Wardell Milan's billboard Series, 5 Indices on A Tortured Body at Pomona College is based on 58 indices of the body by French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, one of the greatest specialists of deconstruction. Nancy's treaties examines the physical and the spirit, the relationship between the tangible and the immaterial. In these billboards, Milan seeks to use this idea and to recontextualize the eternal figure of the human body, even as it becomes more and more psychologically fragmented and unmoored in this age of increasing isolation and division. Each billboard size is unique and was created specifically for the medium of the billboard as well as for precise sites on campus. To this end, the billboard that we are standing in front of right now explores a female body. The location of the billboard, in front of Frank Dining Hall, is poignant. Frank Dining Hall was actually a woman-only dining hall, while Frary Dining Hall or North Campus was all male.
And indeed, at the time that gender integration between the two dining halls was suggested, it was heavily contested by Pomona students at the time. Thus, the location of the billboard asks us to wrestle with how the female body has been systematically barred from male dominated spaces. The female body is a study of multiplicity. The collage billboard began with a cutout from fashion photographer Paella Reversi, who typically depicts thin, Caucasian women. However, here Milan's critical and artistic intervention was to add photographs of women of multiple ethnicities to extend the mantle of femininity to women who have been systematically excluded from this category. This is also reflected in the overlay of the pregnant body with the model's, again, highlighting that femininity can and should be constructed in a multidimensional way. However, the image of the pregnant body also points to a worrying historical impulse in which women's bodies cease to become their own and instead become battle grounds for political agenda.
This is particularly salient as a woman's right to choose became a point of contention after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade earlier this year. Here, Milan's representation of the pregnant female body, therefore underscores the effect that women's bodies have often been pigeonholed and defined by their utility as child bearers. The drawing of a mountain on the right is a reference to the myth of Sisyphus, who's condemned by the gods to roll a boulder down a hill for all of eternity. By portraying these two images side by side, Wardell Milan is portraying the struggles of women, particularly women of color, as indeed Sisyphean.
Diya Mehta ’24