Anatomias Contemporâneas Fundição de Oeiras.

Over the past two decades, the human body has been remembered and dis-membered, exercised and anatomised, de-humanised and post-humanised, has crossed gender and ethnic lines, been agent and object, cyborg and corpse... As an agent and instrument of representation, the body has been a privileged signifier whose pleasures and pains, strengths and weaknesses have played a central role in the visual and performative arts over these past twenty years. As literature on the topic proliferates, exhibitions too abound, with huge international survey shows covering areas of this diversified topic. Examples include the famous Post-Human of the early 1990s, Identity and Alterity, which was the central exhibition at the 1995 Venice Bienale, Inside the Visible and Rites of Passage, both in London also in 1995, and many more. Against this backdrop, the exhibition Contemporary Anatomies comes to us a little late in the day. At this point, the public feels saturated with body-only themes and one longs to see the body reintegrated in other, more diverse curatorial schemes. Curated by Paulo Mendes and Paulo Cunha e Silva, the exhibition is ostensibly a panoramic sweep, exploring representations of the body in contemporary art in Portugal. The show includes forty six artists, most of them belonging to the present generation of young artists, with a few big names from older generations (Paula Rego, Alberto Carneiro, Rui Sanches, Julião Sarmento) granting the show a sense of authority and legitimation. The exhibition certainly gets points for effort. It is an grand undertaking, a sturdy attempt at keeping up with international trends. The book accompanying it is equally ambitious and well produced. In practical terms, however, the show leaves much to be desired. Installed in the stunning, huge space of Hangar 7 at the Fundição de Oeiras, it has, for some inexplicable reason, been cramped into rabbit warren. The lack of signposting or any form of identification or labeling leaves the viewer flailing for the familiar indices of identity and context. The show is divided up into various several thematic sections: 'Action’, ‘Domination', 'Desire', 'Excretion, Secretion’, ‘Expression’, 'Discipline', 'Pleasure', 'Exhibition', and so on. These overriding motives — smacking of Foucault and Kristeva — introduce the big topics (birth, sex, illness, death, what else is there?). As general rubrics, they are simply too broad to be meaningful. While apparently granting a certain order to the exhibition, these themes

seem to corral the works and restrict their meaning, and many of the works, in themselves, conceptually paltry, cannot survive such closure. Other pieces are so simplistic and pretentious as to scarcely survive exhibition at all: this is the case with Paulo Mendes own work, E(x) Romance – Surgical Plastic Love, with Julião Sarmento's video, Pedro Tudela's D'Heart Side, João Paulo Feliciano's Screwed Rubber Fist, Cristina Mateus' Evasão and José Maçãs de Carvalho's affected posters. Other works suffer from a hanging that is too literal in the iconographic connections it tries to establish, for instance Paula Rego's extraordinary bold drawing next to photographs by Augusto Alves da Silva because both focus on the same part of the human anatomy. The works that do stand out seem independent of the exhibition itself: one longs to see them outside of this context. actually, one has seen them outside of this context, and they've usually looked better: Helena Almeida, Pedro Cabrita Reis, João Penalva, Luis Campos, Patricia Garrido, Gerardo Burmester, Fernando José Pereira, Julia Ventura... good work, wrong place.

Ruth Rosengarten

Anatomias Contemporâneas, Fundição de Oeiras. Visão,

23 December 1997