The future of art is bodily. Visceral.
When machines can do it all, when we’ve outsourced even the things that nourish us, more of us will finally remember that everything we think and feel is really happ
To come to the realisation that transcendence is ultimately an internal process, is to take ourselves back to our origins; that we are more meat than machine, spirits trapped in flesh, Stone Age minds ruled by silicon.
We were made for sensation, ecstasy and sweat.
We were meant to consume each other, not content.
As ULTRA has developed, the work most striking in this new world, the work that exists beyond the boundary of the obvious, commoditised, banal, easily replicated – seems ever more clearly linked with embodiment.
Art that viscerally uses, celebrates, reflects, distorts, takes apart and disembowels our raw humanity. Art that sweats, feels, can be touched, smelled; art that decays, or is born of the body, whether made by human hands or machines.
I’ve written about makers whose practice spans the marks on their bodies, or whose bodies become the art itself.
Lately, I spent some time with a practitioner who most would consider an outsider to the art world. Estelle Leon – dominatrix and fetish artist.
This is not work you will typically find in a gallery; the venue, traditionally, would be a dungeon. But Leon’s work is created in a studio. She works from a gauzy, Lynchian space where human bodies become canvases, pondering the usual fine art questions – how to balance her purist interests with commercial appeal; defining a clear and distinctive voice in a space with deep-rooted conventions; the necessary evils of social media.
What drew me to her work was her aesthetic sensibility, expressed through vivid images of human tableau – suspended men, figures turned into flowers, foreskins twisted by needles into petals.
(I’ll let you find imagery of that last one for yourself.)
Lately, she has been developing High-Concept Kink – complex, visionary scenes of waking dreamspace, where participants can voluntarily enter a crafted world of surveillance, control, surrealism, or the abject… a theatrical kill room of viscerality and body fluids.
These are heightened experiences, concepts that make things like immersive theatre seem utterly insipid.
Reflecting on our conversation, there’s a rich vein of elevated, embodied practice in her work that has informed my thinking. Here are a few of those thoughts, with Estelle’s comments represented like this.