Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Here’s a recipe for a Museum of Modern Art mess: stir together a ladleful each of abstraction, biomorphism and gender politics, sprinkle with academic verbiage, and blend until the mixture collapses in on itself.Seen as theoretical argument or historical exegesis, New York show Vital Signs: Artists and the Body is tiresome and confused. But as a collection of works that allude to human flesh and its discontents, the exhibition has an appealing sort of randomness. A few common motifs emerge: breasts, curves and sutured wounds. Paintings and sculptures trumpet the body’s mutability, its fluids and protuberances, but leave plenty of room for interpretation.Many of the separate pieces are worth seeing, even if the thread that ties them together is frayed. Nearly 50 years ago, Senga Nengudi stuffed sand into nylon tights, knotted them into dangling sacs, and suspended them in unnerving arrangements. They appear by turns pustular, unborn or withered — but somehow magnetically sensual too. Traces of beauty and violence echo through works such as “R.S.V.P.I.” (1977/2003), which looks like a body weighted by gravity and tangled in time’s torments.“After giving birth to my own son, I thought of black wet nurses suckling child after child — their own as well as others — until their breasts rested on their knees, their energies drained,” Nengudi wrote in 1977.That sense of artists communicating through a shifting, elusive language of sinews and glands gives the exhibition its liveliness and contributes to whatever unity it has. Louise Bourgeois, for instance, cast a symmetrical arrangement of pods in plaster to produce “Torso, self-portrait” (1963-4). The combination of vertical spine and horizontal nubs, embedded in a lumpy cushion, hints at a range of possible answers to the question “What is that supposed to be?”. We could be looking at a corn cob, a pine tree, an insect’s exoskeleton, a split-open peapod or an X-ray of a human rib cage. Free association and metaphor mix to spawn multiple meanings, some (but not all) suggestive of the female body.To explain that intersection of the evocative and the abstract, curator Lanka Tattersall opens her catalogue essay by rewinding to MoMA’s 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Then, the museum’s founding director Alfred Barr distinguished between “intellectual . . . geometrical” abstraction — “the shape of the square”, he called it — and the more “intuitional and emotional” kind: “the silhouette of the amoeba”.Tattersall has commandeered the second category as the basis for this show, and she presents it as a field dominated by female artists — almost as if they had some essential biological insight into the ways of blood and flesh. Plenty of men have explored the body’s weirdnesses — among them, Robert Gober, Matthew Barney, Bruce Nauman, but none are included here.And so we get a lot of art by women about inhabiting a woman’s body. Mrinalini Mukherjee’s “Yakshi” (1984) is a floor-length dress made of blue hemp, tailored for a 9ft human and named for a forest goddess. Mukherjee drew inspiration from travels across her native India and the carvings found in temples and roadside shrines. But the absent figure that gives the dress its shape belongs to the artist. The menacing, monumental totem is her.Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka also started with a dress, in order to generate her 1956 drawing of 12 balloon-like forms held in place by wriggling lines. The abstract grid is a two-dimensional offshoot of the electric outfit she rigged up for herself, studded with red, green, blue and yellow lightbulbs, all connected by a mess of wires. Plugged in, it looked like a burning bush, flashing warning and revelation. A decade after the horrors of the second world war, she danced in that ecstatic costume, risking electrocution.Knowing that helps to grasp the analogy she made in the deceptively simple drawing — between electric and human circuitry, wires and neurons, bulbs and cells. Postwar Japan had its neon pleasures, but they were bound up with the aftershocks of trauma.This cornucopia of backstories and allusions makes the case that non-figurative art isn’t really pure; most of it derives from the familiar triumvirate of landscape, portrait and still-life. That’s hardly an original point and there are innumerable ways to make it. The show never explains the need to prosecute it again, or what nuance this particular accumulation of works might add.Somewhere in all this you can find the beginnings of a tangentially related argument: the division between genders is porous and blurred, just like the line between abstraction and figuration. Vital Signs includes Eva Hesse’s “Ringaround Arosie” (1965), a small, red-bordered disc mounted above a larger one, like the two spheres of a snowman. She built them out of clothbound electrical wire, laid out in concentric circles that rise to peaks at the centre. The two mounded shapes recall severed body parts, but Hesse couldn’t quite settle on which: “a breast and a penis,” she informed Sol LeWitt at the time; a “breast job” with “one pink nipple and one white,” she later decided.Sexual ambiguity moves to the top of the exhibition’s agenda in the work of the show’s odd man out: Forrest Bess (1911-1977), a self-taught hermit who lived on Texas’s Gulf Coast, fishing by day and painting his dreams by night. The small canvas “Number 40” (1949) is divided into a black vertical stripe on the left and a broader zone of creamy yellow on the right. An earlike shape sits on the border between them and, off to one side, an eye (or is it a mouth?) is stitched or zippered shut. In another untitled painting from 1957, a zipper-like set of train tracks recedes into an apocalyptic landscape tinted orange and grey.Bess’s work is anomalous here, since it tends towards surrealism rather than abstraction. Haunted by a desire for unity, he immersed himself in the theories of Carl Jung and the rituals of indigenous Australians. He took his desire for abolishing divisions quite literally, even performing a series of surgical interventions on his own genitals. “All symbolism in art points toward this mutilation as being the basic step towards the state of pseudo-hermaphrodite as the desirable and intended state of man,” he wrote.Despite his isolation, Bess had powerful connections in the New York art world, corresponding regularly with the art historian Meyer Schapiro and showing his work at Betty Parsons’ gallery. He asked her to post his sexual manifesto alongside his paintings. She refused.What all this has to do with the substance of Vital Signs is hard to parse, but it helps to listen to the art historian Cyle Metzger on the audio guide. “I think Bess is anticipating a moment that we’re arriving closer and closer to now, hopefully, wherein intersex medicine and transness itself is not about making bodies clearly male and female but recognising this notion of gender being an abstraction that is applied to our bodies.”You see? Abstraction isn’t truly abstract, but gender is. Metzger’s observation applies only to that one work, but it also helps clarify why a show that might have been intriguing instead comes off as tendentious. Over the course of a century, artists have confronted the body squeamishly, pruriently, heroically, rebelliously, and in a hundred other ways, but here MoMA forces them all to take sides in one of today’s most volatile cultural debates. Abstraction, the introductory wall text proclaims, is “a useful strategy for artists whose embodied experiences may not align with dominant cultural narratives — including those who are women, gender-expansive, queer, and/or people of colour.” How ironically reductive to take a tool that so many artists valued for its irreducible ambiguity and use it to politicise the past.To February 22, moma.org
