The Thinking Body looks at work from a range of disparate practices, which illuminate the idea of a perceptive, analytical body from multiple perspectives. Curated by Kate Wagle and Anya Kivarkis, it will open at the University of Oregon, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) in June 2008 for three months. The show was created specifically to coincide with the 2008 Olympic Track and Field Trials that will be held on the University campus. Our exhibition connects and contrasts the “thinking body” with the “performative body” of the athletic events.  

The JSMA will also concurrently present Olympic Portraits by Contact Press Image, an exhibit of photographs from past Olympic Games by renowned Contact photographers capturing world-class athletes, as well as Edward Burtynsky: The China Series, honoring the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, comprised of twenty large-scale photographs of a culture and country experiencing dramatically rapid change.

At the time of the Trials, a large international audience, estimated by the Olympic governing body at 150,000, will converge in this city, and our exhibition will take full advantage of that expanded population. A color catalog will be produced and disseminated through a number of different channels.

Exhibition and Curatorial Focus

The Thinking Body is a small, focused exhibition of carefully selected contemporary American and European artists and designers whose work considers the body in relation to its spatial, cultural and intellectual environment. We are not interested in traditional terms that relate the body to superior functionality or enhancing ‘beauty’, but rather in understanding the relationships of adornment and functional objects to the body in new ways. The results are thought provoking, engaging and aesthetically compelling.

Our working context is the ideas that surround the work, rather than considering the work through a common format, as a kind of object (i.e., a ring or a sculpture), or as a specific discipline alone.  These ideas cross disciplines, and examine ways that different practices and different kinds of work consider and relay those ideas.  The Thinking Body’s significance lies in the juxtaposition of a range of vocabularies employed by contemporary designers and artists, advancing scholarship in multiple fields as it extends the critical conversation beyond the specifics of the medium. We have integrated interdisciplinary work that is thematically, materially or culturally connected, to broadly examine the idea of the body from the outlook of multiple disciplines and practices. The work of these seven artists develops original perspectives on adornment and functional objects, and the manner in which the body understands them.

The curators examine ideas about the body’s perceptual relationship to objects and spaces, and relate the work of designers to that of artists that explore the conceptual range of these forms and locations. The exhibition will expose the interesting aesthetic and cultural spaces that exist between the selected works, and consider their relationship to the human body as a uniquely sentient organism with the ability to innovate and understand itself related to the world around it in new ways. 

For example, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray’s Encased Teapot II resists visual understanding, but is clarified as an object that requires physical exploration of its orifices and activation of its function; Janine Antoni’s Umbilical is a spoon whose “bowl” extends into a cast of the interior of her mouth, making present an invisible, unconsidered space, and linking the decorative silver spoon to its physical, as well as social, economic and metaphoric function; Melanie Bilenker’s hair jewelry is a new interpretation of the historical format that utilized disembodied pieces of hair to memorialize and recall the physical; and Gijs Bakker’s strategy of employing the “truth” of photography, to shift the meaning and value of familiar forms of adornment.

The curators delve into the artists’ responses to both vernacular and luxury objects of material culture, bringing together a range of art objects that speak about function, use, display, and adornment, and consider the relationships of all of these kinds of objects to the body. Through these art objects, we are looking at how socially constructed ideas about objects can shift and expand in response to re-placement, re-thinking and re-structuring. The body is at the center of a synergy of consciousness and flesh, gesture and structure, cultural identity and social role.

Photos courtesy of Adam Willis.

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