On the radio recently, I heard news of an Israeli bombing of an apartment building in Beirut that killed everyone inside. One man had been at the bomb site for days waiting for any sign of his sister until, at last, a disembodied hand was found amid the rubble. Desperate for answers, and to stave off the dark prospect of never knowing, the man set about determining if the hand was his sibling’s.
The unidentified hand came to mind when I made my way through “Body Fragment,” an elegiac group show at The Power Station in Dallas. Curated by the art space’s longtime artistic director, Rob Teeters, the exhibition takes cues from current global events like that in Beirut and brings together ancient figurative artifacts alongside works by contemporary artists to consider the historical and ever-current artistic motif of the body in pieces.
A quote from critic Linda Nochlin serves as an epigraph for the show, indicating a defining trait of modernity as fragmentation: “a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection.” Joan Semmel’s painting Blue Back (1973), then, depicting a couple in the act of making love, is a surprise magnet on the far back wall. The majority of the picture is made up of a man’s back, with a glimpse of a woman’s knee making space for him between her unseen legs. Her hand is gripped between his buttocks, pulling him into her. Though an act of clear connection, the man’s body is an ice-cold blue, like one pulled from the freezer after weeks in the morgue, casting a ghostly pall over the erotic scene. One imagines the fantasized reunions of so many war widows and widowers. The aching left-behind.
