This essay will look at the work of British artist Marc Quinn

through psychoanalytical and post-structuralist theories of

the fragmented and de-centred body. The work of Marc Quinn can

be seen in the context of a broader turn towards figuration as

a prominent theme in recent sculpture, yet this is a

figuration which is often in a state of fragmentation and

flux; as Jeffrey Jones has said “It is as if the figure is

given legitimacy as a subject by having something missing from

it” (Jones, 2005, p1). After the post-war modernist regime of

abstraction, the representation of the body returned, though

often under the postmodern guise of the ‘free floating

signifier’, unanchored from its bodily referent. More recent

figurative art has strived for a reaffirmation of the

connection between the image and the body, against the

postmodern conception of representation that says that all

images can do is refer to other images. The mediums and

processes of the British artist Marc Quinn, such as the use of

body casting and substances such as blood and meat, may be

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seen in this context as a strategy for a return to the

fragmented and traumatic body of the Lacanian Real.

For Jacques Lacan the ‘Real’ is the human state of nature

which is lost upon the subject’s entry into language (The

Symbolic), but which nonetheless exerts its influence on us

throughout our lives. The Real may be traumatic in that it

forces us to acknowledge our material existence, and

subsequently our mortality and fragility.

Of primary importance to this essay is Lacan’s theory of the

fragmented body, first outlined in his paper on the Mirror

Stage delivered at the 16th international conference of

psychoanalysis in 1946. According to Lacan it is through the

apprehension of its reflection in a mirror that the infant

first perceives itself as an imaginary unity and symbolic

being within the world. The imaginary appearance of wholeness

that the infant perceives in the mirror stands in contrast to

its own experience of bodily un-coordination and

fragmentation, and thus it is the ideal I of its self-image

towards which the fledgling subject strives. Lacan states

that;

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“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lureof spatial identification, the succession of fantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity.” (Lacan, 1977, p4)

For Lacan the mirror stage is a moment of misrecognition since

the infant perceives a unified ‘I’, where there is a

fragmented and inchoate body. The imaginary unity of the self-

image is always haunted by the retroactive fantasy of the

fragmented and fluid body; of competing drives and primal

forces that threaten to dismember and shatter a fantasy of

corporeal wholeness. Thus for Lacan, it is the armour of the

ego (the alienated identity) of the symbolic order that holds

the human body together in an image of unity and imagined

equilibrium.

The image of the contained and cohesive body is one which was

affirmed by the dominant representations of Western sculpture

up until the 20th century, and where fragmented images did

appear, such as in the disembodied head of a classical bust,

their function was primarily metonymical; as the seat of

consciousness, and thus of the ego, the head is represented in

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the classical bust as the centre of a subjectivity and soul

that is independent of the body.

The historically favoured sculptural mediums of stone and

metal can be seen as the material metaphors for the armour of

the ego that holds together the body as a symbolic unity, and

protect it from the internal and external forces that threaten

to fragment it. In the works of Marc Quinn the figure is

usually depicted as fragmented, fluid, abject or incomplete in

some way, and as such raise questions concerning idealized and

normative representations of the body and the threshold

between the body of the real and the symbolic.

One of the most well known works of Marc Quinn is ‘Self’, a

piece which exemplifies the transgressive impulse that ran

through 1990’s British art. ‘Self’ is a portrait of the

artist’s own head cast in eight pints of his own blood (the

amount needed to sustain life in an average human) and frozen

solid.

‘Self’ blurs the boundaries between a representation and its

flesh and blood referent; it is both a likeness of the body

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and an extension of it, an absence and a presence. Quinn has

made a new version of the work every five years since 1991,

and each new manifestation documents the artist’s

transformation and physical ageing; rather than being a static

artwork ‘Self’ is, like the subject on which it is modelled,

in a state of impermanence and becoming. The process of

casting used to create the work ensures a vital physical

relationship between the body and its image, the cast being an

indexical signifier with an existential relationship to its

referent.

Self1991

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The frozen head of ‘Self’ seems to lie somewhere between the

scientific and the ritualistic; between an object of the

medical gaze, which subordinates it to the symbolic order of

science, and an abject curiosity eliciting both revulsion and

cathartic pleasure. Blood is of course the abject substance par

excellence, it is the fluid that runs through the whole body and

emanates from that symbolic centre of the body, the heart.

The philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva defines the

abject as that which threatens the borders separating subject

and object; In Powers of Horror Kristeva writes:

What is abjected, the jettisoned object, draws me towardsthe place where meaning collapses. A certain “ego” that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it out” (Kristeva, 1982, p2)

Fundamentally, the abject is what the I must expel in order to

become an ‘I’. (Foster, 1996, p156) For Kristeva the abject

includes the maternal body, which the infant abjects in order

to secure its own autonomy, and substances such as blood,

sweat, semen and excreta, which emanate from those openings or

thresholds upon the borders of the body that reveal its

permeability, the mouth, anus, genitals and open wounds. In

Quinn’s sculpture the blood, separated from the envelope of

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the real body, takes on form of the ‘alienating identity’ of a

self-image, that alter ego of the self that resides in the

symbolic order.

‘Self’ recalls the modern mummification of cryogenic freezing,

in which human heads are frozen at extremely low temperatures

in the hope that future technology may be able to resurrect

them, a process that, despite supposedly being at the cutting

edge of science, still relies upon an archaic Cartesian

separation of the mind and body. Like the ancient rituals of

mummification it is a defence against the primal fear of

bodily disintegration and dispersal. Historically, the role

of sculpture has often been analogous to embalmment; we talk

of the subject being ‘immortalized’ in a sculpture, in

materials such as stone and bronze, themselves representative

of permanence and solidity. The figurative sculpture is

traditionally a fixing of the body image against the decaying,

fragile body of the real, yet in ‘Self’ this representational

image is itself in a state of fragility, held together only by

a refrigeration which, were it to be switched off, would

quickly cause the image to melt into a formless, liquid state.

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The liquefied and formless, dissolved body brings me to

another of Quinn’s sculptures, ‘The Morphology Of Specifics’,

which depicts the artists body as a kind of liquid metal, in

a state of transition between the solid identity of the body

and a fluid formlessness. In ‘Morphology’ only those zones of

the most intense sensation, the head, penis and hand, remain

recognisable while the rest of the figure has dissolved into

fragments of molten silver which appear to be travelling off

in different directions, perhaps to merge with other bodies

elsewhere or to re-integrate into a new morphology. The

undecidable substance in ‘Morphology’, neither liquid nor

solid, oscillates between the imaginary gestalt of a human

body and an undifferentiated fluid; its mirrored surface means

it changes appearance according to its surroundings. This

dissolving, ambiguous entity relates both to Kristeva’s notion

of the abject and to Jean Paul Sartre's notion of the viscous.

In her essay on formlessness (Informe) Rosalind Krauss writes;

“Kristeva’s conception of the abject is curiously congruent with Sartre's characterization of the visqueux, acondition of matter that he analyses as neither liquid nor solid […] the autonomous subject is compromised by this substance, which Sartre relentlessly characterizes

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as feminine-yielding, clinging, sweet, passive, and possessive-producing yet one more parallel with the analysis Kristeva would come to produce.”(Krauss, 1996, p92)

For Sartre our revulsion towards our bodies and the organic

world in general is our experience of nature’s viscosity;

slimy, amorphous and, according to Sartre, feminine. The

viscous substance threatens to engulf the subject and absorb

it and thus poses a threat to the masculine ego. Sartre’s

description of the viscous as feminine relates to the fear of

the maternal body into which the infant is absorbed and

dependent, and which he or she must abject in order to enter

in the symbolic order as the ‘I’.

Quinn’s fluid and viscous body in ‘The Morphology of

Specifics’ perhaps brings to mind the fragmented body as

proposed by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and

Guattari share with Lacan an understanding that it is only

through the ‘gestaltic’ (Lewis, 2008, p240) effect of the

imaginary and symbolic that an apprehension of wholeness is

attained; language cuts into the reals plane of continuity to

create distinguishable entities. As Paul Fry says:

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“What is a unity? Should we be pre-occupied with reality as a set of unities? Deleuze and Guattari’s thought experiment is the de-centring of things such that one canno longer talk about unities but a de-centring of the body in favour of bodies which are both everywhere and nowhere.” (Paul Fry, 2009 Yale Lecture)

The ramifications of Deleuze and Guattari’s premise is an

understanding of the human body as a decentred, unbounded

entity that flows beyond itself into the broader networks of

desire; the human body, divisible into organs, cells and

drives, is itself an element or ‘organ’ in the larger organism

or multiplicity of the social body. Here Deleuze and Guattari

see the fragmented body not, as in Lacan, as a negative image

of a broken fragments in relation to a lost whole, but rather

as a positive potential for the body to flow outside of itself

and form new connections (Herzogewrath, 2010, p31). D&G see

desire is a positive force that is directed into the social

and the symbolic realm rather than, as per Lacan, directed

towards a lost primal unity with the mother (Ogut, 1994 p2).

Deleuze and Guattari propose and understanding of the body as

‘molecular’ rather than ‘molar’, with the molecular as

‘nomadic, polyvocal, rhizomatic, transversal, smooth,

processual, intensive’ and the molar as ‘sedentary, bi-

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univocal, arborescent, linear, striated, static, extensive,

and divisible’ (Mullarkey 2006, p. 20). That is, as dynamic

and unformed as opposed to bounded and closed. We see in

Quinn’s ‘Morphology’ a molecular body which is inherently

unstable and schizophrenic, threatening to dissipate or else

re-merge into new formations. It is, like its liquid state, in

a restless mode of constant becoming in pursuit of an

unattainable object of desire. 1

The Morphology of Specifics19961 Lacan describes desire as a never ending process of deferral; as soon as that which is desired is attained it is no longer desired and so desire then moves onto something else related. In this sense desire is conceived of by Lacan as a never ending metonymical chain (Paul Fry, 2009 lecture, Jaques Lacan in theory, Yale)

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For Lacan it is the human subjects entry into the symbolic

that separates it from the animal world, yet the human body

itself is, genetically and structurally, extremely similar to

that of many animals; this proximity of the animal and human

organism is explored in Marc Quinn’s series of ‘Meat

Sculptures’.

Marc Quinn’s meat sculptures confront us with animal

carcasses, purchased from butcher shops and cast in bronze,

arranged in poses reminiscent of art historical

representations of the body; Quinn also uses the language of

art history in titles such as ‘Reclining Figure (Venison’ ). The

unnerving character of these works lies in the assumption by

these animal carcasses of a human body language, since we know

that animals inhabit that pre-linguistic realm of the real, of

drives unmediated by the civilising imperative of the ego or

self-image. If it is the symbolic order itself which separates

the human body from mere meat, Quinn’s meat sculptures

threaten us with a breakdown of this opposition.

The pose of ‘Reclining Figure (Venison) is obviously adopted

from the tradition of the reclining nude, perhaps the genre

that most exemplifies an art of the gaze. In looking at the

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historical genre of the nude one thinks of Helen Cixous

description of a female body as a medium onto which meaning is

projected by a patriarchal symbolic order; in its crudest form

we may talk of the gaze reducing the body to ‘a piece of meat’

awaiting consumption, and its fragmenting effect, which

divides the body into fetishized parts and denies it an

autonomous ‘wholeness’.

In the suggestive pose of ‘Reclining Figure (Venison) we also

cannot help but be reminded of the proximity of desire and

revulsion in our relations to our own and others bodies.

In the ideal body image of classical statuary the skin is

flawless and evenly covers the body; those points of possible

rupture and fragmentation, such as wounds and scars, the anus,

or the genitals, are omitted, closed or covered in drapery;

this is the ideal body as a sealed and tightly bounded entity

that repels the fragmenting forces outside of it and contains

the fragmenting forces within it. In contrast to the smooth

and continuous surfaces of classical sculpture, Quinn’s animal

carcases bear all the traits that Lacan ascribes to images of

the fragmented body: “of mutilation, dismemberment,

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dislocation, devouring, bursting open of the body” (Lacan,

1977, p11), perceived echoes of classical torsos are soon

disturbed by severed limbs and ruptured bellies. The wounds

and ruptures that cover the body of the bronze animal torso

are like cuts in the constructed nature of conventional

representational language.

When we consume animals as food it is almost always in

fragments, in unattached cuts of meat. The butcher that

divides the animal allows us to forget that it was once part

of a whole animal, a living unity. The pleasure of consuming

flesh may be turned to disgust when we are reminded of its

providence; Julia Kristeva reminds us that “Food Loathing is

the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection”

(Kristeva, 1982, p2). Through the consumption of meat the

fragmented body of the animal carcass is, in a sense,

integrated into the human body, and in fact the very

consumption of meat ensures continuity between the animal body

and our own. Through digestion and absorption animal flesh

itself is metamorphosed, and our sense of our own bodily

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autonomy can only be maintained by the repression of meat’s

origins in an exterior body.

Reclining Figure (Venison)2004

Quinn’s work fits in with a broader trend in today’s art of

fragmented figuration, but what are the reasons for this

trend? In the context of contemporary visual culture we might

see this as a critical manoeuvre. We inhabit a world saturated

by images of the body in an idealized form, and such images

dominate to the extent that they no longer represent real

bodies, but rather real bodies take on the form of

representations, through surgery, prosthesis, and a million

diet and exercise regimes. For the subject of late capitalism

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the body-image is central in the construction of the self; as

the literary theorist Terry Eagleton writes:

“The postmodern subject, unlike its Cartesian ancestor, is one whose body is integral to identity. Indeed from Bakhtin to the Body Shop, Lyotard to Leotards, the body has become one of the most recurrent pre-occupations of postmodern thought.” (Doy, 2004, p66)

Of course, contemporary anxieties about body image brought

about by the saturation of idealized representations in

mainstream visual culture are well documented. The constructed

self-image that holds together the body may also become a

shell which suffocates it; the ‘armour of an alienating

identity’ (Lacan, 1977, p4) may also become a prison. The body

is always a signifying medium, yet its meaning is not made by

the self that it encloses, but rather imposed on it by the

cultural and historical symbolic order in which it resides

according to characteristics such as gender, skin colour and

size. as In Marc Quinn’s ‘No Visible Means of Escape’ we see a

body which has shed the skin of its own image, and appears as

if torn open by the conflicting and fragmenting drives and

desires that it once enclosed.

Reversing the upright, phallic body that is the model of

traditional figurative sculpture, the torn polyurethane rubber

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body cast of ‘No Escape’ is bound and hangs limply from a

rope. Yet this pitiful and humiliated body has been vacated,

suggesting renewal and even themes of resurrection.

Quinn’s use of his own body in his practice has been perceived

as autobiographical, though this is a false interpretation

since his practice engages not with his own individual

subjectivity, but with the universal human body and its lived

experience; as Hal Foster writes “If there is, as some have

remarked, an autobiographical turn in art and criticism, it is

often a paradoxical genre, for again, per trauma, there may be

no ‘self’ there” (Foster, 1996, p274).

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No Visible Means of Escape1996

Seen together, Mark Quinn’s work strives for a re-affirmation

of a vital relationship between systems of representation and

the biological and psychical reality of the body. As the

author Estelle Barrett writes “Language can only have meaning

insofar as it articulates with living beings, and hence with

material and biological processes that support the lives of

such beings” (Barrett, 2011, p6).

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Of course, in any visual engagement with the body of the Real

we encounter a problem, for if we understand the Real in its

Lacanian sense as that realm which perpetually eludes

signification then any attempt to represent it is doomed to

fail; Hal Foster asks in The Return of the Real:

“Can the abject be represented at all? If it is opposed to culture, can it be exposed to culture? If it is unconscious can it be made conscious and remain abject? In other words can there be a conscientious abjection or is this all there can be?” (Foster, 1996, p156)

To the question “can the abject be represented at all?”,

Quinn’s work would appear to reply in the affirmative, and his

practice looks for meanings that go beyond the rules of a

particular semitioc system towards those grounded in the

sensation and experience of inhabiting a body, reaffirming the

affective potentiality of art. By fragmenting, extending and

doing violence to the language of sculptural figuration and

expanding symbolic possibilities, Quinn’s work may cause

resonances in our own bodies, blurring the polarisation of the

subject and body, and touching upon the pain and pleasure

which co-exist in the jouissance of the real.

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Bibliography

Victoria Pommery 2002 Mark Quinn: New Work Tate Publishing

Sarah Kent 2003 Shark infested waters Phillip Wilson Publishers

Norman Rosenthal Richard Stone 1998 Sensation: Young BritishArtists in the Saatchi Collection Thames and Hudson

Steven Levine 2008 Lacan Reframed IB Tauris

Jaques Lacan 1977 Ecrits WW Norton and company

Julia Kristeva 1982 Powers of Horror Columbia University Press

Estelle Barrett 2011 Kristeva Reframed IB Tauris

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Charles Harrison and Paul Wood 2003 Art in Theory; 1900-2000 Blackwell

Half Foster 1994 Return of The Real MIT

Rosalind Krauss 1996 "Informe" without Conclusion. October. Vol 78 MIT

Gen Doy 2004 Picturing The Self; Changing views of the subjectin Visual Culture IB TaurisAnthony Julius 2002 Transgressions: The Offences of Art Thamesand Hudson

Darian Leader 2005 Introducing Lacan Icon

Slavoj Zizek 2006 How to Read Lacan Granta

Bernd Herzogenrath 2010 An American Body | Politic: A Deleuzian Approach Dartmouth

John Mullarkey 2007 Post Continental Philosophy Continuum

Hal Foster ,Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, David Joselit 2011 Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism Thames and Husdon

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Helen Cixous 1976 The Laugh of the Medusa Univeristy of Chicago Press

Darian Leader, Enrique Juncosa, Susie Orbach, Rachael Thomas, 2004 Marc Quinn: Flesh Irish Museum of Modern Art,

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Ozlem Ogut 1994 From Psychoanalysis to Schizoanalysis Purdue

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