A hundred years ago the male body was transformed. Two arms became one; legs were replaced by wheels; chins and necks slid together; noses pointed sideways instead of down. As the wounded of Flanders and France started to arrive home, it became clear that many of them could never be restored to physical wholeness. Instead, with the help of the very technology that had blown them apart, they would be reconfigured into new shapes for the coming century.
It is this warping and morphing of the human form in the modern age that lies at the heart of The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics, which runs from 21 July at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Moore himself was injured in northern France in 1917 and spent weeks in hospital surrounded by men who had been blown to smithereens. From these hellish beginnings he developed a sculptural practice that was concerned with stretching and bunching the body in order to test its weight and shape in space. To see, in fact, how far you can go in extending and subtracting from the human figure before it ceases to be itself.
So far, so conceptual. But, as The Body Extended makes clear, sculpture’s response to the broken bodies of 1914‑18 was often practical, too. In 1917 Francis Derwent Wood RA set up the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. His clients were the thousands of servicemen who had been literally effaced as a result of the new, brutal way of doing war. Naively assuming that enemy machine gun fire could be dodged as easily as an old-fashioned rifle bullet or even a gun on a grouse moor, these amateur combatants had stuck their heads above the trenches to get a better look.
Along with catastrophic physical injury, their identities were destroyed. For without that characteristic smile, dimple, snarl or frown, who was to say that you were really still you? More urgently, these men found themselves stared at or shrunk from in the streets, their emotional and social lives bludgeoned along with their faces. Derwent Wood’s great service was to harness “the skill I possess as a sculptor to make a man’s face as near as possible to what it looked like before he was wounded”. In his affectionately named “tin noses shop”, the sculptor made casts of the disfigured faces from which he fashioned paper-thin galvanised copper masks that were held in place on the face by a pair of glasses. The exhibition includes photographs of Derwent Wood making final adjustments to his patients’ restored faces, painting out the tell-tale joins with flesh-coloured gum. The results may not have been comfortable, but they did give a man an approximation of his former self. Decades later, many of Derwent Wood’s clients chose to be buried wearing their “tin noses”.
This commitment of fine artists and master craftsmen to improving the physical lives of injured serviceman did not stop when the guns fell silent in 1918. Twenty-five years later, and with even more powerful ways of maiming citizens now in dreadful evidence, the furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames drew on their experience of working with wood to produce a new kind of leg splint. The existing splints, strapped to the shattered limb, were made of metal, which meant that the wearer felt every jolt as an extra helping of pain. The Eames splint, by contrast, was made out of moulded plywood, making it light to wear, cheap to produce and effective at muffling extraneous knocks and bangs. And yet, as if to question its status as a medical “orthosis”, the Eames splint also bears an uncanny resemblance to the legs that the design duo gave their highly collectible chairs. Buffed to a malty sheen, these splints now go for more than £1,000 and are to be found mounted on museum walls around the world.
Not every artist felt so optimistic about the chances of putting Europe’s broken bodies back together again. The sculptor Jacob Epstein had begun optimistically enough in 1913 when he had soldered a mechanised, abstracted human figure to an industrial drill. The finished piece of work, three metres high, bristled with heroic possibilities as it strode out to meet the future. But what a difference a war makes. By the time of the scuplture’s second outing in 1916, Epstein had dismembered the figure and cut it in half, leaving it truncated and one-armed. Now known as Torso in Metal, the piece speaks of the diminishment of hundreds and thousands of young male bodies at the Battle of the Somme.
Meanwhile in Germany, where one in every 16 citizens encountered on the street in 1919 was a veteran with a visible physical injury, Heinrich Hoerle attempted to move the debate beyond the immediate pain and shame of modern warfare. Along with the Dadaists, to whom he was aligned, Hoerle argued that the modern fragmented body would stay that way for as long as it served the needs of an industrialised society. In Monument to Unknown Prostheses (1930) two figures wear false limbs reminiscent of the “work-arms” developed by the German rehabilitation industry (the exhibition includes chilling photographs of men using these while working in armament factories). Both Hoerle’s main figures have injuries to the head, suggesting psychological as well as physical damage, while a third sits with leg stumps, as if awaiting prostheses. The dedicatee of this satirically titled piece, then, is not a fallen patriot but the new ready-for-production industrialised body.
Hoerle was condemned by the Nazis as a degenerate and forced to flee his homeland. So too was the owner of one of the most unlikely exhibits in this subtly discursive show. In 1923, Sigmund Freud’s face started to collapse. The culprit was not a lingering war wound but the psychoanalyst’s 20-cigar-a-day habit, which landed him, at the age of 67, with oral cancer. Freud endured 33 operations on his mouth and was eventually fitted with a clumsy prosthesis to keep his oral and nasal cavities separated. “The Monster”, as he dubbed it, was only partly successful. Just like the young men who wore Derwent Wood’s “tin noses”, Freud found that, while his prosthesis might make him look normal in repose, movement wasn’t just painful, but grotesque. For the last 16 years of his life, the father of the “talking cure” dribbled when he spoke. Sharp-eyed Freudians have noticed that the master’s work, Civilisation and Its Discontents, written when he was embarking on years of abjection with “the Monster”, is more than usually concerned with the business of bodily pain.
The Body Extended, though, does much more than chart 20th-century attempts to fragment the human form before cobbling it back together again. Many of the prosthetics featured here don’t merely restore the body, but expand and improve it, so it ends up bigger, faster, stronger than it was in its natural state. For there is no reason why, apart from conservative aesthetics, a prosthetic should resemble the part it is replacing. In theory it can take any form, in the process redrawing the boundary between the self and the world.
Key here is the work of Rebecca Horn, whose performance art of the 1970s questioned the shape and space that women were allowed to make in the world. Finger Gloves (1972), in which Horn turns herself into a Struwwelpeter, is a piece that not only explores the expanded reach of freakishly long fingernails, but also the way in which they limit the possibilities of intimacy (you cannot hold a lover or a child if your hands end in daggers). A photograph of Horn’s seminal work also makes us think about the way we use today’s digital technology to expand our reach to infinity. For what, really, is a smartphone but a super-powered detachable prosthesis?
Horn’s body augmentations have always been gently domestic, a matter of making do with string and cardboard rather than banging out a full suit of body armour. This same intimate scale is apparent in the work of Louise Bourgeois, who is represented in the show with two pieces. Bourgeois, who was born in Paris in 1911, carried childhood memories of wounded servicemen with her throughout her long career. The difference here is that she used them as a starting point for an art that was celebratory rather admonitory. In Henriette, Bourgeois has sculpted a delicate prosthetic lower leg, and tenderly given it her sister’s name. A gouache painting, also called Henriette, meanwhile, renders the false limb in a dainty pink, turning it into a girlish accessory rather than the detritus of masculine aggression.
Bourgeois’ work requires us to think about the affinities between the approach of the sculptor and that of the prosthetic maker, a parallel that is explored in a new piece by contemporary artist Rebecca Warren. As yet untitled, the sculpture has been commissioned by the Institute and the Exhibition’s co-sponsor, 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the first world war centenary. Warren is staying tight-lipped about the details, but the piece promises to be a tangle of bronzed, muscled legs. What is already clear is that the initial processes of prosthetic and sculpture-making are identical: materials are chosen, casts made, prototypes endlessly refined. The difference is that the prosthesis needs to be contiguous with the body, whereas the sculpture (or, rather, its maker) can choose its own position in the world, whether that be inside the walls of an institution, like Bourgeois’ Henriette, or situated at its threshold, as Warren’s new work will be when it is installed outside the Henry Moore Institute.
What sculpture can also do is ask what happens when form moves beyond function. Running through The Body Extended is an anxiety about the dangers inherent in the new generation of prosthetics that aim to turn us into a modified super race, with steel legs and bionic eyes. At what point does a human figure become so supplemented that it no longer counts as merely mortal? The worry was there as far back as 1828 when satirist Robert Seymour drew The March of Intellect as a robot on the rampage, trampling down a rabble of scared invested interests including the church, the Law and even the Crown. It was there, a century later in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in which a female robot becomes indistinguishable from her human analogue. And it was there, too, in last year’s television hit Humans, which explores the fall-out when anthropomorphic robots or “synths” try to integrate into the world of warm, breathing flesh.
The Body Extended takes these terrors and asks us to reflect upon them. For while most of us probably feel that we could manage perfectly well without a “synth” to look after our children or unload the dishwasher, which of us would be prepared to do without the body modifications that we take for granted? Mobile phones might perhaps be given up if the pay-off was a future without psychotic robots. But would we really agree to go without our contact lenses, hearing aids, pacemakers and artificial hips? Submitting to the trade-off might indeed make us fully human, but it would also require us to live in a state of unimaginable isolation and pain.
• The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, from 21 July henry-moore.org.
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