Even six decades after its inception, Pop Art instantly conjures images of post-war consumer culture in the public imagination. But Kogelnik was as much enthralled with the utopia of Pop art as she was at odds with it. Kogelnik’s art involved a sardonic feminist critique of the techno-politics of the Cold War era and within this vision, she conceived the body as a type of technology, and saw machines as agents guided by tenets of both control and liberation. In her colourful cyborg silhouettes, like those in Cold Passage or M (both 1964), stylish X-rayed depictions of bodies are rendered in cut-up parts, necessarily anonymous and dehumanised when translated through the fetishising mechanisms of the machine. In Female Robot (1964), this approach is taken a step further with the inclusion of a pair of scissors – another instrument of the subject’s fragmentation. Yet, these images are also oddly freeing. In the suite of paintings Artificial Man in Four Parts (1967), the robotic body is shown in black-and-white, presented as if directly scanned from an X-ray machine. Highlighting the brain, the heart, the hand, the sexual organs, the body appears generative, an agent of feminist militancy instead of gendered regulation.
Madeline Weisburg
