About the Artist

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Artist Karen Sztajnberg, the product of two unraveling cultures (born and raised in Brazil, she is based in the United States), pushes us to us to confront the pressures of narrative and the machine of spectacle on the still-pulsing human desire to make the body matter (even if it means distortion and control).

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Room Tone, 2017

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Five image sources

Three sound tracks (source audio, silence and unrelated domestic foley). 

 

In a visit to a large fitness exhibition, Sztajnberg’s newest work challenges viewers to consider their positions in a world of increasing estrangement and show. As screens alter, pair, split and multiply, we find ourselves complicit in the fatigue and control.  The ‘radical’ posing bodies are as alien and human as the crowd. 

 

Entrance

An unnamed female fitness competitor stands displaying her abs in harsh light to the crowd below. Sztajnberg ’s low angle forces us to face our own controlling gaze. As the camera lingers, the competitor’s smile complicates, at once perfunctory and uncertain.

 

Partial View

A mostly male crowd of photographers hold phallic long lenses at an off-screen stage. A counter screen displays the watching faces of a young troupe of female performers on the sidelines, assessing the competitors on stage, remarking on an (unseen to us) strength. Duration complicates the image when another young woman enters the foreground, her torso obscuring the others. This new face, half in and half out of frame, becomes a formal drama mask, blocking our gaze and becoming/marking the show.

 

The bare shoulders of two young women frame a more distant shot of a woman performing on a pole. Two levels of performance compete: the bare skin of the watching shoulders as they begin to move to the music and the distant performance of perfect poses on the pole, made more striking by the occasional rough glitch between perfect poses.

 

A single female spectator in a reptilian shirt reacts to the video she is shooting on her small camera, her eyes registering delight and surprise at the shot and her own reflection.

 

The final screen in this section is a powerful composite of two groups of onlookers watching behind metal barricades.  With the stage erased from each shot, the onlookers seem to face each other. We feel the weight of exhaustion in watching and comparison as weary bodies lean on the barricades, one holding up her head with her hand, another leaning onto her chin, another with her hand propped against her mouth. The false mirror of these two groups and the wide angles accentuating the tiny bodies in the background, underscore a people weary of holding the body erect in social obedience.

 

On Display

A group of women, made uniform by matching tans, bleached hair and variations of the same tank top, pose with individual male fans. Their heads out of frame, it is the synthetic creation of their relation, a false and knowing duplication, that is awarded with power.

 

A male and female body builder flex for us in sync. Their flexed muscles and smiles are meant for the still camera, but as Sztajnberg’s camera lingers the smiles become contextualized as we watch the woman’s pulsing veins, the man’s trembling fists.

 

The final screen in this series highlights the abstract power and treatment of the radical, pumped body, leaving only the rounded muscles of a male performer’s torso in the frame.  As if looking through a keyhole, we are both close and distanced by the abstraction as shadows of others come into frame. When an arm is draped over the performer’s bare shoulder, we are almost shocked by the human gesture, the power of touch against the force of the muscle.

 

Bars

Instead of connecting us to the body, the fixed multiples and looped abstraction of small moments of a pole performance underscore the eroticization of the female body and erase all moments of a live and fallible body.

 

In the second screen, a horizontal split in the screen breaks the performance of pull-ups into three: presenting a call and response of human labor and a kind of muscular rapture.

 

The final screen is split into three shots: each watching a woman as she wipes her pole with a towel. The repeated gesture, easily read as sexual, instead becomes the endless labor behind gendered performance. We are never sure if the woman is preparing for, or erasing her mark from, the pole.

 

Epilogue

The last projection, as we leave the gallery, Epilogue, acts as a challenge to the other screens. Here, in one long shot from behind a metal fence or restraint, we watch out-of-focus humans hang out in a city park, behind them a line of traffic moves in a line down the street. Shot at dusk, as a kind of last chance, the cars are moving in reverse, asking if we are going backwards or, perhaps, resisting.