STELARC: Performance and sculpture at Lorne Sculpture Bienalle 2011

http://stelarc.org/?catID=20319

This image of Stelarc lying prone on a large-scale sculpture of his  Ear on Arm was part of a performance/sculpture display at the Lorne Sculpture Bienalle in 2011. It is one of the most beautiful and evocative images that Stelarc has produced so far in his career (photographed by Nina Sellars). The most recent photographs of his Ear on Arm also photographed by Sellars were rather detached images of the surgical procedure, devoid of passion or the ability to elicit pathos from the viewer, since the identity of the artist's body remained absent. However this performance reverts back to one of Stelarc's early works - Event for Clone Suspension (1982) when he made a plaster clone of his exterior body and metaphorically shed his skin. 

Although Stelarc has been influenced by technological developments since the sixties, legacies from art historical periods pervade his work. The excesses associated with the Baroque, Futurism’s concern with depicting the speed and affect of technology, and Surrealist and Postmodern fragmentation of the human body. Stelarc’s work engages with human evolution, the redesign of the human body through advanced technologies, post-humanist philosophy, and aesthetics. His performances have dealt with the spatial and temporal aspects of the body in relation to machines, have highlighted the voluntary and involuntary actions of the human body, as well as the automatic and repetitive behavior of human and not human machines. More importantly his work raises questions about what it means to be human, at a time when the divide between the human and not human (machines and animals) have become increasingly blurred through advanced medical and computer technologies and the relationship between the human arm and technology.

Although Darren Tofts maintains Stelarc's body resembles some weird detritus washed up overnight; a strange visitation anticipated in the 1981 Seaside Suspension: Event for Wind and Waves in Jogashima, Japan. It is a figure literally and metaphorically writ large, a play of scale between a human body and a huge fragment of a body, whereby the artist’s arm is equivalent in size to a finger on its Leviathan avatar,  I believe that this work highlights, more than anything else human vulnerability and is more Lazarus than Leviathan.

Stelarc's body is covered with what resembles Vernix caseosa, the white substance that covers a newborn's skin. Vernix is composed of sebum (the oil of the skin) and cells that have sloughed off the fetus' skin. So, not only is Stelarc making reference to the 'shedding of skin' of his early performance Event for Clone Suspension (1982), but also speaks of human evolution since all creatures arose from the primordial ocean mass. He embraces the monstrous, over-sized aberrant arm with ear to acknowledge that human evolution under the reign of biomedical technologies signals our development will involve not only random mutation, but intentional redesign of the human form, which will be totally dependent upon surgical/medical/technological intervention. However, it is Stelarc's silent nakedness that interests me for it is the body bereft of any masks (other than the thin white powdery coating) that suggests that this work, set against a watery background, is about birth, death and resurrection.

Stelarc’s body actually takes on the physical look of a sculpture. Smeared with white clay, he was for most of the performance, porcelain still. This insight reinforces in my mind the notion of him somehow being reborn or resurrected through an association with body sculpting (through cosmetic surgery/liposuction, tissue or genetic engineering) and his body’s proximity to the sea.

http://margartia.tumblr.com/post/134374909

Orlan's Holy Shroud (1993) - a reliquary, Blood and phototransfer on gauze from her 7th Surgical Operation Omnipresence (reproduced in Art and Text magazine 21 November, 1993) is reminiscent of the facial section of the Shroud of Turin posited as holding the image of Christ after the crucifixion.When cloth is wrapped around a corpse, various substances are expelled into the material, leaving traces of corporeal matter. In some ways the cloth becomes a body of evidence, in similar fashion to when traces of Stelarc's skin were left in the plaster cast from his body in 1982 and which would similarly be within the residue on his body in this 2011 performance.

So here, Stelarc, naked, vulnerable, his body supported by a man-made structure, closes his eyes to the world outside, instead to enter inward into another in which he encounters a sensual and soft surface. Concerned with aesthetics and affect, this artwork nonetheless speaks to our current concerns about the human in contemporary society.

Julie Clarke has published the following articles on Stelarc:

(2010) Spectacle of the Mind (Karen Casey and Harry Sokol) catalogue essay included writings on the work of the performance artists ~ Domenico de Clario, Jill Orr and Stelarc.
(2009). 'Performing the Posthuman Body: Stelarc', Chapter 10 in Clarke, Julie ~ The Paradox of the Posthuman: Science Fiction/Techno-Horror Films and Visual Media, VDM Verlag, Dr Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG Germany.
(2008) 'Simulated Talking Machines: Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head', Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, (eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker), Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, Fall.
(2006). 'Corporeal Melange: Aesthetics and Ethics of Biomaterials in Stelarc and Nina Sellars ‘Blender’', Leonardo: Art and Science Journal, (ed. Roger Malina), 39.5, October, USA: MIT.
(2006). 'Aesthetic Emergence+Self', Imagine Exhibition Catalogue, (ed. Zara Stanhope), Australia: Heide Museum of Modern Art. (2005), 'Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head', cTheory – An international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology and culture, 1000 Days of Theory, (eds.) Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, 10 October, 2005,
(2005). 'A Sensorial Act of Replication', Stelarc: The Monograph, (ed.) Dr Marquard Smith, USA: MIT Press.
(2005). 'Face-Off, Stelarc Interview', Meanjin: New Writing in Australia, Portraits of the Artist, (ed.) Ian Britain, Australia: Melbourne University Press, Vol. 64, No. 1 & 2, p166.
(2004). 'pros+thesis', LIVE: Art, Performance and the Contemporary, (ed.) Adrian Heathfield, London: Tate Publications.
(2002). 'The Human/not human in the work of Orlan and Stelarc', The Cyborg Experiments: extensions of the body in the media age, (ed.) Dr. Joanna Zyslinka, London and New York: Continuum.
(2002). 'Pros+Thesis', Alternate Interfaces, Stelarc Exhibition Catalogue at Monash University Art Gallery, Melbourne, September.
(1997). Review of Zibniev Karkowski performance with Stelarc and Geoffrey Hales at the Continental, Prahran, commissioned by Karkowski for his Paris and Tokyo performance flyers.
Lectures:
(2009): Wrote and delivered a two hour lecture accompanied by a power point presentation entitled ‘Stelarc : Tripartite’ to postgraduate students in the Centre for Population Health, The University of Melbourne.
(2006): Wrote and delivered a one hour lecture accompanied by a power point presentation entitled ‘Stelarc: Redesigning the Human Body’, to first year History and Theory of Art students at RMIT University.
Assistance:
(2005): Assisted Stelarc with his article published in ctheory.
(1999): Facilitated Stelarc's artist-in-residancy at ICubed ~ RMIT.
(1999): Voluntary assistance to Nicole Ryan, Arts Officer at RMIT for a lecture by the international performance artist Stelarc in Kaleide Theatre at RMIT.
(1996): High and Low Arts Show, convened by Roger Taylor, 3RRR ~ Stelarc and Julie Clarke interviewed.
(1994): I voluntary organized (with help), a large-scale performance event at the Open Stage, the University of Melbourne. Entitled Phantom Bodies/Fluid Self , Stelarc's performance was part of the Still Photography Symposium 
(1994): Assisted Stelarc for his performance at La Mamma theatre .