A discontinuous body. Carole A. Feuerman at her genesis
By Gloria Moure
Categories, classifications
A comprehensive understanding of the early work of sculptor Carole A. Feuerman requires a journey through her origins, through the medium and the context that gave rise to a sculptural practice poised on unstable ground, both thematically and formally. The issues she addresses and the representational strategies she employs were problematic not only in the artistic and social milieu of the 1970s, from which they emerged, but remain so even today. Artists who display a unique, idiosyncratic character — whose work seems at once singular and derivative — are often mistakenly situated in an indeterminate space, as if they had appeared through spontaneous generation, detached from any genealogy or paradigm. However, tracing the roots of an artistic discourse, examining the humus from which its initial impulse emerged, not only does not lessen its exceptionality but — more precisely — locates the discourse within the history of art, embedding it in genealogies that, far from restricting interpretation, enrich it. Furthermore, with Feuerman as the object of study, this exercise helps us to uncover something that at first appears self-evident: the specificity and the extraordinary polysemy of her early work.
Feuerman’s career began at a highly significant moment in Western contemporary art. To establish her starting point, we must return to the exhibition Fragments. Rated X (1976), and from that date move both forward and backward in time, weaving together the threads that shaped her work up to 1981. Feuerman came to that first solo exhibition — held in a small gallery in Fort Worth, Texas — from a lived experience that deserves close analysis. Central to this was the maturation of second-wave feminism by 1976. Although Feuerman’s work is often associated with countercultural movements, the feminist current she navigated — developed throughout the 1960s and 1970s — was driven primarily by a deep dissatisfaction with the expulsion of gender politics from both Marxist frameworks and their impediments (mainly in Europe) and the countercultural movement and its social offshoots (on both sides of the Atlantic). This undoubtedly led to a general atmosphere of hushed discontent.
In that sense, returning to the female body from a harsh perspective, celebrating beauty but also imperfection and impurity, offering the viewer the body (female and, occasionally, male) in the flesh, in such a transparent and unprejudiced way, resulted in the hasty classification of her work under categories or labels essentially related to moral transgression, when not with a wilful pursuit of scandal. In that sense, the title of that first exhibition, closed only days after its opening, deserves to be put into context. The first pornographic feature film with a plot and mass distribution through X-rated movie theatres in the United States was produced in 1970, marking the beginning of an entire industry that would have a long and controversial history. That Rated — followed by a resounding “X” — for a mainstream audience of the 1970s, could signify nothing other than pornography (or violence, which is not the case with Feuerman except in very subtle and specific ways, as we will see later). That classification — now widely known — was introduced by the then all-powerful MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) in 1968, that is, just a few years before Feuerman’s debut. The institution of that regulation was too recent to go unnoticed by the Fort Worth public, perhaps too conservative to accept not just the content of the exhibition but even its title. The artist reminds us of its origin:
“The exhibition title was named by my art dealer. I think she chose Fragments. Rated X to engage with themes of sensuality and the human body, using the provocative title to challenge societal norms surrounding this subject through my art. Rather than a direct reference to pornography, the title explored the intersection of art and eroticism, questioning what constitutes acceptable representation in both art and society.”[1]
It is no coincidence, either, that it was in 1975 that Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,[2] was published in the form of an article. This became the great point of convergence between psychoanalysis, feminist thought, audiovisual studies, and the new and ambivalent representations of the female body. In it, let’s say for the moment, the ambiguity between sexual or moral liberation and the persistence of an inveterate objectification and sexualisation of women became evident. Within that context, Feuerman’s Fragments. Rated X could not but be interpreted as a declaration of intent— even if conceived as a promotional strategy — because it placed her at the centre of a longstanding debate in the United States related to the limits between obscenity and indecency, and the implications, even legal, of each of these extremes. That “classification” — the self-applied “rating” evoked in the title — already points to Feuerman’s explicit intention: to categorise herself before others could do so, to grant herself a name even at the risk of an unsought-after scandal. This tension between self-definition and external labelling remains one of the most compelling aspects of her artistic discourse. It opens questions about the limits of language, the elasticity of meaning, and the subjectivation of signifiers: realism, gender, pornography, intimacy, nudity, the body.
Alongside this engagement with eroticism and corporeality came another problematic categorisation that the artist encountered in her beginnings, perhaps escaping from the dominant paradigm of hyperrealism, which had consolidated its position at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. In her words: “As a superrealist, my artistic development unfolded within the vibrant cultural landscape of the mid-20th century. Growing up in the aftermath of World War II, I experienced a strong push towards artistic reconstruction and innovation. The counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s inspired me to explore new forms of expression, blending traditional and contemporary themes. This era fostered a liberated approach to art, allowing for the exploration of taboo subjects without fear of censorship. Additionally, the feminist movement of the late 1960s transformed perceptions of self-determination and sexuality, empowering women artists to reclaim their bodies and challenge male-dominated narratives.”
Declaring herself a superrealist in the context of a polarisation between mature conceptual art and the emergence of hyperrealism was also a courageous way of invoking contestation, if not rejection. In adopting this term — superrealist or suprarealist — Feuerman reveals an awareness of the semantic conflicts embedded within labels themselves, paralleling the studied ambiguity of her early sculptural work. From the outset, it is helpful to attempt to sketch out the superrealism to which the artist subscribes in opposition to the more popularised hyperrealism. Let us consider its etymology. The term superrealism is the more accurate translation of the French term surréalisme, coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and later popularized by André Breton. It is a compound word that, strictly speaking, signals with the French preposition sur (“above”) something that is situated on a higher level than reality, that is, “above realism.” While hyperrealism (hiperrealism) implies other nuances, relevant in this context: it is a superior realism (it uses the Greek húper), exaggerated, a hyperbole of reality, a stubborn underscoring of the phenomenological; although, as we will see later, there have been those who have also interpreted this movement as a “repression” of reality. Through this hyperrealist strategy and this successful label, sculptors such as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea managed to occupy a new space in the art history and place on the market products that impressed with their intimacy and proximity to reality and with their disturbing (and often even intentionally unsettling) presence in an exhibition space that always evoked the Freudian concept of Unheimliche (the uncanny). In the brief biography that Feuerman offers of herself in the catalogue for her 2025 exhibition at the Museum of Sex, the artist explicitly distances herself from both authors, preferring to affix her beginnings to a “personal variation of Pop.”[3] Likewise, recently, she has expressed herself in the following way about Hanson: “We both worked at the same time but in different ways. We respected each other’s area of exploration, and we both aligned with our interests in depicting the human figure. His life-sized sculptures of everyday people captured realism and the human condition. I have depicted everyday people when I concentrated on feelings, portraits in fragmented form. But I insist that while it was important to Duane that we could think his subjects were real people, I never aspired to anything of the sort in my work.”
Declaring herself a superrealist could thus imply for Feuerman not just distinguishing herself but also over-signifying herself or consciously limiting the interpretation of her discourse to a circumscribed, ill-defined, lineage- and history-deprived trend in contemporary art; or it could entail a belated adherence to certain elements of surrealism that, by 1976, required a new nomenclature. All that is needed to confirm the latter point is to highlight that intention to “concentrate on feelings, portraits in fragmented form.”
Fragments, phantoms
Another key to exploring Feuerman’s specificity has to do with something so obvious that it often goes unnoticed: an element of her work that is visible to everyone and yet rarely pointed out. In the early stages of her production, what is presented to the viewer consists not primarily of bodies but, above all, of fragments; and it is this truncated character that should be situated above their nakedness or the obscenity that some may have seen in them. From the moment a living body is presented through a highly realistic mode of representation, and it does so in a fragmentary manner, it inevitably distances itself from any claim to reality. The exhibition above contained a question about what constitutes an “acceptable” representation, implicit in that “X”, and this plunges her discourse into dark Freudian waters, but also into the meanders of Georges Bataille’s abjections or Lacan’s labyrinths, where one can seek the meanings of those fragments that, in the heat of the hasty closing of the exhibition, turned out to be “unacceptable.”
The motif of the fragment is thus one of the great discoveries of the early Carole Feuerman, mainly because it involved providing a feminine perspective on an issue that had been present since at least the end of the 19th century, and with particular intensity (more obviously associated with sexual drive and the Freudian death instinct) in the generations of surrealism. It is thus inevitable to see evidence in the incomplete character and the heterodox positions of figures such as Nude on Bicycle (1976),[4] of the extraordinary game of construction and deconstruction of the female body by Hans Bellmer through his poupée, the object of a myriad of metamorphoses that came to make this figure (perhaps despite its creator) the identifying mark of a more complex artist, like Feuerman herself, than what the mere fact of the nude was foregrounding and highlighting.
Bellmer's doll, in its numerous transformations, is primarily defined by an absence: that of the complete body, that is, in short, the perfect body. Yet he has been systematically accused of condensing a kind of invitation to perversion, to a wild and even paraphilic — if not criminal — eroticism. And therein lies Bellmer’s truly disruptive gesture: he appeals from the innocence of a disengaged body, from a theatrical performance, to dark phantoms that reside not only in the viewer’s unconscious, but also in the collective unconscious of a historical moment — that of the rise of Nazism, with its celebration of the normative and univocal body and its contempt for any other model. Pulsing within this motif is an essential theme: the transition from the symbolic body to the real, living body; the moment when Bellmer abandoned his dolls to tie up and photograph the body ensnared by ropes and strings belonging to his partner, the remarkable artist and writer Unica Zürn, in a dynamic of apparent sadomasochism that she expresses lyrically, between the confessional and the tragic, in a dynamic of apparent sadomasochism, in The Man of Jasmine: “She firmly believes he is ‘hypnotising’ her. Her brain, as small as a chick’s, doesn't comprehend that it is ‘she’ who is hypnotising herself by making her thoughts revolve around that same person. He’s the eagle circling above the masochistic chick. She finally understands the solution. There’s no way out for her.”[5]
Feuerman's early work radically reverses this dynamic that Zürn epitomises in the metaphor of animal hunting, as it is a woman who positions herself as the author of the alterations of another’s body (frequently, her own), and therefore, the seemingly latent violence in the body cropping we see in her sculptures is categorically denied. However, in Bellmer’s defence, it is important to note that in any creative process involving a live model — even in nude studies or, if we may, in literary creations such as Zürn’s — there is a dynamic of potential or apparent violence, a discomfort, even if only visual in nature and not involving physical contact. To this end, it is enough to contemplate the image of Feuerman accompanied by one of her models, her face covered, during the process of making the model’s head. What differentiates this image from that of Unica Zürn, immobilised by ropes, aside from the aesthetic intention? First, we understand the dynamics taking place (the act of making a mould of a person’s face); second, the image somehow reveals its contracampo or reverse shot, which is not so much a staged representation as the spontaneous documentation of a moment in the life of an artist’s studio. And yet, it can’t be said that it, too, is not unsettling, even in its humour and naturalness.
Having taken Hans Bellmer as our initial reference, which connects that surréalisme with this superrealism championed by Feuerman, it is essential to return to the artist’s voice to learn about other explicit references. On this point, the artist makes herself very clear regarding the way people are divided by gender: “I have a deep admiration for female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Kiki Smith, Jenny Saville, and Tracey Emin, who have been able to put their bodies and their intimacy into play. In this context, I would also like to remember Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, and Bruce Nauman: the issue of gender and the relationship with one’s body, both physically and psychologically, cannot and must not be considered an exclusively female issue.”
Obviously, the fact that Cindy Sherman’s staging and theatrical manipulation of her own body or Carole Schneemann’s pioneering performances (to name just two of the artists she mentions) are a reference for Feuerman is not surprising, but her inclusion of a short list of male artists is interesting. Let us focus for a moment on the reference to Bruce Nauman, examining his early work and using Henry Moore Bound to Fail (1967-1970) as an example, where the artist’s own torso serves as the model. In this piece, we perceive an aspect that links us (literally) to Bellmer: both that autobiographical component that speaks to us of real bodies (and not of the anonymity of the model), and the very notion of bondage, beyond the reference to Moore and the ingenious wordplay that announces his failure.
It could be argued that this element of bondage does not appear in Feuerman’s early works. Yet, although not literally, it is present in various forms, albeit more subtly and ambiguously. One need only look at works that are somewhat distant in chronology and theme, but that could be said to be similar in intention: one is Red Tie (1976), a composition that was brought back again in works such as Not for Sale (2012); another is the series dedicated to ballet slippers begun in the early 1980s, especially Carole's Toe Shoes (1981), which clearly emphasises the tension generated between flesh and bondage — in one case, a tie threatens to tighten around a neck (a neck, moreover, that is nonexistent; in other words, an impossible suffocation) and in another, the laces of the dance shoes cause the area to swell, with veins protruding in relief and a dramatic cut just above the ankles, not unlike the stark photographs of Parisian slaughterhouses by the surrealist photographer Eli Lotar.
However, the artist categorically denies the existence of violence in her work. Perhaps it could be argued that, on the one hand, what she denies, from an ethical point of view, is the celebration of it; and, on the other, that perhaps not everything we associate with violence necessarily implies, justifies, or calls for it. Here we return to Rated X, since that classification imposed in 1968 was also applied to films laden with extreme violence. With this in mind and with this civilised distinction between real and symbolic violence, one might view both Bellmer’s tied-up woman and Feuerman’s necktie-wearing naked torso from a different perspective, turning it into an image more representative of a specific feminine appropriation of a phallic order symbolised by that garment associated with the masculine universe. Or a perfect image of hermaphroditism that could have its parallel in the ambiguous Hands Breaking in the Toe Shoes (1981), in which a pair of hands twisting a ballet slipper generates a double image that is somewhere between the everyday and the sexual, between care and torture. The disquiet reflected in these images and the ambiguity of the subject do not seem so far from Marcel Duchamp, whose late erotic objects, always fragmentary, were obtained, like Feuerman’s moulds, precisely by reproducing private areas of the female body. Like Duchamp, it seems that with an image such as the twisted slipper, perhaps in an attempt by the hands to wring it out, to milk it, Feuerman compels us to ask ourselves whether we believe she is seeking the implicit or the explicit. She forces us to realise, instantly, that the work places us, as spectators, before the dilemma of interpretation, preceding the responsibility of endowing the work with one meaning or another, whatever moral implications this entails and wherever it situates us. Having said that, it is not irrelevant that Carole Feuerman is a woman and, precisely from that perspective, has been able to lay out a critique of what, following the aforementioned Laura Mulvey, we call “the male gaze”, at least through the intuitive resistance to the patriarchal gaze, because, in her words, “I was concentrating on my feelings as a female, and my feelings about my body and my relationships.”
Taboos, discontinuities
It was Hal Foster, in The Return of the Real, who affirmed that hyperrealism is concerned, above all, with the repression of reality.[6] And this seems to be precisely the opposite undertaking of Feuerman’s surrealism, in which she has sought, from the beginning, strategies to escape repression and generate a new, unexpected visual pleasure, based on images that, not precisely because of their realism but because of their other-worldly appeal to our unconscious, leave a mark on our gaze, inviting us to apply a new visual framework. In these works, there is, above all, the implicit transgression of various taboos that are not just sexual in nature. Let us consider two examples of artists from the past who serve as references for Feuerman and who enacted two of the great desecrations in the art of sculpture: Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin.
The first case is directly linked to the uncomfortable presence of textiles and the ballet subtheme in Feuerman’s work. We are referring to Edgar Degas’s Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans. The scandal caused by that sculpture was fraught with sharp edges, and history has turned it into a compendium of what makes a work provoke either complete rejection or admiration, depending on perspective and argumentation — as is the case with Carole Feuerman’s work. In addition to sculpting a teenage dancer just as she is, with a body that is imperfect and under construction, Degas added the unprecedented use of mixed media in the fine arts: pigmented wax, a skirt of real fabric, a silk bodice, a wig of real hair with a green ribbon tied around its long braid, and pink ballet slippers. Despite not using authentic clothing, Feuerman clearly emphasises this element in a trompe-l'oeil playfulness, which contributes to the seductive quality of her works. She also declared her admiration for the piece and her intimate, domestic relationship with it, which cannot be ignored in this context: “With his focus on movement and capturing fleeting moments, Degas’s techniques inspired me to experiment with capturing motion and the subtleties of light and form. His Little Dancer is one of my favourite sculptures, and I have bought a replica, which I proudly exhibit in my living room.” The other case is Auguste Rodin, admired by Feuerman for his “expressive sculptures that capture emotion and movement.” In 1877, the sculptor was part of an incident involving the transgression of another anathema, another taboo: the historic academic prohibition against sculpting directly from a living model. The Bronze Age, a life-size male nude, was so realistic in the eyes of critics that numerous specialists accused Rodin of having made a cast directly from the body of a soldier instead of modelling it in clay or another material, as dictated by sculptural precepts. Rodin denied this and was forced to defend his creative process publicly; he even offered to show the model to prove that the sculpture was the result of an interpretation and not a simple copy.
Both examples illustrate how Feuerman introduces taboo into her works, not only thematically but also technically. With them in mind, we can return to her early work to perceive it from a different perspective: that superrealism to which she adheres seeks to overcome the deliberate anatomical perfection of realism, historical mimesis, and the idea of the mould from its very foundations, employing its tools. It is something like a revolution from within, whose principal instrument is no longer perfection (like in Rodin) or addition (like in Degas), but fragmentation. In this way, Feuerman’s work generates a new complexity: it is the overcoming of realism through superrealism, rising above the impositions of reality to embrace, perhaps, those of desire. This is one of the postulates of historical surrealism; however, it is impossible to imagine Feuerman’s sculptures among the ranks of that movement’s triumphant moment, in the 1920s and 1930s, which confirms her not as an epigone but as a renewing figure who speaks from a different historical moment. Feuerman’s time is different. It is the 1970s, and, considering that chronology, another voice becomes audible in between the gaps in her early works: the anguished timbre of Jacques Lacan, spurring us to ask ourselves, in conclusion, what the definitive and profound meaning of this fragmented work is, what message of desire and absence it evokes.
Despite its totalising ambition — which one might call Wagnerian, in terms of sexuality and desire — some surrealists, like Hans Bellmer, but also others like Meret Oppenheim, discovered that desire could only be represented fragmentarily, because only in this way could it be experienced and satisfied. Thus, when faced with Feuerman’s works, an image appears: the “laminilla” [the sliver], the metaphor that Lacan used to penetrate the study of the human libido. According to the French thinker, there is no possibility of an absolute language, nor of a complete body that is desired, but, above all, a deficiency, a discontinuity, a crack — similar to what we observe within the limits of Feuerman’s bodies. From this fragmentation, the separation between subject and object is experienced as traumatic, since the desired object is always, according to Lacan, a part without a whole, like the bodies that cannot be grasped and the anatomies that cannot be completed in these resin sculptures, powerless beyond the walls where they are exhibited.
In this sense, it is necessary to remember that the majority of these initial works depict the artist herself, and to underscore how transparently she shows herself in her way of managing this primordial deficiency and the feelings about one’s own body and what others look for in it; in her words: “Mostly all the sculptures are portraits of myself in one way or another. They are stories from my life experiences. I have had areas of my life I want to improve and thoughts I want to explore. I portrayed these themes in all my works from the early works to the present work.” [emphasis added]. For the French thinker, not just the body of others (the male or female model), but even one’s own body can only be experienced, perceived, and represented as lost, as a part, never as an organic whole. Even one’s own body is sought out via impulses. And that seems to be the unmistakable feeling in the photograph that depicts a young Carole Feuerman next to a work with the insightful title, I Am Mine (1976-1981), where the artist emulates the figure represented, striking a pose between tenderness and possession.
Thus, the fragmentary confusion between one’s own anatomy and one’s actions in Feuerman (both between female and male bodies) makes us see them, as Lacan would, as remainders, a residue, a lost and irrecoverable object in its totality. Going in that direction is this reflection by Feuerman, which places the meaning of the fragment outside itself: “Fragments allow the viewer to explore emotion and thoughts without the pressure of completing a full piece. They provide a sense of freedom and spontaneity that a complete work might constrain. A fragment can highlight a particular moment or detail making it more significant. They invite the audience to engage their imagination and interpretation, creating a unique interaction with the work.” [emphasis added].
Fragments that ultimately attempt to reveal a discontinuity — one to which the artist surrenders defencelessly, yet survives, clinging to prosthetics and external objects that sustain her life — like two castaways, they spell a promise of the future: the first indication of the continuum that will shape the rest of her career.
[1] Email interview with the artist, April 9th, 2025. Except where otherwise noted, all quotes from the artist are from this source and the emphasis is ours.
[2] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6-18.
[3] See Ariel Plotek, Carole Feuerman: Long Island Girl, NYC Museum of Sex, New York, 2025, p. 63.
[4] A composition that she picks up again in Schwinn (1981) and in Bareback Saddle (1981-1996), the latter a title that is perhaps purposefully contradictory, alluding to nudity and clothing, riding in a saddle and riding bareback.
[5] Unica Zürn, El Hombre Jazmín: impresiones de una enfermedad mental, Siruela, Madrid, 2006, p. 22.
[6] Hal Foster, El retorno de lo real. La vanguardia a finales de siglo, Akal, Madrid, 2001, p. 148.