With the body under siege, as it has been with Covid for nearly two years, this fleshly machine that carries us through space is certainly a current topic. That could well have been the prod that provoked Border Crossings’ new issue, simply titled “The Body.” But it isn’t the pandemic that is addressed here. Instead, it is the body in some of its myriad forms.
There is The Painted Body, Steven Shearer’s beguiling and unique figures and faces discussed with the artist in a lengthy interview.
There are the Constructed, Encrypted, Cyborgian Bodies that appear in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s startling and engaging films and videos, staged from the 1970s to the present.
The Erotic Bodies and their “animal energy” drawn by legendary American artist Leon Golub is presented here with a previously unpublished interview Border Crossings conducted with the artist six months before his death in August 2004.
We look with wonder at Zachari Logan’s body in his body of work: the Queer Body in Nature where the artist grafts together “the human, the animal and the botanical”.
There is the grief-stricken response in bronze, to the Missing Body. Heart-rending, poignant small figures in that classical material here representing the absence of a friend who died still too young. Andrew Berardini’s introductory essay to this Portfolio perfectly places the beautiful, stricken work of artist Jon Pylypchuk.
We have looked at the Mothering Body and the eternal conflict in the internal, unavoidable dialectic between a woman’s asserting her own self and her nurturing another. Ara Osterweil writes and paints this dilemma with poetic skill.
Fiction conjures images and states, so Canisia Lubrin’s “Ear with Fragment of the Artist” is, as she described it, a stand-alone work of fiction based on the cited Article 33, from King Louis XIV’s “Codes Noir,” a 17th c. decree defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire—so: the Black Body.
In Ann Thomas’s article on artist Max Dean’s recent “body” of work we have the artist in his unflinching transmogrification of his own Unwell Body, the body and its dis-ease made manifest through art.
Vivek Shraya presents to us the glamorous Trans Body in her work “Legends of the Trans,” with an Introductory essay by noted curator Wayne Baerwaldt.
And there is the geography of the Body as Landscape/ Body in Landscape in the remarkable, warm drawings by Inuit artist Jutai Toonoo, his intimate work untroubled by the cold, with an Introduction by curator of Inuit Art, Nancy Campbell.
Professor of architecture, Carlos Rueda takes readers on a brief and dream-infused transport through his travel journal, in the Body and Architecture.
No body is more questioned in its corporeality than the Angelic Body. Philosopher and writer David Carrier queries the readings of Paul Klee’s small Angelus Novus. Painted in 1920 it continues to mystify and invite interpretation.
Critic and poet Barry Schwabsky looks closely at the work of two startling photographers, Hester Scheurwater and Lina Scheynius whose bodies and bodies of work are close, intimate and entirely credible, somehow interrupting the medium’s interventions.
There is always more, of course, in each issue.
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