Posthuman art creates human hybrids

Romance is redefined by artists Stelarc and Nina Sellars in a comment on the posthuman condition, where blended body matter sits alongside hybrid cacti, mutants and robots.
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Detail of Patricia Piccinini & Peter Hennessey’s installation Alone with the gods (2016); installation view Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; image courtesy and © the artists

Blender contains sterilised bodily material surgically extracted from the two artists inside a sealed, air-powered machine and tests the boundaries of our posthuman tolerance.

‘You get a full spectrum of reactions – from shock horror to fascination to amusement,’ said Stelarc.

Test your tolerance with Blender

It is among the works in New Romance: art and the posthuman, an exhibition of hybrids, mutants, robots and machines that explores what it means to be human in an age of genetic engineering, post-apocalyptic thinking and environmental change.

This is not a show just for sci-fi geeks or robot-heads. ‘One of the key ideas we have explored in the show is what it means to be human, and not human, and where those boundaries are blurring today,’ says co-curator Anna Davis.

‘The whole idea of posthuman is highly debated but no one can agree on what it means – what we are comfortable with and not comfortable with. It is appearing in the mass media – something like genetic modification of food and humans – but it is also happening under the radar,’ said Davis. 

‘Why do we find one hybrid beautiful and another disgusting or horrifying? It is a very relevant question,’ she asked.

The exhibition opens with a kind of collision festival this weekend where high-tech, low-tech and immersive installations bring together 18 artists from Australia and Korea at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA).

‘It has been challenging for me actually,’ admitted Davis. ‘Their work raises questions around what is okay to do with human bodies, and then there is this romantic thing too – two people mixing their bodies – and while they don’t talk about it that way – it is a definite new romance.’

As part of the opening Festival of New Romance (30 June – 3 July) Stelarc will be giving a presentation that will take audiences on journey through his work and, more generally, how artists generate contestable futures.

Get tickets to Stelarc’s talk

Blending bodies for art

Stelarc is an artist who has been at the forefront of these questions; a ‘trail blazer’, said Davis. ‘It is like the world has just caught up to him.’

Blender (2005-2016) by Stelarc and Nina Sellars is their only artistic collaboration across their long careers.

‘As a performance artist I have always focused on the body as a site for experimentation and a site for exploring alternate anatomies,’ explained Stelarc.

He said Blender is ‘a machine that becomes the host for a liquid body composed of bio-material from two artist’s bodies’. But it had practical problems.

‘It was an ah-ha moment and then an oh-oh moment. It was highly problematic. It was very difficult to have this procedure done…and in a big public institution there are alarm bells ringing. When you mention bio-materials there is concern that they are somehow bio-hazardous.

‘You have to think of it as a museum specimen bottle with a blender underneath it – it has alcohol in it – It’s just like any specimen in a museum.’  

Sellars is an anatomist with a deep interest in fat. It was actually in an anatomy lab that the two artists first met.

She continued: ‘Fat is playing both villain and hero, and it is the most perfect time to have this work come back up again. There is their weird history of getting rid of fat. Only in last few years in stem cell research articles it is being called an organ.

She explained that fat is 500 times more potent than bone marrow for stem cell growth.

However, Stelarc struck upon the obvious: ‘It does take some years before an approach to art or an artwork becomes acceptable, both conceptually and socially, and what Nina is saying is that at this moment when fat is assuming an important role, Blender makes sense.’

Soyo Lee’s Cactus Grafting Workshop (detail) 2013-15, installation view, Gallery 175, Seoul;  image courtesy and © the artist, photo Sung Yeon Park

Crossbred cacti and K-Pop

If blended body matter is not your thing, then the New Romance opening festival has plenty of other activities and curiosities, as Davis described it will be ‘non-stop K-Pop dance offs, Kimchi cooking, cactus grafting workshops, performances and artist talks’. 

Korean artist Soyo Lee will show visitors how to create their own hybrid cacti.

‘I would describe her as a bio artist and is based around issues of hybridisation and mutants, very much like the questions that Patricia Piccinini asks – why do we find some hybrids beautiful and some disturbing?’

Piccinini has created a collaborative installation with partner Peter Hennessey based on a story they wrote about a cult that started to create their own hybrid beings. She will talk over the weekend.

Sneak a look at the Piccinini – Hennessey collaboration

‘Patricia has been fascinated by technologies that are getting closer to genetically modify things and she and Peter were interested in this idea of people just going rogue with that, and created a secret society and this installation is the left overs of that,’ explained Davis.

Justin Shoulder will introduce audiences to OO, a mesmerising hybrid creature in a performance on Saturday 2 July (and in early August) that transforms from human-like from to insect-like entity, while Wade Marynowsky’s robot in the gallery’s entrance is his first that has legs, and is ‘based on that artist’s memories of his mum going to squash while he went to break dancing class to learn the moon walk,’ explained Davis.

‘There is a real mix of DIY homestyle robotics and then quite high-end technologies,’ she added. The exhibition has a real immersive questioning quality.

Moving around the gallery and the New Romance website people will encounter a virus-like digital intervention by Giselle Stanborough; its pop up windows teasing and flirting but remaining unclickable in a comment on love in our tech-age.

Overall, New Romance is fun, questioning and at moments gut-flippingly seductive.

Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho’s film still EL FIN DEL MUNDO (2012), 2-channel digital video; Image courtesy the artists and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul © the artists

New Romance Opening Festival schedule

Stelarc got it right when he summed up the show: ‘It is indicative to the fact that it is not high-tech or low-tech; it is really about art as affect – as impact – and the way I would characterise artistic practice as opposed to scientific research – one is about accumulating information and one is more about impacting emotion.’

Davis has curated New Romance with Houngcheol Choi of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Seoul.

New Romance: art and the posthuman
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 20 June – 4 September
Opening Festival: 30 June – 3 July

www.mca.com.au

Artists include: Rebecca Baumann, Ian Burns, Hayden Fowler, Siyon Jin, Airan Kang, Sanghyun Lee, Soyo Lee, Wade Marynowsky, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, Patricia Piccinini & Peter Hennessey, Kibong Rhee, Justin Shoulder, Giselle Stanborough, Stelarc & Nina Sellars, and Wonbin Yang.

Gina Fairley is ArtsHub's National Visual Arts Editor. For a decade she worked as a freelance writer and curator across Southeast Asia and was previously the Regional Contributing Editor for Hong Kong based magazines Asian Art News and World Sculpture News. Prior to writing she worked as an arts manager in America and Australia for 14 years, including the regional gallery, biennale and commercial sectors. She is based in Mittagong, regional NSW. Twitter: @ginafairley Instagram: fairleygina