Dirt in the Lens

Abstract

Responding to the theme of ‘Animism and the Elemental’ Dirt in the Lens explores two historic image-series Claude Cahun’s Je tends le bras (1932) and Ana Mendieta Siluetas (1973-1980) alongside a contemporary work, Cassils’ Becoming an Image (2013): Cahun’s arms extending from within a hollowed rock; Mendieta’s relief hollowed in a bed of earth; Cassils punching and kicking a 2,000-Lb block of clay in memory of murdered transgender persons.

Each work unites the photographic, the sculptural and the performative. The paper discusses Cahun, Mendieta and Cassils in relation to Stengers’ conception of the ‘animate earth’ (2012: 6). The photographic performance becomes an assemblage (agencement) which ‘lures us into feeling’, generating ‘metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected’ (9). The performances bear out ‘that we are not alone in the world’ (ibid.). Perceptual changes are understood as a function of molecular movements (Bergson 1896: 8); flesh and thought are understood in term of images. After Stengers, we may ‘freely speak of magic’ (7), since the artists change everything [they] touch’ (8) — but the change belongs, first of all, to the earth. Whilst the performances may remain ultimately anthropocentric works, each proposes that there are only ‘nonhuman becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 169). Each connects the ‘phenomenological body with cosmological forces’, testifying to the ‘body's immersion and participation in nature, chaos, materiality’ (Grosz 2008: 3).