- text by Bojana Kunst
- Lecture, Colloqium New Normativity in Aesthetics, Slovenian Association of Aesthetics, 9 - 10. 9. 1999, Ljubljana, Slovenia
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In this lecture, I will deal the question of normativity from the perspectives of the human body and anatomical gaze which has deeply infuenced many depictions of the body in contemporary art.
We could say that the entire 20th century is marked by a desintegration of the bodily structure, and by the omnipresent awareness of its helplessness, fragility and profanity. Baudelaire's poetic description of a prostitute celebrates a body springing from the margin, a body without aura and integrity, a fragment already reflecting the air of modernity. The same kind of attitude can be found in the new perception of the world as described by Benjamin: "A generation that had gone to school on a horsedrawn street car now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile body." The same feeling is present in the avant-garde demand for body engineering and the construction of a functional body – the idea that was readily adopted by several ideologies (e.g. that of Nazism). After the modernist expulsion of figurality and the prevalence of abstraction which severely questions the norms of an ideal body as set by anatomy, the body again returns to performance art in the early seventies - accompanied by a fairly legitimate demand for it to become an artistic means equal to all the rest. The mass revival of the body in the eighties and nineties reflects it as a fragile and dissected artistic field; as the obsolete body, characterized by fake beauty and integrity; as the fragmentary body, defeated by the advance thought and evolution. Now, let us consider the phenomenon of the fragmentary body. The function of the human body is reduced to that of a container (Stelarc), a specimen for the analysis of man's evolutionary and physiological potentials (Eduardo Kac, CAE), to that of mere material subjected to various operative and techonological transformations (Orlan, Acker). In other words, the body is viewed as something that should be despised, dissected, or transformed. With the fantastic freedom offered by the determination to expose everything, however, the fragmentary body seems to have become a major threat and challenge to the question of normativity, and one of the most direct consequences of the post-modern slogan »everything goes«. By means of postmodern travesty, however, the imperfect, dispersed and fragmentary body seems to have taken the position previously occupied by the ideal image – that of the decisive factor in the establishment of aesthetic and moral criteria governing the normative depiction of the body. It would not suffice to say that the modern disclosure of the body challenges the production of its images by simply abolishing all the criteria and testing the limits of the current moral and aesthetic acceptance. In my opinion, this phenomenon also displays the extremely problematic fragile character of the ideal image, in order to conceal the imperfection and helplessness of the body itself. The fragmentary body mirrors the critical standpoint towards the artistic representation of the body which, throughout western history, reflects the longing for a perfect, ideal form which has also influenced the normative depiction. The phenomenon of the fragmentary body, however, has always been deeply inherent in the production of ideal images: every production of the ideal image results in dismemberment. The body can never be depicted as a perfect whole; quite the contrary, it is always present as a fragment only.
Clearly, no one has ever been more aware of this fact than anatomists. Not those of the present day who, dedicated to objective scientific work, consider dead bodies as morphological objects for research – but the anatomists/artists of the Enlightenment, whose experimental procedure was marked by a constant dialectic of the interior and exterior, and that of the fragmentary body and the image it should reflect. The contrast with the 18th century is, of course, not accidental; according to Barbara Maria Stafford, the 18th century developed and influenced many visual strategies of today; indeed, it often seems that many a bizarre phenomenon of the past was revived in modern times. An analytical comparison of the 18 century anatomical views with the modern obsession with the fragmentary, dissected body can help us understand the modern crave to uncover the epidermal surface. A quick look at contemporary art, media and various catastrophes (wars, traffic accidents) suffices to reveal an anatomical passion which both enlightens and blurs the view of man at the end of the century, reflecting the problem of ideal (or normative) images. I would like to draw your attention to several aspects of the modern metaphore of the dissected, fragmentary body (the phenomenon which, in its entirety, surpases the scope of my lecture): to the continuous presence of the desire for a whole and ideal image, reflected even in the dispersed parts of the fragmentary body, and to the fact that, after so many centuries that divide us from the mentality of the Enlightenment, we still believe in a certain dialectic of the interior and exterior of the body. The resemblance between us and the scholars of the Enlightenment is only that of strategy, however; the fascination of horror and the universal allegorical character of the anatomical images of the Enlightenment have been substituted by a world without secrets, bodies without organs, naked flesh and its fragile potentiality crushed by commercial, popular, scientific and aesthetic pressures.
The fading of the mysteries about and in our bodies has a long history. As I already mentioned, it originates in the birth of modern views upon the production of physical image - in the age of Enlightenment. For the first time in history, a dissected body was regarded as a source of information, although, it could not yet be considered a specimen unproblematic for scientific research1. Let us now explore the imagology of the time - atlases, wax models, anatomical collections and theatres, and the special status of the 18th century anatomists: it appears that they were not dedicated to scientific education of the eye only, but to the artistry of the hand as well. Apparently, the status of anatomists was very much the same as that of sculptors, painters and architects, with an additional, yet essential mission to mediate between science and art. Anatomists were the ones authorized to discover formae in profundis and thus differentiate between the external form and the essence hidden underneath, between the visible and the invisible. Gerdy defines this privilege in his description of the beneficial influence of anatomy upon art: "It permitted the artist to observe more than he could conventionally see. He was thus able to represent forms concealed beneath an occluding matter more faithfully, because they were now clear to his mind." 2 The exploration of the invisible was no less than a spectacle – an unusual form of initiation, a revelation ritual for people chosen (and competent enough) to enter the imaginary; and, at the same time, a privilege to create the basic image of the body, as well as the relating stereotypes of that period. 3 4
The intertwining of artistic and anatomical views was even encouraged by the principles inherited from the Rennaissance, the same that influenced the famous Rennaissance anatomist Vesalius. "Only the finest elements present in the endless variety of Nature may be selected"5, was one of the many beliefs guiding the anatom's hand. The body intended for dissection was to be as beautiful and ideal as possible; only a perfect body can become a specimen on the basis of which one can study all the rest and establish criteria. In 1796, Von Soemmerling published one of the first anatomical studies containing pictures of female skeletons, with his depictions modelled after the Venuses of Medici and Dresden, in order to present forms as ideal as possible. The author's intention was not to present female (or male) individuals (with depictions of Apollo representing the male specimens), but "the finest norm imaginable in this life, depicting carefully studied minutiae of various sexual characteristics as inherent in the entire bone structure of the female sex." 6 Despite their advocacy of perfect bodies, however, the praxis of the anatomists of the Enlightenment was quite different. The bodies available for research were mostly far from the ideals set in the Rennaissance period; on the contrary, they were rejected by the whole moral and ritual systems of both anatomy and medicine. An invitation to an anatomy lesson sent by a scholar from Bern, says: "By the favour of our distinguished magistrates I shall reveal to the sight of any of you who are curious to see what nature has enshrined in all of us. Not out of a desire to vent malice on the work of God (the cadaver being that of evildoer) but so that you may come to know yourself. " 8 This discrepancy definitely adds a perverse and bizarre dimension to the anatomical perspective. Determined to get to the bottom of the invisible, anatomy was still not an objective science but rather a moral and aesthetic strategy; by means of cutting, dissection, »scientific« explanations of the unknown and obscure, as well as by the measuring, counting and classifying of formae in profundis, it began to introduce the absent, the Other Body. By means of differentiation of layers and visible segments, it established the definition of a perfect body, and clearly indicated the elements that differed from it. The impudent classification was candidly present in anatomical depictions and collections, meant as a visual warning – or rather, as whole museums of such warnings, with the frightful stillness of the images in (quasi) superb forms confronting the visitor with his bloody interior. These images no longer represented a universal warning against death and the transient character of microcosmos (as was the case with those of the Rennaissance), but an inexorable connection between life and death (e.g. this is how you will end up as a criminal), between interior and exterior, between looks, morals and beauty. "Medical inventions can provide good examples for ethics ", wrote the French doctor Pierre Roussel in 1775, arguing that: "it is impossible for philosophy to determine the moral strength of man without taking into consideration the organization of the body." 9 To put it differently: The then dialectic of one's interior and exterior was that of competence, determined by the Other Body, resulting in a moral process and the establishment of aesthetic principles. The more secrets of the body we uncover, the more empty and artificial it becomes, subjected to systematization, generalization, control and universal anticipation. It is turned inside out for us to be able to catch a glimpse of the Other Body. Through the darkness of the morbid anatomical theatre, there always pierced the light of the ideal body: "Isn't it all but a surface and content? Body and soul? The outward effect and the ability of the inside? Invisible principles and the visible results?" 10
Thus, in the 18th century, even completely dissected bodies reflected nature, life and morals. At this point, we can perhaps understand some of today hardly comprehensible obsessions of the anatomists of that time, who even attempted to combine parts of different corpses into most unusual compositions, e.g. Giovanni Aldini, who tried to combine different limbs, heads etc. by means of galvanism. The famous collection of Frederik Ruysch (1638 – 1731), Dutch doctor and artist (as such he was regarded by his contemporaries, including Bernard de Fontanelle), is of a similar kind. One of his anatomy lessons was depicted by the Dutch painter Jan van Neck.11 With a special method of preparation he had himself invented, Ruysch managed to create a fantastic museum of curiosities, addressing the visitor with a mysterious inscription carved above the entrance: Come and see! As early as in 1690, his collection was famous Europe-wide. One of the visitors, de Fontanelle, describes the attractions of the museum with the following words: "It might also be said that Ruysch had discovered the secret of resuscitating the dead. His mummies were a revelation of life, compared with which those of the Egyptians presented but the vision of death. Man seems to continue to live in the one, and to continue to die in the other." 12 The collection mainly consisted of children's dead bodies and their various parts (as Ruysch worked as chief obstetrician in Amsterdam), dressed and placed on silk pillows. In the catalogue, some allegories made of skeletons (including a skeleton of a child kicking a syphilitic female skull) and other compositions were defined as Konstwerken (works of art). With his special method of preparation, Ruysch managed to preserve his specimens as extremely life-like. The fearful stillness and the bizarre childlike innocence of the artefacts perfectly suited the moral code created by the scalpel, with their forms representing the aesthetic ideals of the perfect body. We could also say they reflected both “eine edle Einfalt unde eine stille Grandeur” – according to Winckelmann, the two essential characteristics of ancient ideals. It is exactly the tension between life and death that connected the aestheticist Winckelmann and the bizarre doctor – or Kontenaar, an artist, as he was referred to throughout his catalogue. The tension mirroring what I described as the longing for the ideal, impossible body, no longer subjected to dark laws of nature and the transience it has marked us with. This tension mediating between life and death, between the body and its frozen image; was in the neoclassical aesthetic ideal present as the sublime. Ideal beauty was thus connected with death, violence and horror; it is perfectly depicted in the statue of Niobe, who achieved transcendental tranquillity by witnessing extreme violence "which obliterated all signs of expression on her face, leaving her transfixed in the cool forms of a pure, austere, almost absolute beauty." 14
Ruysch’s bizarre creations, as well as other images and collections (for example that of anatomical wax figures owned by the Italian doctor Felice Fontana in the 18th century) reveal that, despite the vanishing mysteries of the body, the people of that time were still further from grasping it in its entirety than they thought they were. Furthermore, the dissected body was occupied by the ideal image which subjected it to systhematizations, emptying the content under the epidermal surface in order to substitute it with a generalized image showing the people what their bodies should have been like. It constantly reminded them of the exclusiveness of the ideal, laying the foundation for the body engineering of the future. Now wonder that the strong connection between anatomical views and aesthetics gave birth to another branch of « science » - physiognomy - which readily transformed the tension of the sublime into a most vulgar connection between the interior and exterior of the body – the Beautiful Soul and the physical constitution reflecting its ideals.
In what way do we resemble – and differ from the scholars of the Enlightenment? Do our images bear any resemblance to the production of dissected images in the 18th century? What (if anything) does the dissected body reflect in the present day?
The moral aspects of anatomy (and those of its operative variation, physiognomy) have long been substituted by objective scientific methods.16 I would agree with Barbara Maria Stafford 17 that several inductive patterns still remain - as part of modern scientific, technological and aesthetic views of the body. The judgements are no longer simple or dependent on direct physical contact with the body; with the advance of modern science, they become epistemologically complicated - and dangerous at the same time. 18 Despite the advent of the new technologies introduced into medical practice as early as in the 19th century (e.g. energy, electricity), and techniques like X-rays, CET and PET, genetic technology, biogenetics, cloning etc. which radically change the anatomistical view, the image of the body remains based on generalization and artificiality. With the discovery of X-rays at the beginning of the 20th century, there follows the first radical change of the depicting and decoding of the human body: it is no longer approached by the intimacy (or morbidity) of direct physical contact, but by means of technological filters.19 The image of the body is created by means of computers and technology; it is transmuted into a dematerialised graph, matrix, shadow, combination of colors and stripes, hyper-texts. 20 Despite the fact that modern medicine, science and art present the body as a mere reconstruction, with the organism transformed into codes and heaps of binary files, we can still trace a remnant of the old views originating in the age of Enlightenment, when, for the first time in history, »we gained an access to the information - through the methodic autopsy procedure«. According to Stafford, modern people still believe that, by the observation of visual characteristics, they can discover something about the very essence of man, even more, we seem to believe that, by means of further combinations of these characteristics, we can compose an »ideal« human being (for example, by means of genetics), and one fit for the new challenges set to its survival by technology. The judgements of the body remain those acquired by looking into its interior; furthermore, the body turned inside out is becoming a document of identification and an insurance chip. In the future, it will probably play an important part in job interviews, family planing, the predicting of one's predisposition to disease or crime and the evaluation of one's genetic material etc. The directness of the scientific and artistic incission of the Enlightenment has been substitued for the gentle slides of CET scanners collecting information in order to generalize and graphically depict human brain waves. Despite the advance of technology, the image produced by electronic finger-tips still reveals the impudence of generalization, resulting in enormous confidential databanks in medical institutions denying access and control to most people. Today, high technology provides the same illusion as that of the microscope in the age of Enlightenment, providing a wonderful ability of magnificaton - and the illusion that we can in fact catch sight of the invisible, flawless information net, the virtual and statistical field of the perfect body.
What we see is a systematized image, with its aesthetic qualities preserved as a decyphering system of lines, vectors, geometric shapes, and colours – the qualities which can even be foreseen, or designed in advance by means of computer monitors. The generalisation is even furthered by virtual worlds creating bodies of data by means of classifications, differentiations and data input. The striving towards the artificial has marked the entire history of the body without secrets, reaching its bizarre climax in plastic surgery 20, a practical outcome of constant studies of physical characteristics deviating from the ideal body - and a practical transfer of artistic strategies (colour, point, line) to the body by means of scalpels. It is therefore not unusual that the advocate of plastic surgery, Mike Kaplan, openly invites art to assist the general process of beautification by providing the necessary aesthetic ideals: "I take the art I see in the museums into the operating room and translate that into actuality", or, to look at another statement of his, it should be necessary to consider "how you could make the eyes more important, how you could eliminate some of the accidents, the disorder of the face...There is so much chaos in the outside world." With the introduction of plastic surgery, aesthetic becomes an applicative science studying the possibilities of commercially fooling the dialectic of one's exterior and interior, in order to create the obsolete, impossible, ideal and successful body by means of tactile incisions.
The recent exhibition of corpses and body parts by Gunther von Hagen in Vienna, the dissected animals in formalin by Damien Hirst in the new Hamburger Banhof Musemu in berlin situated on the former »no man's land« between the east and the west, the continuous plastic operations of Orlan and Elisabeth Dyn, the biogenetic experiments of Eduardo Kac and numerous other phenomena indicate that the anatomical passion of man has again been reignited. This time, however, it is no longer a privilege of a developing branch of science, but more or less an artistic attempt to mercilessly expose and eradicate the remaining mysteries of the body. The disclosure is no longer meant as a mysterious allegory, a warning and moral classification as was the case with the anatomical artist of the Enlightement. The fragmentary and dissected body is a modern metaphore representing the most direct threat to the problematic normative depiction of the body as a whole, disclosing its fragile and paradoxical potentiality. In other words, it reflects the statement of Jean Luc Nancy, saying that there is no such thing as a body, but " masses, masses offered without anything to articulate, without anything to discourse about, without anything to add to them." 24 It reveals the body as a heap of flesh, bone and muscles, which, according to Elisabeth Grosz, is nothing but an "animate organization of the flesh, The body is so to speak organically/biologically/naturally incomplete: it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of unco-ordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering and long-term administration." It reveals the paradoxical, manipulative and epistemologically complicated character of modern generalizations as well as the illusion of the depiction of the body as a whole, which, unfortunately, is still considered as the aim of physical transformation. It shows the problem of the basic potentiality of the body – the quality which enables it to be considered something and somebody. Dissected images thus fill us with a mixture of discomfort and relief. Our discomfort lies in the fact that we are constantly faced with the weakness our bodies reminding us of the lost battles with nature and evolution, as well as of their fragile potentiality, dependence, the inability to support our idenitites and preserve their privacy. As I already mentioned, modern man has successfully overcome the phantazmatic moral classifications created in the 18th century, but only to substitute them for a world without secrets, bodies without organs, naked flesh, epidermal sacks, creation of doubles and clones, and genetic legitimation turned inside out. The statement by the French philosopher Michel Serres, engraved upon a series of bullet-proof glass tables with a central receptacle containing 20 grams of Orlan's flesh, speaks exactly of this problem: "The current tattooed monster, ambidextrous, hermaphroditic and mulatto, what can it make us see now under its skin? Yes, blood and flesh. Science speaks of organs, functions, of cells and molecules only to admit at last that it is high time we stopped speaking of life in laboratories; but science never mentioned the flesh, which quite rightly, signifies the conflation, here nad now, in a specific site of the body, of muscles and blood, of skin and hair, bones, nerves (...)." 25 The statement makes us painfully aware that, despite the fact that it can be subjected to scientific and other generalizations, or loaded as a file, the problem of the fragmentary body still remains, as a foundation for the representation of the body as a whole. In this sense, it is present as a scandal which, rightly advocates the profanity and disclosure of the body. It is the radicality of the strategy that most clearly reflects the problematic character of ideal images and shows that the understanding of our bodies and ourselves has entered a new dimension: especcialy with a possibility to realize "a desire to destroy our current biological design and replace it with a more advanced form." 26, which has indeed become feasible with the introduction of new technological procedures and discoveries. The result expected from these radical strategies is a non-suffering, post-human body, we could also say a cyborg. But this is non-painfull utopia just on the first sight. Quite the contrary, there should be a strong awarennes that every body is created by painful modifications and endless fights inside the body itself (my body is my battleground, says Barbara Kruger in the famous poster from the eighties). The body turns into an elusive field of dislocation, refecting several characteristics of the cyborg as described by Donna Haraway; it is strongly committed to »partiality, irony, intimacy and corruptness; a utopia in constant opposition, robbed of all innocence. It can no longer be grasped as a totality or be seen in the mirror to show us the reflection of Apollo (the ideal body). Instead, the incised body is present as a contrast, fragment, a diffused net, as the stability of the unstable which constantly challenges its boundaries, and the questions of the body's normativity is emerging from the pain of the incision.
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1 According to Foucault (Naissance de la clinique), the beginning of the modern views of the body as an unproblematic object for research is marked by the publishing of several works by Bichat at the beginning of the 19th century; the body is now considered a dead corpse, a morphological object of research, and no longer belongs to the phantasm of life.
2 P. N. Gerdy: Anatomie des formes extérieures du corps humains, aplliqué a la peinture, a la sculpture et a la chirugie, Paris 1829; in: Barbara Maria Stafford: Body criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, 1991, p. 54.
3 One of the moral codes seems to have been broken by the female anatomist Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville who, in 1759, published a depiction of a female skeleton - under the male pseudonym of Jean – J. Sue.
Londa Schiebinger: Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy, in: The Making of Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles & London 1987.
4 Every city of importance had a Praelector, with anatomy lessons representing one of the privileges of his function. The lessons usually took place in candlelight, with occasional acoompaniment of popular flute music, and there are also records of entrance fees. In Amsterdam, the profit from the tickets was usually used for organizing a banquet for the surgeons at the end of the lesson. Source: Julie V. Hansen: Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch; Art Bulletin 4, December 1996, pp. 667 - 678.
5 Bernhard Albinus, as quoted in: Ludwig Choulant: History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, p. 277, Chicago 1920, in: Londa Schiebinger: Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy, in: The Making of Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles & London 1987.
6 ibid., pp. 306 - 7. Londa Shiebinger deals with the research of sexual differences in eighteenth-century anatomy, revealing that depictions of female skeletons are those of the Other Body, having broad hips – and small skulls. Social inequality was considered a natural law, “supported” by with the “evidence” of anatomical research.
7(criminals, beggars etc.: in Holland, there was even a law confiscating dead bodies of foreigners).
8 Julie V. Hansen: Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, Art Bulletin 4, December 1996, pp. 667 - 678.
9 Pierre Roussel: Système physique et moral de la femme, ou tableau philosophique de la constitution, de l'état organique, de témperament, des moeurs & des fonctions propres au sexe, Paris 1775, quoted in: Londa Schiebinger: Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy, in: The Making of Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher in Thomas Laqueur, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles & London 1987, p. 68.
10 Johann Caspar Lavater: Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind; 1792; in: Barbara Maria Stafford: Body criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, 1991, p. 79.
Looking at the 18th century wax images of dissected bodies, there is another factor to be considered. As a branch of science, anatomy is introduced in the 18th century, due to the advanced understanding of the body; it is no longer considered a creation (or a model, as as was the case with Vesalius), but a machine, a mechanism. Wax depicitons of dissected bodies reveal the experimental procedure governing the normative depiciton.The look into the interior speaks of the mercilessness of mechanicali determinism; the body is a machine the funcioning of which can be foreseen, subjected to mechanical laws and can not be altered. The same goes for nature, with the mission of philosophers (i.e. paradigmatic masters of almost three decades of Europen history) similar to that of clock-makers - claiming that an accurate dissection of malfunctioning mechanisms reveal the causes of malfunctions.
11 With his depiction of Ruysch and his anatomists (who ordered the painting), Neck continues the tradition of depicting anatomy lessons started by Rembrandt with the paintings _________ (1632) and ______________ (1656).
12 Ruysch invented a special method of preparation which made his specimens look extremely lifelike.
Julie V. Hansen: Ressurecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, Art Bulletin 4, December 1996.
13 One of the specimen was bought by the Russian emperor Peter the Great in 1717 – for as much as 30.000 guldens. Allegedly, the emperor was so moved by one of the specimen that he couldn’t resist kissing it .
Julie V. Hansen: Ressurecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, Art Bulletin 4, December 1996.
14 Winckelmann, as quoted in: Alex Potts: Flesh and the Ideal, Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1994, p.3.
The legend says that, witnessing the slaughter of her children by Apollo and Diana, Niobe was petrified by grief and horror.
15 Lavater models his philosophical argumentation of physiognomy on that of Baumgarten, especially on the fact that Baumgarten tried to provide aesthetics with a systematic methodological form and establish it as a branch of science. »At least I don't have to fear the objections of Baumgarten's school. His idealistic definition of science (scientia) is well-known…«
Die Physiognomische Fragmente, 1775, as quoted in: Robert E. Norton: The Beautiful Soul, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1995, p. 180.
16 Foucault attributes the merits to Bichat, in the beginning of the 19th century.
17 who, a few years ago, presented a brilliant study of the visual strategies of the Enlightenment, as well as a comparison with the epistemological and scientific strategies of the present day.
Barbara Maria Stafford: Body Criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, 1991
18 Barbara Maria Stafford: Body Criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, 1991, p. 145.
19 Eugene Thacer: Digital Anatomy and the Hyper-Texted Body, Nettime Arhiv, Internet: www.factory.org./nettime/
20 With detailed anatomical depicitons of male and female bodies, the CD-ROM Visible Human Project could be viewed as a digital Fontana’s theatre, with the corporealities functioning as nets (different ftp pages), data accumulations, transfers and animations. “ According to E.Thacker, “digital anatomy does not represent parts of the body, but a variety of binary files.”
E.Thacker: Digital Anatomy and the Hyper-Texted Body, Nettime, Nettime Arhiv, Internet: www.factory.org./nettime/
21 A paraphrase of Marinetti’s Manifesto On Tactile Art , 1921: “The visual sense is born is finger-tips.”
22 As well as in other phenomena of popular culture: taking care of one’s body, fitness, aerobics etc.
23 Mark Kaplan: Surgeons Sculpts New Image, Midway 4, December 1989
25 Orlan: Carnal Art