Muscles, a collaboration with performance artist Lisa Watts
By
Clare Charnley
2006
Clare Charnley
Dimensions
800cm x 800cm
Courtesy of
National Lottery, Leeds City Art Gallery, business sponsorship
In body building the willpower takes over the body. It compartmentalises and controls. Specific parts are made to grow larger and harder, others reduced, reshaped. There is a conscious drive towards an ideal, the peak of perfection. But what if the process were to continue beyond this point? Impossible in the gym maybe, but feasible at the level of desire/fantasy and realisable at that of electronic imaging. In this form of excess, beyond control, the body becomes alarming, a threat, then hilarious, ridiculous. And here (in humour) the audiences reaction includes rejection, a state of not-being-able-to-take-it. What started as a process of control has become chaos, a site of transgressive play.
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