Creating ‘Framing the Flesh,’ a body of work about bodies
As a young woman living at a time when national conversations and proposed laws call into question bodily autonomy, I have been thinking about bodies and agency for some time now. A double major in art history and studio art, I was equally interested in the way that film invites a visceral yet approachable interaction with art.
The Meg Reitman Jacobs ’63 Endowed Internship at the Tang Teaching Museum allowed me the perfect opportunity to combine these dual interests in the form of a screening series, “Framing the Flesh.”
Engaging the audience — and my community
Community engagement is at the core of the Meg Reitman Jacobs ’63 Endowed Internship, formulated to function as a bridge between college and the world beyond. As part of the program, interns are required to take on an 8-hour-a-week position (20 hours during summer) working to involve and educate their local community.
The creation of “Framing the Flesh” involved producing zine-like programming notes
and digital promotional material to further engage my audience. Each zine I created
was a supplementary tool to the films, offering various prompts to help viewers reflect
on their experiences. I included quotations from film scholars and critics, historical
contexts from older films, images, and questions like those I considered during the
screenings’ development.
The project was born of my passion for connecting people to art and supporting opportunities that allow for experiences akin to my own, having grown up feeling very connected to museum spaces. The Tang Teaching Museum emphasizes meeting the viewer where they are and engaging audiences through various lenses with their multidisciplinary exhibits.
I am so grateful for my experiences learning and working at the Tang, which have only fostered more enthusiasm for my interest in facilitating public engagement and public programming in museum spaces.Piper Ingels ’24
A collaborative process inspired by thought-provoking questions
My process of putting together “Framing the Flesh” was also somewhat collaborative; my fellow Tang intern Helen Branch ’24 organized the exhibition “Abject Anatomy” as the capstone project of her 2022–23 Carole Marchand Endowed Internship. Her selection of photographs, prints, drawings, and paintings from the Tang collection explored transformation of the body into something unrecognizable or disturbing, probing human anxieties about bodily behaviors and desires. I was inspired.
Do we need to feel pain to create art?
This is one of the questions I engaged with while I was first devising my screenings, consisting of four body-horror films. The series, which also served as my senior capstone project, was intended to give viewers the opportunity to think about their relationships to their bodies and their agency.
The first film of the series was David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” (2022), about a pair of performance artists (played by Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux) who perform quasi-legal body modifications for entertainment as they uncover what may be the next phase in human evolution. While the film includes encounters with body modification that can be disturbing, the act of watching a film in a dark room among community is often a familiar experience. A power of this film series is that it invites viewers to become comfortable with discomfort, which can be useful when encountering new ideas.
The other films screened were Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face” (1960), a ghastly
and lyrical examination of obsession, guilt, identity, and the lengths a parent will
go to for their child; Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (1989), a frenetic
cyberpunk concoction exploring the intertwining of pain with pleasure, man with metal,
and new media with old; and Laura Moss’s “birth/rebirth” (2023), a reimagining of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that delves into themes of motherhood and creation.
New ways of thinking
I was pleasantly surprised when my ideas attracted visitors from campus and the broader community. It was so gratifying to create something that brings people together and satisfying for me to tap into interests beyond my majors, such as working with film, a medium that has long been a source of fascination for me.
It required me to think about the public in very direct ways, including a news release, social media posts, and event posters; it also tapped into my academic skills. While the entire process required a great deal of creativity, I was especially proud of my work combining my collage and design skills with my research and writing in the zine.
The project allowed me to delve into new modes of thinking, presenting, and communicating — to dare to ask why we seek to change our physical form and how depictions of unconventional bodily alterations engage with our anxieties.
Framing the Flesh
Framing the Flesh was a four-film series that explored our fascination with and revulsion to the fantasies of unconventional bodily alterations. The films meet at the intersection of pain and gratification linked to body modifications, cyborg enhancements, and plastic surgery, examining how these practices serve as sources of stimulation, empowerment, and avenues for sexual satisfaction.
Framing the Flesh was organized by Piper Ingels ’24, as the capstone project for her 2023-24 Meg Reitman Jacobs ’63 Endowed Internship. The series was programmed in conjunction with the student-curated exhibition “Abject Anatomy.”