curator: bridget crone
The Body The Ruin investigated the potential for the body to perform in ways that have agency in rearticulating the narrative of its own representation. In playing out this paradigm, the works in the show inevitably left conceptions of the body as whole, the body as nature in ruins. Without denying the materiality of the body, the artists involved unfolded fragmented bodies that can only be thought through the gestures, actions and the traces of their cultural framing.
Santiago Sierra’s video of the performance Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of 10 workers (2004) seemed to mould the other works in The Body The Ruin to the curatorial premise. The video details, in real time, Sierra’s act of spraying large amounts of polyurethane onto the bodies of ten Iraqi immigrant workers (identified as such by a plaque beside the monitor displaying this work), until large amounts formed free-standing moulds that were then vacated: transforming the remains of the performance into a sculptural installation. This process recalls the preserved human remains in the ancient city of Pompeii. An immediate visual illustration of the title of the show, this piece extrapolated most of the issues about the body raised by the curator and the other works. The documentation of the performance Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of 10 workers, undoes the operation of the resulting sculptural installation. These large sculptures would appear to have no reference beyond the physical relationships they forge between the viewer and their forms (the objective of minimalist practice).1 However, this claim to an abstracted experience of the object is disrupted by the video detailing the conditions of its creation. The identification of these bodies at