Post on 05-Feb-2023
The Material Body: Collapsing the Cultural Taboos
Surrounding Mortality in Visual Arts Practice
Kathryn Lawson Hughes
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of BA (Hons) in Fine Art University of Wales Trinity
St Davids, March 2014
Introduction
The anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921- 2007), in her
seminal book Natural Symbols, articulates two bodies, the
social body (that of society) and the physical body (that of
the individual). She asserts that the experience of the
physical body, the individual, is “always modified by the
social categories through which it is known” (Douglas 1996:
72). Unascertained by us then, the bodies we assume we have
mastery of since birth are often in fact, the product of
exterior socially determined factors, already weaved into the
intricate network of our society’s constructed schema. Our
innate, elemental ways of being, our physicality, how we
move, our patterns of sleep, how we take nourishment, our
sexual behavioural patterns, rituals of cleanliness,
perceptions of pain, exchanges with others, how we process
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loss, and so on, are not intrinsic primal instincts at all,
but attributed to and determined for us through normative
codes of what is perceived to be rational and functionally
appropriate behaviour within the culture we dwell.
The body is perhaps the primary metaphor for a society’sperception of itself. The individual and spoken languageare what make up the social body. The physical body is akind of boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourse. Man can only know himselfthrough his environment. Our awareness of self heightensour awareness of the world around us. Through a deeperunderstanding of what it means to live within one’s ownbody, we understand better that we are all connected andrelated to one another…[The body is] the site wherequestions of sexuality and its categorization in termsof power, biography, and history, are played out.
(Jones 2012: 99)In an authoritative society, humankind’s awareness of the
self is at risk, as the body functioning for, and as a
product, of society is held paramount over individual
subjective needs. If our physical bodies and how we operate
them, are the conception of a previously established system
of conduct imbued in us from the institutional and cultural
disciplines we are subject to in Western civilization from an
early age then, how much control and power can we, the
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occupiers of the aforementioned bodies, still retain over the
drives and discourses they produce? Philosopher and theorist
Michel Foucault (1926- 1984), in his book Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of The Prison, explores how the subject is formed through
its relationships with power, the body and identification of
the subject being “an effect of power” (Foucault 1977).
Disciplinary power within the regimes and institutions of
society serves to render individual bodies docile, in order
for the subjects to become efficient and productive members
of the ordered societal body.
The notion of the other is closely linked to those ofidentity and difference in that identity is understoodto be defined in part by its difference from the other.I am male because I am not female, I am white because Iam not black. […] Such binaries of difference usuallyinvolve a relationship of power, of inclusion andexclusion, in that one of the pair is empowered with apositive identity and the other side of the equationbecomes the subordinated other.
(Barker 2004: 139)
Authoritarian society succeeds in cultivating, with great
accomplishment over time, the practice of suppression and
subordination against subjects considered other (those who in
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some way transgress the affirmed social norms). Binaries are
imposed in society to suppress practices and ideologies that
deviate from the accepted models of behaviour; they serve to
disconnect subjects and denude bodies of their power,
operating as a tool of censorship with which to measure and
uphold the previously established moral order. To Foucault,
binary ways of thinking in relation to difference are always
hierarchical, as one lingual term will always take precedence
over the other, resulting in the corruption of the lesser
term. He, along with significant philosopher Jacques Derrida
(1930- 2004), began to develop and use Post- Structural
analysis, during the 1960’s, to expose the instability of the
prevailing essentialist attitudes towards the human sciences
in the West at the time. Through the process of
Deconstruction1, they could dispel the ideological notion that
specific essential attributes were necessary to the
1 Deconstruction is Jacques Derrida’s remodelling of German philosopherMartin Heidegger’s (1889- 1976) concept of Destruktion. The term is used torefer to the process of disassembling the hegemonic structural systemsoperative in society, to expose the presence of the other- that whichexists outside of, and excluded from, society’s discursive andideological spaces (though necessary to the functioning of such systems).Deconstruction’s assertion of the repressed other establishes thiselement as the potentially transformative agent to the hierarchicalsocial system: “one of the gestures of deconstruction is to notnaturalize what isn’t natural- to not assume that what is conditioned byhistory, institutions, or society is natural.” (Derrida in interview,2002)
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functioning and identity of all entities, showing that
oppressive hegemonic, binary ways of thinking could be taken
apart, de-centered, and thus rendered unstable and liable to
the potential to change.
A contemporary example, in visual practice, of how a
hierarchical relationship of control can be exerted using the
subversion of language to supersede actual or predominant
meaning, can be seen in the Greek film Dogtooth or ‘Kynodontas’
(Lanthimos 2009).
Fig.1 Yorgos Lanthimos, Dogtooth (Kynodontas),
2009
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Here the patriarchal dictator asserts to subdue his isolated
adolescent children into obedience (manipulating their
vocabulary by assigning familiar words and actions unfamiliar
meanings, unbeknownst to them), until one of the teens
conceives the deceit and determines to depose the established
domestic order. We can discern this example as an
interpretation of the patriarchal systems still governing
collective human thought in our supposedly liberated
contemporary civilization. An authoritative, systematized
society neglects the wellbeing of the individual bodies
comprising it, in favour of asserting dominance and control,
to fuel ideological advances (economic, technological,
scientific growth etc).
The artists considered in this thesis have all occupied a
position of otherness within Western society, practicing in
confliction to the governing ideological dogmas of the time.
Perhaps as a symptom of a subordinate position in society
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(occupying bodies already dogmatically stripped of power),
they have taken as their inquiry, the subject matter of human
life and mortality. Utilizing the corporeal body as medium
(both subjectively and objectively), they have probed the
conventional attitudes towards mortal existence, most
prevalent in the Western cultural and societal discourse, at
the time. Contemporary visual practice that takes human
mortality or death as its subject, instantaneously projects
itself into the territory of otherness, as discourse
surrounding mortality is somewhat a taboo subject in 21st
century Western society; the visibility of human mortality is
even more so. The narratives of death we are most inundated
with in contemporary Western culture are fictional,
sensationalized and heroic depictions, exuded through the
mediums of film, television and regulated mass media
reportage. Death is disassociated as endemic to others in
conflicted societies; largely absent from our visual field,
the visual images that do eventually permeate the media in
the West are often times censored (the conditions in Syria
being a current contemporary example). These vehicles of
narrative storytelling and reportage play a significant role
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in how we receive and process prevailing concepts of human
mortality; enforcing binary oppositional thinking, by pitting
life against death, these two differing states are
ideologically fixed as polar adversaries within the
collective cultural consciousness. Misrepresentations of
resolution take centre stage, with the afflicted individual
distinguished as either victim or survivor, winning or losing
the battle for their mortal existence. One of the dangers of
viewing human life in such binary opposing terms, however, is
that no discursive space is left, in society, for those
suffering, for example, a terminal, mental or degenerative
illness, to occupy. These subjects are subsequently delegated
into the role of the other, with society wielding over them a
hierarchy of wellbeing, in which those who cannot get
‘better’ subsist on the lowest rung.
Images of the vulnerable “body in pain” set against the“hyper-healthy body”, the “healthy mind,” and the “bodybeautiful” of the workout and health-farm industries allbelie a culture seeking to disavow disease, decrepitude,and death.
(Campbell & Slackman 1998: 3)
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Western cultural ideologies consistently endorse a hierarchy
of wellness that is antithetical to the healthy functioning
of the human body; in our postmodern culture the ideological
values most revered, when attributed to the body, are those
of youth, beauty, sporting achievement, and optimum health
and fitness. Images advocating these attributes are likely so
prevalent in our culture because they hint at humanity’s
progress, confirming human life as thriving and resuscitating
outmoded religious doctrines of mankind as the superior
species in the animal kingdom. These ideologies also fuel the
economy, further satiating humankind’s narcissistic hunger
for progress and capital gain. However we neglect to bear in
mind that a physically fit and well body is a symptom of the
living conditions one inhabits; an ideological luxury then,
in the West, of a prosperous society in accord, and not
conflict. The meaning of our existence is thus lived out
through affirmative cultural images and representations of
superiority in others; in the bodies of others, we are
affronted with reflections and aspirations for the self. An
ill or deceased body, then, is a reminder to humanity, of
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failure; it signifies the impermanence of health, acting as a
blockade to aspirations of progress, and is thus seldom seen.
This thesis contends that visual practice plays a critical
role in performing these othered bodies, to create a visual
discursive space, within society, that acts as a retributive
and transformative site against the dogmatic afflictions
authoritarian social systems have already had on the human
condition. Chapter one will look at historical works of art
that challenged the Western religious patriarchal canon of
the time, and its resounding beliefs towards human
superiority and immortality. Chapter two focuses specifically
on ageing and mortality in terms of the female body,
exploring the body’s subsequent potential as performative
medium, to subvert contemporary patriarchal ideologies of
fixed youth and beauty. The anthropological concept of
Liminality2 is introduced, and applied to understanding the
state terminally ill and deceased bodies occupy in society.
2 Liminality is the theory proposed by Dutch anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep (1873- 1957) pertaining to the rites of passageand rituals of status change individuals are subject to, in societies and cultural systems.
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Chapter three centres on the moral panic induced by illness
and disease, suggesting also, the transformative powers that
these trangressions to the body can have on the social body
as a whole; such conceptions are advanced upon in the
conclusion.
Historical Subversions of Immortality
Though we now reside in a largely secular postmodern
society, the remnants and traces of historical religious
hierarchy, when religious sectarian beliefs promoted fear of
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the divine spiritual unknown to elicit compliance among the
populace, still lurk at the borders of our cultural fabric.
In the absence of a god-like figure to fear in our postmodern
world, society has instead succeeded in constructing
metaphysical symbolic structures that evoke the same
patriarchal anxieties in its citizens that religion once did.
In the formidable immanence of ageing and mortality,
postmodern society has constructed, for worship, the
unattainable and destructive false idols of eternal youth,
health and beauty. Science has replaced religion as the site
which now promises us immortality; where our ideological
hopes and desires for enduring youth and physical
indestructibility are now directed.
According to the Book of Genesis our ancestor fell froma state of natural innocence when he ate the ambiguousfruit. To attain knowledge of good and evil is still thegod-defying and distinctive goal of human beings. Andalways we find ourselves unable to bear the knowledge,and always erecting filters to protect the idea of ourown interior innocence. One such filter is the strongresistance made by many scholars to the very notion ofsocial determinants of belief. They would rather thinkof beliefs floating free in an autonomous vacuum,developing according to their own internal logic,
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bumping into other ideas by the chance of historicalcontact and being modified by new insights.
(Douglas 1996: 152)
Pre-dating Darwinist theories of evolution, Christianity
cultivated a belief system in the West that human beings were
superior to all other animals; as a result, ideologically,
humanity was elevated and set apart from all other living
species. Religious doctrines promised mortal beings
immortality; transcendence into heaven, after death, as a
reward for compliance and devotion in life. Heaven symbolised
an elevated, ‘higher’ place, reserved for the holy (depicted
visually as existing somewhere in the ether, beyond the sky).
In contrast to this was the debased ‘low’, sunken earthly
underworld of hell, the place where the unfaithful risked
committing themselves to, on cessation. The philosophical
doctrines of René Descartes (1596- 1650) echoed religious
beliefs at the time, instead symbolically assimilating the
ideological states of heaven and hell to the functioning of
the human body. Cartesian ideology promoted an elevation of
the mind over the physical, corporeal body of a subject, and
the material world within which the subject exists. The
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physicality of the body was subsequently rendered base in
comparison to the higher faculties of the mind, within the
Western academic canon.
Fig.2 Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, 1606
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The Italian artist Caravaggio (1571- 1610) was commissioned
to paint Death of the Virgin (1606), for a chapel in Rome, at a
period during which the Catholic Church vigorously supported
visual art as a powerful means for directing the devout.
However, Caravaggio’s depiction of the Virgin Mary’s deceased
mortal body, was promptly rejected by the parish. The
artist’s realist sensibilities proved antithetical to the
Church’s religious doctrines. At the time, the ideological
dogma of the Catholic Church submitted to belief in ‘The
Assumption’; that at the end of her earthly life, the Virgin
Mary didn’t suffer a ‘physical’ death (the fate of all other
mortal beings), but immortally transcended straight up to
heaven. In Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio eschewed traditional
devotional representations of the Virgin Mary as a sacred and
ethereal spiritual idol, instead transgressively performing
her body, within the parameters of the painting, as
remarkably mortal. The title of the painting is itself
significantly subversive (the artist appointing the adjective
‘death’, not favouring ‘assumption’ or ‘transcendence’ to
describe the Virgin’s state). It also elicits a provocative
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paradox that destabilizes the Catholic virtue of virginity;
Caravaggio was known to use live models to delineate his
paintings, and it is hypothesised that the body of the
‘Virgin’ may have been composed from the corporeal body of a
prostitute. In the painting, though the lower portion of the
Virgin Mary’s body appears somewhat to be levitating, the
lifeless limbs of her bodily container present as heavy,
displaying the same gravitational pull towards the earth as
the hanging fabrics, and the bowed heads of the mourners
present. The room has a bowing ceiling too, another visible
barrier against her transcendence to that ‘higher’ place. The
mourners look down on the Virgin’s corporeal body, Caravaggio
having positioned her closer to the baseness of the earth,
than to her conventionally assigned, elevated position in
heaven; their heightened physical distress perhaps resulting
from the realization that their celestial idol has succumbed
to all human fate, thus rendering their own hopes of
salvation obsolete. In Death of the Virgin, the artist subverts
the ideologies of immortality that the patriarchal canons of
the Catholic Church stood for.
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F
ig.3 Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1910
When the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862- 1918)
painted Death and Life (1910) at the beginning of the 20th
century, Darwinian theories of evolution had been
acknowledged into the academic canon; however society was
still (and arguably is still), suffering the effects of
Cartesianism. In Death and Life, Klimt depicts the symbolic
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singular entity of death, glaring towards a unified mass body
of the living. Though this painting confirms the binary
oppositional ways of thinking later exposed by Post-
Structural analysis; positioning life and death as polar
adversary states (‘Death’ is dark, an autonomous entity,
operating left of the pictorial plane, ‘Life’ is colourful,
varied, abundant, and residing on the right), it is
subversive to Cartesian patriarchal conceptions of the human
condition, pertaining to the body. As already discerned,
Cartesian ideologies advocated a separation of the human
mind, from the corporeality of the body; thus the
autonomously thinking mind of the subject, was elevated as a
higher organ of perception, than the sensory body. The
cutaneous senses were affixed as female within the
hierarchical canon, antithetical to the functioning
patriarchal qualities of the mind. In Death and Life, it is
precisely the physicality of the human body that Klimt uses
to perform humankind as antithetical to the notion of death,
exemplifying those cutaneous senses, rendered base through
authoritative doctrines. He heightens the sense of touch
(which was debased by religious doctrines, as pertaining to
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sexual pleasure and thus, sin) representing multiple bodies
in caring human embrace; though the bodies are unclothed
differences in age, gender and race hinder any connotations
of fornication. As such, the caressing, feminine ‘othered’
body of humanity, triumphs, for now, over the looming,
autonomous, patriarchal presence of death.
Performing the Mortal Female Body
Often when I see clothes with manifold pleats, frills,and appendages which fit so smoothly onto lovely bodiesI think they won't keep that smoothness long, but willget creases that can't be ironed out, dust lying so
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thick in the embroidery that it can't be brushed away,and that no one would want to be so unhappy and sofoolish as to wear the same valuable gown every day fromearly morning till night.
And yet I see girls who are lovely enough and displayattractive muscles and small bones and smooth skin andmasses of delicate hair, and nonetheless appear day in,day out, in this same natural fancy dress, alwayspropping the same face on the same palms and letting itbe reflected from the looking glass.
Only sometimes at night, on coming home late from aparty, it seems in the looking glass to be worn out,puffy, dusty, already seen by too many people, andhardly wearable any longer.
(Franz Kafka, 1904)
The author Franz Kafka’s early 20th century observations
of the materiality of ageing female skin unfortunately
presaged anxieties and attitudes towards the ageing female
body that would manifest, towards the end of the 20th
century, into a billion dollar global industry of cosmetic
surgery and purported anti-ageing products. Insecurity and
hatred towards the self is a financially lucrative prospect
for the Western economy. With enough access to medical and
monetary resources, we are now told the human body can be
transformed by technologies and preserved using methods that
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have been previously unavailable to us before; sculpted, cut,
changed, we are convinced we can actively resist ageing and
death, should we so wish. The postmodern female need no
longer be fastened inside her ‘hardly wearable’ dress.
Prevalence is affixed to preserving a fixed, still, non-
transitory state of being, of youth and of beauty; we
profusely fear life as transitory, and the human body as
susceptible to time, and thus change. It is strangely
paradoxical that postmodern culture’s ideological values
affix the same desired state of static physicality onto the
living body, as they fear death will bring (a state of
stagnation and immobility).
Discerned throughout this inquiry, nothing quite strikes fear
in the living like the image of an ill or deceased body. Such
images remind us of our own mortality. On encountering these
images a physical response is triggered in our material
bodies, the physiological fight- or-flight animal reaction to a
perceived threat to our survival. The body’s sympathetic
nervous system surges into action, as our adrenal glands
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release an outpouring of hormones simultaneously increasing
our heart-rate, blood pressure and so on. We thus recoil in
disgust, or respond to our perceived threat with anger. As
such, in Western society we have succeeded in putting into
place efficient systematic actions to prevent and protect us
from looking at death.
Death sets in motion a flurry of activity surroundingthe body of the deceased as well as the social body.Something must be done with the physical body if for noother reason than that its presence will soon becomeunbearable.
(Garces- Foley, 2006: ix)
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Fig. 4 Andres Serrano, The Morgue (AIDS-Related Death),
1992
All bodies of matter have a language, whose meanings (like
language and semantic systems) are unstable, and as such
images of the body provide the perfect site for transgressing
the constraints of prevailing socio-moral taboos surrounding
death and mortality. When we die we transcend our material
body, leaving the organic corporeal self that we occupied for
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the duration of our existence to the process of breaking
itself down into elementary matter. Though decomposition of
our physical bodies begins the moment the heart stops
beating, visual changes in the physical form are not
immediately explicit in the first fresh stage of tissue
breakdown; the body, for a brief time, visibly retains its
lifelike form. In his photographic series The Morgue (Cause of
Death) 1992, artist Andres Serrano draws our attention to this
liminal state the human body occupies in the preliminary
stages after death.
Liminality is a concept developed by anthropologist Arnold Van
Gennep (1873- 1957) to discern the ambiguous and disorienting
state human beings are thrust into when they are subject to
social rituals and rites of passage. This process of status
change is threefold, with the limen (Latin for ‘threshold’)
being the middle, or transitional phase, succeeding the first
phase of separation, and preceding the final phase of
incorporation. For the living, this liminal state calls into
question our beliefs surrounding the previous way we
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structured our world, leaving us to decipher a new symbolic
order we’ve yet to foresee. In a state where we stand between
the threshold of physiological and psychological response,
our ordered world is rendered unstable and liable to change.
A newly deceased body can be deciphered as both occupying a
liminal intermediate territory itself (the bodily container
still visible as matter in the world, yet the ‘self’ no
longer of it), and causing the living to experience the
process of change also. The image above implicitly suggests a
young female AIDS victim. Through presenting this specific
body in its state of transition, Serrano succeeds in
thrusting the viewer into a disorientating and ambiguous
liminal state, as how we should process such a visual
representation of death is utterly alien to us. This
photograph doesn’t conform to the rare yet prevailing visual
depictions of death (specifically of AIDS-related deaths)
delivered by the mass media in Western culture. In some ways
its subject actually confirms cultural ideals attributed to
the postmodern female body, namely those of youth and beauty;
however herein lies the power of this image. As we know,
death scarcely makes itself seen at all in the West; to cope
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with the unfathomable sense of loss that it incurs, our
society has rendered it as abject. The images of death we do
see are repulsive, not, dare we suggest, attractive.
Serrano’s photograph throws that perception into disarray. If
these gracefully placed, manicured young hands belong to a
dead person, that deceased being could just as likely be any
one of us. The tactile sense of touch conveyed in this image
further perturbs our presuppositions of what a dead body
should look and behave like; the human skin is a sensory
organ, the physical boundary of the self through which we
feel and perceive our connections to the world, and to
others. Touch is an innately human sense belonging to the
living, informing one’s relation to the corporeal body and
the self. For this deceased body to appear to be enacting its
cutaneous sense posthumously, the question that perpetually
dumbfounds humanity is raised; to what becomes of the human
self after death?
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Fig 5. Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974
The artist Hannah Wilke (1940- 1993) was heavily criticised
throughout her practice, for using her own body as
performative sculptural medium. Along with other feminist
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body artists of the 1970’s, Wilke performed herself through
pose, in reaction to the Western codes of female
objectification already imbedded within the patriarchal art
canon and society at large (the construction of the female
body as simply a site for display, pertaining to the male
gaze); by aligning her visual language close to those codes,
she sought to subvert them.
…the female narcissist is dangerous to patriarchybecause she obviates the desiring male subject (lovingherself, she needs no confirmation of her desirabilityfrom him). In the case of an artistic practice thatperforms female narcissism (such as Wilke’s), the threatlies in its making superfluous the arbiters of artisticvalue.
(Jones 1998: 178)
Critics accused Wilke’s practice of both narcissism and the
objectifying of herself, as her physical body was one that
visually satiated the very patriarchal ideological codes of
Western female beauty and objectification that she was
seeking to subvert; in short, considered conventionally
‘beautiful’, the hierarchies enacting within the art world
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rejected her practice as a legitimate and radical attestation
of feminism and otherness.
…Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex thatpatriarchy works to separate women’s immanence from anypossibility of cognition, selfhood, or transcendence;the woman’s body is folded into the patriarchal regimeas fundamentally objectified and alienated from thewoman’s “self”.
(Jones 1998: 152)
In 1987 Hannah Wilke was diagnosed with Lymphoma. She spent
the last few years of her life creating the project Intra-
Venus, a documentation of the extensive treatments, and
subsequent deterioration, her body was undergoing in the
thrall of her progressive terminal illness. Exhibited
posthumously, her visual testimony of her own mortality made
visible the extremities of an illness still largely
unascertained by cultural and medical discourse, creating a
discursive arena, in Western culture, for the liminal
territory that terminal illness presents. The title of the
project, Intra- Venus, is itself a subversion of language;
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integrating the medical term ‘Intravenous’ (which translates
as ‘within vein’ and pertains to the method by which
medication is administered through the vein’s of very ill
patients, to accelerate absorption into the body’s
bloodstream), with the name of the Roman goddess Venus (the
mythological immortal icon of female beauty), Wilke exposes
historical and contemporary comparative ideological notions.
In a postmodern society no longer resolute to the admonitions
of religion and mythology, archaic and absurd ideologies of
human immortality are now made manifest in the fields of
science, where humanist beliefs in progression and
interminable progress drive technological and biological
advances. Intravenously applied medication destroys our
comfortable notions of the body as container, as a boundary
between the self and the exterior material world; fluids
permeate the body’s perimeters, literally passing from the
exterior world of objects, through the skin, into the
interior world inside the subject’s body. Intravenous
medication can be administered in two ways; IV ‘push’ (a
single rapid injection of drugs into the bloodstream), or IV
infusion (a constant slow ‘drip’ of medication into the body
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over a set period of time). This medical practice draws
metaphorical parallels to Wilke’s artistic practice; a steady
stream of patriarchal subversion (with regards the
objectification of the female body), followed by a radical
last push at the end of her life (posthumously divulging the
absurdities of such ideologies, straight into the cultural
bloodstream).
Fig 6. Hannah
Wilke, Intra-Venus Series, 1992- 1993
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Visual prejudice has caused world wars, mutilation,hostility, and alienation generated by fear of ‘theother’. Self- hatred is an economic necessity, acapitalistic, totalitarian, religious invention used tocontrol the masses through the denial of the importanceof a body language, which is replaced by a work ethicdevised to establish a slavery of the mind burdened bythat awful albatross- the body…The pride, power andpleasure of one’s own sexual being threatens culturalachievement, unless it can be made into a commodity thathas economic and social utility.
(Wilke 1980: 10)
Wilke’s practice sought to dissolve the patriarchal Cartesian
doctrines that had separated the autonomously thinking mind
from the baseness of the corporeal body; her reactionary
practice was preoccupied with giving visible form to her own
self-reflection, through the use of her corporeal body.
Illness immobilises an active subject; the sense of
embodiment over one’s body is disordered, and can no longer
be governed by the subject. The body becomes other, as well
as belonging to others (medical professionals, the disease
itself, as the object of societal misreading and prejudice).
Terminal and degenerative illnesses render the human body
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alive, but only functionally; as the disease thrives, the
essence of ‘self’ fades away. The terminally ill body
occupies that liminal space, the threshold between life and
death where the subject is temporarily present, but soon to
be absent; in some cases the subject will linger in this
state of indeterminacy for years. This is difficult for the
well to comprehend; it forces us to confront our own
narcissism and the inevitability of our mortal demise. As
such, the terminally ill body occupies a private territory
seldom made visible or seen publicly, reserved only for the
eyes of those closest to the ill subject. In Western society
we die privately, our lives diminishing behind the closed
doors of a hospital ward or domestic space. The photographs
of the Intra- Venus Series (taken by Wilke’s husband) open up
that private, liminal space for public viewing; the viewer is
invited over the threshold, into the hospital ward and beyond
conventional body boundaries. In the photographs Wilke
rebukes self- pity to pose herself as a defiantly acting,
thinking and posing subject, determined to retain full
occupancy of her corporeal body (an occupancy she had exerted
throughout her practice), until the very end. Using her
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performative body language of pose, she deconstructed and
self- sabotaged her own iconic beauty (and embodied,
contained sense of self), to dismantle patriarchal Western
desires of female youth, beauty and being as everlasting;
thus retaining her own sense of ‘self’.
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As elucidated in the analysis of Hannah Wilke’s practice,
disease is a transgression of the normative laws of the body.
It trespasses the body, exceeding the boundaries of health,
wellbeing and everyday order to strip the afflicted of their
power, rendering them subordinate to its internal unknown
threat. It signifies a ‘blurring of the boundaries’ between
the internal and external physical self. Binary oppositional
narratives are continuously employed and asserted, and
metaphors of war, comparing the ill body to the damaged
territories of the social body, are inescapable. However this
distortion of our perception of illness is detrimental to
both the societal body and the patient, who, suddenly
stripped of the power of health is thrust into occupying that
liminal space of isolation and unknown territory. Theorist
Susan Sontag (1933- 2004) asserted that ‘sentimental
fantasies concocted’ around illness should be dispelled for a
healthy society to prevail.
My point is that illness is not a metaphor and the mosttruthful way of regarding illness- and the healthiest
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way of being ill- is one most purified of, mostresistant to, metaphoric thinking.
(Sontag 1991: 3)
When the AIDS virus became prevalent in the West at the
beginning of the 1970’s, the attitudes of the social body
towards this new, unknown disease were exposed to be
destructive and unhealthy, mirroring the malady itself.
Initially conceived of colloquially as a ‘gay cancer’ (due to
the high numbers of homosexual men infected with the virus),
by 1982 the perplexing disease had come to be known as GRID
(Gay-related immune deficiency). The US media was flourishing, by
this point, in sensationalizing homophobia towards these
subjects rendered other by their illness and sexual
preference. In NBC’s earliest report on the AIDS virus in
1982, the reporter informed the nation that the lifestyle of
male homosexuals had triggered an epidemic of a rare form of
cancer. America’s hetero-normative hierarchical system was
using language to construct and elicit a fear, among the mass
populace, of contagion; assimilating the terms ‘epidemic’ and
‘cancer’ to affix a dogma of the fearful unknown, to the
38
disease. Already degraded as abject members of sectarian
heterosexual Western society, the cultural discourse gay
bodies were now subjected to was one of fear, disease and
disgust; the AIDS virus being continually reaffirmed as a
symbolic, evidentiary by-product of a debased immoral
lifestyle (albeit already widely known within the medical
community to be transmittable amongst male and female
heterosexuals too). Archaic religious doctrines, pertaining
to bodily sin, were resurrected to reaffirm the social status
of male homosexuals, as debased others. Western history has
made evidentiary that it is easily achievable for a hegemonic
structural system to abase a group of people, especially one
whose identity is deciphered by an element pertaining to the
corporeal body (in this case sexuality), by the misuse of
language (though Deconstruction has taught us that these
meanings can always be ‘undone’). By the end of the 1980’s,
though medical knowledge of the virus was advancing quickly
enough to begin promoting contradictory ideologies, of
sufferers soon being able to ‘live’ with AIDS, socially,
prevailing prejudices remained, as well as the sombre truth
that AIDS had claimed thousands of individual lives.
39
Fig 8. Derek Jarman, Blue, 1994
A lot of these slogans are ludicrous. I wish you wereliving with AIDS, but it’s the opposite, only dying, dyingwith AIDS. It’s much better to face the facts. I’m stillsurviving but I don’t think I’m going to survive. Itwould be extraordinary if I did. God only knows whatsort of state I’d be in. A sort of ruin; an AIDS ruin
(Jarman in interview, 1993)
40
The artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942- 1994) made Blue
(1994) while he was dying of AIDS. Diagnosed HIV positive in
1986, he resisted the type of metaphorical thinking around
his disease that Sontag spurned, speaking only frankly when
interviewed about his final release; he was under no illusion
that he could triumph over his fate. When Jarman made Blue he
was losing his sight from AIDS-related aggravations. In the
film he describes and contemplates the narratives of his past
and present life experiences (both incorporating and
disregarding the AIDS virus within the story), using the
colour blue as a conceptual framework. Documenting his own
physical struggle with the virus, he also uses this work to
remember lost loves and friends, whose lives had succumbed to
the same ending. For this reason Blue can be considered, not
just an epitaph of the artist’s life, but a work that enables
the mourning of traumatic gay Western histories to occur
also. Blue is considered a groundbreaking and controversial
cinematic work, not only because it takes death as its
subject matter, but because the film contains no moving
images at all, except for a still blue screen (for its entire
seventy-nine minute duration). The narrative is told through
41
a composite soundtrack of spoken dialogue (recounted by
Jarman and close friends), field recordings and ethereal
sound effects, resulting in an abstract and immersive body of
sound. The film displaces the conventional role of the viewer
as passive spectator, as one waits for action and the
familiarity of moving visual images so synonymous of
narrative storytelling in film; when no action or offer of
resolution to this dilemma occurs, one is temporarily left
lingering, waiting for order to resolve. Jarman intentionally
thrusts the viewer into this liminal state, where a lack of
visual images with which to create an order to the narrated
story, means that the visualization of the film’s narrative
becomes the viewer’s responsibility; it is a state evocative
of his own blindness. The moving image ‘takes place as much in the
viewer’s head as it does onscreen’ (Jarman 1993: 39). In denying the
presence of a figurative body of a subject for the viewer to
project hopes and fears onto, attention is instead returned
inward, towards the viewer’s consideration of their own body;
Jarman thus succeeds in forging the viewer into a role of
equal subjectivity within the piece (‘blind’ akin to
himself), compelled to experiencing a liminal state much like
42
he was facing in proximation to his nearing departure. The
viewer becomes the other. Love and loss are the central
subjects to the film; the dialogue spoken throughout conveys
the sincerity of a person with nothing left to lose except
for absolutely everything, as Jarman candidly bears his
attachments to the corporeal world he’s soon to be leaving.
However he does so matter-of-factly, and without self-
grandoising sentiment. ‘Love is life, it lasts forever’, the artist
asserts towards the beginning of the film; if love can be
understood as attachment to the corporeal world, then loss
expects us to let go of our attachments. Blue is so harrowing
to view, of course, as it reminds us of our individual
mortality, igniting our own attachments and connections to
the corporeal world, through the recounts of another being.
When Blue was released, the dominant cultural discourses
surrounding the AIDS virus were either in the field of
techno-scientific research or of social documentary, both
fields retaining a cultural image of the illness as one of
spectacle. Blue is a work of anti-spectacle; it displays a
refusal, from Jarman, to let his mortal being be defined by
space and time. By withholding any visual depictions
43
whatsoever, of his depleting corporeal body on the pictorial
plane, he succeeds in extending his existence from the
screen, out into the ether; his existence becoming infinite,
as infinite as the possibilities of the mind of the viewer in
the face of the blue cinematic expanse.
Conclusion
The terror management theory, developed in social psychology
from anthropologist Ernest Becker’s (1924- 1974) notable text
on mortality, The Denial of Death (1973), provides a premise to
understanding why the human race has perpetually endeavoured
to construct elaborate symbolic meanings surrounding
mortality and death, within its societies. In light of the
unbearable realisation that as mortal beings our material
bodies are perishable, and will one day be gone, a terror is
invoked in us that leads to a need to want to connect with
our culture on a deep-rooted level, to enhance our sense of
belonging to the material world. We create a symbolic,
‘heroic’ self (alongside our ‘physical’ self) to provide our
44
temporal lives with meaning we hope will be eternal,
measuring our self-esteem by how well we feel we are
upholding our cultures’ paramount determining values. In a
postmodern, digital world we now have the option to create a
symbolic identity that inhabits a virtual world unknown to
us, our sense of self becoming further disconnected from our
material body, and its physicality. The terror management
theory can be utilized to understand depression and mental
illness, then, as a state a subject is thrust into when
feelings of failure to maintain social values manifest into a
worthless notion of self. Applying a further theory discerned
in this thesis, these states can be understood as the liminal
territories human subjects occupy, when their own society
fails them, instead of nurturing. Humankind’s narcissistic
fear of demise manifests in a need for social order,
cultivating a sense of superiority centred towards our own
species, race, cultural heritage, habits, moral beliefs, etc;
hierarchies of power are maintained to keep order and self-
esteem intact. To actively defend our cultures’ primary
values (and therefore own boundless and profound sense of
self), we must punish those who do not adhere to the same
45
rules as us; those who are deemed other. Bodies that do not
comply to the fixed symbolic order pose threat to the
ideological immortal existence we have created. We cannot
fathom how these subjects are not fearful, like us, of the
dominant symbolic world, so we abase them to the subordinated
secondary status of abject others. Their fearlessness strikes
fear in us. Fear is an incredibly powerful tool to
authoritarian society. When asserted with exactitude within a
structural system, it can disable subjects, inhibit them, and
engineer into action a manifestation of hostility,
abhorrence, and disgust towards the unchartered object of
fear. Out of fear, irrational hatred of others is born.
Dissociated from our corporeal bodies, and thus disconnected
from our innate animal physicality, in postmodern society we
reside in a perpetual state of fear (fear of contact with the
other, fear of contamination, fear of our mortal bodies
failing us, etc). Religious doctrines professing human power
are re-incarnated, this time under the misleading guise of
Humanism. Humanist beliefs purport that technological and
46
scientific advances will free humankind from its afflictions;
aligning itself with science to assume a God-like patriarchal
position, humanity now believes it can shape its own
evolutionary progress. This ideological ‘progress machine’
however is a myth, as the biggest affliction innate to human
existence will remain; its mortality.
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerouscitizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of thesick. Although we all prefer to use only the goodpassport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at leastfor a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of thatother place.
(Sontag 1991: 3)
The artists in this thesis identified as citizens of that
other place; occupying a liminal state of otherness oneself,
nurtures empathy towards other subordinated subjective
positions. This thesis attests, then, that visual arts
practice provides a critical realm within which destructive,
hegemonic structural systems, that breed hatred towards
othered bodies, can be dismantled. The practitioners
47
presented have themselves resisted the restraints of dominant
cultural doctrines, to create a discursive space for bodies
othered through illness and mortality, to occupy. Working in
confliction to the dogmatic structures imposed on them, they
have produced an alternative discourse that embraces human
life as temporal and degenerative, but does not fear it.
Bodies talk; they are sites that produce meanings and
language. The artists presented in this thesis have exercised
the use of their own body (or the corporeal body of another),
performing the body to produce meanings that de-stabilize
predominant, unhealthy cultural doctrines regarding illness,
mortality and otherness.
The ideological doctrines of the systematized patriarchal
state, in the West (towards the futile pursuit of self-
betterment by chasing monetary gains), have garnered a
society of ineffectually functioning bodies; subjects whose
purpose is to function for the state, whose personal
prosperity and wellbeing is thus neglected. In our futile
beliefs in progress and evolution, we run the risk of
48
devolving as a species. Contemporary Western society is still
suffering the effects of outmoded Cartesian doctrines, with
the fields of academia and physicality being culturally and
ideologically fixed as poles apart; we are henceforth still
ideologically distancing mind from body, and body from mind.
These beliefs are evidently problematic, and present a
destructive binary system at play. While a Cartesian
understanding of the self advocates an autonomously thinking
subject, it spawns a divide between body and mind that is
arguably unhealthy. The mind is one single functioning part
of the corporeal body as a whole unit, and as such the mind
cannot escape the corporeality of the mortal human body;
knowledge alone cannot preserve physical human health and
duration. We do not love and feel with the mind, but with the
body; human skin is a sensory organ, our subjective point of
contact to the sensations of others and the material world
around us. Our sensory, physical reactions unify the body,
informing the mind. It is through our individual material
bodies that we understand our connections to other human
beings. Doctrines that render the physical functioning of the
human body as base strip humanity of an essential attribute;
49
the realisation that we are a species belonging to the animal
kingdom, and thus united with other beings in our mutual
fate. This acceptance of mortality could enable us to connect
to the world on a deeper-rooted, and less destructive level.
We could learn from other cultures that uphold animals as kin
(Shinto, Taoist, Hindu, etc.), and regard life as
transcendental (Buddhism), instead of emphasizing all of our
efforts, in the West, strictly towards cure.
In postmodern society, contemporary art practice can be
utilized in ways that provoke multisensory physical reactions
within the corporeal body of the viewer (subsequently
traversing a broader capacity for changing predominant
axioms, than other mediums might reach). Visual practice can
engage, in unison, the physical and psychical body of the
spectator; with the scope for subverting sensory perceptions,
and ubiquitously held beliefs, potentially unrivalled in
comparison to other physical and sensory affecting mediums
(music, sport, etc). Movement (the functioning physicality of
enacting the self through the human body) is
institutionalized in the West, from an early age, as being
ideologically affixed to the axioms of sport, exercise and
50
fitness. We are seldom encouraged to think of movement as the
performative enactment of an interior self, connecting to the
world through its corporeal container using touch, pose, and
other sensory perceptions; the practices presented in this
thesis have proved the transformative and retributive powers
such thinking can have, and the essential discursive space it
provides, in society. Performing the body requires loss of
inhibition and self-consciousness. As this study has
determined, inhibition can be understood as a symptom of the
dominant structural systems at work, in society; put in place
to render subjective bodies docile. Like all effects of
structural systems, then, the causes of inhibition can be
picked apart using deconstruction, and dispelled, perhaps,
through an occupancy, performance, and connection to ones
corporeal body. For the artists in this thesis, the immediacy
posed on life by terminal illness and impending mortality is
likely to have dissipated any such inhibitions. Perhaps for a
healthy society to prevail, then, the social body politic
needs to be re-centralized to the individual subjective bodies
comprising it. Subjects could be encouraged to develop an
individual physical literacy, charging them with the
51
potential to pervade society, through a performative practice
of the body. A diaspora of the ‘thinking’ self through the
physical body could produce active agents, performing bodies
in ways that are subversive to dominant, oppressive ideology.
52
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DVDs
Blue, Dir. Derek Jarman (UK: Artificial Eye, 2007) [on DVD]
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