Something Amiss

Walking into Lauren Kalman’s Corpus, Figure, Skate is like entering a world in which everything has shrunk a size. Videos are displayed on screens no bigger than airplane windows. Two sculptures—a wheelchair and an unidentifiable apparatus that suggests both a folding bed and a torture rack—are just a little too small to accommodate the adult bodies for which they seem intended. Even the Temporary Contemporary gallery space, which is rather cramped to begin with, has been made a tad more claustrophobic by a partition that creates a second room within it.

This subtle skewing of the environment provides an emotional background for the show’s various elements, all of which focus on the distorted, alienated perceptions women have of their bodies. The viewer’s gnawing awareness of something amiss mirrors the persistent feeling among women that their physical selves are ugly, unhealthy or otherwise faulty.

The first of the exhibit’s two rooms contains a pair of videos and the mysterious bed-like sculpture in an otherwise empty white space. One video, placed in the ceiling, features a lone female figure modeling a series of simple dresses constructed of different materials: fabric, a sheet of lead and what appear to be thin pieces of meat. She stands straight and still as a paper doll as the camera moves around her, despite being perched on a pair of roller skates. The woman in the second video is also static, but her gently swinging image is caught at the peak of a flailing arabesque, with her dress flying up to reveal her body. The skates reappear here, and her pose suggests both dancing and falling. Where the first figure seems almost bodiless and defined by her clothing, the second is profoundly identified with her body, yet is just as passive.

Aspects of both video figures are echoed in the sculpture. Its spindly frame is coated in the same lead that composes one of the modeled dresses. The sheet of lead is draped down to disguise the legs, creating a deceptive impression of grace and fluidity. The joints of the apparatus are hinged so that there is a potential of motion, but like the awkward dancer, the sculpture seems frozen.The three elements together create a sense of a corporeal reality that is fundamentally unviable or inadequate.

The second room of the show repeats many of the elements of the first, but its effect is more unsettling. The narrow space is defined by padded walls, covered with white fabric reminiscent of surgical gauze. An improvised wheelchair dominates the center of the room. Like the first sculpture, it is covered in lead, which gives it an ironic appearance of immobility. Here again, the lead is draped as it reaches the floor, as if to prettify the object or make it more feminine.

The subject here seems to be the pathology inherent in our concept of the feminine. The white padded walls suggest an asylum, while the wheelchair is associated with illness, helplessness and the ever-present fear of aging. This room is a reminder, too, of the voluntary medicalization of femininity in a consumer culture, manifested in everything from the plastic surgery craze to prescheduled C-sections. These themes are reinforced by the single video in this room, which shows another image of a lone woman—again shod in roller skates—moving in an abrupt, stop-action manner as tiny objects gather around her and creep up her legs. The little bulbs might be wads of flesh, but they are also suggestive of flower petals, so that there’s a simultaneous reference to decay and to the ideal purity of a bride.

Kalman, an assistant professor at Watkins College of Art and Design, creates in Corpus, Figure, Skate a remarkable catalog of women’s disordered attitudes toward their bodies. The show effectively evokes the sense of unease, of lurking fear and dissatisfaction that women experience as they confront the gap between their ideal selves and the fragile physical reality. What the show lacks is any portrayal or critique of the source of women’s anguish. Her artist’s statement speaks of “Capitalist vision and Protestant asceticism,” but the objects in the show contain no such references. They seem to exist outside culture. Perhaps that’s fitting. For most women, chronic discontent with the body is experienced in isolation. It’s a problem that seems to arise from nowhere and everywhere, and its true source is invisible to them. They just know they hate what they see in the mirror.