Disfiguration amalgamated with performance often results in a provocation directed at the body or a corporeal transmutation. If ‘figuration’ aims at a representational standardization of the human (or other) body, disfiguration intends its active destabilization, overturning, negation, or its rendering catastrophic. ‘Disfigurement’ may be the residual wounding to the body that ensues from that process, that marks how it happened and also possesses anatomical and other histories, but this issue’s central concern is with the distinctive moment or event or action of disfiguration itself in relation to performance.
The essays and artists’ projects in this issue intend to open up original explorations or documentations of disfiguration as a means, process, idea, imagery or entity; disfiguration may also be a linguistic process, that reflects on the dynamics criss-crossing disfiguration and performance. Disfiguration often implies a process by which an external presence overhauls the body, but it may equally be (as several essays in this issue demonstrate) that the body also itself exacts its own disfiguration – as in many Vienna Action Group performance-art experiments of the 1960s, and in contemporary manifestations of such preoccupations – or else intentionally undertakes an act that dissolves any coherent sense of what the imagining or delineation of the body may entail. Disfiguration can be a mobile, transformative entity that overhauls its own status, by, for example, dissolving it, freezing it, lacerating it, blinding it, fragmenting it, or removing its conceptual basis. But disfiguration may be vulnerable to its own imminent cancellation or betrayal; always, it involves a kind of ‘twisting’, to use the resonant term of the contemporary artist Richard Hawkins, in the title of his 2014 Tate Liverpool exhibition ‘Hijikata Twist’.
Disfiguration appears notably in eras of acute social and corporeal crisis and conflict; it can be a concern of forms of activism allied to performance, as mapped in several essays in this issue. It often entails some kind of obsession or preoccupation with the body as having once held an originating form that now no longer holds true, and has been rendered detrital, or has been covertly stolen, infiltrated and duplicated. The body may have been deadened by that doubling, as the choreographer Ko Murobushi often asserted. As a result, the body now requires an urgent performative intervention, as in the demands for reanimation or autopsying that Antonin Artaud calls for in his final radio work of 1947–8, To have done with the judgement of god, and that will manifest itself (in that instance) as a work specifically of dance: ‘When you will have made of it a body without organs … / Then you will teach the body to dance back to front/as in the delirium of dancehalls … ’ Works preoccupied with disfigurement usually focus upon the remnants, detritus and traces of processes of corporeal disfiguration that demand a countering process to that nullification or deadening of the body, in order to propel that body still deeper into disfiguration, or beyond disfiguration, either to return it to its pre-existent status or else to generate a new manifestation of corporeality, as Artaud envisaged in that final work. Bataille, too, in contrary ways, envisions the body in multiple forms of excessive disfiguration. Pushed too far, disfiguration may become apocalyptic for the body, and Artaud more than anyone charted that excess of disfiguration.
Disfiguration’s primary manifestation is often one in which the body becomes so fundamentally altered (for example, by laceration, or its transformation into that of a bodybuilder) that it is no longer recognizable, and its former parameters of identification have been wiped-out and become subject to oblivion. Disfiguration, in that sense, exists on a cumulative scale of inflicted or self-generated amendment; in its most extreme form, disfiguration is propelled by an act that constitutes an all-engulfing negation of the body and a collapsing of all of its attributes, including all corporeal theory. Alongside their projection via the medium of the body, processes of disfiguration may also consume the totality of the media by which they would otherwise survive – for example, the annulling of digital data, the burning of celluloid-film or the all-out destruction of paper-based archives. As such, disfiguration’s insurgence can form an antithesis to linear, normative performance traditions, histories, genealogies and lineages. But at the same time, disfiguration is often a deeply embedded act of performance.
A less negation-intent process of disfiguration may transform the body into corporeal shards and ruins – or, when the body has entirely vanished, into echoes and haunted resonances, or retinal after-images and blurs. It then holds a particularly distinctive, ghostly presence in urban space, as explored in much post-1960s Japanese performance art and dance, such as the work of Dumb Type, and of Butoh choreographers. Performances and artworks concerned with the disfigurative act of duplicating, collaging and plagiarizing the body often intend not to erase it, but instead to supplant or re-inflect it. An elapsed performance may have already rendered the body so fragile, voided or traumatized that disfiguration serves as the delicate procedure by which corporeal striations and ruptures are mapped, so that disfiguration may even form a neutral process that simply probes and documents the body’s already-achieved disassembly.
Disfiguration, as these essays show, also encompasses and inhabits unfamiliar zones of time and space in which the body’s annulling or contamination is conceived as being so irrecuperable – and the body’s obsolescence so total – that its performance now needs to be re-thought from zero, experimentally, as in spectacles in which the body’s figuration is entirely absent or is digitally replaced. Disfiguration may, for example, take place in the volatile interstice between performance and moving-image media in their many forms, through a process by which the body is transacted between those two entities (performance and moving-image media) and endures such outlandish corporeal mutation – annulling all pre-established formula for coherent identification that it is uniquely held in liminal zones between performance and moving-image media. In all of its manifestations, disfiguration forms a process of marked transformation in the body’s status, inviting and impelling performance’s imprints, excavations and soundings.
Stephen Barber’s essay on Richard Hawkins’ ‘Hijikata Twist’ exhibition-project examines the combination of intensive Tokyo-based archival research and disfigurative provocation that went into Hawkins’ engagement with the Scrapbooks of the Butoh-dance instigator Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–86), originally used as raw material for Hijikata’s seminal performances from the 1960s, such as Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese People: Revolt of the body (1968). Hawkins’ work – with its replacement of Hijikata’s texts and images in the Scrapbooks, and their recreation to reflect Hawkins’ own activities and preoccupations – entails a loving betrayal of Hijikata’s work, of the kind that Jean Genet (a prominent figure in the work of both Hijikata and Hawkins, alongside Francis Bacon) adroitly deployed.
Hawkins often works in the medium of collage, as well as sculpture (his most recent engagement with Hijikata’s work, ‘To the House of Shibusawa’, exhibited in Berlin in 2018, focuses especially on sculpture); collage, with its wielding of disfigurative capacities and its strategies of cuts, forms an ideal medium for anatomizations of the human figure. Hawkins’ recent collages draw from the work of the Surrealism-aligned artist Hans Bellmer, who notoriously used the body of his partner Unica Zürn for photographed experiments in corporeal transmutation, but those collages also demonstrate Hawkins’ overriding, distinctive approaches to disfiguration.
Katja Centonze’s essay analyses in depth the preoccupation with disfiguration in Hijikata’s work. In many ways, Hijikata’s envisioning of the body as material to be inversed, and propelled in wrong-way-round choreographic manoeuvres, resonates with Artaud’s emphasis in his final recordings on a process of disfiguration that renders the body unrecognizable in any conventional sense, surviving only through its raw, stripped-down insurgency. Centonze pinpoints the corporeal strategies at work in that process, as well as exploring the ‘revolutionary’ dimensions of that work. Can disfiguration be a revolutionary process, when it coincides with immense social turmoil, as in urban Japan in the 1960s? – Can performance works focused entirely on the human figure hold revolutionary potential?
Romina Achatz’s essay pursues the relationship between Butoh’s disfigurations and the envisioning of new or shattered corporeal manifestations, although her essay’s subject, Ko Murobushi – one of the performers of recent decades most closely associated with disfigurative approaches – had an autonomous relationship with Butoh, working briefly but intensively with Hijikata at the end of the 1960s (including Murobushi’s contribution to Hijikata’s catastrophic performance at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at the Osaka World Exposition in 1970, which outraged the Pepsi corporate executives), but soon switching to solo projects and forming his own choreographic groups; Murobushi brought Butoh to Europe for the first time in 1978 (at Paris performances attended by Genet and Henri Michaux). Although Murobushi died in 2015, his surviving writings – still almost unknown in Europe and in urgent need of translation – appeared in Japan in 2018 and constitute a multiplicitous theory of disfiguration.
Marielle Pelissero’s theoretically informed essay takes a critical look at the range of normative interpretations often assigned to disfiguration, arguing that contemporary performance art recasts the interplay between figuration and disfiguration in a way that creates a tangible distance from more familiar ideas of rebellion associated with the works, for example, of Hijikata and Murobushi. Disfiguration is now a more intricate and ambivalent entity in the contemporary art world, in relation to figuration, as Pelissero notes: ‘They play like two sections of an orchestra. but never express any authenticity.’
Rose-Anne Gush explores many of the dynamics of disfiguration that are also at stake in the work of Hijikata and Murobushi, but with a distinctively feminist approach that, for example, separates Unica Zürn’s work out from her subjection to Bellmer’s corporeal experiments, and reinforces Zürn’s own work as a poet and artist preoccupied with disfigurative approaches to the female body. The work of the Austrian performance artist VALIE EXPORT – often associated with the performances of the otherwise-male Vienna Action Group artists, but possessing far more insurgent and nuanced corporeal experimentations than their often-narrow provocations – resonates with that of Zürn in Gush’s innovative theory of a feminist disfiguration.
George Bataille’s theoretical and fiction-based investigative practices around disfiguration formulate a divergent approach from that of Artaud. Jeremy Biles’ piece The Wall of History engages with and extends Bataille’s project on the horrified sensorial compulsion to anatomize and infiltrate corporeal zones. Fiction is a primary medium of disfiguration, in its immediacy. One night in 2017, driving with Biles through a frozen, wastelanded and acutely dangerous district of Chicago in order to locate one of the last-surviving buildings designed by the architect employed by Eadweard Muybridge for his 1893 Zoopraxographical Hall, we exited the car momentarily to seize a few photographs of that spectral, derelict building, as though scanning fragments of a terminally eroded human body; returning to the car and speeding away out of danger, Biles proposed this short piece for the ‘On Disfiguration’ issue.
Francesca Steele retrospectively recounts her own body’s process of disfiguration, in her years of transforming it into that of a bodybuilder, interposing theory and a form of writing from the body’s interior in order to map that corporeal experience and (after her bodybuilding practice lapsed) its persistence into the present moment, in symptoms, flaws and body-memorial residual transmutations. As with the work of Zürn examined in Gush’s essay, the process in Steele’s essay of exploring disfiguration is one that shatters boundaries, proceeds from interior to exterior (disfiguration is often an exclamatory process, in many respects), and leaves its imprints in every sensory domain.
Disfiguration can be a delicate process, seized in miniature as well as expansive gestures. Corey Wakeling’s essay looks at processes of miniaturization in the work of the Japanese theatre company Niwa Gekidan Penino, especially their 2013 production Box in the Big Trunk, and relating it to the experiments across recent decades of Japan’s theatre cultures with the space around the human figure. That surrounding space may constrict or traumatize the body, and it may serve to instigate mutations in the body’s scale, in intentional scenographic miniaturizations. For Wakeling, the disfigurative re-conception of space in Niwa Gekidan Penino’s work also generates a new aesthetics of corporeal presence and scale, with implications for the social culture of contemporary Japan.
The compelling issue of digital technology’s new amalgam with corporeality has been at stake in Japan’s performance cultures at least since the innovatory work of Dumb Type, and especially its member Teiji Furuhashi’s influential installation Lovers (1994). What happens when the human figure is entirely supplanted, and automata instead inhabit the performance space? Yuji Sone interrogates this question in his essay on ‘android corporeality’ and on the performance system Alter as ‘experimental robot platform’. Sone expertly assesses the theoretical context for spectatorial responses to android performances, and provides insights for their future implications for disfiguration as a process whereby the human body undergoes extreme transmutation, or even vanishes.
Esra Cizmeci’s essay Performing Sufi Disfiguration transports the reader to Turkey and the Rifai order of Sufism that was founded in twelfth-century Istanbul (readers may be more familiar with the Mevlevi path of Sufism and the Whirling Dervishes, in Rifai some practices of the order are similar). Cizmeci focuses on the beliefs and values of the devotees of Rifai and how the performance rituals engage practices of disfiguration (skewering, piecing and wounding) as a means of transformation. His observations stem from sustained, in-depth field research, following the devotees and their practices as an ethnographic participant – setting his insights within the frame of established scholarship in the area of Sufism studies. Cizmeci offers a detailed account of Rifai devotees ‘performing’ a zikir ceremony where skewers are used to pierce different parts of the dervish’s body without causing pain (due to believing that ‘God’ is present).
Cizmeci interlaces devotees’ personal insight, testimony and observation together with his own reflections and speculations on pain and the transcending power of belief and spiritual guidance. For readers perhaps more familiar with the (art/aesthetic) practices of piercing, cutting and bleeding undertaken by contemporary performance artists (a movement that has been well-chronicled in this journal), this account of a specific Sufi practice, that is both supported by and generative of spiritual belief, will have resonance. This detailed account adds dimension to those ‘art actions’ and ‘exhibitions of suffering’ and places them in a much broader context of purposes and function while advancing a shared foundation in performance rituals of disfiguration.
In For the Love of Elu Robyn Sassen constructs a graphic, literally gory, account of South African born (France-based) performance artist Steven Cohen’s recent work Put Your Heart Under Your Feet and Walk. The subtitle, Steven Cohen’s gentle endocannibalism, prefaces the essay with a disturbing oxymoron: can the flesh (or remains) of the dead be eaten in a gentile manner? Once again, Antonin Artaud, ever present throughout these pages, provokes and (mis)guides this iconographic artist who (like Artaud) courts controversy and confronts national/civic notions of decency and decorum, individual sensibilities, values and taboo. The work described evokes the visceral rituals of the Viennese Actionists, replete with blood, guts and bovine carcasses (a mix of human and animal action and disfigurement) as described at the outset of this editorial. But this is not a re-enactment of a 1960s happening; this is the work of a contemporary artist pushing the boundaries of what is permissible in the public arena in 2018. Cohen puts his body at risk, in extremis – to dance in the blood and bile of a slaughtered animal, to memorialize the anguish and trauma of having lost a life partner (Elu).
Cohen’s work raises issues pertaining to identity, civility and citizenship and what it means to be white, homosexual and Jewish in post-apartheid South Africa. His distinctive, highly theatrical, grotesque-burlesque aesthetic also advances notions of ‘undancing’ within a dance context resonating with both Butoh and Artaudian concepts about the power of performance and its ritual potential. Sassen unpacks all these associations that accumulate around a courageous and outrageous artist whose work is mainly located in France and South Africa, and who challenges legal constructs of what is decent and disfigured and has seen him accused of being on the ‘wrong side’ of the law in both these countries.
The horrors of war sear lasting memories in the bodies of those who ‘see action’; mutilated and amputated the combatants must return to ‘civility’ disfigured and with their disfiguration marking them – as has been for survivors (both civilian and military) for time immemorial, for the veterans of Vietnam and the recent injured of the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Soldiers returning from World War I were some of the first to undergo facial prosthetics in the hope that social reintegration might be more possible. Thousands of British soldiers with ‘grotesque’ facial disfigurements (the results of trench warfare) underwent an early form of plastic surgery and the English sculptor Francis Derwent Wood crafted customized painted copper masks to conceal facial disfigurement that could not be ‘healed’ by physiognomic surgery at the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department (Third London General Hospital).
In Monstrosity Mischa Twitchin looks into the face of war. This essay is a sustained reverie on the physiognomy of war, history, memory and remembrance, considering how war is configured, reconfigured and disfigured; the mutilated remains and disfigured faces of war confront the reader and Twitchin asks how art can represent and reconfigure the maimed and distorted, how politics and art collaborate in the face of war and how war faces the future and resists the easy commodification of ‘remembrance’. The essay springs from 2018 marking the centenary of the end of World War I and the conclusion of numerous cultural events staged in the UK throughout the four years 2014 to 18. Twitchin questions the meanings and significance of national performances of remembrance and disturbs the comfort and conformity of a ‘Great War’ having ever ended, evoking a continuum of monstrosity forever reflected in the faces of those who face war.
Martin Bladh introduces a work in progress between himself and photographer Karolina Urbaniak – The Torture of the 100 Pieces – through an essay that grapples with the fascinating (yet repulsive), transgressive (yet erotic), unbearable (yet seductive) power of images depicting mutilation, dismemberment and disfiguration. The work is foregrounded by a sustained reflection on lingchi and especially the French novelist Georges Bataille’s fascination with photographs of this, now forbidden, Chinese method of torture and execution. Often referred to as ‘death by a thousand cuts’, lingchi (banned in 1905) was a purposefully slow and lingering process of dismembering a victim’s body into numerous pieces while they remained alive, thus rendering it impossible to be reincarnated and destined to be trapped between words as a hungry ghost. Bladh apprehends Bataille’s obsession with eroticism and death and his use of photographs (and their performative power) as controversial provocations within his texts; Bladh reflects on the efficacy of collage and the montage of seemingly disconnected images (as advanced by Bataille) and broadens his scope to the paintings of Francis Bacon.
Bladh admits to being obsessed by Bataille’s obsession with photographic evidence of lingchi and has imagined over several years a project using his own body/wounds as material for ‘a complex piece inspired by Bataille’s obsession’. However, it was not until he began to collaborate with Urbaniak, who experiments with macro lenses and photographing liquids as seen through a microscope, that the project began to take form. The essay details the ‘strict aesthetic system’ to generate the set of images (with juxtaposed texts) for The Torture of the 100 Pieces and chronicles disaster, serendipity, self-harm and painful success through its realization. The essay raises many issues that resonate through this issue relating to Artaud and the Viennese Actionists about cruelty and obsession, the limits of the body and representation; it is followed by eight examples (as a double-page spread) of the images and texts created by Bladh and Urbaniak from this evolving work.
Hans Peter Litscher – renowned for his curatorial work, such as his 2002 exhibition with Cathrin Pichler of Artaud’s work at the Vienna Museum of Modern Art (mumok), as well as for his activities as an artist and performer – returns us finally to Artaud as the pre-eminent proponent of disfiguration in performance. As with Hawkins, Litscher works, among other media, in that of collage, accumulating and incorporating memory-fragments or detrita, including those of Artaud’s own film-acting role in the film The Wooden Crosses (1931) as a doomed World War I soldier; the Europe-wide post-First World War prevalence of ex-soldiers with shattered or voided faces and limbless bodies (painted by George Grosz, for example) forms an explicit display of disfiguration/disfigurement as the sequel to apocalyptic, cataclysmic events – events that Artaud himself attempted to instigate and realize, several years later and in his own way, through his apocalypse-fixated 1937 journey to Ireland. Litscher also collages fragments of the event at Cabinet Gallery in London in March 2018 that marked the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.
The final article in this issue continues in the ethnographic vein of Cizmeci’s essay –a detailed account of a specific performance ritual located in the northern region of Kerala, India – the Teyyam or Tettattam, specifically the Pottan Teyyan. Akhila Vimal proposes the term ‘performing disfiguration’ as a way of exploring how ‘normality’ is destabilized and disabled, and caste systems are disturbed and temporarily reconfigured. The Pottan Teyyan evokes a form of Lord Shiva who appeared as lower caste and the ritual is performed by lower caste and tribal communities considered within the traditional Indian caste system as ‘untouchable’.
Vimal constructs a detailed context for the Pottan Teyyan, describing its formative Sanskrit narratives, its forbidden and ‘outcast’ position with regard to certain sacred groves and famous temples, its subversive function within contemporary Kerala (akin to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of the ‘carnivalesque’ in Medieval Europe), its use of masks and transformation through trance. In Performing Disfiguration Vimal considers how the ritual ‘performs’ the disabled and disfigured status of the Pulaya communities (the ‘outcast’ actors/agents) and how a masked performance gains permission (takes liberties) to disturb conventional civic stratification, operates through a wound and momentarily reconfigures society and community.
The editors would like to express a debt of gratitude to the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ (IRC/IPC), Freie Universität, Berlin and the opportunities for many creative encounters that it has spawned. Both Stephen Barber and Richard Gough were Fellows of the Center in 2014–15. It was at the international conference, Alternative Dramaturgies of the New Millennium – Performing Tangier 2014 (that the IRC/IPC sponsored and supported) held in Tangier and Tetouan, Morocco, that Barber presented a first version of the paper Richard Hawkins and the Disfiguration of the Archive (and Gough presented Against Illustration: Falling bodies – seen and unseen). A lively discussion was triggered between the two around notions of disfiguration and performance in Tangier, and for the year following, back in Berlin. This issue, although making no reference to Morocco, feels as if it has its origins in Tangier, in the context of Khalid Amine’s conference and with the support of all the colleagues and staff of the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ (IRC/ IPC), Freie Universität, Berlin.
