In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Art and the History of the Body: AReview of 'Identity and Alterity', the Keynote Show of the 1995 Venice Biennale In the second of the two articles that I wrote for the Hong Kong Economic Journal concerning the Venice Biennale I concentrated on one particular thematic show. One issue I bring up in my discussion ofIdentity and Alterity is its virtual exclusion of non-Western art, something I might well have overlooked had I not come to live in Hong Kong. The Venice Biennale takes place in a permanent garden site on which a series of national pavilions have been constructed. In this centenary Biennale there are also various other national shows (such as those put on by Taiwan and Croatia) which are taking place at a variety of sites across the city. In addition to these shows there are also a few thematic exhibitions not organized along national lines, and the most ambitious of these is Identity and Alterity which, because of its size, is divided between three locations: the Palazzo Grassi, the Museo Correr and the Italian Pavilion at the permanent site (the Giardini di Castello). Identity and Alterity, organized by Jean Clair, takes as its theme the various ways in which the human body (and particularly the human face) has been represented in 20thcentury art. It has as a basic premise the assumption that we only ever know the body through the mediation of culture, that the body is not an unchanging natural entity with which we have a direct unmediated relationship. In short, that the body has a history, as much as politics or economics have a history. A large-scale exhibition on this theme has not (to my knowledge) been attempted before, but this historically relative understanding of the human body and its representations is by no means new in academic thought. The American periodical Zone, for instance, 207 Western Art in a Hong Kong Frame 208 published a three-part history of the body a few years ago, and quite a bit earlier than that the French thinker Michel Foucault published important studies of the way in which criminology and the penal system (and other such regimes) produce the modern body. Foucault's intellectual interest was in exposing the relations between knowledge and power - because of his scepticism about theories of political liberation he considered the subject primarily in its passive sense, the subject as subjected rather than the subject as the free active centre of its universe. Although the theoretical sophistication of Foucault it not really to be found in Identity and Alterity, which has only minimal wall-texts to signpost its conceptual structure, this subjected subject does appear in earlier sections of the exhibition, where we see science helping visual images in their attempt to specify individual identity as a means for social surveillance and control. We now take passport photos and video surveillance cameras for granted, but the culture of classification and control to which they belong is very much a development of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Identity and Alterity documents the attempts made by Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) to specify the physiognomic differences between individuals, a task of identification which was directly tied to criminological ends. Photography, then still a relatively new invention, proved the most useful tool for this task, becoming established in the role of neutral, truthful witness which it has played many times since. Perhaps the most moving images in the whole exhibition are a group which show the frightening ways in which the technologies of surveillance and control were developed in our own century, namely a series of identity photographs taken ofJewish prisoners in the Auschwitz death camp. Here we see the subjected subject in its extreme form, but of course we abdicate the position of surveillance the image offers us, and make a leap of empathic identification with the victims themselves. A strength of Identity and Alterity is the way it brings scientific or criminological images together with artistic ones, enabling us to see the connections between them. Degas, for instance, is represented by two pastel studies he made of the physiognomy of criminals. These images are influenced by the theories of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), who believed that criminals had specific physical appearances, that they could be visually identified and classified according to type (fig. 31.1). The scientific investigation of the human body in motion by Etienne-Jules Marey and others is similarly juxtaposed with artworks by Thomas...

Share