Body Experience | YURUOHAN

Keywords:

The animality of the human body

The integration of body and objects/tools/machines

Body experience in the city

In my work, there are many body structures. When I make visual associations, I subconsciously use my body to interact with the object. These body images are savage, primitive, restless, crawling and scratching like animals. But they are isolated and silent. What does the behaviour of my own body in the painting represent？ Can the human body be alienated by the city？ Maybe in the city, we all have this animalistic side. We control the desires of our bodies, but in the middle of the night, we abandon all reason and restraint and let our bodies control us.

In Body, Space and Postmodernity, Minan Wang writes 'We see that the long history of churches and monasteries is the silent history of the body; Self-denial, asceticism, meditation, prayer, celibacy, fasting, and poverty are all basic means of controlling the body and extinguishing its boiling energy. Because, the body is an animal thing, is shared by people and animals. To get rid of his animal nature, man must reject, with the greatest possibility, his animal base: the body.'

However, we can see a return of the body in the work of many 20th artists. There are artists who also paint bodies with an animal appearance. Such as the work of Frida Kahlo, TIn the Little Deer. In this work, she replaced the head of the injured deer with her own head, and she empathized with the injured deer. In Heidegger's view, the "animal's body, that is to say, ‘is filled with an overwhelming urge to the body, body the word is in all impulse, drive and passion of domination of the structure as a whole. These impulses, drive and passion have life will, for the survival of the animal is only the body, it is the will to power.'

Maria Lassnig's self-portraits were frequently expressed in traumatic, surrealistic forms that merged the human figure with the animal and the machine.

'Reality may look deformed but isn't because it takes place on another level, the level of feelings. If this often coincides with the level that's seen visually, then it's because my feeling of distance, trained by dealing with external things, has acquired a blind confidence so that external reality—the body everyone sees—is congruent with felt reality, the reality that's so difficult to define.'(Maria Lassnig, 1948)

These works recapture the animality of human beings from the hands of reason and promote the greed, desire and fragility of human beings

It is not hard to find such figures in the works of some contemporary artists. The animalized body is a metaphor for the state of people in the city and the relationship between people.

In addition to incorporating bodies with animals, some artists have incorporated their own bodies with machines and objects. These machines gradually grew organs, blood and flesh. ‘Deleuze removes the concrete content of the body. He does not care about the internal details of the body, but abstracts the body as a productive force, as a productive desire without content. Deleuze's machine of desire is constantly producing and creating.‘（Minan Wang，2005）

In Sarah Lucas‘ works, the metaphors of sex, death and the body are more clearly conveyed through the combination of everyday objects. It also shows her exploration of the narrative of things.

In the book Body and City, Paul Sennett contemns modern civilization from an alternative perspective of the relationship between city and body. In Sennett's architecture, the urban development history of human beings since ancient Greece is summarized into three body images named after different organs of the body, which correspond to three urban concepts and types in human history. Each type reflects the relationship between body experience and city image, in which the body experience shapes the city image, and the city image, in turn, responds to and strengthens the body experience.

Sonnette tries to tell us that culture once played an important role in the creation and use of urban space, but our current concept of the city is contributing to the loss of culture and the numbness of people's minds. Only when human beings return to their bodies and senses can they truly recover their bodies and cultures that have been elbowed out by modern urban civilization.

Rath’s robots combine mechanical movement with ominous Orwellian body parts that grant them an uncannily humorous life while retaining a look that’s got a remarkably uncluttered visual appeal.

Art historian Johann Winckelmann believes that 'the body movements of the bazaar provide an image of physical order in a troubled world.'(Johann Winckelmann, 1969) We've been trying to understand the world in terms of our bodies.

Artist

Maria Lassnig

Lee Lozano

Louise Bourgeois

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe

Sarah Lucas

Paula Rego

Tala Madani

Frida Kahlo

Alan Rath

Clayton Schiff

Books and resources