- text by Bojana Kunst
- First published in: Frakcija, Actor and / as Author, issue no. 20 / 21, automn, 2001.
Visit kunstbody.wordpress.com for updates.
The article deals with bodies in contemporary performance art. Ever since their emergence in the sixties, these bodies have reflected the strong individualism of their authors, and played an important role in the postmodern unclosing of the subject in art. Bodies of orifices and fluids, gender bodies, leaky bodies, everyday and commodified bodies, ecstatic hybrid bodies - these are the predominant forms featured in the performance art by Gina Pane, Carolee Schnemann, Chris Burden, Rebecca Horn, Bob Flanagan, Katarzyna Kozyra, Orlan, Mona Hatoum etc. The aforementioned artists differ to a great extent; springing from various individualist, social and aesthetic contexts, they are difficult to interpret under a common denominator. Moreover, our attempt to do so can easily result in the very thing that their art, insisting on the "unframeable body of embodied subjectivity", is trying to avoid - in an enforcement of our own disciplinary logic of classification, and a suppression of what their works obsessively reveal and display for us to see. The ecstasy, pleasure, obscenity, perversion and danger of self-performing bodies, plays impudently and dangerously with our desire: we are faced with objects insistent upon us enjoying them, and disclosing to us at the same time that this enjoyment is never really pure. According to A.Jones, the interpretational relation is eroticised: it is ecstatic, but not entirely comfortable - venturing to speak, the spectator has to be aware that he has already been included into the generation of the process.
Despite the playfulness and interpretational discomfort it entails (indeed, the two phenomena will always accompany every good erotic relationship to some extent), the body of performance art can nevertheless be dealt with in a coherent manner. That is possible within a broad cultural and philosophical context, that of the general history of the Western contemporary body. During the last few decades, contemporary performance art has become involved in an obsessive romance with self and the body, to the extent that "the performer is obsessed with the urgency of displaying his own body in order to be able to exist in the first place" (Lea Vergine), and depicts the contemporary visibility of the body as a field of dangerous connections. I do not only wish to point out that performance art abandons static representation of the body (Grosz) in order to show us an unclosed, diffused and diverse physical identity. Not only the fact that, instead of an empty location of the body (which also haunted the fragmentarisation and abstraction of the body in the art of high modernism), it introduces the postmodern organic, gendered, social, constructed, relational body (the body which, as says Merleau Ponty, comes before every objectivisation). These are well-known facts, dealt with in the scope of poststructuralist and feminist philosophies; at some point, the praxis of performance art is indeed in total accord with these discourses.
I would like to take one step further and state that the body reveals itself as a topos in which, according to the American feminist performer Carolee Schnemann, there arise "all the splits of Western culture", as well as the deep problematics of their instrumental and rational connections. The body of performance art constitutes itself as a process, showing us the inevitable and problematic intervention of the other. According to Elisabeth Grosz, the body is nothing but "organically, biologically "incomplete"; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term administration". During the last few decades, as a potentiality, the performance art body has been obsessively confronted with the trauma of its articulation and its liability to intervention. On the one hand, it has to succumb to the increasing commodification and be more and more efficient to meet the obsessive rational imperatives. On the other hand, it sees its traditional boundaries disappearing, too - due to the complex role of technology and science.
I.
This broad context within which I wish to deal with the body of modern performance art as a front of dangerous connections, involves and points at deep changes - or rather, calls for an urgent change in our perception of the Western body. It represents the kernel of the inherent political and ethical problematics of Western performance art. It is the very feature that makes this art so attractive and provides its artistic events with a very important topos within contemporary art, and it is here that the proper presence of the body as author can be discovered.
What we will deal with is the visibility (we could also say, a play with invisibility) of something which, throughout the history of modernity, was constantly banished into invisibility, only to intermittently surface in the form of a (chiefly narrative) shadow. What I mean is the visibility of the in-between, the connected, the relational, the phenomena which, throughout the history of modernity, indirectly symbolized and constituted the topos of the monstrous. Modern history of aesthetic framing in artistic reception is accompained by a general modern obsession with differentiation - in science, philosophy as well as art. Differentiation is namely the only way that the modern subject can be placed into the centre of the world. The autonomy and certainty of the modern subject can only be achieved by means of a purification of the dichotomies between man and woman, culture and nature, the natural and the artificial, the living and the non-living. The monstrous, the composed, the unusual, the in-between, and connecting in general, posed a constant threat to the location and status of the modern subject throughout the history of modernity. In a way, it is the connecting that is suppressed in Western culture. Especially traumatic, of course, are impossible, dangerous connections (between man and beast, man and woman, master and slave, the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial), now confronted in a variety of ways by contemporary bodies of performance art and their entire ecstatic range of pain and pleasure.
If familiar with the modern history of the body, one can quickly notice that the field of the in-between is more or less reserved for special creatures which can generally be defined as monsters. Composed, fluid, transgressive and elusive, these creatures follow the modern subject like a shadow and symbolize the horrible precisely because of their obsessive demand for (dangerous) connections - searching for a body in the Enlightenment, a family in the Romantic period and a society in the 20th century, if I allow myself a slight simplification. The monsters' need for their obsessive connecting springs precisely from the fact that, throughout modernity, they are driven into the field of the invisible other, externalised, veiled, and confined into a closed entity, although that is not really their true home. Paradoxically, bodies of modern performance art can be viewed as our contemporary monsters. Their fluids and orifices tell of the illegitimate trajectory of the indistinguishable, and of its inevitable visibility. Moreover: the monstration proves a way of embodiment, a necessary position tactic of contemporary subjectivity which itself arises from a number of impossible and dangerous connections. The traumatic and at the same time, delicious excess of the body as author is not only a consequence of an extremely suppressed position that the body generally occupies in Western culture. It is also a playful flirtation and display of the post-human body image whose connection with the non-human (dangerous, unusual) is actually one of its basic traits.
II.
In order to better understand the process of this monstration, one through which the body of contemporary performance art is unclosed, I will myself venture upon a little dangerous connection and lead us briefly through the history of the physical. My starting point will be a story which belongs to the old discussion on anatomical specimens. Its slight obscurity will help us reveal the manner in which the modern notion of the body is constructed, and at the same time, show that the contemporary unclosing of the body as a place of monstrousity and dangerous connections, is by no means a new phenomenon. Quite the contrary, it is present throughout the modern history of the physical, but always has an invisible (veiled) place. Let us go back three hundred years, to a debate between two 17th century anatomists. It is one of the many cases of the "sweeping of the irregular under rules" (Canguilheim) that appeared with the beginnings of modernity, more precisely, with the placing of the subject into the centre of the world and by the disclosure of its scientific objectivity (as the only mediating relationship to the world). Although just one of the many, I selected this particular story due to its parallel to the unique, re-evoked anatomical passion in the artistic praxes of the present day. This passion confirms that the relationship between the internal and the external remains deeply problematic for contemporary man as well, although it might have become transparent through strategies of medicine and science.
At the turn of the 16th into the 17th century, the anatomists Realdo Colombo and Jean Riolan had opposing views and came to entirely different conclusions in their descriptions and classifications of hermaphrodites. If Colombo still admires them and marvels at their originality and complexity, Riolan is not only disgusted by them, but forbids them as objects of research. Colombo interprets hermaphrodites as the most miraculous of human anatomical specimens precisely due to the feminine and the masculine combined in a single body. Half a century later (1614), Riolan interprets the co-existence of this kind in an entirely different way. He describes hermaphrodites as deformed bodies, with a co-existence of (or transgressiveness between) the sexes not being possible in his opinion. More even, he interprets hermaphrodites as deformed women who, should they ever "take advantage of their sex", can be accused of "scandalous crimes" because monsters of all kinds are nothing but "a perversion of the order of natural things, people's health and King's authority." The turn of the attitude towards monsters and monstrous bodies which takes place in the 17th century is, of course, a consequence of a very critical approach towards everything unusual and miraculous. With the advent of new late 17th century science, the unusual is no longer considered a legitimate artistic or scientific object (as was still the case in the Baroque period). With the new objective and rational approach towards nature, nearly everything miraculous is driven out of the observation of the physical world. At the same time, this kind of rationalisation of the monstrous (Canguilheim) enables us to observe the advent of the autonomous reign of the subject, along with its privileges of visibility and invisibility. The monstrous is banished into the front of invisibility (illegitimacy), and can only be accessed through very specified and regulated channels. Monstruosity does not lose its disruptive role in the understanding of the world; it still remains the basic excess that every modern self-realisation has to cross, but it loses its ontological role. It is only this way that a specified modern way of production, one constantly referring to differentiability and transparency, can be established.
The feature that makes a hermaphrodite an object of admiration and fascination, and proves scandalous a few decades later, is the presence of a dangerous connection. Inscribed deeply in the formation of one's identity, a dangerous connection is also dealt with by Montaigne. In his Essays, he obsessively describes and analyses his own physicality, his embodiment which, in his opinion, is closely connected with the formation of self. According to Dalia Judowitz, Montaigne's identity appears through the play of similarity and difference, and can never be constituted separately from its physical medium. The body is experienced as a borderline, transparent and transgressive as to its exterior and interior, having a fluid border with bodies and objects. In the Baroque period, the attractive characteristic of hermaphrodites, conjoined twins and other "deformed" bodies is their transgressiveness, elusiveness between categories, their ontological dualism and the multiple layers through which a physical identity is formed. With the onset of the new science and the new philosophy of the subject, however, this fascination is labelled as a result of sick imagination, and becomes the field of the monstrous and the horrible, something that no longer has either scientific or philosophical legitimacy. Monstrous specimens, Montaign's fluidity of the physical self, hybrid objects in Baroque curiosities collections - all these examples display a crazy (uncensored) openness of a corporeal fluidity which shatters a clear and distinct punctum of the modern subject. By adamantly refusing to be classified as one thing or another, monsters open the fluidity between self and other; naturally, there is nothing more scandalous than the transgressiveness between the male and the female as present in a hermaphrodite. The modern body can not be fluid, and it is impossible to imagine two identities within a single body; as a notion, fluidity poses an essential threat to the modern schematization and fixation of the body. According to Descartes' Meditations (another grand first-person narration / fiction of modern self, but different entirely from Montaigne's confessions), the modern way of being self means being separated from the other. This kind of self-arrangement and discretion takes place within the security warranted by the accurately placed boundaries of one's body, and not by one's inhabiting of it. It involves the determination and mapping of the boundaries between singular selves and individual bodies, because that alone authorises our being in the centre of the world as the being of modern subjects. The modern ideal of perfection involves singularity, oneness and replicability; an occurrence of monstrous and dangerous connections is not only a perversion of the conventions of order, health and authority, as claims Riolan, but an inherent threat to the modern view of the world and also to the understanding of self.
But what does all this mean, how do monern monsters become invisible? Monsters are not invisible only because they do not match rational criteria and no longer have a functionality and purpose, but because, in the modern history of the body, they become instrumental. In this attitude towards monsters, a very complex and cunning position of the modern subject is at work, and I will only touch the tip of the iceberg at this point. The modern attitude regulates and rationalizes monsters in a very clever way - so that their inherent excess is actually turned into a normative. Their dangerous connection perversely becomes a testimony of modern differentiability; in other words: monsters and their excesses become instrumental. Some of this instrumentality already dawns in Riolan's definition of the hermaphrodite, saying that a hermaphrodite is basically a woman pretending to be a man. When shown in all its visibility, an excess becomes nothing but a result of pretension, imitation, transgression, an obscene trick; it is disclosed (seems visible), but the anatomist (scientist) shows that there is actually no excess at all. In its demand for visibility, monstruosity is nothing but a breaking of the social order; it can, however, be unveiled by the modern scientist, and used as a regulation and disclosure of normativity. Paradoxically, the monstrous is uncovered as a standard - but not as a standard of normality, as was the case in moral and theological tracts of the Middle Ages. In one way or another, modern consciousness interprets every excess as a problematic state of the normative, and this is precisely the fundamental and continuous way to ensure the invisibility of the monstrous. The instrumentality of the monstrous is far from the original meaning of the term, far from the process of monstration: it is no longer a display and unclosing of the indistinguishable, of the transgressiveness and fluidity in which something is not one thing or another. The normative is revealed through the process of de-monstration, of differentiation. Any hybridity is expelled deeply into the field of the invisible, regardless of the fact that it was once inscribed in the original meaning of one of the basic modern scientific perspectives of the world, as well as in the establishment of the relations between the external and the internal. Speaking about modern instrumentalisation, we can also speak of an exteriorization of the monstrous: in the modern world, the monster is driven into the front of the dislocated, invisible, and singular other. With dangerous connections disconnected and made invisible by means of impassable dichotomies (between body and soul, the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial, the male and the female), the monstrous is placed on the other side of the difference - as an entity in terms of a singular other whose inherent erotic attractiveness is now censored and frozen into the icy agony of the horrible. This kind of externalization of dangerous connections results in the viewing of the modern place of the body as an empty spot, a static entity in which the dangers of passion, womanliness, lunacy if not exactly instrumentalised, are at least banished into the "minority" field of the invisible other.
III.
However, the minority field of the invisible other is returning the blow nowadays. Its adrenaline ectasy cuts deeply into our perception of the physical, and problematizes the general representation of the body. Modernity may regulate and discipline its attitude towards the monstrous (and simultaneously, cleanse the body of unusual and dangerous connections), but the monstrous always playfully returns. The hybridity of contemporary performing bodies can be viewed as a symptom of a very important feature of contemporarity - that of an amazing obsession with connections. If, throughout modern history, every connection is banished into invisibility, today (if I exaggerate slightly), being dis-connected is one of the gravest threats. Due to the complex role of technology and science (as the technology is becoming our other and taking the place of nature, Jameson writes), the borders of the firmly determined territories of modern production (where modern non-human objects are generated and regulated), are being demolished. The difference between modern and postmodern interpretations of the problems I approached so far can be found in the contemporary visibility of hybridity. It is no longer veiled by the thoughtlessness, non-representation, and regularity once set by modern institutions; the visibility brings about a reinterpretation of traditional boundaries and categories, and results in a pure transparency of excess. What once used to cast a shadow upon the contract (in terms of an obscurity, enigma and passion of connections) and posed a threat to the autonomy and independence of the modern subject, seems entirely transparent, open and omnipresent nowadays. The effect of multiple layers and diffuseness, the openness of hybrid connections, their palimpsest and nomadic traits is almost hallucinatory. Our experience are constituted through a subtle matrix of connections, not only those between bodies, but between everything from the non-physical to the utmost material. It is therefore not unusual that the French philosopher B. Latour states that "we are going to slow down, reorient, and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially. Will a different democarcy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?" In other words: today, we are again confronted with the questions of legitimacy, officiality, visibility and representation - but not only that of the human (with which modernity used to be obsessed), but first and foremost that of the non-human. We ponder how to provide the non-human with an official place, or according to Latour, on the turning of antropomorphism into morphism.
The obsession with the body renders contemporary artistic praxes a special place in the omnipresent ecstasy of this kind. In my opinion, this art constitutes an important field in the contemporary articulation of the political, individual, and ethical - of everything that, due the omnipresence of connections and diffused experience, seems uncapturable sometimes. "It is primarily this corporeal fluidity, ambivalence, this problematic lack of fixed definitions, the rejection to be one thing or another, that labels the monstrous as the place of interference." At this point, we stumble upon the modern "minority" of passion, emotion, femininity, connections, vulgarity and imagination with no bounds. By means of the erotization of the interpretational relation, performance art parodes and transmutes both the traditional as well as the omnipresent contemporary connections. Performing bodies may be our contemporary monsters. But this does not mean that, just because of their openness, these bodies are indeed present as fluid and uncapturable, and that their monstration opens a view into an quasi-collective subjectivity in which the symbolic moment of identification between self and the subject is constantly postponed (Grosz). In my opinion, we should follow the thesis of M. Shildrick, and be careful by extolling their alleged total openness and dislocatedness. What contemporary monsters reveal is the fact "that the relation between self and the other, as with body and body, is chiasmatic, precisely insofar as corporeality and subjectivity - body and mind - are themselves folded back to each other, overflowing, enmeshed and mutually constitutive." Contemporary monsters become that elusive topos precisely because they enable us an active, creative, pleasurable experience of our subjectivity. (Jones). This experience, however, warns us about the boundaries of a singular embodied subject, and mirrors our insecure and unstable identities. The monsters arouse both a nostalgia for identification and a dread of incorporation.
IV.
By bodies and performers in performance art, the play with impossible and dangerous connections takes place on several levels, and is very complex. On the one hand, it can be read as a reaction upon the suppressed position of the body in Western culture, especially as to its invisible gender, racial and social articulations which are always in opposition to the rationalized and hierarchical divisions of modernity. These articulations are especially noticeable in the everyday and activist body of the sixties and seventies performance art. On the other hand, the disclosure of dangerous connections is present in the articulation of the body and subjectivity within the technological, scientific, and economic fields, especially during the last two decades. In its transparent and liberating play with monstruosity, the contemporary posthuman subject, if we call him so, is becoming posthuman precisely because of the new kind of connection, a new partnership disclosed with the omnipresence and complexity of our exterior. The contemporary monstration in performance art mirrors this kind of embodiment and subjectivity (as the two are intertwined) in a specific way: the ecstatic openness of its connections turns, parodes, fortifies and demolishes its own as well as other contemporary connections. Not only does performance art reveal that monstruosity is both marginal and central for the understanding of man's subjectivity in this world of connections, but also the importance to know "which are made and which not" (Donna Haraway). The legitimacy of our connections is displayed through this kind of awareness, through the constant connecting and the accompanying rise of position / opposition. In other words: in modernity, the monster is indeed exteriorised into the field of the singular, invisible other. But precisely therefore (as the exteriorisation is never absolute and successful), it becomes the most interiorized object of passion and desire, an object of a bizarre and at the same time irresistible eroticism which followed and demolished the foundations of modern differentiability. Today, when we are faced with an omnipresence of connections, this invisible other, as says Baudrillard, reveals itself as an object of production and commodification. Although it seems that we are immersed in countless connections, it now becomes problematic to what extent a dangerous connection is passionate (dangerous) at all anymore.
According to A. Jones, the visibility of postmodern posthuman body calls for taking pleasure in the blurring of boundaries rather than anxiety. The enjoyment of contemporary performance art, however, is quite specific, and can by all means be defined as "tactic pleasure" - a strategy of dangerous connections that primarily reflects a different understanding of subjectivity. The contemporary embodied subjectivity disclosed here is a system of tactic positions which are of racial, gendered, class, and gender nature precisely because of the relations with the others. .
The body of performance art is therefore by no means an unclosed and diffused autonomous container of signs, one-way relations and fragments of identity; its rationality and the proper place are acquired, set and revealed only as a specific (interactive) front in-between, with articulations taking place through a relationality and inevitability of connections. The changing relations with others are ecstatically open, and deeply problematized through the constant staging of desire. In the diffusion of traditional dichotomies, in the endless transgression (between the outside and the inside, the male and the female, the body and the artificial), the thought and self are no longer stable, and their boundaries no longer set by one's skin or the end of the world. "The skin is deceptive ...in life one only has one's skin...there is an error in human relations because one never is what one has...I have an angel's skin but I am a jackal...a crocodile's skin but I am a puppy, a black skin but I am white; a woman's skin but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There is no exception to the rule because I am never what I have." A time for tactic pleasure is due, to play with and also seriously consider and feel the quality of the connections, and the way we dwell within the complex entanglement of them.
The monstration of the body places contemporary performance art in the centre of the attempts to articulate modern ethical and political problems. Essentially, the realisation of the monstration phantasm has never been closer than with the modern development of technology and science. The tactic pleasure of performing bodies shows that this kind of embodiment is not only a product of the contemporary differentiability par excellence as found in scientific laboratories (with the disclosure of human genom probably the peak of this kind of differentiabiliy). It is also a practical realisation of open, individual and positional connections such as those inherent in the feminist notion of the cyborg.
This complex position of monstration is played with by the French artist Orlan; she demonstrates the process of such embodiment, guides and selects dangerous connections by herself, defining her work as situated between the madness and the inability of the gaze. She shows that this embodiment comes before any sort of identity (claiming that her works do not speak of identity at all), that one's identity comes second (if at all) - i.e. as a posterior construction of numerous dangerous connections which, in the modern commodification and commercialisation, become devoid of their inherent passion, danger and provocativeness. The contemporary praxes of the active body in performance art are an insight into (the joy of) the presence of embodiment, into an openness of choice, into fluidity, mystery and playfulness. They warn us that the monstrous, the different, the non-human is carved indelibly into one's self, and that one is a part of the indifferentiable. The tactic pleasure of performing bodies is of a cunning kind. Playful and elusive, it mirrors our inability to frame desire. Its positioning of relationarity speaks of the inevitability of location, boundaries and, last but not least, of horror / otherness of incorporation. The body as author reveals our most invisible yet eternally present dangerous connections, and is actually a strategic presence of our dark, elusive, leaky and constantly braided and interlaced humanity. Let me conclude with Derrida's thought on the inherent ethicalness of monstration: "A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would be already a predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant."