Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Looks Back at—and Forward Towards—Post Human Sexuality
Special retrospective highlights a range of celebrated speculative-erotic artists
Running until January 19th, 2025 at his Los Angeles gallery, contemporary art curator Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles gallery is revisiting his first 1992 Post Human exhibition with a selection of new, equally provocative artists—all of whom pose intriguing questions about how human sexuality might evolve in the years ahead.
“A new breed of human”
Deitch’s current exhibit begins with a quote from Robert Rosenblum’s 2004 Artforum article on the impact of the original exhibit at Switzerland’s FAE Musée d’Art Contemporain, “Post Human was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human.”
This sentiment was echoed eighteen years later in Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Feminism, which applauded Deitch for revealing “the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans.”
Braidotti later went on to say it also “showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”
Who’s who of erotically provocative imagery
Both statements are clearly evidenced by how many of the thirty-six initial Post Human artists are now known for thought-provoking, sexuality-themed artwork.
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The 2024 Post Human exhibition includes the cyberdelic-fetishistic work of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama; the frequently unsettling preserved animal sculpture of Damien Hirst; the whimsical, retro-futuristic inventions of Pippa Garner; the playful science-fiction furniture of Anna Uddenberg; and the work of Chris Cunningham, known for his Björk music video “All Is Full of Love” which remains a pinnacle of robot-sexuality cinema.
Once sci-fi, now reality
Deitch acknowledges a lot has happened over the last thirty-two years, citing the proliferation of surveillance technologies, the idea that virtual reality could eventually supplant real experiences, and how, “AI’s ability to fulfill our creative and specialized needs has reached mass fruition, artists are confronting the impact of what was once considered speculative science fiction, an everyday reality.”
Now 2024’s Post Human show envisions a sexually bleak dystopia in the years ahead pointing out how the new and returning artists “embrace notions of plurality, metamorphosis and multi-beingness. Cyber-futuristic, surgically improved, commodified, stereotyped, and politicized, the ‘cultured body’ lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age.”
Painting a luxurious, passionate future
One aspect every Post Human has shared is that sex, in whatever form it may take, is here to stay. Paul McCarthy, for instance, is upfront and direct with his sex toy-celebrative collages; Cajsa von Zeipel’s sensually ornate figures seem to dance backward and forward in time; and even Jeff Koons’ inflatable-appearing works have a distinctly erotic feel to them.
At the conclusion of Rosenblum’s Artforum review, he notes that while the future-sexual world envisioned in 1992 may somewhat resonate with 2024’s speculative dreams, “As usual, new art changes old art, and the present rewrites the past. The sex machines and robots of Duchamp and Picabia, Léger and Schlemmer may now seem Old Testament prophecies, as do the mostly prosthetic German war veterans depicted by Grosz and Dix.”
Post Human—2056
Using our fertile imaginations, what might the next Post Human exhibition be like? As Rosenblum observed, will we look back at 2024 with nostalgia or embarrassment—or as some of 1992’s speculations remain with us thirty-two years later—maybe 2056’s exhibition will have more and not less in common with its past?
It would be interesting if our follow-up Post Human embraced the technologies Deitch appears to be concerned about. Perhaps by then, artificially intelligent artists will have graduated from curiosity to either mainstream acceptance or even having their work hung alongside the Mona Lisa.
So too, virtual reality will likely provide a new, exciting, and nearly limitless digital canvas for artists—or anyone with an imagination—to step into.
Artificial companions might be the subject of artistic speculations, but why just depict them when they could also lend a helping, creative hand? Just as VR could unleash limitless artistic possibilities, so too can sculptors use advanced robotics to imbibe their work with human-like movements.
We may or may not see these possibilities in the coming decades, the only certainty being just as we’ll always pursue new pleasures and erotic experiences, so will we forever need to make exciting, disturbing, pleasing, thought-provoking, or just plain simply beautiful art.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
