EMMA BEATREZ / QUARTER TURN

June 24 - July 30

“I once read that bodybuilders push their body so far that by the time they are ready to perform they are actually closer to death than they are to life,” artist Emma Beatrez says, remarking on research she’d begun for this photographic project she’s crafted alongside her competitive bodybuilder sister. The photo’s enduring stillness too vexes the lifeness of its sitter. For Roland Barthes, the photographic subject, in “becoming object…, experience[s] a micro-version of death.” In Beatrez’s 35mm snapshots and cyanotype collages life becomes fractured and dismembered figures and frames; poses and their context are rendered slant via undead analogue methods. Slipping between the intimacy and anonymity of the sport’s pageantry, Beatrez reconfigures the performance and viewership of the female form. 

While the photograph might always be seen as a kind of doubling—representation as repetition that evidences the distance from the “thing in itself” to its newly manufactured stand-in—documenting one’s sibling heightens the strangeness of this estrangement. By following her sister, Beatrez mines similarities and differences to tease apart the fluidity of self-presentation. “When my sister and I were young, we would be dressed in matching outfits and be confused as twins,” Beatrez recalls. “We would do everything together.” Though her behind-the-scenes shots and fragmentary reproductions allow the viewer to access their closeness and search for any parallels, the works also highlight the gap between the two. One radically modifies her body through exercise, while the other, Emma, serves as not only an uncanny double, but, like the photographic subject, a kind of “original” set against her sibling’s extreme self-optimization. Especially vivid in the intimate 35mm snapshots, Beatrez explores bodybuilding as an art of self-manufacture: a form of image control, and a kind of studio practice itself.

Male bodybuilding—which got its artworld due in the 1976 Whitney Museum presentation Articulate Muscle—capes to Übermenschian ideals in practically camp excess; female bodybuilding, by contrast, challenges normative expectations of womanhood. Competitions’ regulations plainly display this gendered tension: in 1992, 2000, and 2005, the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness, the sport’s governing body, requested competitors “feminize” by restricting total mass, lest they be penalized in scoring. And while athlete’s bulky bodies challenge “femininity’s” cultural baggage, the various garments competitors are expected to don pander to archetypal gendered pageantry. 

Rather than display this staged pageantry, Beatrez instead isolates its attendant objects, estranging them from both their performative context and from the bodies they might adorn. A rhinestone bikini bottom flops like shed skin. A weight rack, a high-he lifted calf, chains, and a GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS neon sign get equal billing. Plastic shoes and scans of a glittery bustier compliment readymade chains. Each object becomes a subject in its own right, as the proper “subject” slips towards self-conscious objectification. Prototypical figurative tropes of isolating female body parts—legs especially—are redeployed to reveal the constructedness and ubiquity of such representational methods. Figures are reduced to even the numerals 409—a technique of abstraction, sure, (like Marsden Hartley’s German officer), and a technique of identification by de-identification: reducing someone to mere number, a number to be scored. Beatrez constructs these cyanotypes by Photoshopping images she’s captured or found into collage transparencies, as well as layering physical items onto the surface during exposure. By cutting and recomposing images into new digital and physical wholes, these artworks themselves mimic the processes of exercise, performance, and posing in negotiating the body’s (in)completeness.

Beatrez began as a figurative painter, and her cyanotypes too are mounted on stretcher bars, as if a more typical work on canvas. Suitably, “bodybuilding” could be seen as an early interest of figuration in Western art with its fixation on the anatomical accuracy of beefed-up men, a revamp of Greco-Roman tradition. The Renaissance’s male masters famously fixated on “realist” musuclature shining through skin—some, like da Vinci, going so far as to dissect corpses to better understand musculature. While the bodybuilder is showing their (expanded) dermis, in their no-body-fat high-definition, they reveal the beneath-the-surface musculature that lies beneath us all. As too do the various bedazzled bikinis stuck on with glue, the spray-tan and body oil—a play of exposure and occlusion. Bodybuilding is a game of superficial surfaces and deep tissue microtears. Beatrez’s work with chemical and light-reactive surfaces reveal the imagistic mediation that limns our not-so-secure skin.

In one collage, Beatrez layers a horse’s musculature above some barbed wire and three representations of thick muscled thighs—a hardcore parallel that also calls to mind ideas of the workhorse. If one looks closely, faint letters come into view on this appropriated equine image, revealing it as an anatomical diagram—an objectification of an idealized muscular form. 

Her cyanotypes suggest the seriality of a pop art silkscreen; for example, Beatrez’s sister lined up three, nearly four times—the cut off shoulder of a last half figure suggesting an inevitable ongoing, as if she were a serial being, and the photo-negative effect highlighting the body’s quality as image. These repetitions also evince early photo-cinematic experiments of scientist-artists like Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne Jules-Marey. These men’s sequences sought to unpack the anatomical dynamics of animal motion using novel photographic techniques’ quasi-scientific precision. In the case of Muybridge, these experiments not only famously featured a galloping horse—proving that all four of the horse’s feet left the ground—but also frequently featured nude boys and men boxing, running, and otherwise variously exercising.

 In another artist’s hands fragmentation, flattening, seriality, and accumulation, as well as the references to anatomical drawings and other representational conventions, might remove the subject’s identity to center the objectifying aspects of the competition and of photography. Instead, Beatrez’s work reappropriates abstraction and photographic tropes to return specificity to her sister and their relationship through images and the gaze. In one work, a heeled leg and lower body occupy the foreground at left. In a mirror we see nearly the full figure. We see her face. The detourned male-gazey crop confronts us—and also herself. After all, it’s her own body she’s evaluating in the reflection. A reflection above which floats, almost supernaturally, her own back reflected yet again, an infinity of reflections in anticipation of myriad judging, anonymized eyes.

On stage competitors can’t be still. They tremble. Starved and tired, they’ve reached their limits. Barthes’s “mortiferous layer of the Pose” is belied by bodily reality. The athletes flex; they smile for the camera. Vibrating in Beatrez’s images are ghostly presences: the physicality, emotionality, and make believe beneath the surfaces of us all.