Post Human: Revisited at Jeffrey Deitch

Installation views of Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles,, September 12, 2024-January 18, 2025. Photos by Joshua White / JW Pictures. Courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.

By LITA BARRIE January 26, 2025

Flashback to 1992: curator Jeffrey Deitch traveled between Lausanne, Turin, Athens, Hamburg, Jerusalem ( bypassing the  USA and other world art capitals) with a cutting-edge exhibition of 36 avant-garde artists who were foregrounding a moment in technology culture in the early internet age when outmoded binary boundaries between subjects and objects, human and non-humans were being blurred.  The carnivalesque exhibition, Post Human showed that body improvement that celebrated artificiality was becoming the new normality: plastic surgery, diet pills and mind-altering drugs could enhance humans beyond their wildest fantasies. The success of the exhibition showed that art was assuming a more central role by merging with science, computerization, and biotechnology to re-shape the human form and identity with an outlandish flair for embracing the artificial. The controversial message was disseminated by the European press and quickly reached the up and coming younger artists and art schools around the world. The adoration of the inorganic over the natural were becoming habitual to some while others felt the human race was becoming an endangered species.

Italian architectural writer, Stephano Cascone wrote that the exhibition “could have the same impact on art sociology as Charles Jenck’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture has on Architecture” ( Abitare, November 1992.) This high praise is indeed warranted because Deitch’s influential essay in the 1992 exhibition catalogue was so prophetic that art historian Robert Rosenblum later concurred by describing it as “virtually a manifesto triumphing a new art for a new breed of human” ( Artforum, October 2004.)

The catalogue has become a cult anthology of post humanity because the glossy color plates are drawn from art, television advertising, popular magazines and real life. It displays androids who live around us in a society celebrating  botox, fillers, facelifts, nose jobs, boob jobs, before and after tummy tucks and buttock enhancements. Michael Jackson has the center place in a plastic social world, along with Ivana Trump and Barbie. The iconic catalogue was designed by the late Dan Friedman to accentuate Deitch’s curatorial premise by combining powerful illustrations of art and life.

Installation views of Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles,, September 12, 2024-January 18, 2025. Photos by Joshua White / JW Pictures. Courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.

The momentous updated exhibition turned Jeffrey Deitch’s vast gallery into a post human world with three generations of artists’ work meticulously installed to show a dialogue between several key artists from the original 1992 exhibition ( including: Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelly, Pippa Garner, Mathew Barney, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst,) other living legends from this older generation (Cindy Sherman, John Currin) and the new generation of artists continuing to explore these themes today ( Takashi Murakama, Mariko Mori, Isabelle Albuquerque, Arthur Jaffe, Josh Kline, Chris Cunningham and Sam McKinniss) 

The exhibition shows that new art can elevate earlier art by revising the past and even resuscitate precursors like Gilbert and George and Joseph Beuys in images included in the catalogue so that the new genealogical tree of posthuman artists has three generations. The exhibition is presented as part of the Participating Gallery Program for Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide and became the most popular, must-see exhibition this fall. Post Human is the most dynamic exploration of the theme of the intersection of art and science because it has been curated with a circus like flair for spectacle that is characteristic of Deitch’s exhibitions making him rather like a more high cultured, philosophical incarnation of P.T. Barnum as an art showman who can attract large crowds.

Pippa Garner, Human Prototype, 2020. Mixed media, 78 x 33 x 36 in. Photos by Bennet Perez. Courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles

The feminist debates over the cultural meanings of the female body have always been at the core of this exhibition on post human art and they are more timely today in the war against women’s rights. In Posthuman Feminism ( 2022) feminist theorist, Rosi Braidotti wrote: “This cutting-edge exhibition displayed multiple variations of the new micro-femininities being constructed at that moment in technological culture.” Braidotti continues: “ The message was clear: the pleasures of the inorganic have become second nature, producing a deeper intimacy with technological artifacts.  And the contradictions surrounding the female bodies were at the heart of this very first exhibition on the posthuman.” Classic feminist artist Cindy Sherman’s six untitled works from 2010 are gelatin silver print and chromogenic  color print self portraits in which she looks unrecognizable with dramatically altered features through photoshop which  illustrates Braidotti’s insights.

Paul McCarthy’s most famous work, The Garden, 1991 (first exhibited at MOCA in 1992 in Paul Schimmel’s landmark exhibition of LA noire, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s.) is the most controversial work in this exhibition of definitive artworks by legendary artists. This influential piece consists of a raised grove of trees and rocks with  mechanical father and son figures copulating, respectively, with a tree and a patch of ground. Left by themselves in a wilderness, these figures defile the landscape and the sacred bond between father and son with naughty sexual acts which make the viewer gasp and feel like a voyeur - although it is hard not to laugh.

Pippa Garner (a.k.a. Philip Garner) was one of the first transexual artists and sadly died during this exhibition. Her hilarious work is based on her own gender-transformation pokes fun at patriarchal conceits. Manette 1992/2024 is a self-portrait of her when she was a man, dressed in a suit and tie but has fake breasts protruding from his jacket. The exhibition even includes AI works by younger generation artists Chris Cunningham and Josh Kline. Cunningham’s video light box display, Transforma, 2024 a trans-woman with fake protruding lips chews pink bubble gum whose shape shifts into a balloon, and a vagina  which she swallows. Kline’s video light boxes are deep fake from the snapchat era of facial swaps. The faces of two tragic, suicidal singers, Whitney Houston  and Kurt Cobain are swapped with the faces of actors in two pieces  Forever 48 (Whitney) and Forever 27, 2013.

Isabelle Albuquerque, Fall of Man, 2024. Bronze, stainless steel, pine. Figure: 52 x 14 x 16 inches. Overall: 75 x 50 x 46 inches

The term “ post human” is now completely integrated into popular culture, psychology, feminisms and film. This landmark exhibition, like the earlier 1992 version, however examines multiple aspects of  the way the cultural construction of gender, identity, self and the human body are being  transformed, pluralized and transcended with biometrical aestheticization, surgical alteration, engineering and computerization in a cyber-futuristic era.

The exhibition problematizes the notion of realism because the futuristic figurative work included is anything but real. Instead the artists react to an artificial world which is reality to them in a time when reality seems to be disintegrating.

However when the devastating L.A firestorm began on January 7, the first day the gallery reopened after the holidays, the gallery had to close for a few days because the Deitch team evacuated their homes. When the gallery reopened  for a final week, I wondered how these radical artists would respond artistically to a destructive explosion of climate change that is so overwhelmingly real and so super true we can taste the ash in our mouths. Art history will be rewritten again with a new version of the Post Human which is perhaps less human-centric and searches for a balance with nature by using technology for a more sustainable coexistence nature. Isabelle Albuquerque’s graceful bronze figure with a staff standing on a pine tree ring, Fall of Man, 2024 might be the most visionary work in the exhibition - along with McCarthy’s satirical mechanical men f*cking nature.

Post Human was on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, September 12, 2024 -January 18, 2025. WM