- text by Bojana Kunst
- First published in: Frakcija [N.4] - April 1997 (Zagreb, Croatia), Ballett International / Tanz Aktuell [N.8-9] - August 1997 (Berlin, Germany) and Dance & Technology Zone
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Couple of years ago, at the sculptural biennial in Australia, the guru of contemporary performance-art, Stelarc, presented his sculpture named Stomach Piece. He slowly lowered the micro-camera through his mouth and esophagus and it transmitted the precise picture of the content and the surface of his pulsating esophagus onto the big screens. Camera travelled through his body, lighting up the landscape of his stomach: it turned his body inside out. The picture that we saw on the screen was reflection of the view of the miniature sculptural structure, as Stelarc called his micro-camera. The inside of his body offered itself to the artefact which transmitted the picture of the internal spaces of his body with a help of video technology. So, there are no secrets left any more. However, the secrets were actually unveiled long before that. In the period of Enlightenment the public shows of autopsies have been abnormally popular and fascinating. The precise procedure of dissection of the body and its structure stimulated also the fantasy of the artists, so that paintings showing scenes from autopsy rooms became a veritable aesthetical stereotype of that period. Moreover, the liberal exposure of the body represented one of the most important scientific technologies and metaphors that signifiet characteristic desire of the Enlightenment period to uncover the hidden, to see that what cannot be seen (the same desire led to the invention of microscope in that period), in other words, to reach the very end, the place where we can never be, which we can never reach. That fundamental desire which forms the technology of the Enlightenments's logos, marks in a quite significant measure also the contemporary impetus toward learning and knowledge and remains still today the main incentive in development of high technology. Therefore, it is certainly not a mere coincidence that the Enlightenment, with its technological discoveries (autopsy, anatomy, optics, microscope), influences the contemporary scientific techniques and - trough a contact - also contemporary artistic techniques, so that we could regard the period of Enlightenment as a forerunner of contemporary artificial environments, animated automatons and visualization devices. Thus we can say that in the period of Enlightenment we had for the first time gained an access to the information - through the methodic autopsy procedure.
The same procedure of dissection, however, continued, gradually passing through various stages, so that today dissectionary information became also the aesthetical information: inside of a human stomac can now function as an aesthetical picture, because it reflects a different aspect of physicality, different grooves and lines, offering at the same time a specific aesthetic pleasure, which would be easiest to call the pleasure of interaction, the pleasure of distanced presence.
Dissectionary (autopsy) information is an aesthetical information also because it establishes, in techniques of high technology, the specific status of the human body - which is the body beyond the difference, the distanced body, the last territory of the pure here and now, the body which we can cut by means of high technology without fear that we might hurt it; we can subject it to the continuous deconstruction without being forced to do it manually or in close sontact; we can throw it into the endless space of intertwined network of the internet, into the network of dispersed fluid identities. "Mouthless, tongueless, teethless, buttockless, anusless, itself just an epidermal play of perversion, the body is just the body, devoid of any need for organs" (Herman Blau). We can cut it or fall in love with its depths at a distance.
In the 20th century, the establishing of this distance from the body begins with avantguarde movements at the beginning of the century, first with radical tendency toward a disciplined, uniformed and complete body of an automaton or a visual structure, and later with happenings and performances during 60's and 70's, when the body of ectasy (which is also some other body) was put on the stage and at the same time concretely invaded (SM performances of Gino Pana, Chris Burden, Orlan etc.). Although it may seem that in these bodily performances the body becomes most concrete, in fact, these performances establish the greatest distance, the body becomes nothing else but the object, an object that we - licensed by technology - can invade, cut or talk of it (of our own body) as of body/material (this is, for instance, characteristical for Stelarc's emphasized distance). The body is no longer the house of the Self, it is simply a live form, material, something that could be even more intensively transformed with a help of modern technologies, so that we can proceed beyond its mere physicality. The doppelgaenger fantasy, which will become reality once we have fully developed the technology of virtual reality, additionally confirms that the body will soon be able to function in another reality, i.e. it will finally feel at home within the information matter, which, of course, brings with it different physical laws. Well then, but what is happening with our own physical body, that which we carry with us every day, that through which we rest, which feels the toothache - and what about the aesthetical strategies which have at their disposal the procedures of high technology, how they react to such image of the body?
We could say that there are less and less secrets about the body or that those few remaining ones are becoming increasingly shy (by this I dont mean the current ethical debate provoked by the latest successes of genetics technology). The body has become obsolete (Stelarc) or invalid (Virilio). In order to be able to tele-communicate - like any other information - or to be transported by tele-kinesis, the body needs a great number of helping devices and still remains more similar to the body of an ivalid. Movements, or order of movements, have become superfluous, even the voice is no longer sufficiently effective; the latest technology shows that our body is slowly transforming into a linear code, which we shall soon be able to read by scanner. So, in order to be able to act globally, to act at a distance, we are gradually equipping ourselves with devices which are totally crippling our mobility. "Everything is happening in such a way that there is no need to move or to go somewhere." (Paul Virilio) And because the movements has ceased to be effective, because it ceased to be dependable, because its function has been reduced to a minimum, we can oserve the gradual establishing of distrust toward its models also within the contemporary artistic genres. In a number of performances it is already possible to start by computer a preprogrammed motional or choreographic connections, like for instance, in Stelarc's performance piece Obsolete Body in which his body moves according to commands of our "mouse" and performs the preprogrammed choreographic segment, regardeless of physical laws of space (we can start him into motion from another part of the world). The current stage in internet technological development makes the invalidity of the body even more zable, since in spite of its many fascinating possibilities, the modern internet technology is still unable to produce effectively moving pictures, so that it seems as if the pictures on the net are, in fact, reflecting our own immobility in front of the monitor. The situation is rather paradoxical: wandering through the net gives us a feeling of motion (surfing), athough we are constantly surrounded by immobile or very awkwardly moving pictures (moving in their "frozen" state) and although we ourselves are totally immobile. This feeling of motion comes from another network mode, namely from the mode of discursiveness, which I shall mention again in the concluding part of this text.
Further, the body is no longer the basic total structure model, which through the history formed the actual basis of the ideal, both, in science and in art. The biggest conglomeration of knowledge today, the internet, is to complex and marked by an andless multilevel discursive structure to have the structure of the body as its primary architectural support - as it was the case with the biggest compendium of knowledge in the Enlightement period: D'Alembert's Encyclopaedia (1751-1780). The internet structure reminds us more of another encyclopedic attempt of that period, namely, the Encyclopaedia of Mistakes, compiled by Pierre Bayl (1647-1706), which was a lucid travesty of encyclopedism itself and contained, in fact, a certain democratic impulse which will later become an important element of internet. Namely, the main principle of Bayl's encyclopaedia was complete renouncement of any determining principles. This allowed the inclusion of literally every accidental mistake, of literally every coincidence.
Since for quite a long time already the body is devoid of any mistery, a beautiful body exists as marketable goods with its market value and its place in the hierarchy. That's, of course, the preparatory area for some of contemporary net projects and performances, structured as continuous revealing of the obscure beneath the surface of a beautiful body. The obscure is expressed in the endless plastic surgery which the feminist performance-artist Orlaine is conducting on her face in Paris, the obscure relationships between ideal bodies are being revealed in the web art project Bodies INCorporated, which allowes the visitor to of the project to construct their own body, which later act through proportions and relations of the preprogrammed corporation. On one side we have criticisms of the general idea of this corporations, and on the other side, the exhibition of virtual bodies that can be wiped out with one move of the hand, should they break the rules or if we wish to have a new body.
So, the body itself, in the contact with high technologies, has a certain status of the last territory, present also as the territory of the distance, the territory of the pure here and now, never comprehensible as a whole, always just through the perspective of its deconstruction. That's a space od dissection, where the body is not presented, it only functions as pure material, without any repetition. That last territory is very similar to Artaud's concept of "body without organs", the body of pure presence, which has fataly marked Artaud's life and his theatre theory. It is interesting, namely, that his theory influences today's technological artists and theoreticians who in several places mention Artaud as "the man who already fifty years ago heard the dissectionary voices of internet" (from the information about the Project Artaud, Rhizome Internet [www.rhizome.com]). Among the examples of that influence is also the installation dedicated to Artaud. The information about this installation was recently circulated on one of the e-mailing lists. Installation lasted one month and was composed as conglomeration of performance art, telecommunication and video observations, while its composition was constructed by interactive inclusion, so that through electronically induced interferences and shifts the network of Artaud's neurons was drawn out, with intention to make out the outline of his physical and ephemeral body. Artaud himself had a similar intention in one of his last performances in the famus theatre Vieux Colombier, about one year before his death, when all his friends and fans have gathered, along with other people curious to see the real performance of the theatre of cruelty.
Artaud has seriously prepared for that, so called, literary soiree and has staged the agony of a mandying of a bubonic plague, a man under torture, he accompanied his performance with shouts and delirious cries, acting out his own death and crucifixion. Thus, one of the last Artaud's appereances was dedicated to the act of coming face to face with his own fantasy of disarticulated, dissected body, body as the point of shifting, separation and constant fuidity which is the pure presence and body without organs.
So, the old utopian wish to work without a body, fataly marked Artaud and his personal tragedy. He could not know, however, that in somewhat over half a century this utopian wish will become something quite normal. For him, this wish was connected with the fundamental existential experience, with problems linking body to existence and the weight of difference which its substance cannot bear. For the aesthetical strategies of high technologies this wish is the question of technique and searching for a new methodologies, where the body itself is not the carrier of any existential experiences, but an extensible epidermal form, for which the fundamental mode of communication - at least at the present stage of technology development - is discursivity: internet is still and first of all textual. There are at least a few directors in Slovenia who are conceptually realizing that contact between the two levels, the level of the internet and the concrete theatrical level. Directors, like for instance, Marko Peljhan and Igor Stromajer, are intensively preoccupied with interactive net projects in theatre, which influences the specific comprehenson of communication between actor and director. So, in contact with the technology, the body becomes fragmented, endlessly fluid and loses its identity. Wandering through the internet means scanning through a network of dissected identities, all of wich are participating, participating as discursive units. Identity is not defined by body or gender any more; moreover, the performative qualities of the identity can no longer be perceived as a fixed complex of qualities: through endless interaction they are becoming accidental and continuingly reproduced in various discursive contexts. Identity becomes fragmented also in the moment when there are no more spatial limitations, when it comes to the separations of the body from the space, when the groups are defined no longer by spatial, but by discursive qualities. Exactly this loss of identity allows artistical strategies the specific incision into the body as specific structure which tends to move away from the causal or non-causal logic of presentation and to form instead some new structure: a structure wherein it would be possible to participate from a distance; a structure which will have the characteristics of information matter and which will be duplicated at countless levels. The speed and endless interaction are the characteristics of this structure, which means that the views are constantly changing and breaking, that the aesthetical strategies are constantly resolving on countless sides, entering constantly more and more of new information and in their wish to perceive that what's beyond, they continue to empty the body more end more. Exactly because the body of internet and high technologies is just as hard to put into motion as our own everyday body. Because the body is like a pure surface of epidermis, without organs, without a self-sufficient internal structure. Along with the diminishing of the biosphere of the world, we are witnessing the diminishing of the biosphere of the body.
REFERENCES:
- Barbara Maria Stafford: Body Criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, 1993.
- Paul Virilo: Liberation Speed, SOU, Ljubljana, 1996.
- Antoine Artaud: Theatre and Its Double, MGL Library, Ljubljana, 1994.
- Herman Blau: To All Apearances: Ideology and Performance, Routledge, New York and London, 1992.
- Mark Tribe: Postmodern Time, Rhizome Internet.
- Jean Baudrillard: Corps muscules, Les Saisons de la danse, 1994.