Shake That Body: Vital Parts Rearranged at MoMA

by Marsha McCreadie A show to give you nightmares and rip through your subconscious, Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration at MoMA is not so much about decay as rearrangement. The slight misnomer of the title hints at the gothic quality of the 90 paintings, drawings, images, pen-and-inks-you name it-by artists as disparate and wide-ranging as Louise Bourgeois and George Condo, with a seedbed in de Chirico, Max Ernst, Miró and other artists, from 1917 through 2004. With the displacement and exaggeration of certain body parts comes the questioning. What is that breast doing over there (and, then, what is the function of a breast anyway)? Why does "Whip Woman" (Georg Baselitz), with her huge body and minuscule head, work as art/caricature, and make us laugh like hell? Other titles terrify: "Hand Tree," by Marcel Jean, with hands scarily reaching out of a tree trunk; "The Flesh Fly," by Andre Racz; "Baboon Bride," by Chris Finley. Then there's that malevolent-looking leatherette phallus hanging overhead constructed by Bourgeois (with the paradoxical title "Little Girl") which also-deliberately-suggests a female torso. She explains, in an excerpted statement, "From a sexual point of view, I consider the masculine attributes to be very delicate." To read the full article at CityArts [click here](http://cityarts.info/2012/04/03/shake-that-body/).