Healing from Healing (There Is No Recovery)
Something wicked this way comes
The above comes from my photographs and article, “Meat: Digesting The Stranger Within,” published in
The Meat Issue of the Tate Galleries’ Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Was it a cheap shot to start my Radical Art in Action Spring Tour announcement with a single image of Wild’s sliced off thumb? I’m not interested in shock value—never have been. I’m interested in the storytelling of objects in relation to one another. For instance, I used to tell stories, playing with our intimate interconnectivity, by photographing my menstrual pads intertwined with various “objects” (see below). I felt that was a completely different commitment/ art practice than that of those artists from the 1960s who, for example, would line up their bloody pads and fix them on a wall—like isolated, abandoned and captured, pinned insects. That felt like objectification.
Bayo Akomolafé, my friend and collaborator, speaks about the ironies of “trauma” as a form of modernity-insurance. See also Healing From Healing. We will not recover. Even if the hand surgeon had been able to reattach his errant thumb, Wild would not “return to normal.” In my FearTalk 31 & 32 with R. Michael Fisher, we shared the imperative of embracing the fertility of collapse.
In Appalachian Apocalypse: My Son Caught By the Eye of the Storm I wrote about my colleague Catherine Keller’s delightfully provocative Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances and her exploration of the vitality of “apocalyptic mindfulness.” In Jewish traditions, tikkun olam translates as “repair of the world.” This repair comes about through relational transformation, not grasping for the familiar. Spanning human / superpredator infrastructures-to-natural world impact, it behooves many of us to consider some information from a wildlife refuge in Florida’s Everglades: “Few people welcome a hurricane’s devastating effects, but to a natural system a hurricane can provide a necessary and vital rejuvenating force.”
What if, following Hurricane Helene and the structural inability to flush toilets, my son’s school introduced an infrastructure for humanure or DIY-composting toilets in their small community. Instead, they recovered. All the students, faculty, and staff continue to pee and poop in potable water—wasting 1.6 to 7 gallons per flush.
Our industrial civilization continues to embody absolute lunacy: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” (Disaster-ReBuild the same infrastructures rooted in systemic oppression-Disaster-ReBuild the same infrastructures rooted in systemic oppression and on and on…)
In contrast with the alleged inevitability of modernity, petrocapitalism, and settler colonialism, supply-chain consciousness is an embodied practice of individual and collective alternatives to the normalization of industrial-waste society: supply chain, true cost, life-cycle analysis (LCA), cradle-to-grave, embodied energy (local and global cycles of extraction / production / construction of desire / distribution / consumption / disposal). Supply-chain consciousness includes Infrastructures of storytelling (object intimacies) because it implies that the user knows (and makes informed decisions about) where things come from and where they are going.
We learn to embody embodied energy…
Supply-chain consciousness is an apocalyptic embodied practice. It reveals that which is systemically hidden, ob-scene/ off stage. Our hypernormalized processes of objectification re-embeds the stripping away of the animated quality of objects.
By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.
– William Shakespeare, The Witches in Macbeth
Below is an excerpt from Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-Scene, my 2013 interdisciplinary critical philosophy art book (PSU Press):
1990. I began photographing in the forests of Westchester County where I found tree trunks covered by cicada exoskeletons. As if crawling into and emerging from my models’ orifices, I combined these symbols of metamorphosis with bats’ heads, glass laboratory vials, latex gloves, preserved pigs’ ears, molded gourds, my fingernail clippings, bird claws and skulls, rusted metal, multiple mirrors—flesh neither victim, nor perpetrator; yet both. Now, because of the onslaught of the censors, I must return to writing.
The relationships between image and word helped me survive both excess and depravation. Because of our societal perceptions/ impositions of the boundaries of the body in public and private, ironically, writing is the only “safe” public activity in which I can engage—while taking an image, making an art object, can only be “legitimately” produced under private conditions. Because of its perverse deferral, writing is the only thing I can do that doesn’t put me in immediate danger—doesn’t subject me to immediate censorship, expulsion.
As a macrobiotic, I lose my menstrual cycle for three years. Immersed in my photography, human, animal, vegetable, insect, mineral become interchangeable in my photographic imagery as they surge with the fluidity of the uncanny throughout each other’s zones of recognition. Relationally, each element destabilizes definitive categories. Meat becomes the reference through which I enmesh these fragments together into literal and allusive connective tissue.
I celebrate the return of my menstrual cycle by photographing my bloody pads juxtaposed to other allusions to skinned detritus—metal, rubber, mirrored. Ironically, synthetic objects so often appear more organic, sumptuous and alive than flesh itself. I am again reminded that there is no solid ground—no clear-cut or absolute answer—only tension, suspension, anticipation, enfolded readings: “The absolute is a resistant figure that carries desire and hatred in its wake” (Durfourmantelle 2007: 36). Tension animates connective tissue, the web that binds us together, while distinguishing us as autonomous.
My photographs are rooted in an acute awareness of these contingent encounters—psychic, imagined, palpable, and projected. Like Bataille, Bellmer, and Kristeva, Nietzsche sought to dissolve homogeneous normative hierarchies that inhibit the flesh, the meatiness of our bodies: “Nietzsche wanted philosophy to be consumed raw and with the entire body” ((Durfourmantelle 66). When I photograph my menstrual pads stuffed into rusting copper cylinders, woven with earthworms, compressed under plate glass on verdant carpet, or when I balance a found decapitated mouse’s head between the weave of the encrusted pad and wire plate glass, I am celebrating this tension—the confrontation and connectivity between life (as the lived erotic) and death: “the nature of both death and eroticism...[is that] they conceal themselves at the very moment they reveal themselves” (Bataille 1986: 52). As with Scarry’s theorization of pain, the Tantricas believe that everything exists in pulsations—what they call spandas— infinitely conspiring (breathing together) through expansion and contraction. The other is contained within each. Every day we navigate through concealment and revelation. According to the Tantricas, “we can’t know or remember everything so in order to remember or know something well we forget other knowledge or turn away from it” (anonymous). Congruently, the split-self of the ob-scene is reminiscent of Weber’s observation that reality is constructed through relationships that are not seen. Always partially invisible, identity manifests itself as it conceals itself; in appearing, it disappears. (European Graduate School 2008).
Through mapping and storytelling, a circuitous interstitial discourse that meanders and ducks into interconnections and collaborations with the Moment, the Now, my visual work vivifies the potential of creative deformation. Tom Zummer has described my photographs as “artifactual environments in which edge conditions are made salient” (conversation, 2009). Once again, we revisit the magnification of the abject.
By defamiliarizing that which we take for granted, my images imbricate the unknown. The erotics of not knowing, an extension of Kant’s unknowable noumenon, sustains the possibilities of reconceptualizing the grotesque, the vulnerable: “‘Non deceptive’ language would have to give up figurality—in other words, deny its dimension of play and experimentation” (Avital Ronell 1999: 138). The claim that the representation of visually fragmented, i.e. objectified…bodies is inherently violating sabotages the intimacy, play, and collaborative tension within my physically constructed images (in contrast to digital photography’s tendency towards Photoshop).
My images articulate a language beyond the rational— what is represented within the confines of the real, the expected, the familiar. My photographic series of nipples compressed beneath wire-gridded glass, nipples and ears pinched by rusting pliers or delicately threaded through sharp metal slits, toes pulling a tongue, oscillate throughout the porousness of the ineffable. I do not intend for these images to dehumanize, but rather to shift the stakes of the official aesthetic.
The body-as-object is not a given, but rather a question—the body-as-process: “As with Nietzsche, the world is ‘not an object. It is a process’ ” (Nietzsche’s Amor Fati” 19). I engage with the body as inherently a surrealist project of processes: a “temporarily stable assemblage of coordinated elements” (Spinoza’s Ethics IIP13Def). Surrealist and Dadaist women artists such as Hannah Hoch, Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Ann Hamilton, Hannah Wilke, Marina Abramovic and I are
“ ...developing a new language for women by tearing down the barriers that separate not only the genders but the decent from the indecent, the private from the public, the poetic from the gruesome, the perverse from the normal. [Or are they creating] a vision of a private hell in which the female body cannot transgress its own division between pleasure (jouissance) and pain, desiring and hating itself for it” (Mary Ann Caws 1990: 93).
My images parallel Kristeva’s psychoanalytic investigations of the fertile intersections the abject produces—meat as montage. “Kristeva’s theorization of the abject had a very different starting point from Bataille’s, one that was not primarily social—for all its chapters based on the anthropology of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger— but part philosophical and part psychoanalytic” (Rosalind Krauss 1993: 237). The abject quality of our contradictory relationships to our bodies-as-meat links the sacred with the “horrific powers of impurity” (Krauss 237).
1994. New York. I see Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin for the first time. The rotten meat scene continues to seduce and haunt me. Eisenstein conveys to his audience that the meat is contaminated with maggots by superimposing magnifying-like lenses onto the film image. The audience is privileged to see writhing larva—ravenous grubs whose infestation will, ironically, contribute to the sailors’ starvation—whereas these protein-rich maggots could have saved their lives! This missed opportunity to survive is another example of civilization’s failure.
Both Georges Didi-Huberman and Barthes have explored the “Eisenstein-Bataille connection... between the often ‘fetishistic’ use of close-ups in Eisenstein’s films and Bataille’s text on the big toe” (Krauss 73). During this time period, I photographed Bataille’s big toe performing various activities: grabbing a human tongue, poised in relation to a bird skeleton and my leg hair wax strips, melting enormous icicles.
The toes of my foot clutching my tripod; the toes of my right foot wrapped around a tremendous icicle; a magnifying mirror reflecting my bloody Tampax which is wedged inside a crevice of my stepfather’s patinaed-turquoise sheet metal; his head precariously balanced as icicles slowly drip into his ear; my grandmother’s forty-eight-year-old dentures straddling the space between his ear and the mirror. It is hot in the room-before I can catch myself, my foot is slipping down the icicle-my other toes lose their grip of the tripod. I feel as though my pelvis will split as I barely catch my camera before it crashes into the pile of melting icicles into my stepfather’s head—some how I take the shot—gather enough strength and press my thumb down on the shutter release...is this somehow “indecent”? (Personal journal entry 1994). This performance is a déformance, rendering the objects l’informe through their conflictual relations. (Sam Weber’s performance as déformance, 2006: 30).
“Corporal politics making manifest the body in all its vulnerable, disarticulated, morbid aspects, in its apertures, curves, protuberances where the boundaries between self and world are porous-is somehow indecent” (Thomas Lacquer 1993: 14). Disarticulated membranes are rendered indecent precisely because of their inherent ambiguity. Rancière distinguishes between Eisenstein’s principles of montage and visual propaganda material: “Eisenstein systematically denies us this sense of certainty” (Jacques Rancière 2004: 29).
A quintessential Jewish characteristic is one of uncertainty, always questioning, looking beyond what is apparent. In my conclusion to Viscous Expectations, I discuss this “Jewish” drive to question in the context of Arendt’s commitment to thinking as living. I associate this animated thinking as a non-linear series of collisions—collusions and contentions. “Eisenstein chose the word ‘collision’ to express the effect of juxtaposing two shots, and it is this concept of dynamic energy that permeates much of his writing on the various forms of montage—rhythmic, metric, graphic, planar, spatial, tonal, overtonal, contrapuntal…” (MacDougall 2006: 224).
Our collision continues:
