Introduction

The extracts below and the selection of images introduce an interpretation of the post-modern body. Many of the  suggested artists are those who represent the body through, film, photography, installation, sculpture, digital art and performance. However, painting and drawing continue to be relevant within this broader scope of making art.  A contemporary representation of the body is not always destined to the purely figurative but has extended into a larger and more complicated dialogue, one that considers self, other, identity, absence, internal, external, gender, psychology, social behaviour, medicine and sex, so that the body is no longer committed to the superficiality of the objectified female muse. Fascination with the body is not new but an increasing 'openness' is evident in western society that makes possible a heightened level of introspect about one's self that endeavours to make sense of the complex subject: BODY. This ideology spreads worldwide via the ever improving infra-structure of travel and communication and the increasing accessibility of the Internet. It is these dynamic aspects that are slowly eroding cultural barriers to the extent that society is 'virtually global'. This makes the comprehension of the 'other' possibly more informed although are we breeding a new type of electronic multi-culture rather than a homogeneous global society?

These factors help to generate a re-examination and representation of the body in art that can be seen in all its glory from beautiful to monstrous without much fear of alienation for the viewer. This corporeal obsession within the digital age has now given rise to the cyber-body or cyborg which curiously 'disembodies' or replaces the body in the natural sense. This concept is disturbing which leads to the question, what are the limits of the body? Yet it investigates further the representation of the body in futuristic terms, exploring the possibilities of 'genderlessness', greater power, the defeat of physical weakness, illness and perhaps even death.

Helen Tranckle

www.helentranckle.net

'In current art practice, the relationship between artists and medical practitioners is very different from that of the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment when fruitful collaborations between artists, draughtsmen and scientists produced rich fields of shared imagery. It is true, though, that artists are now aided by a greater public receptivity to the socio-cultural dimensions of historical and current medicine. This awareness enhances the potential for some artists to engage with research material in the specialist and public domains. Deanna Petherbridge maintains that 'it is only in recent years that medical history has established a rapprochement with cultural theory, and medical museums and libraries have become a resource for artists'.

Martin Kemp, Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies, Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000

'The image of the cyborg has historically recurred at moments of radical social and cultural change. From bestial monstrosities, to unlikely montages of body and machine parts, to electronic implants, imaginary representations of cyborgs take over when traditional bodies fail. In other words, when the current ontological model of human being does not fit a new paradigm, a hybrid model of existence is required to encompass a new , complex and contradictory lived experience. The cyborg body thus becomes the historical record of changes in human perception. One such change may be reflected in the implied redefinition of the space the cyborg body inhabits'

Jennifer Gonzalez, Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Note From Current Research,cybersexualities, Edinburgh, 1999

'I have been interested in challenging traditional notions of the body so that we can abandon the oppositions by which the body has usually been understood - mind and body, inside and outside, experience and social context, subject and object, self and other and underlying these, the opposition between male and female. Thus 'stripped' corporeality in its sexual specificity may be seen as the material condition of subjectivity that is the body itself may be regarded as the locus and site inscription for specific modes of subjectivity . In a 'deconstructive turn', the subordinated terms of these oppositions take their rightful place at the very heart of the dominant ones.' 

Elizabeth Grosz, Bodies-Cities, (essay) Sexuality and Space, 1992