Symptoms Everywhere

Aline Duriaud

Ground Zero Size Zero is a group exhibition of European artists currently on at up-and-coming gallery Vegas, located in London's East End. Coinciding with fashion week and curated by Ken Pratt, the show's theme is body dysmorphia and the body as a site of anxiety and uncertainty. From the show's press release: "Anxiety is the best diet for models as it makes them underestimate their ability to survive in an unreal world unless they are more beautiful, even skinnier, beyond better." In an era when alienation from the body's wisdom and integrity is celebrated, performed and re-replicated, what's urgently needed are new visions that challenge a prevailing culture of body fascism without falling into the trap of reinscribing fragmentation in the name of critique.

Some of the work in Ground Zero Size Zero skirts the edge of regurgitating anti-imagination notions of beauty and desirability in the sanitized context of a fine art setting. Voyeurism is a strong current here, as subject and strategy. In her essay The Politics of Black Radical Subjectivity bell hooks quotes Audre Lorde "who said, 'the masters tools will never dismantle the master's house'. Is it possible to move beyond performing symptoms? Many of the artists use a female body, or a body masquerading as feminine (or both) to ask this question.

Aram Tanis shows a series of photographs of Ballardian urban architecture juxtaposed with two images of white female naked bodies. One, distressingly emaciated, lies on a surface reminiscent of a gurney. The other appears to be shaving her genital area into a childlike, hairless mound. The position of her hand also connotes a private shooting up ritual. White female bodies are presented as metaphors for death and disease. The series recalls the opening scenes of Christiane F., where faceless tower blocks are shown as breeding grounds for Christiane's burgeoning addiction along with a mother who is presented as inadequate because she works full-time and has a new boyfriend. In Christiane F. as in Tanis' images a young white girl's ravaged body is an object of desire and prurient horror.

More photos are on offer from Marcelle Price and Martin C. de Waal. Price's Ready Teddy shows a male, cross-dressed figure presenting his backside to the camera. In S/M play men enter and exit the role of the slut at will, using an exaggerated female persona as an escape valve through which to live out fantasies of submission. To what degree does Price's subject occupy his role? Is it compartmentalised into private fantasy or does it bleed into his everyday routine? Man, especially male rock musicians, have routinely used so-called feminine postures and clothing for shock value and to rebel against traditional codes of masculinity without necessarily challenging real, live sexism and discrimination. Indeed, the appropriation of cartoonish stereotypes of passivity might reinforce gender cliches. Price's photo floats these contradictions to the surface of her suburban sub's portrait.

Martin C de Waal is an artist, performer, stylist and club personality who straddles the art and fashion worlds. In an echo of Orlan he submits himself to plastic surgery procedures which are documented and digitally manipulated into grotesque and glamorous photographic self-portaits. Unlike Orlan de Waal self-consciously retains and displays his physical beauty. Also showing is his video loop based on Bas Jan Ader's Too Sad to Tell You, and real time video documentation of one of his cosmetic surgery procedures. Using his face, body and lifestyle as raw materials de Waal has his cake and eat it too: his objectification of himself is on a par with Joyce Wildenstein's and Michael Jackson's facial reinventions (the latter alluded to in Marcelle Price's photo John's Hair Shop), neither of which are officially classed as art.

Sculptural installations by Anna Orton and Maurizio Anzeri dredge up corporeality-as-absence thick with theatrical atmosphere. Orton's Man I feel like a Woman riffs off Real Teddy in its evocation of fetishistic sex and gender tourism; a pair of shiny lace up thigh boots lie crumpled and uninhabited on a mirrored podium suggesting a missing or escaped female or transsexual exotic dancer. The figure of the female sex worker has often functioned in art and literature as a synonym for the forbidden, for corruption and bankrupt consumerism. Nowadays London is saturated with gym-based pole dancing classes and Ann Summers sex emporium outlets, lending the materials of Orton's installation an everyday tawdriness that somewhat destabilises these associations. Maurizio Anzeri, whose work has been exhibited in art, design and fashion contextx, shows a ceiling-to-floor cascade of cheap wigs sewed together into a creepy, elegant assemblage with Surrealist overtones, reminiscent of Hans Bellmer's sadistic doll sculptures and photographs but with a gentler feel. The wigs are blonde and brunette -- presumably manufactured to mimic Caucasian hair.

Painting and drawing are represented by Gert-Jan Akerboom and Simon Willems. I love Willems' paintings, especially C3P0 on his deathbed, which mutates the anthropomorphized robot's slick chrome exterior into a delicate, melancholy watercolour blob on the verge of erasure. Santa's cumming plays with gaudy Christmas decoration imagery, twisting it into shapes and surfaces that traverse and blur organic and inorganic registers; viscous emissions mix with plastic, metal and the texture of paint. Akerboom's mysterious charcoal drawings also combine discordant references. Their stiffly controlled technique is in contrast to their teenage horror slash Goth slash military imagery, like stills from a Michael Haneke film shot on CCTV filtered through de Chirico.

Notwithstanding the slightly clunky title, Ground Zero Size Zero is a though-provoking and smartly curated show. It left me with an appetite for work that tackles the effect, upon representations of bodies, beauty and gender, of the contemporary realities of torture, war, human trafficking and other nightmares swirling around us.

Thumbnail image: C3P0 on his deathbed by Simon Willems

Main image: Man I Feel Like a Woman by Anna Orton, 2006