Corporeal Topographies of the Image Zone: From Oskar Kokoschka’s Murder of Metaphor to ’s acéphale

Rainer Rumold

Oskar Kokoschka’s turn-of-the-century play “Murderer the Women’s Hope” (Vienna, 1907) and his illustrations are paradigmatic for a view of the human body shared by Surrealists and post-Surrealists in the Paris of the late 1920s which undercut the cen- tral perspective and narrative interpretation. The idealist vertical image of humanity, which culminates in the privileging of the head and the face as the site of human identity, is under attack. Such privileging of the vertical over the horizontal is a func- tion of the subject-centeredness of Western cultural , which extends from sexual to political icons. The avant-garde responds by liquidating concepts and meta- phors as mere conceptual grids and replaces them by the grafting on of an audio- visual tactile experience of the human being in its corporeal materiality. Kokoschka's iconoclasm is viewed as the inception of a series of experiments in decomposing the grid of this vertical zone. Its scope is inherently beyond a Freudian psychoanalytical model.

“I see something you don’t see!” With this refrain from an age-old children’s game I would like to approach the problematic of Oskar Kokoschka’s view of the image – because he himself often cited the youthful magical spell for the unique vision of his own work (Schriften 24, my trans.). The sense of its provocation, understood in the context of the turn-of-the-century, could, of course, also apply to the then-nascent psychoanalysis or the rising medium of film, which Walter Benjamin later addressed as a medium that brings to view the “visual unconscious” (“The Work of Art” 236f). The paradigmatic shift of aesthetics around 1900, which Friedrich A. Kittler has analyzed in his groundbreaking work on literature and the media as a specialization of the senses, has hitherto mostly been discussed as taking place in the newly evolving technological media, such as the typewriter, the gramophone or film. I will here focus instead on an increasing specialization of the senses already within the traditional medium of the arts. My paradigm is avant-garde and painting from turn-of-the- century Paris to secessionist Vienna and the dissident Surrealists of the late 1920s as a self-reflective turn of literature and art into itself as a medium. Such a self-reflective turn takes place at the very edge of questioning the re- production of the symbolic order on the basis of experiencing its underlying materiality (word, marble or paint). I am here reviewing instances where a medial boundary zone is encountered and explored with a thematic focus on 170 Rainer Rumold the human body within an institutional frame of art, albeit that of the avant- garde operating with the effect of shock. This means that such radical anti-art positions as Antonin Artaud’s compulsive turn against the “columbarium” of signs (Nietzsche 882) to the performance of an excess of bodily immediacy, which is to explode the stage and involve the audience in a shared total ex- perience of life, are outside my purview. As for the French perspective, I am more interested in the self-ethnographic, critical documentation of the body, such as in Bataille’s Parisian journal Documents. In other words, my focus here is on developments that begin to dissolve traditional definitions of the body as a system of cultural signs in terms of an outside versus an inside and continue to do so today. This is the very issue which the aesthetic subject raises about its own boundary vis-à-vis the object. In so doing, artists and thinkers also take positions against the idealist-rationalist metaphoricity of an above or below. They turn against the verticalist Weltanschauung of Western tradition which has placed a premium on the face and head as the apex and culmination of the significance of the human image. In this kind of thwarting of things, a type of visual “defamiliarization” effect comes into play, which broadly defined compels us to review our normative perception and, as the Russian futurists theorized, turns our attention to the material base of signifi- cation processes. In the history of painting this move is part of a Copernican turn. Moreover, such an anti-metaphysical project of the avant-garde between the wars brings with it a re-ligious dimension that turns against the religious icons of Western humanity in turning, instead, toward a neo-Gnostic vision of the human body-mind world. Experimentation with verticality and the horizontal as basic forms of the monocular central perspective in the linguistic as well as visual work of art appears to be a special property of secessionist painter and expressionist poet Oskar Kokoschka around 1910. In his painting Die Windsbraut [Tem- pest Bride] (c. 1914), for example, the focus is not the icon of man vs. the icon of woman but on an underlying corporeal unity expressed in the medium of coalescing colours and traces of brush strokes. Widening the historical lens, however, one can detect a more or less hidden line reaching from Vienna back to the sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris and forward to the Paris of the late 1920s, to André Masson and Georges Bataille. Thinker and painter respectively, these latter turn programmatically against the culturally- dominant and powerful icon of the verticality of the human body, with its apex the head. Instead Bataille’s journal Documents (Paris 1929-30) investigated, for instance, the slippery corporeal base of a cultural pariah such as the stinky, slimy “Big Toe,”1 or the fluidly evanescent contours of “spittle,” a chief paradigm of what was presented against the Western tradition of form in photographs and commentary as the informe (382). Thus, one speaks against a rationalistic meta-physical metaphor of above and below. Moreover, there are these strange, rhizomatic, twisted lines in