Words by Drew Zeiba
In 1966, following a visit to the skull-stacked catacombs of Sicily, the artist Paul Thek told an interviewer that, “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.”
At Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles, such flowers sprout: as rocks like mushroom caps in Thek’s 1969 Fish Tank, as candy-coloured wax blossoms shooting away from Tetsumi Kudo’s 1978 Mediation Between Memory and Future, as gaping, screaming mouth in a Lucas Samaras photo-transformation, as mossen greenery kept in a cage in Max Hooper Schneider’s Crisis Hotline, made last year. Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, the four-person show ‘Technologies of the Self’ is a catacomb of sorts, a room ‘decorated’ with coffins or chrysalises, depending on one’s perspective.
Nayssan cites Michel Foucault’s definition of the exhibition’s titular phrase which described technologies of the self as methods or devices “which permit individuals to effect by their own means a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls so as to transform themselves.” This exhibition asks how art might be one such technology, and how the frames we function in — images, galleries, bodies, belief systems — bear on the limits and potentials of such alterations.
Beginning in the 1960s, Thek created ‘Technological Reliquaries’, containers—generally terrarium-like, but occasionally semi-transparent pyramids or even a Brillo box — with latex body parts and other meaty things. Imagine Larry Bell meets David Croenberg. Nayssan’s included Untitled #73 from the series, a wall-mounted glass-and-metal box with a slab of beeswax flesh and a painted 73 atop, looking like the numbers on a sports jersey. Numbers are also seen on a 1982 work where red-painted newsprint is scrawled with ‘1 to 1’ in blue bubble script. It’s a suitable mathematics for the exhibition: what one-to-one relationship is here? Of the news to reality, of image to object, of us to another, of Thek’s image to himself?
The split oneness is a principal problem of representation. In trying to generate a presence of a thing or being in the world, the representation tends to only make present the gap between itself and the “original,” casting the notion of an original in doubt. A self-portrait then might be the ultimate technology of the self, a transformation that reproduces transformation’s limits. In Portrait of the Artist, Buddha in Paris (Médiation entre futur programme et mémoire enregistrée) (1976), Kudo fills a green birdcage with a third-eyed head sprouting four balls of yarn like thought bubbles. Two hands frame the head, as if intensifying it’s focus. An artificial bird rests on a hanging perch above, its egg below the face’s chin. This head, though seemingly liberating itself from the material realm through transcendent thought, is kept, its thoughts bundled up, stuck. Textiles explode in other yarn sculptures by Kudo. In To Kill is to Let Live, whirls of yarn drip and crawl out of a wall-mounted frame, descending onto the gallery floor. These explosions of colour and material share eerie resonance with the Fossil in Hiroshima series—imprints of leaves and other geologic and biological matter pressed to paper and day-glo spray-painted.