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Body images
Perspectives
Book Body images Body of Art is a book the colour and size of a breeze block that could break your coffee table. Don’t fret; there is much of interest in this rich collection of art for health professionals. The images comprehensively span humanity’s take on our own form, going from the tubby Venus of Willendorf made around 24 000 BB (before bariatric) to Ryan Trecartin’s frenzied video Center Jenny (2013) of American youth and their aspirations for physical perfection. With themed sections, “Beauty”, unsurprisingly, is up front. We see both Botticelli and Velázquez’s Venuses but, more daringly, there is a double page spread that contrasts the sublime bust of the monocular Nefertiti with the grotesquerie of one of Willem De Kooning’s toothy women. Joan Jonas’ work Mirror Check (1970) is rightly highlighted, a performance in which the artist slowly observes aspects of her body with a small hand mirror. We are told that the work is a reflection on “self-scrutiny as a powerful aspect of the female experience”. For medics this work could make us reflect on patients’ own perceptions of their bodies.
“…there is much of interest in this rich collection of art for health professionals” “Power” features the 1982 work of Jo Spence, a photographer who wrote the words “Property of Jo Spence” over her left breast after a doctor “without introduction…bent over me and began to ink a cross onto the area of flesh”. One would hope such behaviour is no longer common practice but it still comes as a shock to be reminded that this attitude was once a commonplace abuse of power by the medical profession. “Sex and Gender” is the chapter for the gynaecology, urology, and genitourinary medicine workers. Here we find the boldness of
Joan Jonas. Photo: Roberta Neiman
Body of Art Phaidon, 2015. Pp 440. £39·95 ISBN 978071486966 7
In the “Identity” section we find the brilliantly lurid pinks of Philip Guston’s canvas Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973). This self-portrait has the artist’s bloated face puffing on a cigarette while he lies in bed caramelising himself with a plate of oozing cakes on his taut tummy. This is the image of self-indulgence, one for the diabetologists.
Joan Jonas, Mirror Check (1970), performance, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, 1972
424
Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), the priapic exaggerations of Aubrey Beardsley, and the bored dehumanisation of Otto Dix’s sex workers in The Salon 1 (1921). “Emotion Embodied” is especially intriguing and begins with one of Rineke Dijkstra’s optimistic photographs of immediately post-partum women from 1994. These contrast sharply with the stark tragedy of Käthe Kollwitz’s Woman with a Dead Child (1903). Psychiatrists might find interest in the busts of F X Messerschmidt from 1771 that capture facial expressions in a variety of startling contortions. “The Body’s Limits” section has Maria Lassnig’s painting of misery on the wards—Krankenhaus (2005) in which three figures with suffering faces recall the daily trials of frail elderly inpatients. Not everything here will suit all. Theodor Adorno famously questioned the position of poetry after Auschwitz, but one suspects Spencer Tunick pays little heed to such qualms. In “Bodies and Space” we get one of his dire shots of people lying around naked, Consumed 2 (2003), in this case at the make-up section of Selfridges, a crass image that conflates consumerism and the concentration camps. “The Abject Body”, however, highlights the brilliant Cloaca (2000) by Wim Delvoye, an enormous artificial gastrointestinal tract that works like a robotic car production line to make faeces. A work that reinvigorates your own wonder at the actual human body. Lastly, in “The Absent Body” Carey Young’s Inventory (2007) asks how much the body is worth at contemporary prices for each element we contain. The answer was £13 002. This terrific book is worth more than gold—in your body of course.
John Quin www.thelancet.com Vol 387 January 30, 2016
Book Body images Body of Art is a book the colour and size of a breeze block that could break your coffee table. Don’t fret; there is much of interest in this rich collection of art for health professionals. The images comprehensively span humanity’s take on our own form, going from the tubby Venus of Willendorf made around 24 000 BB (before bariatric) to Ryan Trecartin’s frenzied video Center Jenny (2013) of American youth and their aspirations for physical perfection. With themed sections, “Beauty”, unsurprisingly, is up front. We see both Botticelli and Velázquez’s Venuses but, more daringly, there is a double page spread that contrasts the sublime bust of the monocular Nefertiti with the grotesquerie of one of Willem De Kooning’s toothy women. Joan Jonas’ work Mirror Check (1970) is rightly highlighted, a performance in which the artist slowly observes aspects of her body with a small hand mirror. We are told that the work is a reflection on “self-scrutiny as a powerful aspect of the female experience”. For medics this work could make us reflect on patients’ own perceptions of their bodies.
“…there is much of interest in this rich collection of art for health professionals” “Power” features the 1982 work of Jo Spence, a photographer who wrote the words “Property of Jo Spence” over her left breast after a doctor “without introduction…bent over me and began to ink a cross onto the area of flesh”. One would hope such behaviour is no longer common practice but it still comes as a shock to be reminded that this attitude was once a commonplace abuse of power by the medical profession. “Sex and Gender” is the chapter for the gynaecology, urology, and genitourinary medicine workers. Here we find the boldness of
Joan Jonas. Photo: Roberta Neiman
Body of Art Phaidon, 2015. Pp 440. £39·95 ISBN 978071486966 7
In the “Identity” section we find the brilliantly lurid pinks of Philip Guston’s canvas Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973). This self-portrait has the artist’s bloated face puffing on a cigarette while he lies in bed caramelising himself with a plate of oozing cakes on his taut tummy. This is the image of self-indulgence, one for the diabetologists.
Joan Jonas, Mirror Check (1970), performance, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, 1972
424
Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), the priapic exaggerations of Aubrey Beardsley, and the bored dehumanisation of Otto Dix’s sex workers in The Salon 1 (1921). “Emotion Embodied” is especially intriguing and begins with one of Rineke Dijkstra’s optimistic photographs of immediately post-partum women from 1994. These contrast sharply with the stark tragedy of Käthe Kollwitz’s Woman with a Dead Child (1903). Psychiatrists might find interest in the busts of F X Messerschmidt from 1771 that capture facial expressions in a variety of startling contortions. “The Body’s Limits” section has Maria Lassnig’s painting of misery on the wards—Krankenhaus (2005) in which three figures with suffering faces recall the daily trials of frail elderly inpatients. Not everything here will suit all. Theodor Adorno famously questioned the position of poetry after Auschwitz, but one suspects Spencer Tunick pays little heed to such qualms. In “Bodies and Space” we get one of his dire shots of people lying around naked, Consumed 2 (2003), in this case at the make-up section of Selfridges, a crass image that conflates consumerism and the concentration camps. “The Abject Body”, however, highlights the brilliant Cloaca (2000) by Wim Delvoye, an enormous artificial gastrointestinal tract that works like a robotic car production line to make faeces. A work that reinvigorates your own wonder at the actual human body. Lastly, in “The Absent Body” Carey Young’s Inventory (2007) asks how much the body is worth at contemporary prices for each element we contain. The answer was £13 002. This terrific book is worth more than gold—in your body of course.
John Quin www.thelancet.com Vol 387 January 30, 2016