The Cypriot-Australian artist who treated his own body as obsolete hardware · suspended by hooks, extended by robots, and re-engineered by surgery in a decades-long argument that the body is a form to be redesigned.
Stelarc (born Stelios Arcadiou, 1946, Limassol) is one of the foundational figures of body and posthuman performance, and the Bureau files him at the head of the Performance sub-section as the artist who made the body itself his medium and his argument. Where the photographers in the Visual department record the scene from outside, Stelarc works on the body from within, treating it as a structure to be probed, extended and re-engineered rather than a self to be expressed.
His best-known early work is the suspension series: between 1976 and 1988 he completed twenty-five performances in which his body was held aloft by hooks through the skin, sometimes with one of his robotic devices attached. The Bureau records the practice as documented art history and deliberately supplies no method detail; what matters here is the idea the work advanced, that the body is an object subject to gravity, stress and engineering, and that the artist could submit it to those forces as a deliberate statement rather than endure them as accident.
From the suspensions he moved toward the machine. The Third Hand, a robotic prosthesis he operated alongside his own two hands; the Exoskeleton, a six-legged walking machine he rode and steered; the Stomach Sculpture, an object inserted into the body cavity; and the long-running Ear on Arm, a surgically constructed and cell-grown ear, are the signature works of his prosthetic period. Across all of them the body is interfaced with robotics, the internet and biotechnology, and the question is always the same: what is the body once it can be extended, networked and rebuilt?
That question is compressed into his central thesis, "the body is obsolete", the provocation that the human form is an evolutionary stage ripe for technological redesign. The Bureau notes the thesis without adjudicating it: it is the engine of the work, a posthuman argument made not in theory but through the artist's own flesh, and it is why Stelarc lies at the conceptual root of the body-and-machine strand the archive's industrial tradition keeps returning to.
The connection to the archive's territory runs through that strand. Stelarc is a friend and contemporary of Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, and the two share a remit, the body, the machine and obsolescence, that links Stelarc's flesh-and-robotics performances to the industrial machine-performance tradition. Where Pauline builds machines that destroy each other, Stelarc rebuilds the body as one more machine; the two are the biological and mechanical poles of the same industrial-age preoccupation.
A content advisory governs the filing, as it does across the Performance sub-section: the work involves voluntary surgery, suspension and bodily risk. The Bureau documents the art and its ideas rather than its techniques, presents it as the serious, widely recognised practice it is (Stelarc holds academic chairs in performance art and won the Ars Electronica Hybrid Arts Prize in 2010), and neither sensationalises the body work nor recommends it. Stelarc is filed as the figure who turned the obsolescence of the body from a metaphor into a method.