Any show about “the body” has the backhanded blessing of wide appeal. Everybody has one — so what? The thesis of “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body,” a survey of more than 65 modern and contemporary artists currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, is more specific than its title suggests: It proposes that 20th-century artists used abstraction to explore the human body’s changeability, and press the limits of identity.
Lanka Tattersall, a curator in the museum’s drawings and prints department, frames the show as filling the gaps in art history, in particular the story of modern art as told by MoMA around midcentury, marked by the abstract self-expression of manly men, like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. “Vital Signs,” instead, features a cross-racial and international selection of women and gender-nonconforming artists, nearly all from the museum’s collection.
There are fresh acquisitions such as twee body-horror ceramics (a woman merged with a book titled “Historia del Hombre,” or a cob studded with toothy lumps) by Tecla Tofano, a Venezuelan artist who died in 1997. Lynda Benglis is here, with a classic condiment-hued latex “pour,” an almost obligatory nod to 1960s feminist critiques of ab-ex excess. And there are happy surprises, like Mako Idemitsu’s video “Inner Man,” in which a mustachioed nude frolics over footage of a woman in a pale kimono.
It’s an understated show, shadowed with critical thinking. After all, many of the thorniest issues of the 21st century — immigration, trans rights, mass incarceration — are inextricably connected to the concept of the body: where a body comes from, how a person may change their body, which bodies are confined.
That is why it’s frustrating that the show mostly sticks to the 20th century, without reckoning with the complications introduced to its subject by the internet, social media and big data. “Vital Signs” wants to address timely debates around identity but feels stuck in art history.
It’s a formal show, concerned with fundamentals like color and line. Many works feature wiggly, organic shapes, sometimes given eyes or nipples, that insinuate human anatomy. Some of these artists approach corporality the way they might compose a canvas. In an untitled 1957 painting by the Texan artist Forrest Bess — perhaps the most severe example — a hashmarked finger of black and yellow probes a hot grisaille field. Bess based his pictures on visions related to his ideas about androgyny, a desire he consummated through a series of operations.
Embodiment can feel constricting. As these artists unfurl their bodies into various intangible designs, the connection to “the body” becomes tenuous — and sometimes thrilling. Why do Lee Lozano’s furious drawings of tools, like a 1963 rendering of a misassembled pipe wrench, evoke the human form? Maybe because we’re seeking new shapes.
The show’s thesis is sharper in some of the more conceptual pieces. José Leonilson’s “34 com scars (34 with Scars),” 1991, a white textile roughly sutured with black thread as if by a battlefield surgeon, stems from the Brazilian artist’s H.I.V. diagnosis. And the Canadian artist Jackie Winsor’s “Burnt Piece,” 1977-78, a scorched, striated cube made of cement and wood, invokes bodies without likeness.
If the implications of virtual identities and alternate selves can’t be fully investigated through 20th-century work, the precursors are there: in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Roberta’s Construction Chart #2,” 1976, a plan for facial alterations related to a persona she inhabited in the 1970s; and in the systematic approach to corporality taken by Adrian Piper, Charles Gaines and Mary Kelly. Gaines’s eerie manual pixelization of photographic portraits, broken down into a grid and then superimposed on those of other people to make a kind of generalized average face, was a sardonic exercise in 1978. But similar techniques now underpin facial recognition software.
Only one piece in the exhibition was made after 2000: “Misdirected Kiss,” a photo-collage mural from 2018 by Martine Syms, an artist who argues that online life and images of “the body” shape abstractions like youth and Blackness. At 36, she is the youngest artist in the show by 20 years. The wallpaper’s orthogonal clatter of screenshots of text and digital portraits of Black women, including a double selfie of Tyra Banks and the artist, runs along the wall after you exit the show, above couches where museum visitors check their phones.
Syms’s work — acquired by the museum this year — proves the curators’ awareness of the issues that make a show like “Vital Signs” vital: the impacts of the internet, the tension between virtual and physical realities, the alienating avatars built and processed, often without our consent, from the data we shed. At its best, the show highlights how inadequate art that emphasizes the expression of discrete individuals can now feel against our networked identity crisis.
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