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In the long history of artistic innovation, few developments have been as quietly alarming as the moment artists began to use the human body not merely as subject, but as substance. Tears, hair, vomit, blood, ashes, and (inevitably, because this is contemporary art) entire corpses have appeared in studios and galleries with a regularity that suggests the artistic imagination is most active precisely where everyone else’s stomach lining gives up. It raises a question museums rarely place on wall labels: How, exactly, are artists getting away with this?
We begin gently. Rose-Lynn Fisher’s Topography of Tears photographs dried tears under a microscope, revealing delicate crystalline formations that resemble coastlines or aerial topographies rather than emotional residue. Her project, documented in National Geographic and later in her 2017 monograph, reflects on the biological and emotional significance of tears and how differently they crystallise depending on their cause.¹ Tears are, among bodily fluids, the least likely to alarm a gallery audience, which makes them an ideal gateway into the stranger realms ahead. Bill Fink’s “Time and Matter Photography” goes one step further. For over three decades, Fink has created hyper-realistic portraits using the actual hair of the sitter, an approach referenced in Kaja Silverman’s discussions of alternative photographic processes.² Hair carries cultural and symbolic weight across many societies, yet Fink’s practice remains ethically uncomplicated thanks to consent and the replaceable nature of the material. Still, there is something faintly disconcerting about seeing a face built from the very strands that once helped frame it. Biomatter, even in its politest forms, refuses neutrality. Things escalate with Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961), perhaps the most famous bodily-fluid artwork in the Western canon. Ninety sealed tins of his own faeces, priced by weight at the cost of gold, satirised both the fetishisation of the artist’s body and the art market’s willingness to commodify anything.³ As Germano Celant notes, Manzoni’s provocation was less about shock and more about value: who decides what art is worth, and why? Unpleasant but ethically harmless, it remains a triumph of conceptual audacity. Millie Brown’s vomit paintings, by contrast, prompted public unease. Her performances, publicly vomiting coloured liquids onto canvas—were widely discussed in Vice and The Guardian, both of which reported accusations of glamorising eating disorders. Brown countered that her work was about embodiment, not pathology, and that gender biases shaped the criticism.⁴ Here the ethical questions shift: not to the biomatter itself, but to artistic influence, audience vulnerability, and the cultural meanings attached to bodily functions. Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings were produced by urinating on metallic paint, creating chemical reactions that formed stains and abstractions. Though sometimes dismissed as crude, the Whitney Museum and Warhol Foundation position these works as autobiographical documents of queer nightlife and bodily expression in 1970s New York.⁵ Warhol, as usual, managed to transform even bodily waste into social commentary, albeit commentary that required excellent ventilation. Tracey Emin’s History of Painting Part I (1999) brought menstrual blood into the gallery, a subject long shrouded in cultural discomfort. Emin’s use of her own tampons and a pregnancy test was in keeping with her confessional style; the work was discussed in Frieze and White Cube’s catalogue notes as an unfiltered celebration of her body’s functionality.⁶ It remains controversial precisely because menstruation is both biologically ordinary and socially taboo, an ideal recipe for contemporary art. Marc Quinn’s Self, the first version created in 1991, is a frozen sculpture of his head made from ten pints of his own blood. The National Portrait Gallery’s acquisition history confirms Quinn repeated the process every five years, creating a series of chilling self-portraits dependent on refrigeration, a metaphor for fragility and survival.⁷ Blood extraction introduces the first serious ethical tension: while it is voluntarily given, it involves medical procedures that push the boundary between art and bodily risk. Bill Fink reappears in more ethically complex territory with his portraits made from human ashes, donated by families of individuals who died of AIDS. American newspaper archives from the early 1990s document both praise and outrage during exhibitions in California.⁸ Ashes (as both material and memorial) complicate the relationship between representation, dignity, and posthumous consent. At the far edge sits Dr. Gunther von Hagens, creator of Body Worlds. Plastination transformed donated corpses into touring anatomical sculptures. Investigations by Der Spiegel and The Guardian raised concerns about specimens sourced from vulnerable populations, including unclaimed bodies from Russia and China, despite von Hagens’ public insistence on ethical donation.⁹ When the medium is a full human body, the ethical stakes move from discomfort to international scrutiny. The enduring truth is that art lacks a universal ethical code. Doctors have one. Lawyers have one. Even accountants, against all odds, have rules. Artists, meanwhile, work in a realm where provocation is celebrated, censorship feared, and human material becomes conceptual toolkit. Biomatter art persists not because it is comfortable, but because it asks questions that polite society prefers to avoid: about our physicality, our mortality, our boundaries, and our reflex to recoil when confronted with our own biology. Art shows us our insides, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes quite literally. To censor that would be to deny the messy truth of being human. (Adapted from lecture delivered at NLCS Singapore, 17 Mar 2021) LINK References :
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