Embodied in a Virtual World

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

In one city, three views of the predicament of the body in a virtual world: an art-historical show on the Nude, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art loosely organised around a trope of embodiment, and a roundup of design in the new technologies fabricating augmentations of ‘flesh’.

Curating anything on the body in art is up against the off-camera presence of images of the body everywhere, in photography, commercial art, medical science and pornography. The different aims of marketing images, medical imaging and porn rival the thinking of embodiment in our virtual world. In the exhibitions, these ubiquitous genres of representation threatened to eclipse the aesthetic of the traditional art nude. Meanwhile, the imagining of other bodies using virtual techniques was more animated, while the whole distinction between embodiment and the virtual was transgressed in the energising show of new technologies.

It may speak to the spirit of the time that desire is more at home among the weightless avatars of the virtual. And yet, the paradox remains: despite the internet and so much of the world moving on-line, we remain embodied. We are shackled to the physical reality of being in a body and of needing that connection to live a life—even a virtual life.

‘In a virtual culture, the thingness of painting is what calls us back to galleries, and, when the “thing” in question portrays a body, it can call to us with special force’, so Justin Paton hopes, writing in the catalogue essay for the exhibition Nude: art from the Tate collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. But is this right, ‘What is the place of the painted nude today? Does... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Pierre Bonnard, The bath, 1925. Oil paint on canvas, 86 x 120.6cm. Tate: Presented by Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill through the Contemporary Art Society 1930. © Estate of Pierre Bonnard. Image © Tate, London 2016.

Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989. From Portfolio ‘Compleat’ 1985-2012. Poster, 27.9 x 71.1cm sheet. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 2014. © Guerrilla Girls. Courtesy of guerrillagirls.com