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Giorgio Verzotti, Valentino Catricalà[1]
Post Human
The exhibition Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, had arrived from Lausanne to the Castello di Rivoli in autumn 1992. It immediately received a certain amount of attention, because it seemed to mark a sort of lived epistemological fracture in the reality that contemporary art was more or less promptly registering. Technology was beginning to interfere with the structure of our bodies, and the possibilities of cosmetic surgery and medicine promised well-being and psychological gratification. There was already talk of genetic manipulation, cyborgs, robotics, even affecting sensitive ethical issues. Art was registering the scope of all this, albeit not without surprise: until then, the most radical research had been directed in the opposite direction, towards the preservation of a positive relationship between the subject of culture and the natural environment that technological development had long since endangered. Joseph Beuys’s famous performance, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), was era-defining, as it thematised the need for the subject to recover its animality, in order to achieve a less precarious psychological set-up than that resulting from the ‘malaise of civilisation’. Let us recall: the artist had himself locked up for several days in a New York gallery with a coyote; the photographic documentation shows the phases of this cohabitation, from the animal’s aggressive actions towards the human, protected from bites and scratches with a felt blanket, to acceptance. It was, in other words, an attempt at harmonisation between human and prehuman (a decidedly anthropocentric term) that also challenged other artists. Reference can be made, here, to Hermann Nitsch’s Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries, based on the disembowelment of animals on the bodies of his assistants, where religious symbols are mixed with the display of guts and blood, in a kind of short-circuit between Apollonian and Dionysian that harks back to the origin of rituals with violent sacrifices. In contrast to these practices, aimed at perceptual shock (similar to certain actions by Marina Abramović, like one in which she grapples with a python), Giuseppe Penone leaves traces of his body on trees, blocks of clay or piles of leaves, signalling a similar disalienating intent.
But there we are talking about the 1960s and 1970s, while Post Human arrived in Italy at the beginning of the 1990s, in a completely different historical and aesthetic context. No longer was the prehuman evoked as comparison or completion; for now it was the machine that was meant to prefigure the new humanity, no longer the archaic, but the futurible. The artists called upon by Deitch were almost all American, and each of them, from Cindy Sherman to Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray, in their photographic or sculptural portraits elaborated the signs delineating corporeity according to the canons and stereotypes in vogue in the information system. Sometimes accepting their seductive power, more often rejecting them through self-denigrating rhetoric. In Italy, too, these developments began to emerge, and in some cases became mainstream. In that period Vanessa Beecroft debuted with tableaux vivants featuring girls in tights and red wigs, alongside large paintings of almost deformed female bodies, synthetically defined in pink on white. Images generated by the artist’s discomfort with her own physicality, her installations gradually took a different direction, forming a kind of uninterrupted catalogue of the stereotypes that inform the aesthetic ideal expressed by the media. In 1998, at the Guggenheim in New York, Beecroft presented a group of models covered only by a bikini created by a famous fashion designer. From then on, fashion would frequently contribute to the selection of her performers: bodies shaped by signs, by ‘aspects of fashion’ à la Barthes, to which the definition of an identity is almost entirely entrusted. This, too, is posthuman, as the aspects of fashion set conditions and are never the object of free choice. In the same years, Maurizio Cattelan began the research that brought him international success, and his works can be compared to the posthuman aesthetic we are talking about here. The taxidermied animals and, shortly afterwards, the mannequins that became his stylistic signature, might well be compared with the equally perfect replicas of the living that conveyed that critical view of the simulacra of the information system. Yet there is a marked difference the post-human artists, at least those contemplated in Deitch’s exhibition, imagine a (feared or desired) future existence, , while Cattelan deals with death. From his earliest works to his most recent ones, visible in the large exhibition at HangarBicocca (July 2021-February 2022, ed.), the artist expresses a strong tragic sense of existence, which no technological future can redeem. If dead and stuffed animals can evoke the idea of the overcoming of death in the eternalised effigy, mannequins are the psychologically disturbing instance of the double, no matter if represented alive or dead (the hanged children, Kennedy’’ coffin…). In addition, they evoke the horror of the revenant, the ghost that returns among the living. The child we see, from a distance and from behind, kneeling, up close reveals himself to be an adult and incongruously praying Hitler: it is Him (2001), one of the most shocking works of the start of the millennium.
It is a long time since the word posthuman was first used. Its first uses can be traced back to the 1950s, but it was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that it became increasingly common. This was an era in which the concept of posthuman was still very close to terms such as transhumanism. If the latter indicated a power of technology over man, the possibility of a new evolution through technology, the posthuman instead represented a more general and profound philosophical concept, a way to develop a new aesthetic sensibility between man and machine, different identities represented by the figure of the cyborg, as well expressed in Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto[2] . This is why the posthuman has been widely investigated by many artists, often at odds with the direction of transhumanism. We might think of Stelarc, a pioneer of the aesthetic exploration of the body/machine relationship, or Orlan, Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca, Haim Steinbach, who have made the body the experimental table of a new technological identity, up until the exhibition Post Human.
But, some might ask, what does posthuman mean today? What is left of this vein of research? Indeed, this concept has made a comeback after years in which, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, little was heard of it. A return that presents certain changes, also in light of the theoretical and social developments that humanity is facing. There is no doubt, in fact, that there are drastic metamorphoses, our era is approaching a new social, economic and philosophical model, which intertwines major technological changes with social and climatic ones. Thus, the notion of the posthuman is increasingly connected to that of the Anthropocene, the new era in which man, with his technological apparatus, directly affects geological processes; which, in turn, have repercussions on man, his life and the imperceptible biological modifications that our species is facing. If the ‘old’ posthuman was still a time when the technological and the natural, the synthetic and the organic, were distinct, today we live in a ‘synthetic age’, as Christopher J. Preston describes it, in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the synthetic. It is a ‘contemporary post-human’, if we appropriate Leonardo Caffo’s sense of the term, in which ‘behaviour, the relationship with the environment, the observation of things are just some of the aspects that highlight the existence of another species of human’.[3]
Many artists and designers work on this basis: for example Neri Oxman, a designer/artist who has made the analysis of natural materials, the development of a new ecology, the focal point of her research. From tree bark and crustacean shells to silkworm webs and human breath, nature is the ‘material ecology’ of Oxman’s production processes. The body is no longer the end of the technological process, but technology is employed as a means to explore possible new humanity in a post-anthropocentric world. Thus, cyborg art can be interpreted as a direct consequence of ‘classical’ post-humanism but, simultaneously, as a departure from it. Neil Harbisson, Manel Muñoz, Pau Prats, and Moon Ribas, represent a generation of artists who aim to investigate new sensory layers, develop new senses, overcome historic gender identities and categories of perception, through the grafting of technological elements into the body, bringing the cyborg to the fore. Indicative of this is Harbisson’s antenna, installed on his spine, which transforms the range of colours into sound vibrations.
Marco Donnarumma certainly continues the tradition of posthumanism, investigating the body through technology. But Donnarumma pushes the posthuman question further, integrating performance art, computer music, new media art and science. His work focuses on the human body, machines and sound; in the Humane Methods cycle(2019-ongoing), he exposes the violence of today’s algorithmic societies and brings dozens of human performers, non-human organisms, to the stage with an audience-performer. The dramaturgy is guided by an artificial intelligence developed by a team of scientists and performers.
In a less technological perspective, many authors are reflecting on these topics, on the relationship between species, organic and inorganic, terrestrial and alien. Italy is in the vanguard in this sense, thanks to artists such as Benni Bosetto, Ambra Castagnetti, Giulia Cenci, Federica Di Pietrantonio and Antonio Fiorentino.
Thus, amidst technology, nature, climate change, the Earth as part of a whole, it is still art that shows us a new way, to understand man in his countless metamorphoses – not only human ones but also the posthuman. Donato Piccolo’s Leonardo sogna le nuvole is emblematic in this regard: a face (that of Leonardo Da Vinci) attached to a tube mechanism, where technology does not help man to improve himself, to become stronger, but simply to dream. Dream of what? Of a new humanity.
[1] The first part was written by Giorgio Verzotti, the second by Valentino Catricalà.
[2] D. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, Socialist Review, 1985.
[3] L. Caffo, Fragile umanità. Il postumano contemporaneo, Einaudi, 2017.
