Having a body is weird. You have to feed it and groom it and move it around, all while remembering people’s names and acting appropriately in social situations and trying to forget that, at every second, it’s decaying and readying itself for its final resting place.
No wonder filmmakers and visual artists are so inspired by the body’s pleasures and horrors. Cinema can offer parables about the strangeness of corporeal experience, while sculpture and performance turn to materials, from plaster and urine to the body itself, to generate powerful new understandings of skin, bone, and everything in between.
On the cinematic side of things, David Cronenberg is perhaps the American filmmaker most linked to the genre of body horror, which focuses on bodily traumas, mutations, and grotesqueries. He makes films that literalize the monsters inside us and our most self-destructive desires. Among them are The Brood (1979), which features a woman who sprouts growths that turn into violent new beings, and The Fly (1986), which centers on a man who slowly transforms into the titular insect. As Cronenberg explores technology, violence, and sex, he keeps his focus on the intricacies of the flesh.
If you’re interested in Cronenberg’s films, here are seven visual artists whose work explores similar themes.
Carolee Schneemann
B. 1939, Philadelphia. D. 2019, New Paltz, New York.
Carolee Schneemann used her body to make provocative statements about the pleasures and grotesqueries of women’s corporeal experience. She remains a major figure of early feminist art.
Schneemann’s infamous 1975 work Interior Scroll featured the artist unraveling then reading a scroll that had been situated inside her vagina. As in The Brood—in which a woman’s rage sprouts into tumors that develop into small monsters—the artist birthed something potent, new, and unnatural. Her film Fuses (1964–67), which aimed to reconfigure notions of power in heterosexual relationships, captured the artist having sex with her partner, as seen from their cat’s perspective. Schneemann pushed performance art toward orgy with Meat Joy (1964), in which the artist and seven other performers lathered their half-clad bodies in paint while playing with raw fish, chickens, sausages, and each other.
Liberation and violence similarly coalesce in Snows (1967), a performance that featured movement, films, and many images of atrocity in Vietnam. While Schneemann’s own body was at the core of her work, she used it as a tool to consider larger political forces and events.