Technologies of the Self

“In 1982, Michel Foucault defined technologies of the self as techniques ‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls so as to transform themselves’. Ever since we have been able to tell a story, we have occupied ourselves with the one that lies at the center of the human condition: our quest to overcome our limitations in order to reunite the mortal with the divine. These limitations, however, are precisely what give form and shape to our physical existence on Earth. Our bodies, our homes, our belief systems—are all containers. Confronting this fundamental paradox of containment-transformation has been central to our own narrative for millennia. Each of the artists in Technologies of the Self—Max Hooper Schneider, Tetsumi Kudo, Lucas Samaras, and Paul Thek—has been principally occupied with the idea of containment, often placing the self, or symbols of the self, within a container: a vitrine, a cage, a box, or a reliquary. Effectively creating a portrait of the self, the container serves for these artists as a technology for gathering, sorting, managing, and processing information on the self. Their containers inevitably become vessels for, if not representations of, transformation. . . .”
—Jay Ezra Nayssan