The Wellcome Collection
19 September - 27 October 2013
This is my recent review I wrote for the online publishing site: http://intuition-online.co.uk/article.php?id=3416
A study of mind, movement and dance, 'Thinking with the body' was the most recent exhibition presented by the Wellcome Collection in the increasing emergence of collaborative art and science practice. In recent years, artists have become ever more interdisciplinary and multi-faceted practitioners in their own right; engaging with an array of experts, scientists and consultants alike to fuel the research invested in their artworks. In this exhibition Wayne McGregor investigates aspects of perception, sensation and physical movement in relation to cognitive and social sciences, demonstrated through the art of dance itself.
The
exhibition certainly addressed some really intriguing ideas around the body as
a tool and vessel of physical expression. Using dance as a case study, this
spontaneous and inexplicable expressive form of behaviour allows the dancer to
use their body as their chosen medium. In fact using the body as an artistic
medium is not purely restricted to just dancers, performance artists have been
doing the same thing for years. Whilst watching the interchange between both
the dancers and choreographers, you feel very much like a voyeur; looking in on
a unique form of language by those who possess an obvious enriched
understanding and utility of the body as an instrument. It goes beyond ordinary
gesture, its flexible, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes amazingly subtle, as if
they own a completely different embedded vocabulary of movements they are able
to appropriate at will. Just like any other type of artist, dancing explores
the endless possibilities of the chosen medium and in this respect, the limits
to which the body can be used to express both emotion and narrative. Dance is
certainly not just a visually spectacular practice but an innate form of
expression drawn from the emotive core. As with many art forms; what appears on
the surface is only half the story, the
rather more interesting art lies in the cognitive and psychological intentions
driving the resulting physical catharsis.
