Abstract

This thesis critiques visual representations of the post-human body by investigating works of contemporary artists like Mona Hatoum, Marc Quinn, Alba d'Urbano, and Bill Viola. The body could in its true light depict a formless, androgynous entity, unrestricted by historical impositions and free to evolve in space. ;Chapter One contains an analysis of androgyny in art, especially of the new impulse coming from science, which makes gender non-essential, and renders androgyny more viable in a world of alternative possibilities. Formless androgyny is a liberating power; it frees the body from the sexual and erotic connotations that have led to its exploitation and coercion. Chapter Two overviews Hindu philosophy and religion, with a brief essay on how the body is still understood by that culture, and more emphatically how the Eastern visions of the eternal or formless body inspires contemporary art. Chapter Three discusses the political forces that affect the body and the social constructions that restrict its development. It contains an investigation of the different forms in which the body is exploited in a mercantile society and the confrontations produced when traditional societies conflict with new methods of production and consumption. Chapter Four deliberates on 'cannibalism' which becomes a metaphor of assimilation in which body and spirit, flesh and food, death and resurrection are combined; but the most abiding symbols of life are found in rituals which offer the body for a sacred consumption. Contemporary artists offer their body as works of art to reaffirm the unexpected and formless destiny of the body and the dismemberment of its parts. ;The search of the formless body could be constituted by an idea of the eternal body detected or re-constructed in the fields of technology, ritual, art, or in a neutral symbolic zone of emptiness. It is recommended that the artist's task be that of reaching out for transcendence by interpreting the evolving reality of a post-human body