Despite the ever advancing onslaught of technological ubiquity, communication is becoming, in its own way, increasingly bodily. Gesture and gesticulation are taking on new significance with specific motions becoming part of daily life: the spread of thumb and index finger to increase size, the latitudinal swipe to advance content, the double tap, the press and hold. Anatomy, tactility and language are more intrinsically linked than ever.
In 2013, London-based artist Paul Elliman produced ‘Untitled (September Magazine)’ – a book project exploring this intimate relationship between body, gesture and language. Now he has transposed the 600-page, full bleed edition into a single-channel video, which plays on an endless loop. The body of work comprises hundreds of images appropriated from the pages of fashion, pornography and sports magazines, each cropped and truncated so as to reveal only ambiguous sections, such as the crook of an elbow or the knuckles of a splayed hand. The experience is somewhat mesmerising and definitely uncomfortable. Sitting on a hard, backless bench in a cold, dark room it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain whether there are patterns emerging in the ceaseless parade of limbs, digits and genitals.
A strange truth accompanied me, blinking and stretching, out of the gallery. The cropped and abstracted images Elliman presents seem somehow more relatable than the unrealistically glamorised depictions found in magazines themselves.
Nick Warner