John (from DYSTOPIA series)

Aziz + Cucher have worked together for over thirty years and are regarded as path makers in the field of digital art, which was still nascent when they made the Dystopia series. Dystopia was produced by hand-modifying, pixel by pixel, studio portraits of individuals and couples so that their eyes, nostrils, and mouths seem to be sealed by smooth skin; the models themselves appear unbothered. In the mid-1990s, advances in digital communication and e-commerce brought widespread optimism about technology’s utopian future—despite the fact that these developments were premised on the dissolution of the real-life public sphere. Aziz + Cucher here imagine the loss of sense organs as a potential evolutionary response to a world in which people need never interact in person. Made during the period when AIDS-related deaths reached their highest levels in the United States, these works can also be read as depicting bodies functioning to suppress desire—closing off orifices of pleasure out of a fear of contagion. In the added context of the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, John’s religious homoeroticism (the figure evokes a leather-bound Saint Sebastian) marks a moment in which artists whose work addressed sexuality and the queer body were subject to government censorship.