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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Fig 7. Hannah Wilke, Intra- Venus Series (July 26), 1992

Illness As Transgression

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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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Blue, Dir. Derek Jarman (UK: Artificial Eye, 2007) [on DVD]

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Derrida, Dir. Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick (USA: Jane Doe Films, 2003) [on DVD]

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