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Transformation of Body in Contemporary Art of Posthuman Era

Hyesook Jeon 1

1이화여자대학교

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ABSTRACT

Generally, the posthuman body makes us imagine two things. One is the cyborg which is reinforced by machines or various prosthesis and the other is a strong and new eugenic being made from genetic engineering, nano- technology, neuropharmacology, and memory enhancing drugs. There are two perspectives on these bodies; of looking at them as the aim itself as they overcome human weaknesses and improve their ability and another of confusion and fear in that they can make the boundary between the human and nonhuman obscure. The very technology which improves the human also holds the potential danger which may make the human forfeit 'human identity(or pureness)'. Then, in what context and meaning should we use the term posthuman? In his Conditions of the Posthuman, Robert Pepperell explains that the term 'posthuman' first, is used to mark the end of that period of social development known as humanism, and so in this sense it means ‘after humanism’. Second, it refers to the fact that our traditional view of what constitutes a human being is now undergoing a profound transformation. It is argued that we can no longer think about being human in the same way we used to. Third, the term refers to the general convergence of biology and technology to the point where they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable. While the 'posthuman condition' cannot be easily defined, he states that it is the condition of existence in which we find ourselves once the posthuman era begins. To recognize the bodily transformation through posthumanism, it is not only important to perceive the commensal relationship between what is human and nonhuman -machines, animals, things, but also the blurring of demarcating between the organic and the artificial. This signifies that we have freed ourselves from Descartes's binary method of understanding humans which distinguishes between 'us' and 'them'. That is,the discernment by putting the 'human' against the whole of 'non-humans' and drawing boundaries has lost its validity, and it has been long since existences which go against such logic with scientific technology and question the fixedness of the boundaries appeared. In this essay, I observed the key characteristics and significance of the posthuman body and body-discourse through the artworks of Orlan, Bharti Ker, Patricia Piccinini,Matthew Barney, and Motohilko Odani who work by transforming their own bodies and using various aspects of artificial transformation. In light of the posthuman body discourses discussed in the former section, these artists reveal the instability inherent in the demarcating between nature/artifical, human/nonhuman, and normal/pathologically abnormal. Therefore, their works not only reveal the posthuman condition but also are placed in the center of the controversy over posthuman bodily transformation. Here I saw what the meaning of the strategic representation device of 'blurring boundaries,' which groups their bodily transformation works into the common characteristic of 'posthuman'art, is in each of their works. Observing the understanding of the posthuman and the various reproduction of posthuman bodies presented in this study, the artistic reproduction devices presenting the posthuman bodily transformation can be seen as actively accepting the possibility that positively or negatively, the soleness of human will become extinct, evolve, or become deconstructed at the various levels of the body, psychology, science, and culture, and a hybrid and transformed liminal existence will take its stead. It would be accurate to say that rather than seeing the posthuman figure in these works, we have observed various reproduction of posthumanism's understanding of the human. While it cannot be a clear answer to the question posed in the introduction "Why, how, and for what is the human body transforming into something which is no longer human?", the points of reproduction and devices blurring the boundary between humans itself will offer clues to the various forms of posthuman understanding of the human. It is worth noting that numerous artists of the early 21st century have begun to (re)consider bodily transformation. In the present condition in which not the change itself but its speed is what causes us anxiety, what most sensitively reveals the blurring of boundaries and hybridity is our own body. It is quite natural for us who already live in a posthuman condition to search for the existence and significance of the posthuman from our transformed bodies. The bodies transformed through the blurring of boundaries are still functioning in the present progressive tense. Through the understanding of thresholds and boundaries between the human and non-human, discussions on bodily transformation will still be the foundation to understand the posthumanism discourse of 'new methods to understand what it is to exist as a human' and its artistic and cultural context.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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