![\"Kate](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Unbenannt-4.jpg\")
Kate Cooper RIGGED, 2014, courtesy Kate Cooper<\/p>\n Kate Cooper RIGGED, 2014, courtesy Kate Cooper<\/p>\n
Health is not a topic that artists have traditionally been interested in \u2013 life, death, love, pain and humanity have all taken up a far greater proportion of canvases and plinths. Yet a new generation of K\u00fcnstler<\/a> is appropriating and developing the codes associated with products that optimise our bodies \u2013 smart drugs, sportswear and, at the more extreme end, plastic surgery. YOGAESTHETICS<\/strong> \nTimur Si-Qin<\/strong> \nMelted yoga mats, disfigured by burn marks to accentuate their manufactured nature, hang on walls beside photoshopped images of a young female beauty, homogenous and safe. This exhibition from Soci\u00e9t\u00e9, Berlin, \u201cInfinite Surrender, Focused Control\u201d by Timur Si-Qin (2013), questions where the idea of \u2018natural\u2019 enters into these motifs of health, attractiveness and aesthetics. Yoga mats may seem to be a clean and pure accoutrement to a healthy mind-body relationship \u2013 yet materially they are far from natural. In the context of the commercialised visual language of marketing, the objects, thus destroyed, give up on their attempt at a fetishised appeal for our attention. SYNERGIZE \/ ENERGIZE<\/strong> \nGr\u00e9goire Blunt and Emmy Skensved<\/strong> \n\u201cOptimize performance, synergize your capabilities\/ overcome the limitations of your human body.\u201d So reads the description of Gr\u00e9goire Blunt and Emmy Skensved\u2019s current exhibition at Import Projects, Berlin, based around the theme of human enhancement technologies. An immersive exhibition to be styled as an e-cigarette, with a fog machine blasting out vapours containing nicotine and caffeine, \u201ceStamina\u201d consists of a 60-minute ambient audio track accompanied by CG visuals. The e-cigarette phenomenon is symptomatic of a new kind of intoxication, in which the \u2018toxic\u2019 is removed: the rise of smart drugs and \u2018nootropics\u2019 mean that we can be wilder, out later, and be more productive the next day. The \u2018chapters\u2019 of the audio are composed by 26 contributors, each of whom was asked by the artists to write and then narrate a piece of writing on the topic of the show, but each with a different letter of the alphabet. Skensved explains: \u201cIt\u2019s a seemingly logical system, but it\u2019s actually an absurd way of organising the information. In a similar way, a lot of technological developments are presented as rational and progressive, but often this is just a reflection of the advertising and imagery used to market these products.\u201d Blunt elaborates: \u201cWe wanted to relay an element of humour \u2013 flipping back and forth between the seemingly logical and the erratic, the serious and the lighthearted. It reflects the variety of responses we received from contributors: an array of different voices.\u201d WEALTHY HEALTHY<\/strong> \nJosh Kline<\/strong> \nJosh Kline\u2019s work \u201cSkittles\u201d (2014), also plays with the commercialised and superficial aspects of a healthy lifestyle. In the art installation on New York\u2019s High Line, a vending machine with a variety of multicoloured \u2018juices\u2019 is on display. Echoing the rapidly gentrifying surroundings of a redeveloped train line, the work includes bottles filled with poetically varied substances, often with questionable healthgiving potential. Each is named for a typical persona and their imaginary lifestyle: one entitled \u201cmixed greens\u201d contains a tennis ball, wheatgrass, olive oil and dollars. Another, \u201cwilliamsburg\u201d, contains a credit card, clothes from American Apparel, kale chips, kombucha, microbrew, quinoa and agave. Of course, it\u2019s the journey through the blender\u2019s blades that give these \u2018smoothies\u2019 their healthy glow, not their ingredients. The narratives and myths of health-giving properties are as much a part of the story as the reality of health \u2013 again, we are propelled by our need to analyse ourselves by standards that seem to be more objective than our intuitive rationale. In the language of productivity and performance enhancement, we want to say: if we know the input, we must know the output.<\/p>\n CONSTRUCTED PERFECTION<\/strong> \nKate Cooper<\/strong> \nAs well as technology becoming more and more intimately connected with our bodies, digital bodies are becoming seemingly more human. Kate Cooper\u2019s recent show \u201cManipuliert<\/a>\u201d, at the KW Institute, Berlin, featured a speciallycreated CG model, created from scratch for the exhibition, complete with pores, traces of smile lines and freckles. The sterility of consumer culture as it relates to fitness and health appears on the surface of this work, which sees a young female model jogging in fitness clothing, while another gnashes and stretches her brace-constrained mouth, alone in an empty, hygienic white background. \u201cThis constructed image of the \u2018working body\u2019, particularly in relation to this health image in industry, favours a particular class and gender,\u201d Cooper explains. The artist embraces the inauthentic nature of this imagery, particularly its lack of connection to human, bodily perfection. A CG model has a tenuous link to our own identities, while its link to our bodies is barely material. CELL-FIE<\/strong> \nHeather Dewey-Hagborg<\/strong> \n\u201cWe are always looking for some external thing \u2013 for what we wish was an objective system, to tell us about ourselves,\u201d Heather Dewey-Hagborg explains when asked about her thoughts on how humans measure their bodies, and could explain one reason behind the popularity of the \u2018Quantified Self\u2019 movement. Born out of the tech community, who represent our desire to accumulate as much data as possible about our bodies, it is exemplified by Apple\u2019s new native \u201cHealth\u201d app, or consumers measuring their sleep patterns to see how they perform even in resting mode. Kate Cooper RIGGED, 2014, courtesy Kate Cooper Health is not a topic that artists have traditionally been interested in \u2013 life, death, love, pain and humanity have all taken up a far greater proportion of canvases and plinths. Yet a new generation of artists is appropriating and developing the codes associated with products that optimise…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[2407,2807,2443,2174,2808,1032,2038,524],"class_list":["post-22050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-body","tag-gregoire-blunt-and-emmy-skensved","tag-health","tag-health-goth","tag-heather-dewey-hagborg","tag-josh-kline","tag-kate-cooper","tag-timur-si-qin"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nBut where does art\u2019s current preoccupation with wellness, fitness and body-hacking come from? After all, artists are, as the clich\u00e9 has it, more likely to be carousing dipsomaniacs, propping up the bar long after the clock has struck midnight. \u201cThe art industry looks more and more like a traditional business model,\u201d says artist Gr\u00e9goire Blunt (more on the show \u201ceStamina<\/a>\u201d, co-created with Emmy Skensved, later). \u201cArtists are following the traditional etiquette of business. It\u2019s about your looks and being articulate, healthy, and competitive. At the same time you\u2019re expected to party a lot but still look great the next day.\u201d These social pressures are somewhat new to the artistic community, that obstinate bastion of hedonism. As these societal values continue to play themselves out across every echelon of the internet, discipline, \u2018clean-eating\u2019 and training have come to connote aspirational desirability. Indeed, this is one of the many cultural references used by Amalia Ulman, in her recent Instagram project, \u201cExcellences and Perfections\u201d. This artwork concocted an online persona on the image-sharing platform as a manifestation of a \u2018Hot Babe\u2019, complete with aspirations of wellbeing, is a good example of these new health-orientated aesthetics (one photo shows Ulman in a yoga meditation pose in a hotel room).
\nHealth, or perhaps more specifically, the performance of health, is a status symbol that has entered even further into our image culture than the young women who are perhaps the most obvious targets of its pressures. In 2014, trendhoppers everywhere were suddenly sporting shiny black kicks, white mesh and Nike ticks on pulled up socks, as part of the fad known as Health Goth. The Health Goth aesthetic turns sportswear into something ominously technological \u2013 the Facebook page that kickstarted the movement recently posted a photo of what appeared to be a robot helmet, complete with corporate sports logos, swaddled in a stark white windbreaker. These images, often digitally manipulated, are reminiscent of corporate stock imagery, and are part of a wider conversation about how technology interacts with the body, both in terms of monitoring performance (mainly fitness or sleep) and the development of cyborgs and body hacking possibilities.
\nThe theme of this year\u2019s transmediale festival for digital art in Berlin was \u201cCapture All\u201d. \u201cTrack Sleep. Track Steps. Track Habits,\u201d its website urges us. As we attempt to find out more about how we tick through self-monitoring, ever-more invasive ways to gauge information are created. In this sense, the futuristic and commercialised aesthetic in contemporary art often questions the naive complacency of a society that expects technology to solve all problems, including the ones it creates.
\nIn the following section, we look at five artists whose work centres on the interstices of the body and technology to reveal something new about what it means to be inside the human anatomy.<\/p>\n![\"Timur](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Unbenannt-1.jpg\")
Timur Si-Qin, Melted Yoga Mat (Dark Blue 7) (detail), 2013, yoga mat on aluminium panel, 200 x 100 cm, courtesy the artist and Soci\u00e9t\u00e9, Berlin<\/p>\n
\nThroughout Si-Qin\u2019s practice, the artist investigates our impulses towards certain images over others, inevitably calling upon the value system of health to distinguish attractive from unattractive. Elsewhere in the same exhibition, leaflets in a LED-lit tray portray close-ups of fresh tomatoes, water beads sitting freshly on their surface and hands intertwined under running water, all of which raises some challenging questions. What is it about these images that make them so universally attractive? And as our concept of what is healthy develops in line with technology, how will our attitudes to stock imagery change? Perhaps the singularity of Si-Qin\u2019s art lies in its ability to produce such critical assessments rather than arrive at any simplistic answers.<\/p>\n![\"Gr\u00e9goire](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Unbenannt-2.jpg\")
Gr\u00e9goire Blunt and Emmy Skensved, eStamina, 2015, video still courtesy the artists<\/p>\n
\nWhile the texts vacillate between anxiety and hope, visual aspects refer to the often utopian yet capitalist idealism of the dialogue around technology: \u201cWe\u2019re working with a very commercial aesthetic, trying to make the imagery look like stock photography with glossy, glassy white surfaces and floating, flawless objects,\u201d Blunt says.
\n <\/p>\n![\"Unbenannt-3\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Unbenannt-3.jpg\" "\\"Josh")
Josh Kline, Skittles, 2014 Part of Archeo, a High Line Commission On view April 2014 \u2013 March 2015 on the High Line, New York Courtesy of Friends of the High Line, New York. Photo: Timothy Schenck<\/p>\n Kate Cooper RIGGED, 2014, courtesy Kate Cooper<\/p>\n
\nLike many others working with these ideas, there are aspects of our tracking- focused culture in her work: \u201cI\u2019m interested in this idea of management or control of the body. Being healthy is something you must actively work at \u2013 health becomes an image of something.\u201d Carrying out these processes of self-management, by our own volition, makes our bodies yet another battleground for commerce: \u201cIt\u2019s the promise that we can be better \u2013 the capitalist dream. But actually it\u2019s just eroding every part of daily lives \u2013 work and non-work have become blurred.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Heather](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Unbenannt-5.jpg\")
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visions, 2012\u20132013 Found genetic materials, custom software, 3D prints, documentation Approximate dimensions; portrait: 20.3 x 15 x 15 cm; sample box: 22.8 x 30 x 7.6 cm, courtesy the artist. Photo: Heather Dewey-Hagborg<\/p>\n
\nDewey-Hagborg\u2019s work focuses on the idea of genetic surveillance, a tool that is becoming more significant in judicial systems, and is also under far less scrutiny than its digital counterpart: \u201cIt occurred to me that we were fixating on the electronic realm of surveillance but not even thinking about what was even more personal \u2013 our bodies themselves. We are constantly losing genetic info without thinking about it at all.\u201d In \u201cStranger Visions\u201d (2012\u201313), these scattered genetic markers (saliva, hair, nail clippings) are turned into portrait sculptures, showing the same impulses as a crime scene investigator towards forensic examination of evidence.
\nAs the body-hackers and lifeloggers create more ways of measuring and analysing everything from our blood sugar levels to our respiratory rate, Dewey-Hagborg\u2019s work intends to alert us to these unintentional data leaks, as well as creating strategies to mask them. \u201cInvisible\u201d (2014), is a product-as-art-project, composed of two serums; one designed to delete and the other to replace the genetic material that we leave behind. After all, in the post-Snowden era of hyper-surveillance, all data collected can be a threat to privacy \u2013 and as Dewey-Hagborg\u2019s work implies, this could even include the DNA in a few discarded cells of skin.
\nText von\u00a0Josie Thaddeus-Johns<\/a><\/strong> \nMore: Read other Print Features<\/strong><\/a>
\nMore: Auto Italia\u2019s Kate Cooper embraces the inauthentic<\/a><\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"