Core Response 2: A Discussion of Stone in Conversation with Contemporary Art

Mike Kelley, Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects, 1990

Coming from an art history/theory background (which, I should confess, might become a recurring theme of my analyses), it was not so easy for me to digest the last few bits of Stone’s article that draws from various studies about the body, the subject, and the death of the body as a public spectacle.

The discussion of aesthetic implications is absolutely necessary, especially if we are unpacking the evolution of the spectacularization or fetishization of the physical body. This is a concept that harkens all the way back to what Lacan termed “imagos of the fragmented body,” and more recently in Julia Kristeva’s essay on abjection in 1982. The concept of the “abject” in art indicates a grotesque mass of uncontained selfhood, the paradigm of physical spectacularization, through the display of bodily fragments, leaky bodies, and corporeal materials. The reclamation of the human body through the investigation of abjection colors the work of many prominent contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Mike Kelley, and others.

These artists call our attention to the threat that the bodily imago faces from what Stone calls the “radical refiguration” of the body and the rest of the world, “brought about in part through the mediation of technology.” The increasing preoccupation of contemporary auteurs with bodily fragments signals an anxiety in the postmodern age of such disembodiment, and functions as an attempt to hold on to the bodies “at a time when the body is being replaced and eclipsed by technology and prosthetics,” as art historian Simon Taylor argues in his 1993 publication (just two years after Stone’s article!). According to Stone, Barker suggests that “the human body gradually ceased to be perceived as public spectacle,” but what constitutes the "public" sphere? I guess I have to disagree with Barker here, because I align myself with artists engaged in oppositional practices more so than I do with engineers or cyborgs. In some ways, the human body has become more of a spectacle, a fetish, a phobic object — than ever before.

I think Stone’s research on the decoupling of the subject and the body is compelling, and I do agree with a lot of his analyses. What I wanted to convey through this post is that while there is no doubt about the technological impact on the changing notions of the body and the subject, it is dangerous to generalize what is true of a certain academic discipline as an overarching social phenomenon.

Yes, there are phone sex workers and VR engineers who morph into “desiring machines” rendered by technology; but we must also be aware of the increasing abundance and popularity of performance artists and corpophiliac sculptors who are struggling to reclaim the bodies we inhabit in the real world.