At One with DNA:
Nancy Burson’s Exhibition "Looking
Up" at Deutsche Bank Wall Street
Installation view, Looking Up (The Human Face)
at Deutsche Bank Wall Street
Since the inception
of her career as an artist, Nancy
Burson has been interested in the interaction of art and science. In
the early 80s, it was Burson who introduced “
morphing”, a computer program that was able to create facial composites.
Later her method came to be used by police departments to find missing
children by “morphing” their faces to account for age change. The human
face, its morphology, and its underlying genetic code are recurring themes
in almost all of Burson’s works. In her pictures we encounter images of
healers and Jesus look-alikes, composites of modern icons like
Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe
and political leaders, but also deformed faces, hermaphrodites, and new
chimera. Burson’s “transgenic” visions of race and gender ask fundamental
questions: Who are we, and how much of who we are can we change? What do
we, as humans, all have in common?
First and Second Beauty Composites
(First Composite: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn,
Grace Kelley, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe.
Second Composite: Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset,
Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, and Meryl Streep), 1982,
©Nancy Burson
The current exhibition of
Burson’s work, in three locations of Deutsche Bank at 60 Wall Street, not
only presents the different stages of Burson’s artistic development; it
shows how Burson has moved, in the context of modern “
transgenic art,” through the various discourses in a wondering,
inquisitive and self-directed manner. Her path reflecs the moral quandary
of all current debates revolving around the possible uses and abuses of
genetic science. Burson, it seems, has traveled from a somewhat
apprehensive and critical posture to one of positivity almost amounting to
faith.
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Warhead I (55% Reagan, 45% Brezhnev, less
than
1% each of Thatcher,
Mitterand, and Deng),
©Nancy
Burson
A mini-retrospective of Burson’s work,
on view inside the Bank, introduces us to the artist’s concerns at a
younger, more political moment. In Warhead (1982), one of her
signature works of the mid-1980s, Burson creates a saucy composite of
world leaders of the time: Soviet leader
Leonid Breshnev morphing into
Ronald Reagan, Maggie
Thatcher and others. The portrait seems to joke about the futility of
morphing by suggesting that all these leaders were cloned from some
conservative DNA-gameplan for the 1980s geopolitical scene. In another
early work, entitled Baby Elvis (1989-90), Burson takes on
Andy Warhol by morphing Elvis back in
time to depict him as a premature iconic baby. The work plays off cultural
obsessions and wonders, with some amusement, to what extent fame is
embedded in physical appearance –
DNA as destiny?
The Difference Between Negative and Positive Thought, 2000,
©Nancy Burso
In the following years, Burson
moved on to images of healers and their auras. In The Difference
Between Positive and Negative Energy Burson sets down the thesis for
most of her work in the next decade. Using a gas visualization camera,
Burson captures an imprint of different kinds of energy, creating
different auras. In the Touch without Touching series, healing is
viewed as the manipulation of auras believed to surround the body. Burson
explores the potential for the transgenic aspects of bodies, using
energetic methods, that Western science has ignored. The healer series is
positive and upbeat, in an almost “new age” way, and points to a decided
shift in Burson’s artistic discourse.
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