The Body in Contemporary Art

World of Art

by Sally O'Reilly

A new volume in the acclaimed World of Art featuring work across a range of media that represents the human body. This international survey presents art made over the last two decades in which the human form is central. From painting and sculpture to installation, video art, and performance, it examines the roles played by the body in art, from being the subject of portraiture to becoming an active presence in participatory events.

Organized thematically, the book focuses on subjects such as nature and technology, the grotesque, identity politics, and the place of the individual in society. Featuring work by artists such as Matthew Barney, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Oleg Kulik, and Ernesto Neto, it shows how the body continues to be pivotal to the understanding and expression of our place in the universe. 251 illustrations, 202 in colour

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Sally O'Reilly (born 1971) is a writer, critic, teacher, editor and events organiser. She was Writer in Residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2010/11. She has contributed to Art Monthly, Contemporary Magazine, Frieze, Cabinet, Modern Painters, and Time Out as well as writing catalogue essays for numerous international art exhibitions. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames and Hudson in 2009. As well as a knowledge of contemporary art, her writing displays a keen awareness of debates in science, politics and critical theory. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[Michelle Bechtel · Rating 4 out of 5]

love artists who match each other’s freak

[Nathalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Succinct, beautifully designed and relatively comprehensive as far as a survey like this goes — it could have easily been two, three times longer with even more great examples.

‘How the body is judged and treated, how readily its health and well-being are protected or neglected has become the focus of many politicians, activists, artists and concerned citizens.’ (p. 8)

‘In 2022 the Global Wellness Institue valued the wellness market at 5.6 trillion dollars (…) Within this maelstrom contemporary artists continue to explore what it means to be and to have a body, to be at once a singular person and an unstable bundle of sensations, states of mind, experiences and relations.’ (pp. 8-9)

‘The body is more that its own substance and senses. (…) A person has and is a body, and they are also more than their body.’ (p. 38)

‘Our bodies are continually subject to the demands of clocks, calendars, timetables and deadlines, everyday impositions that carve up the disorderly expanses of the universe into manageable abstractions. The organic rhythms of the body are warped — a little, or alarmingly so — to fit to this infrastructure that holds together contemporary everyday life and international business. Peaks and troughs in health, both mental and physical, are testament to our ability to cope with being pulled out of shape in this way.’ (p. 84)

‘The labouring body is often tucked away at the margins, figuratively and literally, in kitchens at the back or downstairs, in factories beyond town boundaries or in another country altogether, in vast distribution centres in the middle of nowhere.’ (p. 100)

‘Autobiography is a powerful tool and personal experience and eyewitness accounts given an artist license to represent openly. But telling the stories of others who cannot tell their own is also vital.’ (p. 192)

‘Understanding the body has deepened and made great leaps through developments in medical imaging, from the invention of the microscope in the late 16th century and the discovery of X-rays in 1895, to late 20th century developments in scanning for radioactive tracers and digital archiving and distribution systems. Medical diagnosis is now aided by information gleaned at the scales of molecules, DNA, cells, tissue, organs and body-wide systems. Artists have regarded this technology with ambivalence. On the one hand lives are saved by diagnostic tools that do not require a body to be cut open. On the other, the patient is anonymized, turned into data and medicalised as the bearer of symptoms rather than a full person of will and contradiction.’ (p. 218)

‘The body is an interface between machine and flesh. Technology and biology intersect variously, from commonplace glasses and hearing aids to cutting-edge brain computer interfaces that bypass paralysed limbs with neurologically controlled prosthetics. We take many devices for granted, though our lives would be very different without them. A breast pump, for instance, aids the disentanglement of mother and baby, externalising and storing milk to release the mother from the restrictions of an intense feeding schedule.’ (p. 221)

‘(…) the importance of care in times of socio-economic and ecological precarity. Binaries such as gender and species difference, and differentiation between nature, culture, science and spirituality are rendered redundant if one accepts the interdependence of all things. When a body accepts that it is in unending relation with all else in its ecosystem, responsibility for survival is distributed everywhere. Mutual care is an imperative for the survival of all. We are each but a spirited cell of the body that is this planet, and the consequences of our tiny actions spiral out through the myriad, vast, interconnected systems through which we persist.’ (p. 255)

[Anaïs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una raccolta di artisti e opere che hanno trattato il corpo in varie accezioni. Fornisce tanti spunti ma non approfondisce veramente nessuno di loro. È una sorta di elenco di opere e artisti che hanno trattato una tematica piuttosto che un’altra.

[Arianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tutto ci ricorda che le immagini sono in grado di influenzarci tanto quanto l'esperienza vissuta, e che l'impegno può essere di tipo intellettuale o emotivo quanto fattivo. E infine che i nostri corpi sono coinvolti, se non essenziali, in tutto ciò che facciamo, pensiamo e diciamo.

[Bistra Ivanova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Интересна и богата беше, научих за много нови готини артисти, чиито сайтове разгледах, но така и не я довърших... :-)

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of contemporary artists and the themes associated with the use of a body in the making of art.