Vital Signs: Artists and the Body – Hardcover

“Behind this mask, another mask; I will never be done with removing all these faces,” wrote the artist and poet Claude Cahun in 1930. Throughout the twentieth century, artists like Cahun have harnessed abstract notions of the body in nuanced engagements with aesthetics, politics, and identity. And now, at a moment when the body has become a heightened subject of governance and debate, Vital Signs: Artists and the Body explores this multifaceted history and the new contexts in which it might be understood.

Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Vital Signs takes MoMA’s celebrated collection as a starting point for a consideration of abstract art in the twentieth century, exploring its intimate ties to the complex, ecstatic, and contradictory experience of having a body. An introductory essay by Lanka Tattersall, the exhibition’s curator, explores the intertwining of abstraction and figuration in modern art as it converges with feminist, queer, and Black studies; contributions by the poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and the writer Cyrus Dunham bring new language to bear on the relationship between our outer forms and inner lives.