Boundaries of the Body: Filling Up/Spilling Out – By Jody Servon

We all have had days when we feel uneasy inhabiting our body, uncomfortable in our own skin.

Boundaries of the Body: Filling Up/Spilling Out

By Jody Servon

 

 

 

 

We all have had days when we feel uneasy inhabiting our body, uncomfortable in our own skin. As the body’s largest organ, skin provides a fragile membrane of demarcation between our innards and the atmosphere. These boundaries—between our interior realm and the outside world—are mutated, penetrated, altered, and negotiated on a daily basis. The five artists from Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art’s group show Filling Up/Spilling Out use the body as a vehicle to challenge the limitations and confines of our physical and social existence. Through sometimes comical and often disturbing actions executed for the camera, these artists focus on the human form as a container, engaging its orifices and residues in unusual rituals. Continuing a tradition in contemporary art of using the body as material for performative video work, Jeanne Dunning, Marit Følstad, Tiago Judas, Michael Oliveri, and Ene-Liis Semper expose the vigor and the vulnerability of flesh. By themselves or with the aid of enlisted participants, these artists carry out intimate acts for the camera that mediate a passage into their inner workings. Watching their individual manipulations of the body, particularly the mouth, we are confronted with a heightened awareness of ourselves.

Jeanne Dunning’s video Getting Dressed (1999) features a young woman challenged with the task of dressing a jelly-filled, bloblike sac in women’s clothing. Frustrated by her attempts to mold the amorphous mound of "flesh" into the confines of the brightly colored outfit, the woman keeps at her arduous assignment as the formless sac jiggles on the surface of the crumpled bed. As each garment is added, this "body" takes on human form: a bulbous head emerges from the neckline, stumps extend out the armholes, the belly spills over the waistband. Finally the "blob" is outfitted and lies vulnerably on display, tragically trying to conform to society’s standards of the "ideal" female body. Grappling with feminist concerns and anxieties about the body, this performance carries fleshy issues into psychological terrain.

Foodfood (2000) by Tiago Judas, acts out a comically gluttonous consumption of unhealthy edibles. Unable or unwilling to use his arms, the hands of others reach in to feed the artist a selection of assorted snack foods, including greasy sandwiches, pastel-colored drinks, and frozen treats. Everyone knows the pleasure of the first taste of something splendid—the first lick of an ice cream cone, the first bite of a freshly made sandwich—and Judas humorously repeats this feeling of gratification. In a playful manner, he gobbles mouthful after mouthful while keeping pace with the carnivalesque musical sound track. His jerky forward and reverse editing, as food slips in and out of his mouth, synthesizes our discomfort with overindulgence and tampers with the mechanics of ingestion. At one point, the artist ends up wearing what he consumes, becoming a game-like example of the adage, "You are what you eat."

Turning to interior spaces of the body, Michael Oliveri’s video features a street performer he encountered during a visit to Havana, Cuba, for the 2000 Bienal de La Habana. In Still Smoking (2000), Oliveri documents the aging man as he slowly sucks on a cigarette while passersby float through the background. The man periodically performs tricks, pulling the burning cigarette in and out of his mouth with the flair of a magician. Storing the smoke deep in his lungs until the cigarette is spent, the man then chews up and spits out the remains. As he swallows and eventually regurgitates the polluted air, the slow motion, close-up footage is accompanied by a melodic tune timed to the progression of this endurance test. His visible effort to contain the smoke causes a rising awareness of the pacing of our own inhales and exhales. We are mesmerized and disturbed by the disappearing and reappearing smoke-filled breath of the performer. Oliveri’s portrait causes us to consider anew what we consume and how we ritualize ordinary activities.

Also using her mouth as the centerpiece of a performance, Ene-Liis Semper offers herself up as a conduit between mankind and the earth. Assuming a corpselike posture in Oasis (1999), which we view on a monitor facing up from the floor, Semper uses her mouth as a receptacle for new growth. After another participant’s hands part her lips, dirt is shoveled into the artist’s mouth so that she may mother a new life form—a flower. Undaunted by the accumulation of soil in her orifice, Semper endures this stifling action with only a blink of her eyes. Once the flower is firmly planted, the artist’s eyes peacefully close and never reopen. Following her voluntary surrender to a metaphoric death, the flower is showered with water for continued growth. The conceptual interplay in Oasis embodies a bold statement on the organismic relationship between humans and their environment.

Marit Følstad enlists a partner to act out an intervention with her body that emphasizes the dualities of pain and pleasure, public and private actions, interior and exterior selves. In Strategies for Living (2003), the artist sits motionless while a man, from behind, slowly works his way down her neck with his mouth. Their gaze never meets during this intimate encounter; instead, her vacant expression suggests ambivalence toward his caresses. Throughout this seemingly loving action, neither one of them speaks, though the man periodically emits soft sucking sounds as his lips travel along her naked skin. Only when he pulls away are the traces of his imprint revealed—a trail of bright red hickeys. These raw "love bites," usually hidden from view, are now exposed. Like a territorial demarcation they highlight the physical boundaries between people, loneliness in relationships, and the marks we leave on each other.

At times confrontational and unsettling, the videos in Filling Up/Spilling Out briefly address some of the physical and psychological challenges of occupying a human body. Through their thought-provoking performances and self-inflicted discomforts, Dunning, Judas, Oliveri, Semper, and Følstad heighten our awareness of the body’s inherent mutability. These visceral works arouse corporeal awareness, with an added twist of wit, reminding us that the edges of our realities are blurred as we navigate through our surroundings, experiencing everyday acts that fill us up and spill us out.

Filling Up/Spilling Out will run from March 20 to June 6, 2004 at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. For more information please visit http://www.palmbeachica.org/.