“In the end, all we’ll amount to is a sack of bloody slop”

There’s a scene in Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance where aerobics TV host Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) first gets bitten by vanity. She’s recently been ejected from her glittering Hollywood career after turning 50 and discovered The Substance, a new, clandestine potion that, once injected, means she can split her time between her real self, and a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version. All goes well, until her reckless, hedonistic alter ego, Sue (Margaret Qualley) tries to cheat the programme to spend more time as herself. The price is that Sparkle’s real self begins to age, rot and wither at an accelerated rate. Her skin shrivels and discolours, her veins pop up like tree roots on pavement. We begin to see her body for what it is: a body.

The Substance embodies a very real-world threat to women: that when your looks run out, you’re out of a job. When you hit 50, just crawl into a hole until you expire. Please, don’t subject others to your undignified deterioration! No one wants to see that, no one wants to be reminded of what they will become, or what they currently have underneath that carefully polished veneer.

At Tate Modern, the liquid dripping out of Mire Lee’s installation isn’t nuclear bile-coloured like in The Substance. It’s a putrid red-brown and smells like something on the cusp of rot, like laundry left in the machine too long. With Open Wound, the Korean artist has made the Turbine Hall into her living body factory in which everything that is usually kept inner is now outer. Tattered rags of ‘skin’ hang from chains from the ceiling, a recommissioned turbine rotates and pumps a viscous substance through long silicone veins, which drips into a tray on the floor. It looks a little like those freaky, butchered attempts at human imitation in John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Like the plot of The Substance, Lee’s work is about how soft, visceral bodies and bulging organs sit within a rigid machine framework. Her installations perform repetitive motions and change shape over time. They get under our skin and scratch at our fears and fetishes until they become the same thing – a mishmash of philias and phobias. Fargeat’s film also succeeds in creating this tension. “We need her young, we need her hot, we need her now!” says The Substance’s repellent TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid), his own signs of ageing, body functionality and bestial behaviour on full display with no consequences. “People always ask for something new. Renewal is inevitable”. Society’s deceit is the false promise of renewal. That the machine will keep moving, shedding itself and regenerating, if we just keep tweaking, editing and enhancing, we can be perfect.

While Sparkle’s body begins to be ravaged by The Substance abuse, her alter-ego is thriving, reducing everyone she meets into a drooling wreck. There are scenes in which Sue vacantly admires her own mirror image; she caresses her newly plumped body in the shower and gyrates in some Eric Prydz Call on Me era flesh-fest. Something for the lads? No, it packages the relentless pummelling of sexualised and idealised imagery that girls and women have been benched against for the last half-century. We’re bored with it, but we can’t look away, the promise of a more perfect self is just too strong. Sue’s quasi-soft-porn scenes are just that bit too long, designed to be as grotesque as the finale, in which the mutant Sparkle, live on stage at her much-anticipated televised New Year’s Eve performance is so fucked up from all the tampering that she gives birth to a breast from her face and explodes, dousing the audience with the mother of all gore fests. Everyone wanted a piece of her, now they get it.

Ageing, bodily deterioration and anatomical quirks make our humanity more obvious – they give us away. So we neutralise and smooth over lumps, bumps, smells, sounds and excretions – evidence of the machinery that makes us run. To embody that hollow mono-aesthetic driven by the Frankenstein of social media, bodies are gutted with Ozempic (the dead space pumped with botox), definable features given at birth are chiselled away; faces are masked in undetectable Insta filters – then we deny it all because of course it’s all natural and how dare anyone suggest otherwise.

There isn’t a happy ending to The Substance, no Dorian Gray deal-with-the-devil nonsense could ever end well. But society would rather delude us into believing that there doesn’t have to be an end to youth at all. What we seem to forget, in the moments when that delusion is too strong, is that the value of youth is its ephemerality. “You can’t escape from yourself” warns The Substance. This could just as easily be a maxim of reassurance from Open Wound.

Themes of body horror and vain self-improvement are nothing new; mutations, imitations, enhancements of the human body are well-worn tropes in film, art and literature. But figurative artists today seem divided. There are those who treat the body as a tamed entity – smooth, dewy, plumped to the point of embalmment, like it’s made of clay or plastic with no interior (Anna Weyant, Tali Lennox, Emma Stern) – and those unleashing the beast of body horror (King Cobra, Ivana Bašic, Mire Lee and Holly Jones among them). But I think they’re all talking about the same thing, the itchy discomfort of occupying a body under such scrutiny, and our futile attempts to achieve the unattainable and freeze the inevitable. What is new is our forensic, desperate attempts to defy our body’s natural state and course. Lee’s exhibition text goes hard on the Turbine Hall’s history: its “former life” as a power station, something about coal miners’ changing rooms, the brutality of manual labour and reawakening our industrial past. I get that commissioned art must be ‘in dialogue’ with its surroundings, but honestly, I don’t read any of this. What I do take from it is that an open wound to the body might be a good thing; exposing that which has not yet healed as evidence of our power to recover, to be openly alive.

We won’t win against the decline of our bodies, no matter how many machines or potions we make, or how many machines and potions make us. That’s probably the most compelling thing about having one. In the end, the machine will stop and all we’ll amount to is a sack of bloody slop. But if we’re lucky, it won’t be splashed over a live TV audience, or across the floor of Tate.