Posthuman monstrosities, posthuman toys

In the exhibition “A Duad in Play,” Ronald Ventura continues his exegesis into the synthesis of commodification and the posthuman, taking seriously and in jest the notion of play. Folding together toys, religious icons, war machines, animal parts, animated/storybook characters and human bodies, Ventura explores “play” as a part of his oeuvre with particular interest in its relation to art, value and meaning-making.

Ventura looks into the paradigm of toys, generational shifts becoming palpable in tracing every so often the current fashionable toys for children. The playthings and characters in vogue vary from season to season, coming in later years to epitomize and define a generation. With it comes a variation of perspective, the artist noting that visual images that would have scared older generations are met with nonchalance, delight, even coos of “cute” by kids of the 21st century.

If yesterday’s monsters have become today’s toys, the artist plays with and conflates this further, turning yesterday’s toys into contemporary monsters that are smooth, glossy and, depending on one’s perspective certainly, quite chic. An astronaut with a human skull, multiple gun barreled-hands and donkey-headed shoes. The lustrous body from a teddy bear piggybank with the head of a Sto. Niño sprouting little horns. The sizeable red robot with human hands, human organs and, when its robotic head is split open, reveals a human one. A young boy, donning a plastic pair of sunglasses, who grins widely at the images of the skulled Mickey, the anatomically revealed Goofy and the blobs that spit limbs, organs and starred rainbow.

Ventura’s works and their density of layered images point to something deeper than a customary rite of aging that viewpoints signal. If the amalgamation of elements, if these monstrous bodies as it were have become relatable and indeed buyable, as they are, it is because there is something identifiable in it in current conditions — the condition of the posthuman. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, the editors of the book Posthuman Bodies, write, “Posthuman monstrosity and its bodily forms are recognizable because they occupy the overlap between the now and the then, the here and the always… Posthuman bodies…are of the past and future lived as present crisis.” Indeed, in the present and continually unraveling posthuman age, bodies are becoming more and more easily modifiable and as ‘mix-and-match’ as accessories. Technology, increasingly seen as essential extensions of identity, marches humans into an era of consumer-happy cyborgs. The posthuman is one easily altered — it is as Halberstam and Livingston and Jeffrey Deitch have noted, a screen, a projected image, a mirror, a window display. Posthuman monstrosities comprehend the body as plaything, packaged in the slick veneer of commodity and technology where the image is both foremost and fleeting. Posthuman monstrosities are posthuman toys — the posthuman itself.

Though the posthuman may be one that is “played” upon, this should not undermine the significance of this play, play being an essential element of culture as the cultural historian Johan Huizinga has strongly made the case of. Ventura, however, teases the longstanding notion of its triviality in connection to the solemnity of art. The jumbled assortments which make their way into Ventura’s canvases or bandied together into sculptures in play present the artist’s provocation to the system which deifies his objects. Ventura himself questions of the works, “Are they still toys? Or is it art?” Surely, he is, as many are, highly conscious of his rising status as an artist. Utilizing this to expose the art world as game and one taken in the utmost of seriousness, Ventura questions how value systems operate and how the correlating monetary worths are established. Indicative of his challenge is his displacement of the museum-learning showcase, the diorama, into his ahistorical symbiosis of motley elements marked by presence and play. While the play world is not ordinary or real life, neither is art nor its white walled setting. Though one is evidently more valued than the other, the play world of the artist is its combination and exception — an elevated platform, a creative realm beheld in rapture, though one translatable into and desired as merchandise.

The artist’s interest in commodification eminently suits the approach he uses. It may be said that themes of the posthuman are better engaged in methods that may more deeply broach the issues it presents rather than the use of figures in common sculptural materials and paint on canvas. Yet, what would be more fitting than to package it in the easily consumable, take home-able product, especially one with as striking a visage as Ventura’s works? Connecting ideas of art, the body and “thing,” the curator and art historian Patrick Flores wrote of Ventura’s smoothly pleasing paintings, “This ‘retinal ravishment’ leads us to think that the fluidity of the body is virtually arrested, trapped as fetish, reified as thing.” Indeed, even as thing, the posthuman body is revered and, though constantly altered, it is, like much art attempted to be preserved one way or another, inherently indisposable, indispensable. What, after all, could be left? Shedding its shields, breaching boundaries, the posthuman body is a body contaminated, the human, as Halberstam and Livingston have written, “no longer part of ‘the family of man’ but of a zoo of posthumanities.”

Like Ventura’s young boy driving his toy racing car into a depthless plane, where the posthuman will go and what it will evolve into is still unclear. The dynamics that will govern future posthuman monstrosities is also as imprecise. Yet, Ventura reminds us that in the posthuman age, the origins begin at the present, a present hypermediated into mirrors, screens and projected images. Recalling his previous exhibition Metaphysics of Skin, Ventura’s works ask us to probe not what lies beneath the surface but rather to investigate the meanings of the surface itself.

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“A Duad in Play: Francis Ng & Ronald Ventura” was on view at the ICA Gallery 1, LASALLE School of the Arts, 1 McNally Street, Singapore. The author may be e-mailed at letterstolisa@gmail.com. Her art writings are at http://writelisawrite.blogspot.com.