Taking Apart the Body

Abstract

When thinking about abjection in relation to the body it is illuminating to think about the significance of the boundary between two different states. In abjection this boundary becomes problematized through transgression. This article examines the various processes of transgression employed by performance artists that involved piercing, cutting, ingesting and expelling as a way of rupturing personal and social homogeneity and distorting the normal parameters of bodily expression and sensation. These processes often left the artist in a state of stupor or ecstasy at which point they were able to escape beyond their culturally determined body to a state of abjection and anarchy. By subjecting their bodies to a range of often extreme experiences, artists pushed the boundaries of representation and expressed corporeal and psychological states that transgressed social propriety. Abjection became a tool of social critique where marginalized groups could articulate their concerns as a way of empowering their minority status. Viewers in turn experienced sights and participated in actions that challenged their assumptions about art and conveyed a whole new arena of experience.

Notes

1 ‘Body art’ is often used interchangeably with Performance Art, although, technically, as a branch or category of Performance Art, body art concentrates on the artist's body as material or the use of the body in other ways to make ‘human sculptural forms in space’ (see, for instance, Goldberg 1999: 153). Performance art itself started much earlier than the 1960s with the Dadaists and the arrival of the European war exiles in the United States in the 1940s.

2 Examples include Andy Warhol's oxidations paintings in the 1970s and Hermann Nitsch in his OMT works in the 1960s.

3 This use of their body as the platform and locus of self-expression was met with reservation in some quarters. Lisa Tickner comments on the tendency of women artists in the 1970s to take the body as their ‘starting point’, arguing for the importance of making a distinction between the overpowering position of ‘living in’ and ‘looking at’ a female body, which are qualitatively different experiences (Tickner 1987: 263, 266). Vaginal iconography may be used politically, but there is a danger that it can be viewed as a debasing gesture that enforces biological determinism by reducing women to their bodies.

4 Womanhouse was an installation and performance space created by Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and their students of the Feminist Art Programme at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

5 L’écriture féminine [women's writing] is a concept that was coined by French feminist Hélène Cixous in 1975 and was used in feminist literary practice to promote a liberating practice that emphasized women's experiences and the drives of the libido.

6 What is interesting about contamination is that it is not solely brought about by the other but also by the self-as-other. In other words, there are aspects that belong to ourselves that may cause contamination and disruption to both body and mind, as in the case of a tumour.

7 Artists working in the field of Conceptualism and Performance Art often used language performatively and instructively instead of merely in a descriptive sense. The influence of the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin's notion of ‘speech acts’ is apparent here.

8 The psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment that explored the relationship between the orders of authority and one's own morality.

9 Hal Foster stated that ‘[i]n trauma discourse … the subject is evacuated and elevated at once’ (Foster 1996a: 168).

10 This is not applicable in the case of bad horror films, which are unconvincing and uncompelling.

11 Hatoum may also be referring to her own political displacement as a refugee in Britain during the Lebanese Civil War.