The body was treated as an art installation this week by the Australian artist Stelarc.
There is literally no form of physical torture, manipulation, disfigurement or mutilation that could not
be categorised as part of art for this guy. Confronting at first but thoroughly fascinating, his art has become a media frenzy since the 60s because of its crude nature and limitless creator.
The most famous and confronting installations was in the 70s when Stelarc suspended his body on hooks in various locations, once even in a street of New York without permission. As Stelarc remarked his intention was to make the body involuntary and at the mercy of external force.
His current projects include reinventing the self online, having an online identity; something that couldn't register as anything less than The Sims with me; a fad that has come and gone.
The level of shock everyone experienced at the lecture wasn't enough to stop us from peering at the prosthetic ear Stelarc has lodged under the skin of his left arm. Curiosity got the better of us.
What struck a nerve is how he completely disregarded his physical needs and often put himself through pain for the sake of art. For example gagging when he tried to lodge a metal 'sculpture' into his stomach repeatedly seemed a bit extreme.
Extreme is the category that you would have to put Stelarc in. His new work, as he ages and mellows perhaps, is less physically invasive and thoroughly interesting. He concerns himself with how man and machine can work together, how movement can be created in machines by mind control. The future for humans seems to be one where robots do everything and are controlled by human minds, making the body more or less redundant.
Above all I admire his originality but would never think of my body or use it in similar ways. ever.
No idea where this Massumi article is lurking so comments on Bohm from week one will have to do:
'Why has man given the supreme importance to thought?'-Krishnamurti, J. and David Bohm 1985
Bohm seems to think that there is no meaning of life, humans just go on living and thats that.
The less religious people come, the less meaning there is in everything and the more anomie is created.
Apparently facts are in the way psychologically, I think its merely a way of organising information into 'forgetable' and 'unforgetable' so that our brains can properly process all the information it gets bombarded with.
Krishnamurti believes that if enough people believe in something publicly then it suddenly becomes fact. I would certainly say that about religion.
So basically, scientists have it wrong, all religions have it wrong, and these two can't decide who has it right. All human beings are irrational creatures and let their irrationality get in the way of decisions, what they choose to believe and who they converse with.
I don't believe that peoples backgrounds shape how they think as an adult. Plenty of adults do not think the way their parents thought or hold the same values. But they certainly are irrational, curious, looking for answers constantly; whether there are answers or not is an undecided matter.
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