uprooting the illusion of reality. Landy Sheridan further suggests both the presence and absence of her hand, which penned the handwritten inscription and presumably stitched the plastic sheet to the paper with red and green fibers.

Sonia Landy Sheridan (American, b. 1925), A Trace of Sonia in Time . . . Shrunken Hand Print, September 7, 1977, Collage, ink on paper with plastic affixed to page with thread, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Gift of the artist; MIS.2004.84.424.


With transparent shafts of blue, green, and magenta light segmented diagonally, this Copy Art creation captures the artist’s face alongside her left hand pressed against the surface of a photocopy machine. Her hand, its index finger outstretched, contrasts vividly with her face, which appears more grainy and washed out, her eyes closed and brow slightly furrowed.
Mika Rottenberg (Argentinian, b. 1976), S12 (Ass Print No. 3), 2006. Graphite, gold leaf, and acrylic on paper. Overall: 48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9 cm). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Anonymous Gift; 2018.37.318. © Mika Rottenberg.

I’m interested in people who sell their body in one form or another. Do you really own your self?

—Mika Rottenberg

Mika Rottenberg utilizes self-representation to explore how the body—particularly the persona of the female artist—becomes packaged for marketplace consumption. Rottenberg stamps her naked body across the canvas, creating “ass prints,” which function as indexical marks of her creative process and record her labor in the final product packaged for capitalist exchange. The prints hyperbolize the artist signature as an art-market emblem of authentication and, therefore, economic value.

Rottenberg exercises creative autonomy and bodily agency, as she maintains the power to shape the production of this commodity, while questioning the relationship between labor value and exchange value. Conflating artistic labor and artwork, Rottenberg underscores the potential for bodies to be subsumed within systems of capitalist consumption. The “ass print” becomes the site of commodity fetishism, given the function of the “ass” as both an object of heterosexual erotic desire under the male capitalist gaze and an instrument of capitalist production enabling the creation of this commodity. “I have this claustrophobic feeling that I am physically trapped inside my body, inside my sexuality, inside my gender,” she noted. “I want to try to spit that out, and package it. Maybe there is a way out from oppression to liberation, when you are able to observe it—to look at it as an object.”

Consider: How does the experience of these bodily imprints through our screens in this virtual format shape our encounter with the tactile, corporeal markings left by Sonia Landy Sheridan and Mika Rottenberg?


A Polaroid photograph captures the nude torso of the artist covered in deep blue paint accented with white, wavelike lines. Standing in front of a blue background matching the color of her body paint, Campos-Pons has two milk-filled baby bottles strung around her neck, covering her breasts and dripping onto a wooden vessel shaped like a boat, which she holds in both hands in front of her stomach.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons transforms her body to plumb a collective diasporic unconscious, channeling the liminality of the Middle Passage by painting her body blue with wavelike markings and holding a simple boat-shaped wooden vessel. With a pair of milk-filled baby bottles over her breasts, Campos-Pons further conjures the mythical Yoruba figure Yemayá—the spiritual Mother of all lifeforms who reigns over the sea, providing nourishment for all beings. 

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuban, b. 1959), Untitled (Breast and Bottle Feeding), from the series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Alla, 1994, Polaroid photograph. Overall: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Purchased through the Contemporary Art Fund; 2009.12, © María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Describing this work, Kimberly Juanita Brown writes, “Campos-Pons’s photographic self-portrait captures maternal ambiguity and translates its symbolic power through the lens of loss. . . . As a source of movement and dispossession, as a source of regeneration and reclamation, the sea marks itself against all bodies, all forms of motion.” According to the artist, this photograph fits into her larger body of work in which “I end up covering the body up a lot, transforming the body, making the body just a repository of many layers from which we construct the total meaning.”

A Polaroid photograph depicts the artist from the shoulders up as she faces the camera with her eyes closed, her bare skin seemingly covered with splattered layers of brown paint. Standing before a spare white background, the artist has inscribed across her chest in capital letters, “IDENTITY COULD BE A TRAGEDY.”

María Magdalena Campos-Pons underscores the instability, fluidity, and multiplicity of identity while conveying the trap inherent in representing selfhood. Her self-portraiture seeks to explore aspects of her experience as a Black Cuban woman of Chinese ancestry today, while simultaneously problematizing the very prospect of conveying identity. Describing her series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Alla, she noted, “What I was trying to say is this is who I am. I am as much black, Cuban, woman, Chinese. I am this tapestry of all of that, and the responses to that could be very complicated and could include even anguish and pain.” 

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuban, b. 1959), Untitled (Identity Could Be A Tragedy), from the series When I Am Not Here / Estoy Alla, 1996, Polaroid photograph, Overall: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Purchased in honor of Hugh Freund, Class of 1967, Class of 2008P; 2008.7, © María Magdalena Campos-Pons.


Berni Searle (South African, b. 1964), Number Five of Five from the portfolio Stain, from the Discolored Series, 2000, Digital print with text, Edition 3/20, Sheet: 19 9/16 × 17 11/16 in. (49.7 × 45 cm), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, College: Purchased through the William B. and Evelyn F. Jaffe (58, 60, & 63) Fund; PR.2002.67.2 © Berni Searle.

Berni Searle uses her body to render visible the trauma experienced as a “colored” woman of African and European ancestry under South African apartheid. Searle used Egyptian henna to “stain” the soles of her feet, which appear bruised, serving as lasting markers of pain inflicted particularly upon the bodies of Black women. In “coloring” her feet, Searle calls attention to the arbitrary racial classifications under apartheid while problematizing “color” as a tangible marker of identity. 

“Exposing myself involves a process of claiming and points to the idea that there are a range of axes that inform identity which are interconnected, determining relationships of dependency and domination in any given context.”

—Berni Searle¹⁰

Searle calls upon the history of documentary photography as a colonialist tool of oppression used to catalog, objectify, and dehumanize the Black female subject as Other. Searle presents her fragmented, anonymized body yet rejects victimization; instead, she commands creative power to problematize the visual representation of the complexities of identity. The artist challenges the historic erasure and oppression of Black women while subverting the white, masculine colonial gaze.


Fringe captures a nude subject lying on her side atop a white sheet with her back to the camera, a white cloth draped over her buttocks. With her head propped on a white pillow and her arm outstretched along her body, her bare back is marked by a sutured wound stretching diagonally from her shoulder to her hip. Upon close examination, the “blood” dripping from the stitched wound consists of red beading, a “fringe” of embellishments falling from her healing suture.
Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe (Ojibwe / Chippewa), Lac Seul First Nation, First Nation, Northern Woodlands, b. 1960), Fringe, 2007, Digital print (pigment on archival paper), 5/5 Sheet: 26 × 67 7/8 in. (66 × 172.4 cm), Image: 21 × 63 in. (53.3 × 160 cm), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Purchased through the Elizabeth and David C. Lowenstein ’67 Fund and the Olivia H. Parker and John O. Parker ’58 Acquisition Fund; 2010.65. © Rebecca Belmore.

“As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself,” stated Rebecca Belmore, describing Fringe. “Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it.”¹¹

Belmore contends that strength lies in perseverance, in the endurance of generational trauma that remains embedded within the individual psyche and collective memory: “[S]he will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. . . . The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear.”¹² The sutured wound across the length of her bare back attests to a legacy of colonial genocide while simultaneously constituting a site of healing and resilience, reflected through the glimmering beads of her healing laceration.