When Chris Cunningham's Rubber Johnny came out on DVD, it was the grossest thing on display at the record store. Grown men easily twice my age squirmed when I bought it. "I don't even want to know what that is," one said, glancing sideways at the fleshy, hairy cover. I paid my $10 and went home to pore over the monster that Cunningham had grown by smearing together photos of his junk with the rest of his body.
Rubber Johnny was released as a standalone short a few years after Cunningham's Directors Label DVD made the rounds among teenagers hungry to be grossed out. It was the Videodrome of music video anthologies, full of disgusting Aphex Twin cuts and also sublime images accompanying songs by Portishead, Madonna, and Björk. "Come to Daddy" saw an emaciated monster with Richard D. James's face being birthed from an old television in clear Cronenberg homage. "All is Full of Love", meanwhile, spliced Björk's face onto two robots that kissed in a pristine white factory.
Cunningham loved to distort the male form—in the Rubber Johnny short, he bends his own body like putty to another Aphex tune—but he shied from manipulating women's bodies in the same way. Even in his infamous "Windowlicker" video, the female dancers onto which he pastes James's likeness adhere to a conventional ideal of sexual attractiveness. You see perfect bodies topped off with a hideous face. That's the whole joke.
There's something of Cunningham (and Cronenberg) in Jesse Kanda's collaborations with Arca and FKA twigs, but the young artist's work assumes markedly different politics. Xen, the character that stars in Arca's videos and appears on the cover of the album of the same name, is a grotesquerie whose body blends gendered anatomies. Arca has called the figure an androgynous alter ego; Xen wears a bald scalp, broad shoulders, full breasts, and large buttocks. On the cover of Arca's debut, Xen's skin ripples as if about to peel and fall off (amusingly, Spotify blurs the figure's crotch even though no genitals appear). For a split second in the "Thievery" video, Xen's genitals appear as a bubbling mass of indeterminate flesh. The "Xen" video distends the character further, dimpling the skin as though it never covered a body at all.
In FKA twigs' early videos, Kanda also teases the female form as something mutable. A shining, black, headless figure hangs in space, then deflates the moment twigs starts to sing in "How's That". The shell begins to glitch, clustering around the center of the frame, billowing in a digital vacuum. Sometimes, the shape of a hand is the only reminder that it ever was a body to begin with.
Madonna might shapeshift into animals in Cunningham's video for "Frozen", but her gendered body retains its integrity. Cunningham's visual world enforces a duality of forms: male bodies can be twisted to horrific effect, while female bodies remain intact in the service of aesthetic beauty.
The idea of female bodies as statuesque and immutable of course rings hollow to anyone who's inhabited a body that they might call female at any point in their lives. Most cis women accumulate and shed a bloody uterine lining every month; people that become pregnant witness their bodies changing bizarrely to grow a new human. Trans women may alter their bodies with hormones or surgery to alleviate dysphoria. Even in its most mundane rituals—shaving, waxing, dieting, exercise—femininity necessitates an often uncomfortable physical flux.
Of course, many of these rituals are often used to uphold the patriarchal myth that the female body is unchangingly perfect, a plasticine figure for their enjoyment. In Cunningham's world, the female form is not subject to the same mutations and injuries endured by his masculine characters. Women are literally robots cast in plastic making out with each other under a shower of white goo.
"Part of my goal is to present ‘disgusting’ things as something beautiful, to question what is okay to call disgusting or ugly," Kanda said in a recent interview. His videos lend inner life to the concept of woman (or androgyne) as mutant. His work extends empathy toward a grotesque and queer femininity, a femininity that bubbles and roils in time with similarly form-defying music; in doing so, Kanda claims and elevates bodily metamorphosis as an act of beauty.