|
From: The
mutated body Written by Jorinde Seijdel in a
Montevideo/TBA publication,1998 ‘Frozen Voice’ and ‘Without
the Word’, installations dating from 1992 and 1994, also include
various parts of the body which manifest themselves in isolation from each
other. Bogers' representations of the body are a far cry from the humanistic
ideology of the body, which is precisely about unity and wholeness, about the
body as an integrated system of connected parts, governed and controlled by
an all co-ordinating higher brain - the subject that imposes its will and
identity on the body as the object. This traditional concept of the body fits
in with the philosophy of progress, in which man controls his environment and
bends technology and matter to his will. What, then, is the identity and
ideology of Bogers' disintegrated, mutated and
alienated bodies? What is their context and deeper truth? At face value, they
are devoid of any kind of hierarchy, of a central point, which gives them
coherence and unity. The organs, which seem to be in an embryonic state of
weightlessness, are also restrained, held in quarantine, by the hardware and
software of the technology with which they are represented; it is precisely
this technology which defines their context, identity and truth. Technology
is not merely used as a presentation model, instrument, medium or shell, but
rather, is part of the content. Bogers' bodies seem to be possessed by
an alien bodily order, which has taken hold of
them internally. They are following a logic, which has nothing to do with us.
They do not control technology, but rather, it controls them, mutates them
internally. The traditional rift between body and technology seems to have
been eradicated, to make place for a hybrid fusion. Bogers' bodies are no
longer superior to technology and matter, but rather, are completely absorbed
by them. They are an ecstatic representation of the ongoing mutilation of the
body. This is alarming, but only if considered from the traditional idea of
the pure controlling and controlled body. Now that the body is becoming more and
more contaminated, not only by external, but also by internal
(bio)technological prostheses and genetic manipulation, now that there are
dreams of cultivating parts of bodies and bodies without heads, the fusion of
body and technology is no longer a nightmare or science fiction, rather, it
has become reality. Bogers shows the body in a precarious position, but
without provoking a nostalgic yearning for 'the times when all was as it
should be' -of course, we now know that such times never existed, but were only
invented in retrospect. Rather, Bogers' work represents a courageous spirit
of survival, and attempts to let go of the old and familiar, in favour of the
strangeness and uncertainty of the metamorphosis. The metamorphosis of the world Bogers' installations can also be
regarded as attempts to make the fundamental chasm between the inner and the
outside world, between subject and object, between image/representation and
reality, visible and tangible. Bogers emphatically shows the confinement of
the images within the order governing the representation, a strange,
introverted order, which does not belong to ordinary reality. Everything
looks so miss-happen and strange that you are forced into reflection on the
status of both worlds, the ordinary world and the one represented. It is as
if the manifestations in Bogers' work were in a different dimension, with a
different gravity and different laws of space and time. Considered from the
sphere of the normal and conventional, it is governed by total disintegration
and fragmentation, and you are the observer of alienating, introverted,
rituals. There are barely answers to the whys and wherefores, on the
contrary, questions are raised. There are no co-ordinating, narrative,
contexts: the images mainly relate to themselves and to each other. |