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Abstract
This essay assesses the ambivalent gesture of repair in the work of the Franco-Algerian artist Kader Attia, as it is brought to bear upon the history of the facially injured soldiers of the First World War. Attia mobilises installation art to ask searching questions of the epistemological frameworks within which the experience of the gueules cassées has been understood in the last hundred years. That history is scrutinised by means of the notion of the ‘continuum’, which problematically suggests a relationship of equivalence between surgical and non-surgical repair and, equally, between Western and non-Western facial modification in the present and the past. Attia’s meditation on facial injury is contextualised here by reference to the notion of the lieu commun, literally ‘common place’, which is provocatively juxtaposed with a specular evocation of Jacob’s ladder in Attia’s Continuum of Repair.
ORCiD
David Houston Jones http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9186-6114
Notes
1 Translations mine unless otherwise stated.
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David Houston Jones
David Houston Jones is Associate Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture, University of Exeter. His publications include Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism (2016), Paddy Hartley: of Faces and Facades (2015) (with Marjorie Gehrhardt), Samuel Beckett and Testimony (2011), Jean Genet, Journal du voleur (2004), The Body Abject (2000), and a critical edition of François Tanazacq's La Suprême Abjection de la Passion du Christ (2001). From 2013 to 15 he was UK principal investigator on the EU INTERREG IV-funded research project 1914FACES2014 on the cultural legacy of the gueules cassées (facially injured soldiers of WWI).