"Post Human"

"THE BEAUTY OF OPENING a time capsule is what we learn not about the past, but about our disarming proximity to it. Few exhibitions are so ripe for unearthing and reflection in this vein as "Post Human." Organized by Jeffrey Deitch in 1992-and enjoying a tour of international venues beginning with FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne, and concluding at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem-"

"Popular experience was proving increasingly manipulable, whether through mind-altering pharmaceuticals, body-sculpting surgical procedures, or culture-hacking information technologies. And such a shifting environment, Deitch asserted in the show's bold catalogue, was "shaping . . . a new construction of what it means to be a human being"-something "conceptual," he added, as opposed to "natural." If artists were making figurative work, that renewed impulse and allure only spoke to an urgent need to process just how thoroughly ordinary life was already permeated, and recast, by artifice and invention."

"Sound familiar? At the time, this premise put Deitch squarely in the pocket of a theoretical wave gathering among Futurists and select philosophical circles. Recall that Donna J. Haraway's feminist collection Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) appeared the previous year, speculating on the apparent transposition of anthropological terms into fluid code, whether from sex into genetic engineering or from mind into artificial intelligence."

Jeffrey Deitch organized Post Human in 1992, presenting figurative artists working as conventional realism was being questioned. Popular experience was shown as increasingly manipulable via pharmaceuticals, surgical body modification, and emergent information technologies. The exhibition framed a new, constructed notion of humanity described as conceptual rather than natural. The moment resonated with Donna J. Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), which probed the transposition of anthropological categories into fluid code across sex, genetics, and mind. The Post Human perspective later expanded into debates around post-internet art and the Anthropocene and reappeared in subsequent major exhibitions.

Read at Artforum