The Body Electric

In an age dominated by digital technology, The Body Electric explores themes of the real and virtual, the organic and artificial, moving from the physical world to the screen and back again. Looking across the past 50 years, the exhibition presents an intergenerational and international group of artists who have seized upon the screen as a place to rethink the body and identity, with a particular emphasis on questions of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The Body Electric contextualizes contemporary artists engaging today with digital technology and the influence of the internet within a broader art-historical narrative to reveal shared interests that emerge across generations, despite differing technological means.

The exhibition begins with a pioneering generation of artists active in the mid-1960s—Shigeko Kubota, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Wolf Vostell—for whom the television was both the subject and object of their expanded practices spanning performance, sculpture, and the moving image. Reimagined for the exhibition, a newly created installation by Joan Jonas conflates the physical world and its representation, while footage of performances by the Wooster Group offers a frenetic meditation on the all-pervasive presence of technology and the fusion of body and screen. Works by Sanja Iveković, Howardena Pindell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Cindy Sherman, and Amalia Ulman chart a history of artists turning the lens of the camera onto their own bodies, creating personal spaces of performance, whether via the 1960s Portapak camera or today’s selfie. Disembodied beings and digital avatars populate contributions by Laurie Anderson, Ed Atkins, Pierre Huyghe, and Sidsel Meineche Hansen, while sculptures by Robert Gober and Anicka Yi as well as an immersive installation by Trisha Baga explore the slippery ambiguity of materials poised between the digital and analog, the real and rendered. For Dara Birnbaum, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, and Martine Syms, the lens of the camera creates a space to rethink the representation of sociopolitical identities and to question the structures that govern our understanding of race and gender. The presentation concludes with works by Josh Kline, Carolyn Lazard, Candice Lin and Patrick Staff, and Marianna Simnett that reflect on the malleability of the body, speaking to themes of care, surgical intervention, and chemical and biological processes imperceptible to the human eye.

The Body Electric is accompanied by Icosahedron (2019), an interactive commission by Zach Blas. Conceived as a meta-work for the exhibition, the project takes the form of a work desk with an artificially intelligent crystal ball that predicts the future of prediction. Inspired by influential writers and thinkers such as Ayn Rand, Stewart Brand, Ray Kurzweil, and Michio Kaku, Icosahedron speaks to contemporary society’s preoccupation with the future, viewed through the intersection of technology, fantasy, and science fiction.

Artists in the exhibition: 
Laurie Anderson, Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga, Dara Birnbaum, Zach Blas, James Byrne, Peter Campus, Petra Cortright, Andrea Crespo, Zackary Drucker, Rhys Ernst, VALIE EXPORT, Simone Forti, Robert Gober, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Pierre Huyghe, Juliana Huxtable, Sanja Iveković, Joan Jonas, Josh Kline, Shigeko Kubota, Carolyn Lazard, Candice Lin & Patrick Staff, Helen Marten, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Charlotte Moorman, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Letícia Parente, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Ulrike Rosenbach, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Lorna Simpson, Martine Syms, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Wolf Vostell, The Wooster Group, and Anicka Yi.

The Body Electric is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The exhibition will be on view at the Walker Art Center, March 30–July 21, 2019, and then tour to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, September 6, 2019–January 26, 2020.

Curated by Pavel S. Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center; with Jadine Collingwood, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts.

Acknowledgments
The Body Electric is organized by the Walker Art Center. The exhibition is made possible by generous support from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. Additional support provided by Ellen and Jan Breyer and the David and Leni Moore Family Foundation.

Related Events

The Body Electric Opening-Day Program
Artist Talk: Joan Jonas
Saturday, March 30, 1pm
Walker Cinema

Video and performance art pioneer Joan Jonas looks back across her decades-long practice and the early work Funnel, which was performed at the Walker in 1974 and now exists as an installation made especially for The Body Electric. With exhibition curator Pavel Pyś.

Artist Talk: Zach Blas
Saturday, March 30, 3pm
Walker Cinema

Join artist Zach Blas and Kris Paulsen (Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Film Studies Program at The Ohio State University) as they discuss Blas’s newly commissioned work Icosahedron (2019).

Public programs are supported by Eleanor and Bobby Cayre.

Mack Lecture Series
Ed Atkins: I (can scarcely move or draw my breath)
Wednesday, April 24, 7pm
Walker Cinema

British artist Ed Atkins will “attempt an adequate recitation of American novelist Gilbert Sorrentino’s poem ‘The Morning Roundup’ (1971), with songs and histrionics throughout,” as he describes.

The Mack Lecture series is made possible by generous support from Aaron and Carol Mack.