Week 3 — Ada Jiang

In the last class discussion on body and identity, we examined a few relevant pieces that use female bodies as the subject to reveal and debate stereotypes on how female bodies should be represented: Joan Semmel’s A Necessary Elaboration, Yasumasa Morimura’s reinterpretation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia, Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. - Starification Object Series. All these works question what it means to represent female forms, encourage breaking away from the idealized female nude and placing female bodies in broader contexts such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, science.

We talked about the Body as a fluid signifying system, beyond just the female body, there’s also been an undergoing transformation. Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy encourages free expression of sexuality and “breaks taboos against the vitality of naked body in movement”. The work best explains her quote ‘life of the body is more variously expressive than a sex-negative society can admit’. In The Mythic Being sereis, Adrian Piper dressed up as an African American man, her alter ego, and moved through people as medium. She experimented with fragmentation of the self to better understand who she is through the responses of the others.

My favorite exhibition from week 3’s gallery visit was Paul Stephen Benjamin’s Pure, Very, New. The collection investigates the meaning of “black” as a color as the artist attempted to represent the color in every shade and medium, suggesting it can not only be seen, but also heard and sensed differently. In contrary to many artworks I’ve seen that have an either implicit or explicit political stance, Benjamin took a different approach by simply providing the platform for viewers to ponder the profoundness of any cultural, social or racial issue. The open-endedness of his work invites viewers’ free interpretation based on their own experiences.

Although I haven’t got a chance to see Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art at the Whitney this week, I was deeply fascinated by 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (1965), a 10 performances interdisciplinary project that combined the expertise of a group of engineers and artists. Only if I could be present at the live performances, I could fully experience the scale and complexity of the pieces. The forms of art expression were manifold and made possible by numerous technologies that started to prevail in the twentieth century. Through imagining my participation on site, I identified the theme of “interdependency”, though not explicitly addressed in the archive, to be present or implied in many of these performances. John Cage explored different acoustic possibilities with principles of chance through the use of communication media in Variations VII. The amplification of the sound broadcasted in the Armory was dependent on the the acoustic material from outside the Armory, with connections established by the use 10 telephone lines. Robert Rauschenberg, in his Open Score, tied the sound of tennis balls, through players’ movement, to stage lighting achieved by FM frequency. In Physical Things by Steve Paxton, the non-dancer participants wearing radio receivers moving freely in the polyethylene tube structure determined how the pre-recorded everyday sound interlace with one another. These non-traditional performances experimented with the relationships between performers and non-performers, sound and image, objects and space, with technology blurring the lines and establishing unexpected connections to create symphony.