Part satire, part commentary, all strange
“I would not be standing here today if it wasn’t for the Posture Grid,” states Jessica Borusky matter-of-factly in her 7-hour video performance (also titled The Posture Grid!). The piece—part of the artist’s MFA thesis from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts—premiered earlier this month at the Anthony Greaney gallery and is currently featured at SMFA’s Grossman Gallery through May 18th. The Greaney showcase featured segments of the video on loop, in addition to a floor-to-ceiling paper installation.
“The Posture Grid”—most literally a hand-painted black and white grid—was on view as torn and fragmented.
So, what’s the deal? As described by Borusky, the video “unpacks advertising language in order to engage how products designed to ‘help’ the body often reflect ways in which the body has been repeatedly regimented, silenced, and forced into straight lines.” And the artist is selling it. Grid plays like an exaggerated infomercial in which consumers can miraculously gain an “accomplished” body if they follow the products’ literal and figurative guidelines.
AlignaBod
The idea is that aligning the body to a grid will, in turn, structure the consumer’s internal state, preventing strangeness and rampages of emotion. If practiced successfully, users can allow their newfound sense of self-worth to re-shape their societal standing. That’s strange, but the strangest part? As a pilates instructor who frequently receives magazines packed with body-shaping merchandise, Borusky’s performance is loosely based on her knowledge of a product called AlignaBod.
While Borusky tells me that pilates has helped her “unlock” parts of her body she felt were closed off due to illness and physical stress, a literal grid is far from a perfection tool. “The performance is under the guise of satire,” she assures me,
and like its real-life counterpart AlignaBod, (which the artist owns and has used) Grid resonates with the pro-normative culture common in American advertising.
In pinnacle form, the grid shuns those who are not straight. This can be interpreted as the artist’s reaction to her own queerness or rejection of a leftist ideology. In any case, the problems put forth by the grid are relatable to everyone, whether-or-not our projected identities are connected to larger social or political topics: none of us are perfect, and no physical body is ever straight.
Understanding this, Borusky’s salesmanship and endurance throughout the performance seems to teeter in and out. At times, the artist is controlled, focused, and speaking dominantly. However, her facade crashes during key moments: in cackled laughter or nervously repetitive hand motions, the grid’s influence breaks just long enough for the artist to alert us to intimate bits of personal information.
“My work is based on persona,” she replied, when asked if the multiple personalities in her the video was some kind of deranged alter-ego.
“I am always myself, just a different side of myself,” she continued. The video appears to conglomerate the shades and tones of a person: her personalities merging in ways that can be alarming and unexpected to both the viewer and the performer in duration. While the purpose of the grid is to “start from within to develop better relationships for a stronger nation,” the result is the surfacing of deeper issues that can’t be ironed simply out.
When I jokingly asked if her the aforementioned statement was true, if she believed that she would not be standing before me if it wasn’t for The Posture Grid, she quickly replied, “Yes.”
Her eyes, sparkling with the same crazed honesty shown in her video, told me not to question her twice.
Clip from The Posture Grid! from Jessica Borusky on Vimeo.
THE POSTURE GRID!
SMFA’S MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
THROUGH 5.18.13
GROSSMAN GALLERY
230 THE FENWAY
BOSTON
@SMFABOSTON
SMFA.EDU