In striking 'Body Parts,' mortality is made flesh

November 07, 2004|Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE -- Since change defined the career of John Coplans (1920-2003), it makes perfect sense that it should define his photographs, too. Beginning as a painter in Britain, he became a critic in America, an important critic (Coplans was a founder of Artforum). He became an influential museum curator and director. Then he took up photography.

A narrow (if also universal) form of change defines Coplans's photography: physical decay. He was 60 when he began taking pictures, and they were self-portraits -- or, rather, portions of self-portraits. Coplans's pictures show various unclothed parts of his body. "Unclothed" is more accurate than "nude" or "naked" because all the assorted issues attached to the words "nude" and "naked" -- prurience, censorship, physical perfection -- simply don't apply to Coplans's images. They aren't about sex or beauty or even vanity. They're reports on aging: visual autopsies.

The work in "Body Parts -- A Self-Portrait by John Coplans," which runs at MIT'S List Visual Arts Center through Dec. 31, marked a subtle yet significant departure for Coplans. It consists of a series of 26 large-size diptychs that show paired body parts (Coplans's, of course): thighs, calves, buttocks, arms, hands. The photographs present flesh as artifact, flesh as fact, but also divorced from identity (we never see Coplans's head). His flesh fills and dominates the frame, a corporeal Mont Ste.-Victoire, as obsessed over and three-dimensional as anything in Cezanne.

What differs from Coplans's previous work is the cropping and juxtaposing of the photographs so as to suggest images from a medieval bestiary. A forearm or thigh, for example, will be so placed in one photograph as to seem to emerge from the small of Coplans's back in the one next to it. (Only a very narrow strip of white separates each image within the diptychs, making them seem one unit.) The effect is at once pleasing -- the elegant play of curves -- and horrific: This is not how the human body is constructed.

The horror goes deeper. Coplans consciously did these photographs in the tradition of the grotesque. (Shrunken down and painted over, they wouldn't look out of place in the background of a Bosch or Breughel.) What is more grotesque than a flesh-and-blood abstraction: the human form as at once palpably real and absurdly fictive.