The historical and social origins of prosthetic devices are complex and touch upon various disciplines that go beyond medical studies. Modern times have indeed attempted to juxtapose the natural body with the artificial one, analysing prostheses from the point of view of philosophy, visual culture, psychoanalysis and cybertheory.
Fashion and style played a part in more recent years with customisable parts - quite often 3D printed - produced by companies catering for a younger generation of amputees and therefore manufacturing prostheses or covers for them that may suit their needs and personalities and boost their self-confidence.
People interested in the these themes should definitely check out the exhibition "The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics" at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Developed across three gallery spaces, the event features over seventy artworks, objects and images from the late-19th century to the present day, combining painting, sculpture and medical science. These pieces will help visitors thinking about issues such as replacement, extension and enhancement while considering how artists addressed radical changes to the human bodies.
The exhibition actually opens outside the institute on the city's busiest thoroughfare, with a sculpture (co-commissioned with 14-18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions) made by British artist Rebecca Warren. The raw bronze piece consists in a pair of legs set on a rudimentary bronze wheeled platform, taking a monumental stride.
Prosthetic technology took a considerable step forward during and after the First World War: injured and disfigured soldiers became a familiar sight at the time and sculptors such as English Captain Francis Derwent Wood and American Anna Coleman Ladd worked directly with surgeons, creating restorative face masks for WWI soldiers.
Facial injuries were disheartening as soldiers had to deal with the physical loss and the psychological stress. In the photographs included in the exhibition Derwent Wood - who set up at the Third London General Hospital the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department - is pictured as he makes final adjustments to his patients' restored faces, while examples of the portrait masks Ladd created from her studio in the artists' quarter of Paris can also be admired.
These masks could be attached to a patient's face and were modelled from photographs taken before the injury and painted in oils to resemble the former features of the patient.
This section ties in with the life of artist Henry Moore, who was sent to fight to France where he and his regiment took part in the battle of Cambrai.
Moore's active participation in the war ceased when he was gassed and was hospitalised for around two months, spending time with amputees and severely wounded soldiers.
The man VS machine dichotomy is highlighted in the works of Alice Lex-Nerlinger and Jacob Epstein.
In the former's collages of androgynous cyborgs the artist hints at the possibility of a new existence half human and half artificial; the latter is known instead for his "Rock Drill", an abstract sculpture consisting in a sinister and menacing looking machine-like robot with a beak-shaped visage and armoured ribs that sat on top of a real miner's rock drill (the name of its American manufacturer was still emblazoned on its side).
Originally, the figure was three metre high, but Epstein dismantled the drill in 1916 casting the remaining figure in gun metal and re-titling it "Torso in Metal", almost to hint at the thousands of young male bodies dismembered at the Battle of the Somme.
As the years passed the technologised body was reinterpreted as the industrialised body.
Heinrich Hoerle's painting "Monument to Unknown Prostheses" portrays mechanised bodies represented by two figures wearing prosthetic arms reminiscent of work-arms developed by the rehabilitation industry.
Both the figures show injuries to the head, pointing to psychological and physical damage, while a third sits with legs awaiting prostheses to be fitted.
Prostheses from the collections of the Freud Museum, Hunterian Museum, Imperial War Museum, Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds and the V&A, are displayed next to artworks charged with further symbolic meanings such as Louise Bourgeois' peg leg suspended in space, a tribute to her sister Henriette, afflicted with a stiff leg.
Visitors are invited to draw comparisons between other works such as Oskar Schlemmer's "Slat Dance 1" (1927) in which equipment designed for physical education was employed to extend the dancer's limbs, and the isolated body extensions by Rebecca Horn such as her arm extensions that reach across a room or help the wearer scraping the floor or engaging in multiple functions, tackling in this way issues of space and the role of women.
There is also an interesting connection with architecture and interior design: moving from their experience of working with wood, furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames produced indeed a light leg splint made out of moulded plywood, that also looked a bit like the legs they designed for their chairs, so there is an intriguing connection here between form and function.
Fashionistas visiting the exhibition will instead immediately think about Aimee Mullins, world-class Paralympic athlete, activist, model for Alexander McQueen (many remember her equally terrifying and exciting appearance on the runway for the "No. 13" S/S 1999 collection in her prosthetic legs of carved elm wood) and protagonist of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.
Barney's "The Cabinet of Bessie Gilmore" (1999) from Cremaster 2 evokes natural history museums and cabinets of curiosity, and consists in a table with a glassed-in cabinet containing a series of pieces such as a translucent corset and a rock of solar salt over which loops a resin rope.
This piece may be disturbing, but the final message of "The Body Extended" is not an upsetting one since the main point of this event is to prompt visitors to ponder about pushing beyond our collective limits and about interactions between body and technology. Prostheses enhanced the body, but innovative technological devices are improving it while new drugs can help nourishing and modifying it from within.
"Man has (...) become a kind of prosthetic God," Freud claimed in Civilisation and Its Discontents, written after his face started collapsing from oral cancer and, after several operations, he was fitted with a prosthesis that kept his oral and nasal cavities separated.
"When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times," he stated, adding "Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more."
Will we turn into prosthetic gods, as Freud prophesised, and exceed our corporeal boundaries?
The exhibition doesn't really provide us with a final answer (though pop culture offers modern examples such as Latvian-born bionic pop star, artist and MIT Media Lab fellow Viktoria Modesta who usually wears different prosthetic legs that match with her outfits…) but it's certainly a clever way to consider a series of dichotomies and assumptions surrounding notions of normalcy, impairment, beauty and discrimination.
"The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics" is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 23rd October 2016.
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