Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Danillo Barata: the technological boundaries of the body-image

It is no overstatement to claim that technological innovations are no longer predominantly found in the laboratories. They are increasingly becoming a part of everyday life and are present in the bodies of thousands of people who follow the trends of biotechnology in these times of cyberculture. Among the many charms and perplexities of modern living, resulting from the progressive dissolution of the multiple technological boundaries that involve the body and the images of the body, Danillo Barata is an artist of the connectivities of biological and artificial systems, of sensoriality, and of other modes of subjectivation in the face of the close-knit creative and technical interfaces between the body, the mind, and the digital world. He is an artist who promotes fertile dialogues amidst the unusual, fascinating contemporary crossroads that recreate new corporal imageries. The perception of body-image by the artist takes place in a paradoxical manner, because the body is at once the subject and the object of his representations. And it is nothing further than that; after all, the body does not exist outside of the representations that we make of it. Such perception expresses the uninterrupted aesthetics of the metamorphic construction and deconstruction of sideralized corporalities. This analysis may be observed in the video installations and videos selected for this Essay.

VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

Passarela

To the Western man, the body has become the place of his identity and his way of being. Our time surrenders to the various cults that celebrate and praise corporality. From sports to the widespread use of silicone implants and plastic surgery, many techniques and therapies aim to overvalue and showboat the body in the streets, beaches, clubs, magazine pages, television shows, advertising films, various images on the Internet, in the catwalks, in the art galleries.

With each new instant we are invited to manage our own appearance, to overcome and redesign physical shapes. It has become a must to have a chameleonic body, constantly subject to change. The promotional images of the mutant body, everywhere, evoke the many ways through which this object can undergo manipulation and agencing, in the name of an ever-distant, and perhaps precisely for that reason, increasingly desired perfection.

This fashionista universe of seductive appearances exalts an aesthetic of fleeting bodies converted into models to be pursued. But not all is fascinating when one is faced with the real possibility of building and modifying appearance, and acquiring the body that one plans and aims to. The obsession with perfection is also fed by a continual dissatisfaction with its results, which are provisionally obtained and as of then overcome. Maybe this dissatisfaction reveals another aesthetic, one of obsoleteness, of bodies that never manage to be sufficiently updated, and thus are always on the margin of classic catwalks. These are interdicted bodies.

In Passarela, Danillo Barata denounces this emptiness. The artist used six gurneys, on top of which are several television sets showing footage of fashion shows, in which supposedly perfect bodies occupy the catwalks and impose themselves on people. Oddly enough, in these very videos, other catwalks, far removed from any glamour, expose the evidence of a daily routine in which several bodies parade their interdictions, mutilations, and various imperfections. These depreciated anatomies, these marginalized, hidden bodies translate other facets of corporality.

To the artist, the gurneys represent a place for adjustment, where people mutilate themselves and undergo transformation processes so as to cater to the demands of the first images, those of dominant corporal representations. A hospital, an operating room, an infirmary. These places are emblems of the discomforts experienced by those who chase an ideal type, but must live with their bodies in need of new interventions and updating.

With his work, Danillo Barata says that corporal models coexist with their countermodels. It is a thin line between authorized definitions and representations of the body, and those considered scandalous. Maybe they all occupy one single catwalk where we parade our bodies marked by interdictions and incompleteness.

O corpo como inscrição de acontecimentos

Everywhere, the discourses and techniques for liberating the body from old religious, philosophical, geographic, temporal, moral, pedagogical ties proliferate. In the last decades, by means of the genome project, science has attempted to free each person’s body from its cultural and genetic heritage. It has become a pressing need to eliminate each and every physical and mental dissatisfaction, put an end to a real or assumed imperfection, correct each detail, build up the shape considered most adequate, prevent any embryonic possibility of disease, alter features that displease us, retain the vigor of youth, boast the healthiest appearance, celebrate the beauty conquered with the aid of technological and scientific progress: diets, therapies, cosmetics, surgery, prosthetics, genetic manipulation. Amidst so many remodeling resources, the ugly, out of shape, flaccid, wrinkled, and aged are only those who want to be so, those who do not love themselves, do not care for themselves, or do not show off. The cult of the body has become a lifestyle. The fascinating promise of an additional gain in health, youth, and beauty has conquered a never-before-seen space in scientific and artistic circles, in the media, in every sphere of our everyday lives.

This unfinished body, regarded as an object that is always ready to be reformed, needs to boost its levels of performance. In order to beat the growing dangers of turning obsolete, the body needs to be constantly boosted so as to keep up with the sophistication of machines, and cater to the new demands for pleasure and freedom that are typical of modern days.

But the obsession for the body considered to be perfect, the slender, smooth shape, inevitably coexists more and more with the leftovers deemed inadequate and depreciated. Our time values the slender, but the population is growing more and more obese. It celebrates youth, however our bodies are increasingly flaccid and wrinkled, often precociously. It praises health, but the ghosts of disease surround us. The hectic life and constant stress of the big cities seem to always deplete people’s vigor.

The installation entitled O corpo como inscrição de acontecimentos reveals that paradox. While many wish to eliminate the marks of time and experience, the artist tells us that events are inscribed on the body. The imbalanced dieting is there in accumulated fat, the strength of the years is there in the flaccidness of flesh, the experiences are there in the persistent wrinkles that torment us so. The background sound is one of things being dragged around, bodies being fixed up. The images display fat and skinny bodies, young and not so young, in gestures that translate efforts to breathe and maintain good shape. Initially shown facing the camera, the bodies soon move and turn their backs on us. With their heads down, each model is turned to itself. To the artist, we might even disguise the inscriptions of events on the surface of our skin. However, behind that which is apparent, inside of us, there lie all of the marks, lost suffering and joys, imperfections and incompletion that translate what we are.

Corpos interditados

Beauty, vigor, youth. These vectors provide the foundation for the elaboration of the discourses and models of the body that is considered perfect. In order to attain the standards of perfection, the vital body is increasingly fed stimulant techniques that are capable of building up and enhancing features regarded as graceful, the resistance, and the always young and healthy look. In many ways, there is a need to accelerate the body, derive more motion and pleasure from it. The body needs to be tested, maximum performance must be pursued, obstacles overcome, boundaries crossed, records broken.

The logic of technical excitation postulates that the equipped, ceaselessly reconfigured body has become the valid, efficient model. On the other hand, the notion of handicap has changed. The bearers of anomalies, visible physical shortcomings, the skinny, the skinless, and the morbidly obese are no longer the only ones considered to be grossly obscene. The escalade of obscenity includes all of those whose body is not sufficiently equipped, sculpted, and preserved by prosthetics and other technologies for protecting and promoting new reflexes, and physical and mental stimuli.

In other words, whatever body is believed to be “normal,” pointed out as beautiful, strong, and young, however removed from this obsession with fast-paced change, bearing no ties to the perpetual stimulation, is labeled as obsolete, passé, ugly, old, handicapped, and, therefore, culturally depreciated. Without changing the bodily architecture on a daily basis, be it by adding superficial prosthetics or by the intraorganic intrusion of said prosthetics within our organs, we are no longer able to readjust our awareness of the world. We are no longer able to glorify ourselves.

Equipping the body, building efficiency. This is our paradox. Perfection seems right around the corner, conquerable. But let no one be fooled. The more the body is surgically processed, equipped with prosthetics and products that aim to repeatedly elaborate new designs, the farther it remains from the ideal of perfection. People become more dissatisfied, they suffer. With each passing moment the elaborated shapes are left behind, models become aged and are cast aside. This means that somehow all of us, who obsessively chase maximum efficiency, regardless of the level of corporal elaboration, have become physically impaired, handicaps, bearers of interdicted bodies, carrying the burden of a progressively depreciated physical structure.

Today’s latest-generation equipment becomes the technical oddity early tomorrow. By the same token, the physical shape conquered through effort, work, and heavy financial and emotional investment is immediately defeated and abandoned. At every moment, it is imperative to set out for new conquests. This urgency leads one to believe that, in fact, there is not a model of perfection, but rather an illusion of perfection. The beautiful, strong, and young, efficient and appreciated body is not the one that acquired certain shapes and adapted to certain standards. The beautiful, strong, and young, efficient and appreciated body is the one that does not cease to be updated, no matter what provisional shape it acquires, and immediately intends to rid itself of.

In Corpos interditados, such is the condition and destiny of the body on display. Several screens show images of several bodies, men’s and women’s, young and not so young, black, dark skinned, white. The technique for showing the bodies is anthropometrics, “side, front, back,” routinely used by the police. Each subject, with its lightness and grace, moves while chasing these angles. Apparently, the images projected on the screen have nothing grotesque, no physical shape bears any abnormality. The bodies shown by the artist can all be considered “normal,” of the type regularly supplied everywhere by the human market. In fact, however, it is precisely this supposed “normality” that contains the perversion, odd, the ugly, the despicable, that which must not be appreciated and adored. These bodies do not visibly represent the dynamics of physical and mental mutability provided by the technologies that revolutionize the architecture of the body in cyberculture. Not all is lost, though, as it is always possible to eliminate some of the shortcomings to build up more valued, appreciated shapes. In this work of art, not by chance, as the bodies display their anatomical obsoleteness, one can hear the sound of flesh and bone being chopped, manipulated, grafted, glued together, and sewn. This is the music that is supposedly able to mobilize and lure people into the cult of the cyberbody, which rocks the silicone gel-, prosthetics-, liposuction-filled bodies, and has them dancing.

VIDEOS

Soco na imagem

In a way, for a long time, the idealization of corporal beauty matched the representation of the motionless body, in sculpture, painting, and even in photography. The idea was that the aesthetic apprehension of the body at rest was more intense than when in motion. However, studies on the motion of a walking or running body are surprising, as they reveal it in the succession of images. With these studies, more than ever, the eye must be trained in order to notice the details of the limbs, the torso, the face, in the same instant as they are displaced. Fragmentation is the scene. It is the body itself. The aesthetic perception of the moving body entails a gaze that is able to join the image in its rhythm, in which the ambiguousness of displacements comprises the representations themselves.

In Soco na imagem it is Danillo Barata’s own body that fights, punches, and caresses his image in the mirror. Now, the body is the image itself, reflected on the surface of a mirror or a screen, wrapped in digital imagery. It is the motion manipulated by the camera that makes it slower or faster, brighter or shady, visible or invisible, self-affecting and self-portraying. The image is no longer a mere copy of the object that is said to be real. It expresses the rupture and the simultaneous appropriation of the body that only exists as image. Not by chance, the technique used is the loop, which allows the artist to get out of the front of the camera and then return, in an endless confrontation.

This dialogue with the camera and against it is, in fact, a struggle with oneself, and often a struggle against the tyranny of the mirror, which punches the person with their own incomplete body, out of sync with the physical shapes celebrated by the media and updated in the model images that surround us. It is as if the person, by punching the image and by punching themselves, were able to see and become aware of their weaknesses and angst, which go in and out of scene, making themselves present and absent in the reflective surfaces of the body-image.

Soco na imagem may also be viewed as an allegory of the discomfort caused by the intense flow of images to which we are submitted on a daily basis. This is why the performer keeps up his guard and throws punches ceaselessly at his own image, but maybe also at the viewer watching him. The same tension between body and image, rest and motion, the appreciated or depreciated physical model, is present between the viewer, the artist, and the work.

Capitália

Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine comedy and by the capital sins dealt with by the Italian writer, the video focuses on the nightlife of downtown Salvador and its multiple, haunted characters. It may be seen as a depiction of an abandoned city, marked by its own ruin and that of its inhabitants. If all is engulfed in the deep darkness of night, it is only to highlight the nightmarish state in which the tensioned, complex urban life takes by storm the passing bodies that wander around. On one side, cars pass through on the avenues to seemingly uncertain destinations and disappear in the distant curves, in the pitch black night. On the other side, the characters, with their nightly sins and virtues, stumble like those sleepwalking aimlessly on the hole-filled sidewalks in dilacerated places with their chaotic urbanization and devastated nature. This imponderable needs to be taken into consideration: the inscription of objects, people, and places into the flow of the urban dynamic. Because it is there, in the experience of the abyss, that each must find their own sense of belonging in these territories de/configured by precarious transportation and communication systems.

To the artist, it is amidst the disorder of the big city, surrounded by threats and fleeting pleasures, that boundaries are suspended or crossed. Old social, political, economic, cultural, and educational boundaries lose their meaning in these disaggregation-ridden locations. Old bridges, ruined warehouses, junkyards, dirty, stinky staircases on which people roll by in all their misery, comprise the Capitálialandscape. Vices and virtues are condemned by the hurrying and the crumbling down of sensations. In between the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that torments and kills, promises of hope and freedom fade away, and are also renewed. It is in this endless spinning of places and bodies abandoned by the sides of the roads, overpasses, and sidewalks that the Capitália recreates the plots of life in permanent displacements and mutations.

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Danillo Barata’s production, both the installations and the videos—which complement each other—are permeated by the vertigo of the destructuring bodies-images of contemporary times. His approaches are multiple, disquieting, and fertile. Inscribed in this complexity is the poetics of the artist, avid and critical of this magical world generated and fed by optical illusions, which questions and invests in the subjectivities progressively characterized by the dissolving and renewal of boundaries between organic and inorganic, between body and images.

In the context of electronic networks, the basis for artistic creation is metamorphosis; the synesthetic appeals of the body are redone through multiple connections between meanings and possibilities. In cyberculture, our cognitive processes increasingly develop in partnership with electronic and digital systems. The technologized body inserts itself into new digital boundaries, continually dissolved and renewed. In these interfaces, Danillo Barata finds the poetic foundations for his work.