Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch

Cajsa von Zeipel, Pep Talk (installation view) (2024). Silicone and mixed media, approximately 80 × 48 × 84 inches. Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery. Photo: Charles White.

Those familiar with haute topics in academia may think of the “posthuman”—defined by N. Katherine Hayles as a “view” that seamlessly integrates human and mechanic bodies¹—as a broad category of creative and intellectual inquiry. Following a poststructuralist turn in critical theory ushered in by Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” and popularized by its 2016 republication,² in recent years the posthuman has been the subject of more discourse than ever before. In 2020, musician Arca tweeted: “Is the concept of posthumanism intellectual before it is visceral?”³ While critical theorists like Haraway and Hayles were more interested in the posthuman as a philosophical framework, Arca’s question about viscerality reflects a shift three decades removed from the cyber-fetishism that spilled into ’90s pop culture and academia. In our digital age, the cyborg exists beyond a speculative mode of inquiry, pressing into our daily realities.

On the heels of Haraway’s essay and at the nexus of the posthuman moment, Jeffrey Deitch’s 1992 show Post Human was pivotal in framing the term for the art world. The show brought together thirty-six artists, including Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Barney, crowning what critic Robert Rosenblum described as a “new dynasty.”⁴ The show was popular and toured broadly, essentially distributing the concept of posthumanism to the world. Thirty-three years later, Post Human returned to Jeffrey Deitch—a bigger and broader revival of the 1992 exhibition in Deitch’s huge Hollywood gallery space, mixing some pieces from the original show with new works by an expanded group of artists. The effect was something of a perverted world’s fair, reflections on futurity from now and decades past.

Theorist Rosi Braidotti recently credited Deitch’s original 1992 show with “show[ing] also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization, and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”⁵ However, in 2025, this “flair for the artificial” is well-felt and no longer nascent within culture; “computerization” is an anachronism. As the integration of AI into everyday life and artmaking processes becomes a reality, the strain on our collective imagination to envision the future intensifies. As innovations in cosmetic surgery proliferate, the previously speculative becomes plainly possible. As the internet begins to shape culture instead of the other way around, new social, political, and economic dynamics emerge and are encoded without delay, without any space for speculation. Compared to its predecessor, this Post Human was less of a meditation on what might come after the human, and more of a postmortem. While its newer pieces reflected our contemporary, technologized bodies in fascinating ways, these were not exactly in conversation with the older pieces, not exactly their successors. Presented together in a hodgepodge were new mechanic humanoids alongside older ones that gazed at these new bodies from a nebulous moment in the past. The effect was an uncanniness on top of an intended uncanniness.

The gallery’s funhouse layout made it difficult to discern which pieces existed in what time—now, the ’90s, between, or before. This timeless feeling, like a room without windows, could be felt in the presentation of Damien Hirst’s Nothing is a Problem for Me (1992), a wall of shelves displaying pharmaceuticals. The work did less to amplify the ubiquity of tech in our present moment and more to perhaps unwittingly display its acceleration since the ’90s (as well as unwittingly mirror the unimpressive pick-and-choose nature of the 2024 show). Another work from the 1992 show, Paul McCarthy’s sprawling, animatronic installation The Garden (1991–92) dominated the gallery, taking up more space than any of the more than 50 other works in the show. Its dense forest landscape contains two very basic animatronic bodies, pants around their ankles, thrusting into the trunk of an oak and a mossy knoll respectively. The figures are adult white men—in other words, culturally unmarked subjects. In this way, The Garden doesn’t actually trouble the human. Perhaps a commentary on perversion, it does not subvert. The piece read as anachronistic compared to much of the work that surrounded it, work whose humanoids were, in their beings, different.

On the other side of a wall in the huge gallery space, almost as if from a different show, and certainly from a different time, stood Anna Uddenberg’s T-Top Tummy Tuck (2022), an unsettling body-focused utility contraption that fuses medical apparatuses and auto upholstery materials to suggest a thing on which the viewer might be made to sit. It offers a far more incisive critique of the body’s technologized future: Rather than presenting a human figure, it calls the viewer’s own body into question, the ambiguous nature of the seat daring the viewer to wonder what will happen to their body once inside. Where McCarthy’s The Garden, with its dusty colors and abject persons, positions the viewer as voyeur, the challenge of Uddenberg’s contraption lies in its immense eroticism, inviting the viewer to sit in as posthuman figure; to surrender their body—your body—to the future in a visceral way. This body can be any body. Uddenberg has said that her work is largely inspired by control.⁶ Gender stands out as a theme in other nearby works, like Ivana Bašić’s pearlescent clitoral figure I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #2 (2017), which recalls and disrupts the female form. Confusingly sharing the space with McCarthy’s take on sexuality, these works felt especially nuanced.

These fluid and forward-looking pieces did well to engage in rather than merely comment on futurity. However, many works in the show were content to simply imagine a modified body. Throughout the show, the human or humanoid form was filled with plastic; plaster; smooth metal; foam; and uncanny, bulbous wax, from Cajsa von Zeipel’s surreal feminine figure Pep Talk (2024) to Mariko Mori’s famous Technogel aliens (Oneness, 2003). Here, our anorexic cultural moment finds itself mirrored by iterations on Botox. These pieces squish and slide their old forms into an image meant to signify futurity, wholly ignoring that time has produced a popular, Facetuned, futurist—yes, but ever-depreciating—aesthetic. As the internet has accelerated culture, these aesthetic paradoxes have proliferated, and our ideas about the future and how to imagine it have sputtered, failed.

As a member of the so-called “internet generation,” born after the dawn of the internet, I’ve often argued that our relationship to tech is not about so-called “digital citizenship,” but about being born into a new and differently- structured time. Post-1992, the internet has accelerated everything. There simply isn’t any way the revival of a past exhibition—no matter how star-studded or wide-ranging—can truly capture what the posthuman means to us now. In this sense, we are, forgive me, post-posthuman, the concept played to its end in light of new ideas around subjectivity and embodiment. If Post Human were to present itself as a retrospective on futurity, that would be one thing. But in its sprawl, this show buried reflections about the present and future in a strange nostalgia for a long-gone past.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Post Human (installation view) 2024–25). Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artists and Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Joshua White.