Disfiguration, Obliteration: What remains of the body in the works of Unica Zürn and VALIE EXPORT

Abstract

This essay explores the place of the body in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Unica Zürn through the notion of ‘disfiguration’, a notion which connotes an undoing, a deformation. In considering the political implications of artistic practices which disfigure, or deform the body, this essay reflects on the historical significance and conceptual underpinning of this practice. By tracing the history of the cut, as both injury and technique in EXPORT’s work, I show that the Riß (a word that gives meanings that encompass tear, rent, crack, split, rip, break, gap and laceration, and which emerges from the cut), should be understood as both, a technique in art, and the result of societal disfiguration or distortion. Through analysing EXPORT’s Expanded Cinema works, performances, texts and unfinished films, by tracing the transmutation of writing and drawing to media such as video and photography this essay explores the methodological and historical influence of Unica Zürn on EXPORT’s work. Through their disfiguration, I argue these works figure an ‘underground history’, and as such a (return of the repressed) temporally placed para-present of the body, where instincts and passions are understood as deformed and dis-figured (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947). By reading EXPORT and Zürn back onto this ‘underground history’ I want to ask how this distortion is gendered. How and why do they disfigure the body anagrammatically through image and language to its eventual obliteration? What are the conditions of possibility for these practices? And considering these practices, which tend towards their own break (Riß), what is left of the body in art?