Body Parts

This new exhibit at Houston's Menil Collection assembles a wide range of representations of fragmented bodies, including reliquaries, surrealist paintings and sculptures, and tribal arts that meditate on this theme.  Upon entering the exhibit, the visitor encounters a set of mirrors installed at an angle that produces a fragmented reflection.  The visitor is thus made a part of the displays in a manner that underscores the centurality of identity and selfhood to any discussion of bodily fragmentation:

Exaggerated scale is also deployed in a fifteenth-century French reliquary that contains bone fragments. Depicting an erect and over-sized index finger, it speaks to the continued vitality of the body, even after death, from which the bones issued. Similar themes can be addressed through a reduction of scale...In one photogram, Light Borne in Darkness, ca. 1951, the artists' hands appear ethereal and weightless. This, combined with the hands' diminutive scale, would seem to allude to those immaterial aspects of the subject--intentionality and consciousness--that cannot be captured by its physical boundaries.

--Mary Lambrakos, Curatorial Assistant, Menil Collection. From the exhibition pamphlet for "Body in Fragments" on display at the Menil from August 21, 2009--February 28, 2010.