Bodies Feeling Bodies - Sainsbury Centre, Living Art Review
While advances in AI have us collectively pondering the significance of human touch and emotion in art making, being guided through the Sainsbury Centre’s collection with feeling, touch and instinct felt fundamentally necessary. Living Art highlighted the emotional resonance left by the artist's hand, the knowledge expressed through the body in the manipulation of paint, stone and clay. It was refreshing being guided by feeling through the collection, to try and break down the barriers that can make museums feel elitist or inaccessible. Why should a museum be a quiet place, a place without touch, a place without strong displays of emotion? Museums hold objects that encapsulate our deepest collective experiences, and it’s powerful to be able to reach out and touch those feelings.
The exhibition begins with the guided experience of coming up very close to Henry Moore’s Mother and Child (1932) sculpture, being asked to close my eyes and recall being held by my own mother, then reaching out blindly to stroke the cool contours of the back of the sculpture in front of me. This felt like one of the most intimate experiences I’ve had in a museum, a truly tender moment with a work of art. Art has the capacity to reveal deeply touching emotion in us, and to be able to physically touch the work in return felt like the formation of a reciprocal relationship, one which is generally considered forbidden. When it comes to painting and sculpture, there is traditionally always physical space between you and the work, a metaphorical and real boundary that cannot be crossed. The work is separate from you; it is to be admired from a distance but never too close. To blindly reach out and touch the contours of this sculpture, to think of skin and memory, of temperature and texture, felt deeply moving. Crossing that boundary felt empowering as a viewer, it let down an emotional wall and an intellectual elitism that can imprison these works within historical canon. The sculpture felt alive through touch, bodies feeling bodies.
Wandering over to Francis Bacon, I savoured the moment of being shown the detail that a single strand of hair from the artist had ended up embedded on the shoulder of his painted figure in Study for Portrait of P.L., no. 2 (1957), fused into this passionate depiction of his lover. Bacon’s work always strikes me as animalistic, his figures contorted and transforming, driven by survival and carnality, expressions of uncontainable emotion. Knowing this detail added a certain kind of wild magic to the work, it drew a tangible link to the human being that created this painting in pure expressive release, body and paint combined. The animal is alive in this painting, and you can feel it shedding, growling, and clawing its way out. This opens the boundary between art object and body, where any work of art could contain the physical traces of its creator. If you look closely enough, you may find their hair, skin, nails, and saliva embedded in an emotional landscape.
Study for Portrait of P.L., no. 2 (1957) by Francis Bacon, with embedded hair.
Another experience where the body comes into direct relationship with the work was the hammock installation with the suspended Alberto Giacometti painting, Diego Seated (1948). Getting into a hammock always feels rather clumsy, but once you settle yourself in you do feel a sense of vulnerability, a lack of control. The body is suspended in air, the subtle swaying back and forth is out of your control, and you have nowhere to look except for the painting above. The exhibition asks you to tell this painting a secret, something you wouldn’t tell a person. Instantly I felt a patient/therapist dynamic, Giacometti’s painted man dressed in a suit, firmly sitting on a chair, looking directly at you. The viewer on the other hand is not firmly on the ground, we are suspended in the air and gently swaying, body outstretched. I must admit to feeling uneasy, I became ultra aware of the gaze of the man in the painting, likely because I felt my movement was slightly constricted by the hammock. I had to wonder, why this painting? It could have been any painting from the Sainsbury collection, Leonora Carrington perhaps? How would the viewer have felt, floating above the ground, transporting themselves into her surreal landscape, becoming one of her Old Maids (1947), attending her mysterious tea party. I may have felt more comfortable sharing my secrets with them. So why Giacometti? Could it be that this figure might be seemingly universal, building a relationship with a simple seated figure, comparing our body to one portrayed in paint and gesture. However no figure can portray a universal experience of the body, each lived experience varies with personal experience and social power dynamics, with gender, race and ability. I do wonder if my unease came from the decision to place a strong masculine presence in this high, towering position. His gaze felt intense, almost judgmental, and definitely looming. All these questions flooded to me in a way that they never had in previous encounters with this work, a testament to the power of how the installation of an artwork can define and distort perception.
Hammock installation with the suspended Alberto Giacometti painting, Diego Seated (1948).
The central installation also contained small eye shaped holes in the wall, which when peered through revealed a couple of the collections Indian miniatures, including Woman with tambur, seated on a branch of a tree (1680 c.). Something about this viewing experience felt distinctly magical, the scale felt altered, the distinction between miniature and giant became indistinguishable. The other strong feeling was one of voyeurism, like a peeping tom, I almost felt as though I was spying on the exquisite paintings, looking in on an uncovered secret. Without getting in close with your body, closing one eye and positioning yourself against the wall, you wouldn’t be able to see the works at all. Unlike large domineering paintings which assert their importance through scale, through being instantly seen when you enter the room, these paintings don’t need your gaze to be important. They revel in the beauty of detail, of appreciating sensitive delight, of needing to be discovered to be enjoyed.
The gaze is further explored when you step inside a glass box and ‘become’ an artwork yourself, you feel the eyes of the multitude of artworks positioned around you, gazing back at you, reversing the roles of viewer and art object. I enjoy the idea of subverting this dynamic, like these artworks are exhausted by always being looked at, and it’s their turn to reclaim their gaze and show you how it feels. This empowers the work by making the consumed the consumer, and it destabilises where the power lies in the viewing experience. Different works of art strike differently depending on who is looking, is it possible that we can have the same effect on a work of art? Do the viewers of art imprint themselves upon it, just as much as art has the power to imprint itself upon us? Perhaps these works of art hold the memory of each experience they have had with a viewer, each smile or grimace forever etched in their gaze.
Glass box surrounded by works of art, where you step in and ‘become an artwork’ yourself.
Just as artworks are alive with the reflection of their maker, they also have the ability to mirror the lived experience of the viewer; they express the shared experiences we have as living, breathing, emotional beings. Art always has something to say, and that voice shifts and transforms over time, folding history into the present day. Ultimately it is about connection, about piecing together our own emotional identities in relation to our bodies, and seeing those experiences reflected in the flesh of art.
