Flesh-Pots and Clay Bodies in This Article, Courtney Lee Weida Explores Art Practices of Ceramics Relating to Themes of Flesh and Consumption

Antennae Issue 15 – Winter 2010 ISSN 1756-9575

Meet Animal Meat Bastien Desfriches Doria Mammal Thoughts Courtney Lee Weida Flash-Pots and Clay Bodies Cara Judea Alhadeff Meat: Digesting the Stranger Within Simone Racheli The Biomechanics of Objects Gunter von Hagen The Problematic Exposure of Flesh Ron Broglio Meat Matters

Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi

Academic Board Steve Baker Ron Broglio Matthew Brower Eric Brown Donna Haraway Linda Kalof Rosemarie McGoldrick Rachel Poliquin Annie Potts Ken Rinaldo Jessica Ullrich Carol Gigliotti Susan McHugh

Advisory Board Bergit Arends Rod Bennison Claude d’Anthenaise Lisa Brown Rikke Hansen Petra Lange-Berndt Chris Hunter Karen Knorr Susan Nance Andrea Roe David Rothenberg Nigel Rothfels Angela Singer Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir Helen Bullard

Global Contributors Sonja Britz Tim Chamberlain Lucy Davies Amy Fletcher Carolina Parra Zoe Peled Julien Salaud Paul Thomas Sabrina Tonutti Johanna Willenfelt Dina Popova Amir Fahim Christine Marran Conception Cortes

Copy Editor Lisa Brown

Junior Copy Editor Maia Wentrup

Front Cover: Poltrona 2006, wood, papier mache, wax. cm76x58x91h. Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery Simone Racheli Back Cover: Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress as worn at the MTV Video Music Award 2010 on the 12th of September 2010 2 EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 15

In 2002, Zhang Huan’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial, titled My New York, involved xxxwearing a suit made of fresh-cuts of meat stitched together which the artist wore down Fifth xxxAvenue, whilst releasing doves from a cage, a Buddhist gesture of compassion. The work was xxxIa response to September the 11th and sprung from the artist’s experience of the city as a visitor. “Many things looked strong” recalls Huan, “but were extremely fragile. In New York, I saw men exercise beyond what their hearts could handle and take all kinds of vitamins and supplements to pump up their bodies. In this performance, I invited immigrants to participate and used doves. My assistants designed an outfit of beef for me. It took five tailors one day and one night to stitch all the beef onto a diving suit. The beef outfit was very heavy, maybe about fifty kilograms, and hard to walk in. What would take a bodybuilder more than ten years to achieve only took me one night!” As a performative act, My New York is charged with the presence of rich signifiers, the flesh, the doves, and not lastly, the presence of an artist from Beijing in New York. Some have hinted, the work could be read as a metaphor of America’s role in the contemporary socio- political world-scene. Others have distanced themselves from such readings. The flesh we see Zhang Huan wearing is that of animals, not his own, however as the artist claims, it was symbolizing his own flesh, simultaneously capturing a sense of powerful strength, in the bulky and full forms of an alluded body-building anatomy and in the immense frailty rendered by the nakedness of the flesh which appears here at its most vulnerable as skinned. This ambiguity, a multi-signifying agency of meat is explored in this issue of Antennae; our second installment on the subject. Ron Broglio captures this most effectively in the opening paragraph of his essay, ‘Meat Matters’ an extract from his forthcoming book titled On the Surface: Thinking with Animals and Art. “In meat” says Broglio, “there is a transformation from living to dead, from hidden to revealed, and from indigestible to edible. As the marker of this change, meat has a visceral materiality. The material form of dead animal flesh is haunted by the trace of a life transformed into an object through the violence of death. The willful life of an animal becomes an object that shows little ability to resist human understanding, manipulation, and consumption”. The artists’ work featured in this issue, directly explore all this. The photographic images of Bastien Desfriches Doria and Cara Judea Alhadeff question meat and the subject of identity through the genre of portraiture and self-portraiture. Courtney Lee Weida explores the themes of flesh and consumption through the surprising versatility of ceramics, whilst the work of Italian artist Simone Racheli brings us to reflect on the agency of meat as implicated in the relationship of everyday objects. This issue also features an exclusive interview with highly controversial artist Gunter von Hagen, the inventor of the Body Worlds exhibitions which mercilessly expose flesh in ways and contexts that many find problematic, but that other fully appreciate as science or art.

Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief of Antennae Project

Zhang Huan was interviewed by Antennae in May 2010

3 Zhang Huan My New York, performance, 2002 © Zhang Huan

4 CONTENTS ANTENNAE ISSUE 15

6 Mammal Thoughts The series Mammal Thoughts explores the questioning of bodily identity interweaved with philosophical self-reflection (the Cartesian Cogito). Each large format color portrait involved an intercollaborative dialogue between the photographer and the subject, encouraging the latter to reappropriate his/her own particular understanding of bodily representation through absurdity, absence, humor or eroticism while being presented as just a body. Text by Bastien Desfriches Doria

17 Flesh-Pots and Clay Bodies In this article, Courtney Lee Weida explores art practices of ceramics relating to themes of flesh and consumption. Beyond ceramic sculptures of animals and vessels used to store and serve meat, there are subtle themes and symbols of animals and flesh surrounding the clay medium. Text by Courtney Lee Weida

27 Meat: Digesting the Stranger Within Meat becomes the reference through which I weave these fragmented body parts together into literal and allusive connective tissue. I celebrate the return of my menstrual cycle by photographing my bloody menstrual pads juxtaposed to other allusions to skinned detritus—metal, rubber, mirror. Text by Cara Judea Alhadeff

41 The Biomechanics of Objects Simone Racheli’s work is challenging and visionary. Through the simulation of biomechanical objects the artist questions our relationship with the world around us, and the psychological and philosophical ties we become entangled with. Here he discusses his work in an exclusive interview with Zoe Peled. Questions by Zoe Peled Translation by Giovanni Aloi

48 The Problematic Exposure of Flesh For over a decade, plastinator Gunter von Hagen has enraged and fascinated audiences around the world through his always controversial Body Worlds shows. His work is carried out in the name of education but at times ethical considerations around his work tend to focus on the inappropriateness of some displays. We interviewed the scientist/artist as his show focusing on plastinated animals hits the road. Questions by Giovanni Aloi Text by The Institution for Plastination

58 Meat Matters Meat is the moment when what remained hidden to us is opened up. The animal's insides become outsides. Its depth of form becomes a surface, and its depth of being becomes the thin lifelessness of an object exposed. Meat makes the animal insides visible, and through sight, the animal body becomes knowable. And while meat serves as a means for us to take in the animal visually and intellectually, it also marks the moment when the animal becomes physically consumable. Text by Ron Broglio

5 MAMMAL THOUGHTS

The series Mammal Thoughts explores the questioning of bodily identity interweaved with philosophical self-reflection (the Cartesian Cogito). Each large format color portrait involved an intercollaborative dialogue between the photographer and the subject, encouraging the latter to reappropriate his/her own particular understanding of bodily representation through absurdity, absence, humor or eroticism while being presented as just a body. Text by Bastien Desfriches Doria

t is of significance that the growing relevancy body and its sensualist primacy in the relationship of postmodern topography substantiates most of the subject with the object world. The Fluxus art I of our contemporary critical thinking of societal movement, Robert Morris’ Process Art and his space and of its objective reflections on the theorization of “Anti-Form” in 1968, as well as the individual since the late sixties. As a provisional works of Arman and Joseph Cornell just to name answer to globalization’s ever-intensifying a few, are representative of that elementary drive integration of later capitalism into the social — in nineteen sixties and seventies art toward crude one should say existential — sphere, it seems that materialism and against manufactured a descriptive theorization of our transfigured aesthetics. The performative happenings of material milieu prevailed in contemporary Carolee Schneemann, Shigeko Kubota and other thinking. So that from the visual arts’ perspective, first-wave feminist artists also significantly the emblematic figure of Rem Koolhaas’ generic contributed to question vision’s naturality and city, or the peripheral landscapes of suburbanity culturality through their critical positions. In her in general, provide a certain visibility regarding 1963 inaugural “Eye/Body” performance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “Empire”. Schneemann’s exhibiting of her naked body However, the question of how — what I would covered with paint, grease and other primal term —architectures of desublimation insinuate materials suggested an ambiguously embodied the individual’s own materiality is becoming self-envisioning, where vision “happened” to be increasingly pertinent within the emerging context constituted not only by the seer but also by the of postmodernity. The now dominant synthetic seen. Such preoccupations resonate throughout environment of human activities engendered by the Mammal Thoughts photographic series, computer technology and the advent of the concerned with how vision is subsumed into Internet has taken the dialectics of Marxist materiality. The reciprocal exclusion of physicality alienation into Baudrillard’s hyperreality. The and identity ultimately grounded my research in a resultant disintegration of material production into radical scrutiny of Western culture’s classic mind- communication testifies to the progressive body dualism. My approach to portraiture dematerialization of both the productive body reenacts Descartes’ indubitable cogito ergo sum and produced bodies in a world of entirely (I think therefore I am) in the theoretical context automated factories and “web romance”. In left open by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s response to the on-going disappearance — or Phenomenology of Perception. Each of the quasi-invisibility — of the physical body in social thirteen photographs composing the series realities, a paradoxical and reactionary ‘antivision’ portray the same individual performance — a developed in contemporary art since the early thinking moment — where individuals are asked sixties to re-affirm the materiality of the human to reflect in front of the camera as body-subjects. 6

Bastien Desfriches Doria Stephanie, Mammal Thoughts, 2005, 30x40 Lightjet print © Bastien Desfriches Doria

My photographic project Mammal Thoughts as a testimony to Western culture’s mind-body strives to represent the human body and dualism originated in the 16th and 17th century individuality according to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of mind. More specifically, I would like corporeal phenomenology where the subject’s to briefly refer here to René Descartes’ Meditations ability to envision the world, and to be of it, is on First Philosophy, whose cogito we already recomposed in corporeality itself. The raw meat referred to in the present discourse. It is to that laid out in the narrative spaces of each seminal work that we owe the first systematic photograph unveils Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the account of the mind-body relationship, historically world, and questions traditional discrimination emblematized in its cornerstone formulae cogito between the subjects’ materiality and that of the ergo sum. In the larger metaphysical context of world. this writing, Descartes was to ultimately demonstrate the existence of God after It has often been argued that the establishing certain foundations for scientific introduction of arte povera in the gallery space knowledge, and jointly to fight the obscurantism was a symptomatic consequence of the and the skepticism of the minds of his time. As the broadening importance of artistic methodologies founder of rationalist thinking, his demonstration concerned with feminism, queer theory, post- relied on a particular intellectual process that structuralism and psychoanalytic theory. Descartes himself coined “methodical doubt”, Regardless of that statement’s supposed truth, which consisted in posing more and more the use of soft, poor, and mundane materials has powerful skeptical hypotheses in order to call into been promoted since the sixties as an original doubt entire classes of knowledge. Having medium able to assemble the new abjected and eliminated all truths derived from the senses, from degraded identities circulating in modern society. the imagination and many of those which come But the “poorness’ revolution” of the arts didn’t rise from reason, Descartes finally concluded that without effectively transgressing the traditions of there was one thing he would never be deceived purity and prudery of the institution by into doubting: the certainty of his own existence, foregrounding issues of gender and sexuality in for something has to necessarily exist that thinks the art exhibited. More importantly, inasmuch as it and doubts in order to be deceived. Thus, symbolically proposed to violate the hermetic according to Descartes, even the most skeptical purity of the laboratory of institutional values, it person would have to admit that he is at least a signaled the inauguration of an essential counter res cogitans (a thinking thing). But interestingly and movement from within the instances of social retrospectively then, all that on which our basic control toward the superficial homogeneity and cognitive Western culture is based would continuity of global consumerism and the aseptic structurally be our own self-consciousness. As in aesthetic of the ever-fashionable self that it the perspective of Descartes’ cogito, all realities subjugates. To that extent, the use of raw meat in would then indeed unmistakably happen to be the Mammal Thoughts photographs certainly just representations. But thinking about vision’s satisfies a will to distance individual representation material nature, the fact that the Cartesian mind from portraying an integrated Self within social introspects the entire world and its sensible spaces of profuse materiality. Rather contrarily, it information through its omnipotent reflection, aims at detaching that mythological narrative of eventually synthesizing not only the body but the consumptive happiness from the body’s Self, provides his philosophy with a problematic, constitutive relationship with the subject, while de-substantiated vision. For it would then glimpsing at the even greater deficit of meaning presuppose a mind without eyes or body, namely existing today between the two. Thus the lack of a disembodied vision, which in return should be understanding of one’s own materiality occupies able to consider one’s own body just as another’s. a central role in the representation of each If the body resists the mind’s absolute horizon, it character in the series, allegedly performing a may well be on the contrary because the latter paradoxical cogito: to think that one merely is his originates within corporeality, as a physical own body. The Mammal Thoughts photographs understanding of material visibility. However, suggest dialectical possibilities to attempt to refuting Descartes’ idealism leaves one with no overcome the metaphysical aporia that occupies other choice than reversing the terms of his the subject’s relationship with his own materiality. equation. Therefore, anchoring vision and self- The mutual exclusion of bodily reality and reflection back into the perceptive materiality of self-perception actualized in my work recalls the one’s body appears necessary. But re- ever problematic nature of any relational encapsulating vision in the body fundamentally displacement from presentation to representation, characterizes it as situational and perspectival, 8

Bastien Desfriches Doria Eric, Mammal Thoughts, 2006, 30x40 Lightjet print © Bastien Desfriches Doria

meaning that there is no vision without viewpoint, body-mind dualism previously entertained in our nor without the inherent limitation of the body’s discussion. According to him, a flawed horizon. Such an existential repositioning of the intellectualism always outlined both empiricist mind and body relationship places physicality at (immanential) and idealist (transcendental) the center of self-reflective activity, where the philosophical projects. It betrayed in essence the bodily being as both sentient subject and sensible integrity, and thus primacy, of existential object becomes nodal, if not indistinguishable. experience by privileging one of the terms — the Hence corporeality needs to be rethought outside body or the mind — over the other. As a result, the mind-body dualism’s artificial split, and away neither the rationalist world apprehended by a from a visuality of transcendental nature. If, on the reflecting cogito, nor the objectification realized contrary, vision is immanential, always embedded through science’s analytical studies succeeded in and related to the physical presence of one’s authentically accounting for the lived reality of the body, then the paradoxical attempt to reach the Self. In fact, both methodologies missed the disincarnated point of view of being one’s body bearing that firstly conditions them: that existence — that is, being pure human materiality — sought comprises only embodied experiences, and by the Mammal Thoughts’ individuals is hence that there can only be embodied symbolically envisioned as raw meat in my meanings in the world. It is thus of one ontological photographs. This ultimate thought, unbounded necessity for Merleau-Ponty that the cognitive from its bodily thinker, not only actualizes its subject reintegrates the practical exigencies of signification of crude physicality in the meat, but what he names the body-subject, in order to also betrays its inherent subjective nature in it. “rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of subject and Lastly, it seems ironically plausible to consider the object, the fact of my subjectivity and the meat as a successful cogito, or in other words as nascent object, that primordial layer at which a freed thought now being able to position itself both things and ideas come into being” (Merleau- before the body in order to signify the individual Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception). as itself. Away from any dualistic exploration of Consequently, the mind and the body existence, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body- must not be conceived exogenously as two subject reclaims the perceiving mind as an heterogeneous modes framing the existential incarnated body, insofar as one accesses the space in which one lives. Because there is but world only through his body: “I am not in front of one topos, our body, in which to rearticulate my body, I am in it or rather I am it…If we can still human being’s materiality and self-reflectivity, one speak of interpretation in relation to the must seek a first philosophy where those two perception of one’s own body, we shall have to existential extremities meet and dialectically say that it interprets itself” (Merleau-Ponty, integrate each other. As a means to further Phenomenology of Perception). What examine and circumscribe the theoretical characterizes the significance of the body in implications and aesthetic articulations underlined Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is its inherence to the by such ontological questioning through the world, its embodied state of being, and closer to present photographic work, one needs to our photographic discourse the very fact that investigate prospective answers within the writings seeing also depends on one’s capacity to be of one of the most significant contributors to seen. Indeed for him, subjective vision is contemporary phenomenology. As in fact, dialectically constituted, just as much as my Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of a engagement in the physical world as an phenomenological body-subject interestingly engaging of the physical world in me. Merleau- conceived of a notion of a pre-linguistic subject, Ponty’s viewing eye is situated in a moving and whose consciousness fundamentally appears empirical body that, despite its lack of inseparable and indistinguishable from the identification with the world, is yet of the world. human body. Merleau-Ponty’s denigration of Western Paradoxically enough, what is essentially at philosophy’s antinomical relationship between the stake in Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus Self and the object world through the incarnation Phenomenology of Perception isn’t perception per of individual existence into the body-subject se, but rather a fundamental repositioning of the draws a relational and situational definition of existential subject in the world. Historically knowledge that, while not giving way to any associated with the “phenomenological turn” that materialist or behaviorist philosophy, eludes a occupied European philosophy before the rise of clear frame of reference. His reflections in structuralism, his understanding of the subject Phenomenology of Perception are united around radically rejects the metaphysical tradition of the claim that the lived experience of one’s body 10

Bastien Desfriches Doria George, Mammal Thoughts, 2006, 30x40 Lightjet print © Bastien Desfriches Doria

11 is foundational of human communications, self- that the portrayed individuals try to stand for. identity and cognition in general. When asserting Yet, “what enables us to center our existence is that “I am my body” (Merleau-Ponty, also what prevents us from centering it Phenomenology of Perception), he essentially completely, and the anonymity of our body is means that the practical modes of action of the inseparably both freedom and servitude” body-subject are indiscernible from the (Merleau-Ponty, Signs). There is ambiguity precisely perceiving body-subject, in the same way that because we are not capable of disembodied the body-subject himself cannot detach his reflection upon our own bodies. For that reason, presence in the world from his body: “Inside and Merleau-Ponty considers the body as our means outside are inseparable. The World is wholly inside of communication with the world: “Things in the and I am wholly outside of myself” (Merleau-Ponty, world must have meaning”, he writes, “not Phenomenology of Perception). because we have signs but because we have What appears central to Merleau-Ponty’s bodies” (Merleau-Ponty, Signs). Hence, by existential view here is a principle of uncertainty, or gesturing into space, one brings a meaningful rather as he terms it himself of ambiguity, based world into being. The central role played by the on the body’s reversible propensity: its capacity to moving body in meaning construction is such that be both sentient and sensible, or in other words to it seems to constitute the subject’s closest be both object of the world and subject in the relationship to meaning itself, to the point of world. But that reversibility intrinsically demands conceiving a genealogy of language based on that those two modes of being never fully what he calls the gestural sign. The body analogy coincide, that they coextend through time, which through the concept of gesture brings a whole clearly entails the two major existential different aesthetic of communication into play, impossibilities of knowing oneself absolutely and where visual perception models verbal and of objectifying the world totally. As Merleau-Ponty pictorial significations. In fact, Merleau-Ponty wrote it, “ambiguity prevails both in my perception consistently compares the production and of things and in the knowledge I have of myself” reception of images to the production and (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception), reception of gestures: “Words and Images”, he as “whenever I try to understand myself, the whole says, “emerge from me like gestures” (Merleau- fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and Ponty, Signs). with it come the others who are caught in it” By rearticulating the constitution of the Self (Merleau-Ponty. Signs). But the uncertainty of and the very process of signification into the knowledge we mentioned earlier must not be bodily subject, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology understood as its mere condemnation, for if the manifests untapped perspectives to approach empirical and transcendental attitudes are materiality in general, and to question its uses and definitely disclaimed, the body-subject representations in plastic and visual arts. In his experiences are nonetheless meaningful in a unfinished writings The Visible and the Invisible, different way. Through its complex commerce Merleau-Ponty draws on the ontological with the material substance of the world, the body implications necessitated by his thinking of the is revealed as one integral but permeable individual as body-subject. Our embodied medium phenomenally moving in the world, as subjectivity is never purely located in either our well as moving the world into oneself. body or the world, but rather in the correlation of This last remark bears a twofold those, namely, in Merleau-Ponty’s own importance when considering how the world for terminology, where the lines of the chiasm they Merleau-Ponty inherently co-defines the body and constitute intersect with one another: “There is a literally resides in it. In reality, the assertion that “the body of the mind, and a mind of the body and a world is wholly inside and (that) I am wholly outside chiasm between them” (Merleau-Ponty. The of myself” not only practically characterizes the Visible and the Invisible), he says. The chiasmic way the subject interacts with the world and gets figure is yet the principled scheme of subjectivity to know it, but it also postulates a world no longer for Merleau-Ponty. As the ruling ontological motif foreign and absolutely separated from the that testifies that mind and body, subject and subject. The abolition of the mutual exclusion of object, self and world are but an encroachment, self and world entailed in the abandonment of the chiasm dialectically reflects the body- the dualist conception of mind and body will in subject’s reversibility and its corresponding fact lead Merleau-Ponty to conceive of material ambiguity onto the world, which is thus theorized reality as flesh. This notion is central to my as flesh — or flesh of the world. As he makes it upcoming interpretation of the Mammal Thought clear, “the thickness of the body, far from rivaling series, where it symbolizes the carnal intentionality that of the world, is on the contrary the sole 12 means I have to go unto the heart of the things, series firstly function as a portrayal of individuals by making myself a world and by making them cogitating, and even more so reflecting on the flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible). possibility of being just their own bodies. However abstract in its formulation, Consequently, the series’ photographic Merleau-Ponty ‘s working out of materiality as flesh momentum is essentially about grasping body- must not be either literally or poetically subjects approaching their elemental gap, or just interpreted. Unequivocally, the flesh of things is the same constantly falling on one side of relationally constituted within the perceiving body- Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasm. Each individual has subject, permeating the inner recesses of his therefore been “seen”, meaning here “seen not subjectivity “so that the seer and the visible seeing”, while the camera presence subjected reciprocate one another… It is this Visibility, this them to the very vision they were seeking, and generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity reflected their question as to who and how they innate to Myself that we have previously called are manifestly, or one should say phenomenally, flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible). as finished subjects: mammal thinkers, This “anonymity innate to myself”, that chiasmically photographed, absorbed in the unseen antruthful material belonging of me-as-a- unthinkable reflection of pieces of meat that body within the world, this one reflection of my trapped them and freed them all in the same continuity and unity with it that only the Other gesture. realizes, but that I always miscarry by thinking I am Visually speaking, the raw meat “appears” contiguous to the world as a subject, means the in the true Heideggerian sense of Erscheinung — flesh. As such, it also is a gap (écart, in French), apparition — from the material world to the visible everywhere in the world between my own investigating subjectivity. It is exactly “what” the corporeality and me as a subject. Measures of body-subject can’t reflect — or measure — of this gap only exist in my self-reflection, and in my himself while bent on itself. Or in other words, it is projection of a world of objects around me. My “where” the mind slips and falls back into the body ignores it, for it knows pre-reflectively — that world, again away from itself. As the lexical is perceptually — how to be in equilibrium as a symbol of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the visible, the mortal and temporal being. But insofar as I can’t meat represents what is yet invisible in each reflect on my body’s pre-reflective knowledge, my portrait: the coincidence of the thought of being body remains unknown to myself albeit present to material with the envisioning of that thought. itself: it is phenomenally inconsiderable Importantly, the theoretical role assumed (“infigurable”, in French). And yet, as an earlier by the meat in this work echoes the larger quote from Merleau-Ponty already suggested, it is problematic of understanding visuality in its both what conditions my freedom and my dialectical relationship with materiality, as found in servitude: it is my liberty to be in the world (“être au Merleau-Ponty’s later aesthetic philosophy. As we monde”, in French), to move in it and to act upon now know, he conceived of visual depiction as it. Inasmuch as it situates me in time and space, it grounded in a complex engagement with the intercedes for my being of the world, and material environment. But the constitutive position therefore alienates me to be with it while leading of the seer is fundamentally emphasized beyond me astray from my immediacy and my own pure perception in The Visible and the Invisible, presence. This is my ambiguity, and only along the idea that “the thickness of flesh ambiguously am I given to myself: “I know myself between the seer and the thing is constitutive for only insofar as I am inherent in time and in the the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his world, that is, I know myself only in my ambiguity” corporeality” (Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the (Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception). Invisible). In other words, things are only visible for There is no elucidating it, one can only know it, an embodied subject, which in return gives the and thus only by accepting my ambiguity — not world its visibility. Clearly, there is no visibility, no coinciding with my body, living in the chiasmic tangibility nor sensibility without a being-sensible, a permanence of its écart, namely being a body- being-tangible and a being-visible. But the subject — can I come into terms with my own necessary condition and mutual conditioning that finitude. materiality is, that co-founding of coincidental With those bare existential aspects in mind, flesh, appears here most ambiguously as visuality. one cannot but think of the raw meat displayed in For if corporeality really conditions the visibility of each photograph of the Mammal Thoughts series the world indeed reciprocally the significance of as a pictorial equivalent for Merleau-Ponty’s seeing is to be found in the materiality of the seer. concept of flesh. Several other fundamental However, according to Merleau-Ponty and his connections reinforce such a reading, having the theorization of the body-subject, subjectivity is 13

Bastien Desfriches Doria Daehwan, Mammal Thoughts, 2005, 30x40 Lightjet print © Bastien Desfriches Doria

constitutionally unable to embrace its bodily complexities beyond the body-mind dualism condition, and is thus condemned to existential traditionally prevailing in Western culture’s ambiguity. What is then central to the writings of philosophical and representational definitions. The Visible and the Invisible is the argument, close Even the recent post-structuralist incursions to Heidegger’s ontology, that we need to re- in photography didn’t fundamentally change our interrogate our visual understanding of the world conception of the body, while nonetheless on the premise that ambiguity necessarily prevails acknowledging its deconstructive nature through in it. The meat visible in the photographs of the the subject’s historicity and the social prism of Mammal Thoughts series embeds such questions. sexuality, as in the works of Robert Heinecken or In fact, it literally asks and answers them Richard Hamilton. The ontological wonder at the chiasmically, in accordance with one’s decision body and at its ambiguous belonging to both to read it from the portrayed individual’s subjectivity and the object world hasn’t changed perspective —where the meat manifests the or been resolved. Aside from early kinesthetic, world and the subject’s invisibility to itself — or on anatomical and pseudo-anthropological uses of contrary if one invests the image as a photography, and not considering the modernist representation, pounding the indexical weight of lyricism of formal purity and its long lineage of the meat on ambiguous metaphorical meanings. practitioners (up to Lucien Clerge, Barbara Crane Even if Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body- and Ralph Gibson), body representations often subject and his emphasis upon a pre-reflective branched between morbid, sexual or racial body don’t advocate a return to simple and convolutions (Hans Bellmer, Robert Mapplethorpe, spontaneous relations with the physical world, or Lynn Davis), social observation or conceptual re- to put it differently don’t exalt a nostalgic desire to appropriation (Humberto Rivas, Rineke Dijkstra, rejoin some primordial inherence in Being, his Bruce Nauman), a literal adherence to the body’s “indirect” ontology of the Self doesn’t resolve the material essence of hair, flesh and skin (Robert difficult question of how one needs to interpret his Davies, Yves Trémorin, John Coplans, Holly Wright), body’s materiality. If one cannot understand what and eerie scenarios inherited from the Dada and roots existence and thus what provides meaning Surrealist traditions (from Oscar Gustave Rejlander to it, except through the fundamental to Jerry Uelsmann), the latter group mainly communication — if not stasis — of his body with succumbing to the great temptation of the rest of universal concreteness, a non-space of dematerializing the body toward its identification philosophy may be legitimately called upon to fill with unconscious, soul or mind. Merleau-Ponty’s gap. In the perspective of freeing The point of such an analytical — albeit oneself from what he calls “the paradox of arbitrary and probably too rigidly categorizing — transcendence in immanence”, the temptation to account of the photographic body, is that the simply abdicate the seemingly secondary term of fabric of vision still problematically relies on the the body-subject — being a subject — and opt mind-body dualism, which in the philosophical for a radical bodily ontogenesis is not insignificant. perspective of the Mammal Thoughts doesn’t But the resulting existentiality, filled with carnal coincide with the integrative fabric of the body’s meaning and constituted out of intercorporeality reality. However, few artists successfully managed instead of intersubjectivity, would however to incorporate in their work the body’s ontological presuppose the annihilation of self-reflexivity, and and ethical ambivalence as both subject and thus the death of individuality. Such a radical object of the world, and so not only developed perspective certainly doesn’t concern my present an entirely different aesthetic of that relationship, work, but its picturing has consistently inspired but more importantly inscribed its viewpoint upon controversial works since the very beginning of the viewer’s position. Lucas Samaras, who photography, mainly in the asubjective directions consistently embedded the body image within of pornography (from Auguste Belloc to Cindy the material texturality of the Polaroid print through Sherman’s “Sex Pictures”) and morbidity (from his manipulation of the film’s layers, appears to Weegee to Joel-Peter Witkin). me as one of them. The fact that most of his work Historically, the body as either object or subject consists in self-portraits literally illustrates my of visual interpretation has persistently argument for an envisioning of the subject by the foregrounded explorations of the fundamental seer as neither simply corporeal nor relationship between physicality and Self and their transcendental. Photography here embeds the inextricable interdependency. The notions of artist’s impossible vision of a disembodied self- ‘being’ and the meaning of ‘body’ have only reflection, what Merleau-Ponty would term a recently extended into the psychoanalytic and hyper-reflection, that same existential modality of the linguistic arenas, interrogating unsuspected perception that the characters of the Mammal 15

Thoughts series actualize by thinking of themselves understood as the true envisioning of a as bodies. community of cogitos made visible by virtue of Francesca Woodman’s work, generally the photographer’s existence. However, the speaking, as well as Arno-Rafael Minkkinen’s “Body revealed interdependence between photography Land” series both represent other significant and the photographer’s existence cannot provide photographic testimonials of the common any conclusion as to know exactly what the encroachment of the body onto the material resulting photographs stand for. They could substance of the world. Minkkinen chose to represent the photographer’s shared historicity of explore natural settings to foreground his yet authentic individual self-reflections, in which corporeal inherency to wilderness’ open being. His case the photographer’s consciousness would idea that “we are in the same world but in then become the true sensible photographic different landscapes” (Minkkinen, A. Body Land) material. If on the other hand they were not about resituates the body’s dialectical relationship to Self the photographer’s constitutive co-presence, the and world within the quest of its ontological photographs could then plausibly uncover envisioning. Minkinnen thinks of the body as being portraiture as a successful monstration of self- co-constitutive of landscape vision, as its reflectiveness. But in that case, the visual criteria necessary material provenance. evaluating the degree to which self-reflection The works of Samaras, Woodman and occurs or not are not identifiable. Moreover, Minkkinen are all exemplary definitions of self- seeing oneself as his own body from the viewpoint portraiture as a reflective investigation of the of another subject would presuppose a sort of subject upon his presence or appearance in the projection, if not disincarnating. If so, the visibility world. As such, they entail crucial conceptual and of such a phenomenon would problematically critical resonances with the Mammal Thoughts not belong to any physical subject, echoing series. The imperative questioning carried out in Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic saying that “Man is not any self-figuration definitely underlines the human the end of the body” (Merleau-Ponty. The Visible need to mirror one’s factuality when facing and the Invisible). existential doubt. What is then asked of the photograph in a self-portrait is to provide a co- Bibliography objective perception of oneself in the world, so Cunningham, Imogen. On the Body. Boston, Bulfinch Press, 1998. that one is able to see himself as objectively as another; namely, to be both seer and seen, Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis, Hackett Pub. Co, 1979. object and subject of that perception. Consequently, the photographic self-portrait is Ewing, A., William. Body : photographs of the human form. San Francisco, always cogitatively designed on a first literal level Chronicle Books, 1994. of significance. But unlike subjectivity’s diegetic Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London, Routledge temporality in actual life, its perception has been and Kegan Paul, 1962. discontinued from the perceived object and Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, therefore constitutes a reported experience. It is 1964. thus a product, as reflection or imago, of an Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, elusive self-reflection owned by the world. As a Northwestern University Press, 1964. principial remedy, the Mammal Thoughts’ series Minkkinen, Arno Rafael. Body Land. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian allowed for a resynchronization of the cogitative Institution Press, 1999. experience and of its witnessing, while Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York, Routledge, photographing individuals engaged in the active 1997. doubting of themselves as anything else than Towsend, Chris. Vile bodies : photography and the crisis of looking. Munich- bodies. The displacement from self-portraiture to New York, Prestel-Verlag, 1998. portraiture redistributed the subjective and Wolf, Sylvia. Dieter Appelt. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Shop, objective investments of the real in accordance 1994. with a diachronic world composed of intersubjective relationships. If indeed the portraying of a self-reflecting individual by another individual guarantees an integral perceptive Professor Bastien Desfriches Doria was born in Paris, where he used to live experience of self-perception, since what is thus and work before moving to America in 1999 to study Photography. In France, depicted isn’t a differed and reflective self- Bastien earned both a degree in Philosophy and in Information & Communication Sciences. Bastien earned an MFA in Photography at the reflection of the photograph’s subject but the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in May 2006 and has been working objective and lived experience of another, the as an assistant professor of Digital Imaging and Photography at Governors Mammal Thoughts series can therefore be State University since September 2006. 16

FLESH-POTS AND

CLAY BODIES

In this article, Courtney Lee Weida explores art practices of ceramics relating to themes of flesh and consumption. Beyond ceramic sculptures of animals and vessels used to store and serve meat, there are subtle themes and symbols of animals and flesh surrounding the clay medium. Text by Courtney Lee Weida

ntroduction: Ceramic Containers, Fleshy The Clay Body, Sexual Bodies, and Forms, and Meaty Media Gendered, Living Vessels I Meat imagery has appeared in various works of Clay has been connected to human bodies and art dating back to Paleolithic cave paintings. The flesh throughout many cultures and traditions. The consumption of animals and images of fleshy, form of pots can echo the curves and functional bloody meat have appeared in various paintings, parts of human bodies. As potters, we speak in drawings, and sculptures since ancient times, physical references to the body and the pot (“lip,” which document, imagine, and critique “foot,” “belly,” and “shoulder” of the vessel). British carnivorous practices. While surrealist painter potter Kate Malone invites the associations of the Salvador Dali reportedly wished to be a cook shapes and curves of her ceramic forms to that of before he ever hoped to be an artist, potter-poet a baby and to the backs of children’s knees. Clary Mary Caroline (“M.C.”) Richards once Illian (1999) has noted the shared qualities commented “the way a man eats dinner is between pots and people in that both have an political.” In terms of its roles in food axial symmetry and are types of consumption, ceramic art is perhaps uniquely vessels/containers, while Marguerite Wildenhain generative of various meat metaphors among (1962) has written that the potter “creates pots other media. This distinction arises from the fact after [his/her] own image” (p. 140). It is also that clay can embody themes, textures, and possible to compare clay to human skin (Mathieu, images of meat, and can also contain actual 2008), or to recognize the vessel symbolically as meat products. Archaeologists have also relating to life-giving food, water, and the womb. identified traces of animal fat dating back to Pueblo potters, such as Stella Shutiva (1987), Mycenaean ceramic wares, providing historical describe relationships between the pot and the information about eating practices of the past. potter, noting that some pots by men are larger Ceramic majolica ware and puzzle mugs of the and shaped like their bodies, while some women’s American Art and Craft Movement employed pots are plumped as their bodies are. (qtd. in animals such as rabbits or snakes as accents on Trimble, 2007, p. 14). This points out that our own functional serving ware. Ceramic art straddles the physicality as gendered makers can directly divide of functional and purely aesthetic art and/or subtly impact the ways in which we use our objects from pottery to ceramic sculpture. This hands and minds to shape pots. article will address meat themes in contemporary Vincentelli (2000) has observed the clay art that relates to various representations of commonly held belief that pottery was historically consumption, sexuality, and commodification. “an exclusively female activity” so that working 17

Kate Malone Pumpkin Forms, 2008 © Kate Malone 18

with clay becomes a ‘naturalized’ activity linked to like quality that persists across its history within females.” Yet she argues that “such roles are not numerous cultures. Silberstein Storfer and Jones dictated by nature but by culture and the result of (1982) have noted that Native American potters choices that particular groups have made.” (p. have long compared clay and bread dough. 15). Moira Gatens (1995) also writes of the Native American potter Lucy Lewis has said that generative symbolism of women’s bodies: “the “pots are spirits,” clay is “sacred,” and that if you female body, in our culture, is seen and no doubt eat clay “raw . . .you are going back to it when often ‘lived’ as an envelope, vessel or receptacle” you die.” (qtd. in Peterson, 2004, p. 123). As Levi- (p. 41). Certainly, this emphasizes the unique Strauss (1996) reminds us, Ancient Greek, Pomo, capacity of the female body to undergo and Mexican peoples commonly engaged in childbirth and bear life just as pots can hold geophagy, or the ingestion of clay in ritual, for sustaining food and water. The clay vessel medicinal purposes, and in crafting vessels. potentially stands not only for the meaty human Trimble (2007) similarly observed that within body, but also for the container that holds human Acoma culture, the grandchildren of women life. potters “sneak up behind [them] when [they are] At the same time, societal visions of the working and take little pieces of Acoma clay to female form as a sort of vessel may outweigh, eat” (p. 14). I have witnessed potters from many outlast, and overwhelm choices to bear (or not to different backgrounds taste clay and ceramic bear) children. These socialized associations materials (even in recent times and within urban underscore the way in which clay, as a material, areas) to identify a material’s contents and quality when employed to create pots, can suggest a before use. Paired with the idea that clay can be corporeal, sexualized, and commodified quality like people, there is a potential for cannibalistic of flesh. In clay, the connection to the earth as associations in clay work that is tasted and/or “Mother” Earth, or a sort of life-giving material, is touched to the lips and tongue as a container for most apparent in the processes of forming the food. On the other hand, we touch our lips to the clay. Constance Classen (1998) has observed “lips” of a vessel, which is perhaps more like a kiss that the Earth has long been understood as “a (again referencing the clay vessel as a sort of formidable reservoir of female power” (p. 86). The body). While these various functions and connections of gender, flesh, and pottery can be associations would seem contradictory or overt, or they may be subtler. As potter Jane impossible to reconcile, the clay medium often Hamlyn (1991) writes: accomplishes these many roles fluidly and simultaneously. I am a woman, a mother and a potter, I am interested in feminism Clay Processes as Kitchen Processes and though I do not feel oppressed by men, I am aware of difference. One lasting association of pottery and Our bodies for a start are not the food, in an era in which stoneware vessels are not same. If pots are about our bodies always employed for daily use, lies within the and women make pots, then I think making of contemporary clay vessels. Even in there is something about that which recent times, when manufactured containers and communicates itself (qtd. in serving dishes have in some cases replaced Vincentelli and McDermott, np). hand-made pottery, we find compelling links between pottery practices and food that relate to Although women potters may or may not make the kitchen space. Ceramicists often define and corporeal connections in their work, these inscribe their work in terms of home spaces and associations exist concretely or elusively, contexts. impacting interpretations and uses of the work. Of her early days as a ceramicist, Beatrice The rich, muddy tactility of clay work is undeniable Wood (2006) writes “I was just like a bride who and can be intimate, like touching skin. does not know how to boil eggs. She becomes a good cook by experimentation; that's how I Consuming Clay and Being Consumed By became a potter” (p. 110). Jane Peiser describes Clay her pottery process as containable within domestic space, such as a small table within a While ceramic vessels can be kitchen (qtd. in Coyne, 1975, p. 61). Spargo experienced as a sort of body (with various types (1974) has compared both the tools and process of clay sometimes being referred to as “clay of slip decoration in pottery to cake decoration. bodies”), the clay material also has a basic food- For Kate Malone, making pottery is linked to 19

Patz Fowle Pork Pie, 1980 © Patz Fowle

“childhood memories of pressing soft pastry industrial meat processor. Further, like many meat between finger and thumb to make the fluted items, ceramic ware is cooked in an oven. rims on apple pies.” (qtd. in Jackson and Malone, Pyrometric cones, which potters employ to 2003, p. 13). The significance of all of these monitor the oven (or kiln) temperatures for glazing techniques can be as personal and direct as purposes, could be likened to the meat cooking and baking processes. While common thermometer. practices (recipes) exist to guide the clay artist, To return to particular gendered visions of aspects of forming the clay by hand are ceramics in terms of the kiln, Vincentelli (2000) individualized to suit the artist’s “taste.” The dough- mentions low-fire, pit-fired pottery done by women like associations of clay mentioned earlier in this historically and potential links between the kiln and paper, combined with the tools and techniques the womb, as parallel warm spaces that give life of clay being shared with kitchen spaces, to an object. However, even for a potter that suggests culinary connection in ceramic work. never creates meat-related ceramic art, some associations with meat can be made within these Food Parallels in the Studio studio processes. As an aside relating to issues of exhibitions, the Meat Market Craft Center is a For studio potters who do not make these popular venue for many ceramic artists, while kitchen connections, different food associations some of New York’s Chelsea’s artists have moved may still abound, not necessarily within into the meatpacking district. Clay artist Tashima techniques, but rather surrounding ceramic tools Hirotsune created a series exhibited in Tokyo, and equipment. In larger studios, unused and called The Meat Market, with platters of food atop unsuitable clay is often remixed and recycled the bottom halves of a male and female figure using a pug mill, which churns the clay and expels shaking hands. it in chunks not unlike those produced by an 20

Patz Fowle The Revenge of Other White Meat Had Finally Begun, 2003 © Patz Fowle

Hirotsune Tashima Moonlight Dinner, 2004 © Hirotsune Tashima

The Meat of the Work: Ceramics flesh, but also attractive female flesh, is Incorporating Meat Themes highlighted here with a certain gendered dimension. In both pieces the various forms of As the materiality and the processes of “meat” suggest a sense of vulnerability through clay work may generate meat metaphors, some cartoonish iconography. We might also compare artists also take this theme more directly into the this work with that of Hirotsune Tashima, who often concepts and forms of their work. Patz Fowle’s uses severed human parts paired not only with Pork Pie exemplifies one of the most overt uses of meat, but also with sushi rolls, rendered in clay. In meat as food product within a ceramic sculpture. both cases, objects employing aesthetics of This sculpture contains hundreds of ceramic pig delicacy and/or sweetness are reconfigured to faces with prominent snouts baked into a pie, with contain disturbing forms of “meat.” a generous slice suggestively removed. The Returning to the functional vessel, we may possibilities of clay as dough are translated quite also consider the work of potters Mark Moskovitz literally here. Meanwhile, the “pork berries” of the and Bonnie Seeman. Mark Moskovitz creates witty pie are cartoonish, even cute, and contrast serving platters: Uptown Meat and Uptown Dairy strangely with the ominous pools of blood and the inscribed with a flourishing font that reads “meat” sense that hundreds of pig heads are about to be or “dairy.” The inscription repeats in a radial (or have already been) consumed. pattern as an accent to the porcelain plates. Fowle notes a psychological dimension in These labels both allude to the function of the her work, integrating advocacy for animals that pieces and also highlight the cultural practices of comes across strongly in other pieces like The keeping kosher and the various food taboos Revenge of the Other White Meat. This piece entailed in these practices. The labeling itself is features an overweight pig dressed up as a practical, and yet takes on a tone of irony and farmer in overalls holding a Barbie-like human on wit. Moskowitz describes the font itself as giving a a large skewer. Consumption of meat as human “sunny, fifties vibe.” 22

Hirotsune Tashima Family Dining, 2005 © Hirotsune Tashima

Hannah Wilke, an artist who works in clay, as well Other White Meat, Wilke’s Venus Pareve expressly as food media, created a series of sculptures that responds to the consumption of animal meat as might be considered alongside Moskovitz’s work. forms of protest, while Moskovitz’ dairy plates Wilke’s Venus Pareve (1982–1984) is a set of small address nuanced culinary abstention. self-portrait figures that were cast in chocolate. Instead of comparing or separating meats Within a body of work that relates consumption from other material, clay artist Bonnie Seeman and food, Wilke’s title explores female and Jewish juxtaposes vegetal and meat forms in her work. identity through the terminology of diet: pareve She creates functional vessels that are clearly (neither meat nor dairy). Wilke’s women figures inspired by the leaves and stalks of various are neutral in some ways because they are vegetables. However, a closer glance reveals neither meat nor dairy, and yet a woman’s body that reddish veins and muscles are also a part of and the material of chocolate may well contain the design. These botanical, and yet anatomical, forms of milk product. Like Fowle’s Revenge of the works perhaps draw our attention to the 23

Mark Moskovitz Meat Plate, 2006 © Mark Moskovitz

connectedness of meat and plant. Potentially Concluding Comments: omnivorous vessels, they also highlight ways in Ceramic Conceptions and Constructs of which all consumption entails a form of death, an Meat annihilation. The artist describes her work as a blending of “macabre and the beautiful” that This article has touched on a sampling of overt references the duality of “fragility and resiliency” in and subtle references to meat and flesh among life. Meat art in clay and meat metaphors in the clay artists. However, many artists also work within field of ceramics seem to work within and contexts more often associated with clay, but between these tensions and contrasts, inviting the rendered in meat as an art material. Betty Hirst’s artist and the viewer to question both “natural” Hommage a Meret Oppenheim is a cup, spoon, associations between clay and meat and those and saucer made of bacon. Simone Rachell’s juxtapositions that make us more uncomfortable Water Closet is a toilet made out of meat, which (and perhaps more thoughtful) about various also draws our attention to forms generally forms of life and choices about ingestion. rendered in porcelain and/or stoneware. 24

Bonnie Seeman Untitled, Gravy Boat, 2008 © Bonnie Seeman

meat, which also draws our attention to forms These plates often contained images of the Virgin generally rendered in porcelain and/or stoneware. Mary. Aside from the familial and religious While not ceramic works, these two forms relevance of these platters, the generative and emphasize the common iconography of clay fleshy realities of clay are uniquely underscored objects rendered in meat as an art media. with religious and motherly overtones from Another artist and architect, Natalija Subotincic, references to the Virgin Mary and the undeniably created a work in which she saved the bones of generative symbolism of the eggshells used as a every animal she ate and washed them, sort of ingredient in the clay she utilized. preserving bones and preparing them on a table As clay comes from the earth, and bodies like a reconstituted meal. Each of these pieces eventually end up there as well, we must realize responds to the context of dishware and the that ceramics not only embody, but also can theme of meat as material, but does so within contain, the organic matter of meat. Singely and non-ceramic media that is uniquely recycled or Horwitz (2006) note that “projecting ourselves refurbished. These works highlight a certain aura inside the space of the statue or the coffeepot, of ceramic forms, contextualizing conventions of rather than simply gazing at these objects from function in new and disturbing ways. behind a glass case, opens up the tabletop or Returning to the clay media, but with meat the kitchen counter into a delirious landscape of integrated into the material, Carol Prusa’s work has possibility” (p. 7). The sculptures and vessels of redefined clay itself. Her Grind, Sift, and Serve ceramics mentioned here open up artistic (1998) transformed eggshells from daily meals into possibilities and confront viewers with their a fine silt that she added to unfired clay plates. assorted fears and fantasies about meat. Meat 25

as a ceramic theme is dually applicable to livestock and human bodies. Whether working in milky porcelain or meaty earthenware, references to flesh lurk within claywork. Ceramic art is unique and distinctively relevant among other meat art because the processes and associations of flesh are experienced as embodied, constructed and understood as biological, and defined and redefined as historical.

References

Classen, C. (1998). The Color of angels: Cosmology, gender, and the aesthetic imagination. London: Routledge.

Coyne, J. (1975). Penland School of Craft: Book of pottery. New York: Routledge.

Gatens, M. (1995). Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power, and corporeality. New York: Routledge.

Hamlyn, J. (1991). In Vincentelli, M and McDermott, L. (Eds). Women Potters Speak. Retrieved January 1, 2008 from http://www.aber.ac.uk/ceramics/wom-qte.html#bro.

Horwitz, J and Singley, P. (Ed). (2004). Eating architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Illian, C. (1999). A Potter’s workbook. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Jackson, L. and Malone, K. (2003). A Book of pots. London: A & C Black.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1996). The Jealous potter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mathieu, P. (2008). Sex pots: Eroticism in ceramics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Peterson, S. (2004). Lucy Lewis: American Indian potter. New York: Kodasha International.

Silberstein-Storfer, M. with Jones, M. (1982). Discovering the joys of appreciating and creating art. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc.

Singely and Horwitz. (2006). Eating architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Spargo, J. (1974). Early American pottery and china. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co.

Trimble, S. (2007). Talking with the clay: The Art of Pueblo pottery. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Vincentelli, M. (2000). Women and ceramics: Gendered vessels. New York: Manchester University Press.

Weida, C. L. (2008). Ambivalences of art: Nuance, contradiction, and duality in the words and works of women in contemporary ceramics. Doctoral dissertation: Columbia University Teachers College.

Weida, C. L. (2007). Re-searching gender and ceramics. In Spaces: Arts and Humanities Journal. Vol. 1, np. New York: Columbia University. Courtney Lee Weida is an Assistant Professor of Art Education at Weida, C. L. (2006). En-gendering clay: Her stories in ceramics. Terra Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. Her dissertation and Cotta Journal. Vol. 1, np. recent publications address ceramic art, studio craft, and gender issues in art education. As a practicing ceramic artist, she possesses a unique Wildenhain, M. (1962). Pottery: Form and expression. New York: American Craftsmen's Council. background in English literature and archaeology museum work that has informed her art and research in ceramics. Wood, B. (2006). in Smith, L. (Ed.) I shock myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood. Ojai, CA: Dillingham Press.

M EAT: DIGESTING F LESH-POTS AND

TC HLEA YS TBROADNIEGSE R

W ITHIN

Meat becomes the reference through which I weave these fragmented body parts together into literal and allusive connective tissue. I celebrate the return of my menstrual cycle by photographing my bloody menstrual pads juxtaposed to other allusions to skinned detritus—metal, rubber, mirror. Text by Cara Judea Alhadeff

Cara Judea Alhadeff Tahbi’s Causin, A., c-print 1990 © Cara Judea Alhadeff

989. Just months before the fall of the anticipation, interpretation. Tension animates Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet connective tissue, the web that binds us together, 1 Union, I join La Commune du Monde, while distinguishing us as autonomous. My Wilderdorp, the commune of the world. Servicing photographs are rooted in an acute awareness of a tiny, lavishly wealthy village near Ghent, these contingent encounters—psychic, imagined, Belgium. This macrobiotic commune is a palpable, and projected. When I photograph my sanctuary for itinerant poets/story-tellers, bloody pads stuffed into patinaed, rusting copper philosophers, recovering drug-addicts, sexual cylinders, covered by earthworms, compressed freedom fighters. No animal flesh or by-products under plate glass on bright green carpet, or when of any kind are permitted on the macrobiotic I balance a found decapitated mouse's head commune—except during the Tunisian festival for between the interweave of the encrusted pad les mechouis in which a sheep is slaughtered. As and metal gridded glass, I am celebrating this her throat is ceremoniously slit, her expression is tension—the dialogue between life and death. placid—the knife glides through layers of wool, layers of muscle. There is a profusion of blood. I 1991. Road-kill enters the picture, but not as a cannot forget the quiet. simple representation of horror. Similarly, I leave the commune to travel to Tunisia photographing my bloody pads was not about and photograph the only literal image of meat shock, but about relationship: the relational that I will ever shoot. Every image hereafter is tension between road-kill, my camera and allusion—allusion to that moment in the early body/bodily processes, and other intuitively morning sunlight when a Tunisian butcher held in chosen objects. Choreographing those his hands the serenity of death—that moment relationships is a conscious process of Re- when Thanatos is born from Night and Darkness. animation. The crushed skull of a road kill possum Witnessing such strength in vulnerability, my mid-screech, like the ash-atrophied figures from camera and I begin to play. We explore the the eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii, in relation to possibilities of the grotesque in the everyday—the my fist wrapped tightly in a green latex glove fertility of ambiguous relationships. Dialogue gripping a Japanese embroidered puppet with between life and death, decay and resurrection, long nostril hair, awakens the uncanny tension leads me to the subject of my photography. between anxiety and beauty. My images I begin choreographing my photographs illuminate a call and response between anxiety in the forests of Westchester where I find tree trunks and beauty. Anxiety manifests in the moment of full of cicada exoskeletons. I incorporate these recognizing the familiar within the unfamiliar, symbols of transformation, along with bats’ heads, feeling a connection with the other, yet clinging to glass laboratory vials, latex gloves, preserved pigs’ a separate identification. Beauty emerges in the ears, molding gourds, hair wax strips, my fingernail moment of responsiveness to our undeniable clippings, bird claws and skulls, patinaed metal, connectedness. Through my work, I explore this bloody menstrual pads, whole moles, unbroken web as a process of multi-layered storytelling in birds, an endless stream of road-kill, and multiple which ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but rather mirrors magnifying the crawling into and a multiplicity of clarities. Meat triggers the pliability emerging out of my models’ orifices. of perception. Because of its optical allusive As a vegan, I lost my menstrual cycle for quality, meat inhabits this fertility of ambiguity—a three years. Immersed in my photography, bridge between life and death. human, animal, vegetable, insect, mineral Both animals and human friends bring me become unrecognizable as they border cross. As gifts of dead animals as props for my photos. One they surge with the fluidity of the uncanny into such gift is a dead oriole, bright yellow and still each other's zones of recognition, each element intact. Post-mortem, the oriole's body endures destabilizes definitive categories. Meat becomes being saturated in milk, dissolving her brilliantly the reference through which I weave these colored feathers into human cheeks, necks, fragmented body parts together into literal and knees, gradually deteriorating, over numerous allusive connective tissue. I celebrate the return of photo shoots. I stretch and compress and adhere my menstrual cycle by photographing my bloody my dead oriole until her accommodating body menstrual pads juxtaposed to other allusions to can no longer yield—from death, back to life, to skinned detritus—metal, rubber, mirror. Ironically, perhaps a more complete death. synthetic objects so often appear more organic, sumptuous and alive than flesh itself. I am again 1993. The Seattle Science Museum. A docent is reminded that there is no solid ground—no clear- dissecting a cow eyeball to demonstrate to cut or absolute answer—only tension, suspension, children how similar the cow is to the human. I ask 28

Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings from the Self-Portraits Series, Raw #1 © Cara Judea Alhadeff

if I can keep the post-dissected eyeball for my version of The Story of the Eye? photographs. For the next three months, I store the cow eyeball in a Snoopy thermos—alternately Barthes “rejects a thematic or freezing and thawing it between my photo shoots. 'extraplastic' reading of Bataille's Eventually, the cow's eye disintegrates into 1926 pornographic novel unrecognizable meat. Strands of membrane are L'Histoire de l'Oeil (The Story of the now barely capable of holding the eyeball Eye), no matter how filled the together—dissolving under the heat of the lamp book might be with the focused on the dyed turquoise bristle of my precipates of perverse fantasy model's head; her ear reddens under my pressure and unleashed sexual as the eyeball continues to melt into her scalp. imagination, to insist instead on a How would Bataille have (de) constructed this specifically structuralist account 29

Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings from the Self-Portraits Series, Raw #2, 1995 © Cara Judea Alhadeff

of the book. The story, Barthes “In terms of sources, one declares, is not that of a set of wonders...whether Bellmer's characters and their exploits, but 'physical unconscious' was in any of an object—the eye—whose way a response to Walter characteristics yield the Benjamin's notion of an 'optical combinatoire from which the unconscious,' introduced in the textual fabric is woven, both at latter's “Small History of the level of its language and in Photography” in 1931. 'It is the dimension of its events” through photography,' wrote (Krauss and Bois, 154). Benjamin, 'that we first discover the existence of this optical L'Histoire de l'Oeil offers infinite permutations. This unconscious, just as we discover combinatoire reminds me of Hans Bellmer's the instinctual unconscious “physical unconscious”—a living prosthetic. [1] The through psychoanalysis'”(quoted eye is meat—by nature, in constant in Rosalind Krauss, The Optical transformation. Unconscious [Cambridge, Mass., 1993], 178). 30

The eye is a wound which suggests incalculable relation to a bird skeleton and my leg hair wax perigrinations. [2] These erotic conjunctions, like strips. With an awareness of Eisenstein as a Jew in Bellmer's dolls and the surrealist arrangement of a post-revolutionary Russia, I can't help but peculiar incident, provide a framework for associate his magnified maggots with the host- perceiving the world through possibility rather than parasite history of Jews within their adopted prescription: countries. Since Biblical times, Jews have inhabited a space of alterity—an uncanny zone “Freud's model of the mobility of of the stranger within. As with any irreducible the libido provided the basis for irritant, the host interrogates, “What do you do with Bellmer's theorizing about erotic that which cannot be assimilated? “ Fear of the feeling...Freud observed that ambiguous nature of interpretation has been 'sexual impulse-excitations are institutionalized across both time and space. We exceptionally plastic,' and are taught to resist the gap between negation continued: 'One of them can and affirmation, the spectral, the uncanny, the step in place of another; if stranger within. When we believe that our satisfaction of one is denied in everyday world rotates around a static central root reality, satisfaction of another of a unambiguous neutrality, we feed directly into can offer full recompense. They our addiction to being right, our comfort with only are related to one another like a the familiar, and the machine of self-censorship network of intercommunicating and its accompanying acceptable social channels filled with fluid, and this behavior. We cannibalize our imaginations. is inspite of their subordination to the primacy of the genitals—a 1994. My first experience with censorship. It state of affairs that is not at all becomes absurdly clear to me how people can easily combined in a single become more threatened by their own picture'”(Sue Taylor. “Hans Bellmer imaginations than by reality. I am less concerned in The Art Institute of Chicago: The with overt moral crusades that have dictacted our Wandering Libido and the behavior and cultural norms over past centuries, Hysterical Body,” 12). and am much more wary of the insidious explicit and implicit ways in which we have internalized This combinatoire of what I am exploring here as phallic norms and fear of our own bodies. I realize erotic politics, opens up a space for a poetics of that my photographs serve as a tabula rasa— relation. [3] Similarly, my images explore Julia onto which viewers can project their potentially Kristeva's discussions of the fertile intersections that worst fears: sexual abuse, mutilation, physical the abject produce[4]—meat as montage. The manifestations of misogyny. My viewers tell me I abject quality of our contradictory relationships to am accountable for their personal and social our bodies as meat links the sacred and the projections onto my work—how they reframe my “horrific powers of impurity” (Krauss, 237). images. Where I see mutation as celebration, they see mutilation as obscenity—as 1994. I see Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin pornographic and irreducibly offensive. Where I for the first time. The rotten meat scene continues see a lust for life, they see imposed death. to seduce and haunt me. Eisenstein conveys to During my lecture at the Contemporary his audience that the meat is contaminated with Museum of Art in Lyon, France, one of the curators maggots by superimposing magnifying-like lenses from the Lyon Biennial told me how compelling onto the film image. We get to see the writhing he found my photo of an old woman. I larva—ravenous grubs whose presence will responded by telling him that “the old woman” is contribute to the sailors' starvation. (Of course, the actually a young man. What is of particular sailors should have devoured the protein-rich interest to me is not the curator’s interpretation of maggots!) Both Didi-Huberman and Barthes have the age or gender of the character in the explored the “Eisenstein-Bataille photograph, but more importantly, I ask: how connection...between the often 'fetishistic' use of does he react when he discovers that his taken- close-ups in Einsenstein's films and Bataille's text for-granted interpretation is actually completely on the big toe” (Krauss, 73). During the period I inverted? Another example of how mystified and shot my bloody menstrual pads with decapitated commodified hegemonic practices distort our mice, bat's heads, earthworms, and my own self-perceptions and how difference is body parts, I photographed the big toe: melting institutionally denied is when my photographs enormous icicles, grabbing a tongue, poised in were censored in San Francisco’s City Hall. Even 31

Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings from the Self-Portraits Series, Period #1, 1992 © Cara Judea Alhadeff

as I was hanging my solo-exhibition that was clarify my role as an activist, writer, and visual supposed to run 3 months, one of the city artist. Through my images and collaborative supervisors warned me that Mayor Willie Brown performances, I want the body to continually defy cannot be expected to walk past a vagina the assumption that it can be easily categorized everyday on the way to his office. The “vagina” by blurring its own constructed boundaries of actually was a close-up of my armpit with chicken difference/sameness, pleasure/pain, claws. expectation/unfamiliarity. Since the early 90's, my photographs have Perhaps because I am a child of a been publicly defended by Freedom of Speech holocaust survivor, multiple, contradictory organizations such as artsave/People for the perspectives feel inherent to the way I function American Way and the ACLU. By witnessing both personally and politically. Instead of first hand people's reactionary tendencies and automatically defining difference as threatening, I unconscious addiction to standardization, these hope to construct environments in which we can experiences with censorship have helped me discover how we are connected to what we think

Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings from the Self-Portraits Series, Period #2, 1992 © Cara Judea Alhadeff

is unfamiliar. In the eyes of the threatened viewer, continual becoming, as inhabiting and reviving squeezed plums, gliding over my model's collar the tension between life and death, between Eros bones, become blood; burst open guava and Thanatos. My own body as meat. between my mirrored blistered feet becomes raw ground beef; refractions in my grandfather's In a similar vein, “Bellmer shaving mirror become fragmented, dissected depicted the body as an misogynous representations; in the viewer's amalgamation of the organic imaginations, women’s bodies are cut up. In and inorganic, [the living and reality, in my images, skin is pulled, pushed, the dead], transgressing its spread, compressed and bunched up. I do not normative limits to incorporate deny the violence, the flesh violation, intrusion. aspecsts of its environment. He But, it is my own body that is craving and fantasized the body as a series demanding these relationships; my own body as of shifting, interchangeable 33

erogenous zones, subject to face, I had to control my breathing to limit my the forces of psychic nasal intake of air so that I could reduce the repression in what he termed nausea swelling inside me. It was an illuminating 'the physical unconscious'” experience of finding my limitations and reaching (Taylor, 11). around them to feel what's on the impregnable other side. Every session we do together, a little Since my body and those of my models are the more about my body is revealed to my mind. only living meat in my photographs, I quote some Another time, Cara inserted very large dead of my models in order to illustrate this continual insects in and around my ears. Beautiful and becoming: horrifying creatures, which allowed such intimate contact only because they were dead...helped Astraea: It wasn't a hostile degrading to reduce my irrational fear of "bugs." It was experience—it tempted the tension between play exhilarating and so sensual: feeling the delicate and pain-now when I look at the photograph of prickly legs and raspy crisp wings and the fuzziness my nipple pulled through a sharp metal disc, of the abdomens on my own skin sent chills what I remember is play. It was an image Cara through my body...It is ironic that the tension I feel and I created in my room when we were first while we are taking photographs does not always getting to know each other—a very warm space. come through in the final print. Perhaps we do I was propped up against the wall and using rusty not want to see the scars, the adipose flesh, the heavy pliers, I pulled my recalcitrant nipple blood, the pressure of organs, the through the metal, a corrugated, convoluted blemishes...Those who are afraid of their bodies, I disc, which Cara refers to as her dinosaur believe, are afraid of life itself and so limit or try to diaphragm. And my nipple which at times disregard this living tension. became just as convoluted. There was a lot of The sanctity of normalcy constitutes a tenderness. We were trying to figure out how to hegemony of representation that colonizes our make it stay hard so the photograph would show relationships with our own bodies, in particular, the visual metaphor between my vulnerable flesh women’s bodies. Institutionalized constructions of and this supposedly hard object. This metal vulnerability bind the psychological to the object looked like it had once moved like a physical. According to Bataille and his narrator, fluid—his object that could have been the “To others, the universe seems decent because hardened skin of an animal. The process was one decent people have gelded eyes. That is why of play—of attention to my body-and while trying they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by to get it to do a very specific thing—the the crowing of a rooster [which strikes Bataille’s recognition that it had its own responses-the narrator with an overwhelming nausea] or when resistance of a nipple. strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ only on condition Don: I felt I was part of a landscape, a collage, that they be insipid.” [5] fitting in there with so many other things that are coming together to make a whole-a construction Late 1994. I am photographing three friends similar to the montage of forms that make up a (one of whom recently had radical knee surgery separate reality, separate from me, like Salvador and whose entire leg looks battered with purple, Dali's "Apparition and Fruit Bowl". I felt like I was green, and deep yellow bruises) in the bathroom becoming part of something else...Cicadas on of philosopher, anthropologist Alphonso Lingus. my lips, rotting berries in my mouth, saliva dripping His bathroom, our photo site, is all chrome down my chin, my tongue being grabbed by reflection—floor, ceiling, walls of mirrors. The rest rubber sheathed toes. My saliva and to some of his home is lined, floor to ceiling, with fertility degree, my viscera became joined into this gods and goddesses that Lingus has retrieved collection of forms that make up a different from around the world. I am again taken by the whole. I felt literally frozen in time-holding the ironic play between violence and creation. [6] pose-I am becoming the photograph. Mid 1960's. Temple Grandin invents the Julia: One reason I enjoy modeling for Cara is “squeeze machine”: a more humane way of that she puts me into situations and positions that slaughtering animals, particularly cows, destined test and question my own physical experience; a for agribusiness production and consumption. As reaching out and past the boundaries my culture I learn more about Grandin's autism, I get a and I, myself have set up. One time while Cara clearer sense of how my own corporeality and balanced a very smelly dried octopus on my visual work slip between eroticism and death. I 34

Cara Judea Alhadeff MirrormappingsCara Judea Alhadeff from the Self-Portraits Series, Hand Claw #3, 1994 © Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings from the Self-Portraits Series, Hand Claw #3, 1994 © Cara Judea Alhadeff

experience meat, flesh, vulnerability as a raw corpse—was applied” (Krauss, 64). Grandin sees craving, a bridge between the two—Eros and the corpse of both human and animal as Thanatos. unequivocal meat while devoting her life to making the bridge between life and death as “...The struggle between eros and respectful and responsible as possible. death, between chance as the Grandin's squeeze machine, the deep unbridled upsurge of endless pressure device designed to relieve anxiety, is possibility and chance as the used not just for industrial farm animals walking the ultimate version of determination plank, but to help ease human beings diagnosed and control (what Aristotle would with autism. Because my nervous system is so speak of as one form of causality, intimately connected with my erotic sensibilities, namely, the automaton), can be the squeeze machine becomes a reference seen figured here in the very point that forces me to consider my own sexual objects to which this name— desires within the context of death. Reconciling 35

my sex-drive/death-drive feels like Grandin's objects, and bodies (including my own) in such a animals going to slaughter: a Butoh-like surrender way that blurs the lines that separate them. This without fear. Only when I consider how physical luminescent excess inhabits both the domestic pressure arouses me, only then do I allow myself and the animal. The characters become hybrids to settle uncomfortably into the exquisite tension of machine and animal that populate dream-like between Eros and Thanatos. worlds. The quotidian in relation to the sensual I have resisted this pairing for so long. But, spectacle sets up a ritualistic narrative—a collision my body as meat forces me to recognize what of strewn bodies and space is simultaneously Bataille insisted on in his Tears of Eros: purposeful and haphazard. Through a carnal visual language, these polymorphic bodies are “...the end of reason, which engaged in ambiguous ceremonies. exceeds reason is not opposed to the overcoming of reason. In 2004. During the opening for my solo exhibition the violence of the overcoming, in Hamburg, Germany, a musicologist shared his in the disorder of my laughter interpretation of one my photographs. He and my sobbing, in the excess of apologized, expressing his shame: he saw a raptures that shatter me, I seize combination of the train scene in “Some Like It on the similarity between a horror Hot” and a concentration camp. I loved his and a voluptuousness that goes interpretation. Recognizing the perversity of those beyond me, between an co-existing realities—different variations of absurd ultimate pain and an unbearable hysteria—is integral to how I see myself in relation joy!” (Bataille, 20). to the world around me. My photographs explore the body as a membrane between sensuality and Similarly, Thomas Mann’s “the voluptuousness of restraint, surrender and resistance. My intention is doom” invokes the physical and psychological to disrupt the distinction between the interior and uncertainty of the universe—a co-mingling of Eros exterior of both psychological and physical and Thanatos. For me, this relationship lies in the experiences—to fully inhabit the potential of being entangled density of meat—of what it means to meat and living amongst meat. Bataille be meat, to cannibalize meat, to lust after, demands: “If I want to realize totality in my penetrate and be penetrated by meat. consciousness, I have to relate myself to an Still, I resist the slippage between eroticism immense, ludicrous and painful convulsion of all and death, so common in French philosophy and of humanity.” This erotic politics reminds us that psychoanalysis (“Pleasure is so close to ruinous everything we need is already here, it reminds us waste that we refer to the moment of climax as a of the beauty and horror of our 'little death,'” Bataille, Eroticism: Death and interconnectedness. Sensuality, 170). Instead, I cling to experiencing Similarly, Nietzsche’s excess of life suffering the erotic within the context of living life as fully as and pleasure in sublime ecstasy and over-fullness possible. This erotic politics disrupts and reorients (overflowing, abundance, awe, wander, wonder our cultural constructs of pleasure and as creative principles) as a love of the world (a vulnerability, and ultimately who has power and body both separate and within) has been control over our bodies—setting the groundwork tremendously reassuring to me. If we are truly for a citizenship that embraces the fertility of the conscious of ourselves in relation to ourselves and uncanny—the unfamiliar and its accompanying to others, we inhabit the excess of uncanny: “[It] is relational tensions. But then, because of the a figure and experience of what is at once inside complexities inherent in meat, I am thrown once and added on, always already at home yet an again into another contradictory position. This outsider, constitutive yet supplementary...The incongruity resonates with Kathy Acker's uncanny overflows” (Royle, 19). investigation of her own body: the ways in which her meat/muscle developed within her 1980. I found home the first time I visited Le bodybuilding practice. We tear our muscles and Musee Picasso in Paris. As a nine year old they fill in the imposed gaps with new muscle overwhelmingly seduced by Picasso’s contorted fiber, new life. Destruction of muscles leads to bodies, the world suddenly made sense. I rebirth of muscle tissue. Shiva[7], the Hindu God of recognized that this is how we, people, really are. Destruction and Creation, personifies how the This is Integrity. Clarity. Honesty. Picasso's disintegration of individual and social bodies may grotesquely beautiful heads integrated into become vital integration. monstrous forms, helped me feel at ease in my In my photographs, I arrange the space, own body—dissonant and rich with life-affirming 36

energy and sensual and political potential. into my tibia; my aching leg bone awakens me in Bataille’s characters’ plurality of impulses mirror the middle of the night. I am becoming rotten Picasso’s figures. Their “brutal frenzy” and flesh. Although I am convinced I have gangrene, surrender to the “lewd” confirms who I am, who I I feel compelled to photograph my own decay. have always been. Bellmer's displaced body parts The more the inside oozes to the outside, the “as materialization of hysterical conversion better the photographs. This collaboration symptoms”(18) formed his commitment to mind- between my mind and body has served as a body relations. The lush, precise excesses and the perverse, demanding gift, provoking me to fertility of chaos in Bellmer, Picasso, and Bataille photograph myself. For the past 20 years, my spawn an economy of over-abundance, an body has supplied me with inexplicable skin erotics of the uncanny, digesting the stranger afflictions that have become central to my within. photographic material. I am both horrified and Soon after I first visited Le Musee Picasso, I thrilled. saw my first Japanese Butoh dance performance. Wounds (not self-inflicted, that would be I understood the outrageousness of Butoh, like the much too easy!—again, I must emphasize the erotic, as a key to examine the unconscious mind inexplicable, the ineffable, the undecidable, the by plunging into our carnal nature that is often unknowable) are a direct passage between the prohibited and suppressed under both Western concealed and the revealed, a dynamic tension and Eastern social norms. Butoh asks, “What does between the public and the private. Wounds ooze it mean to be incarnate on earth?” Butoh is not the uncanny (ultimate uncertainty). I construct my only performance, but also the embodiment of images as I imagine Kafka must have lived his one of the most precise critical political actions in writing: an inherent openness to others, a “wound the history of consciousness of the body. beauty,” a vulnerability that allows space for the capacity of being wounded—of being receptive, “The dance evokes images of fully alive. The wound is both/and. It inhabits the decay, of fear and dream-logic of the monstrous, the abject. desparation, images of Wounds produce intersections of possibility eroticism, ecstasy and (Kristeva's carrefours [8] ). They embody erotic stillness...the essence of butoh politics— flechten: an interweaving of everything lies in the mechanism through within everything. Wounds convey a which the dancers stops being circumlocution, a radical metaphoricity, a himself and becomes Gordian knot. Wounds, like animals, exist in a someone or something language that is not clear-cut, not else...Perhaps this enables us to comprehensible, containable—they seep, they bring our bodies back to their demand attention. In Kafka's writing, wounding is original state and reconcile us wholly different from cutting. Wounding enlivens, with ourselves and with the it bursts forth, re-vivifying—reminding us that life is world around us. The more you in constant flux, always gaping, incomplete; while adhere to the details of the cutting lives in the prison of conceptual language. body, the more they expand to It simplifies, categorizes, judges, reduces, arrives a cosmological scale. When at a decision along a predetermined path. On you continue that process, the the other hand, “The writer is a wound that purity of the body is incredibly wounds”(Fred Ulfers on Kafka, NYU, 2008). When refined” (Ashikawa Yôko quoted we de-cide, when we uphold the tyrannical in Kurihara 1997, 159). standards of a language of conceptual understanding, the illusion of truth. Inherently Immediately following my first photo session in the leading to judgment, we cut off other possibilities, woods with the cicadas and my naked pokeberry we shut down the fertile liminal zone of juice covered friend, my skin erupts with some undecidability. kind of itchy, pusy, peculiar allergic reaction. The Undecidability, like artifactuality [9], inhabits more I look like I have been infested with flesh- the potential life-affirming shift from “seriousness to eating parasites, the more I cannot resist play.” J. G. Ballard conjures the writer as an active photographing my body's newly acquired dreamer, what I see as a playful prosthetic monstrosities. My initial skin affliction includes an donor: "The fiction is already here, and the role of enormous amber pustule, the size of a 50-cent the writer is to invent the reality." The wound piece, which grew in the middle of my left shin. embodies the art of the allusive. The writings of As it continues to swell, I feel the infection eating Brazilian Jewish novelist Clarice Lispector exemplify 37

the transformative power of this art: “I am alive like rigid gender distinctions and the ways in which we are all so entrenched in the invisibility of sexism. I have a wound, a flower in the flesh.” Similarly, found that fear of human meatiness, our grotesque Heraclitus, known as the Greek Taoist, focused on primal possibilities, actually feeds sexism. A few years the ambiguous relationships of the one to the ago, I was invited to participate in an exhibition many—autonomous yet interconnected. His sponsored by San Francisco’s apparently not so radical description of this enigma is a metaphoric thrust in fetish scene—Women-of-Color BDSM. Among the four which there is always more room for participating photographers, I was the only woman. interpretation—always more room for life. After several months of logistical preparation, my photography entries were abruptly censored by the curator because of our conflicting interpretations of the Notes concept of fetish. She expressed disgust at what she interpreted as placenta coming out of a “man’s“ crotch, and at a woman with hair on her toes. This was an unexpected and an ironically fascinating gender [1] Like Bataille and Bellmer, Kristeva seeks to dissolve reversal. Her bottom-line was that the bodies in the homogeneous normative hierarchies that inhibit the images needed to be unambiguously beautiful, i.e., meatiness of our bodies: “…Kristeva, anxious to forge a hairless, well-groomed, and Gender-Specific: “I believe connection between the somatic and the psychic I stated that there can be nudity, however, it should be (and thus ultimately, the symbolic), sees the pulsatile tasteful, fetish-style sexy, artistic and in keeping with the beat of the drives as the bridge between the body’s 2257 [code] i.e.,: No sexual stimulation, no intercourse, flexion—the spasmodic movement of the glottal or no erect penises, no fingers in vaginas, no spread anal sphincters, for example—and the repetition eagled legs for the women, no spread butt anus shots, necessary to languages’s fundamental spacing, or fisting, pornographic inspired. The images we would articulation. It is from this beat that Kristeva sets up what like to present will give a flavor of the various fetishes. she calls a ‘chora’: “The chora, as rupture and However, many aspects of fetish are about the sexy articulations (rhythm) precedes evidence, verisimilitude, clothes, shoes, props, play toys, hair and makeup…” spatiality, and temporality” (Krauss, 221). When one of the most underground queer sub-cultures in the most “experimental” city in the US is so deeply [2] As a Sephardic Jewish photographer, the rooted in hetero normative patriarchical conventional construction of sight and the History of the Gaze are notions of the real: i.e,. assimilationist consumerism, critical to my understanding of my work. My future sanitized beauty, and psychological comfort, then, as research includes Spinoza’s background as a lens social exiles, where can we go? grinder. This particular occupation has come up Apparently, not across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. numerous times in ironic and exciting contexts, such as One of my images that was censored in San E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sand-Man’s ambiguous itinerant Francisco's City Hall for sexualized interpretations: I was Italian opitician, Giuseppe Coppola (coppo=eye- told (and read in my comment book) the reflected socket), (Freud, pp. 137, 159). The violence and head was seen either as testicles or as hairy breasts, beauty, the grotesque exaggerations, in Bataille’s was censored in the Oakland Federal Building for L’Histoire de L’Oeil offer obvious connections. racialized interpretations: it happened to be Black History Month—the head in my photograph was seen [3] Poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant conjures a as a head, as opposed to testicles and breasts, but a collective “desire to go against the [monolingual] head of enslaved bodies. Also, the justification for root...The root is not important. Movement is. Center removing this particular image included comments and periphery are equivalent...[This relationship about the monks who had been recently burned in involves] revelatory wanderings: spiral retelling; Tibet, and also references to the Oklahoma Federal dialectics of rerouting, asserting...political strength but, Building Bombing—as if I was depicting and even simultaneously, the rhizome of a multiple relationship celebrating the mutilated, fragmented bodies of with the Other and basing every community's reason subjugated ethnic others. for existence on a modern form of the sacred, which would be, all in all, Poetics of Relation” (Glissant, 16). [6] One interpretation of a Hindu creation myth is when Brahma creates Sarasvati, the earth. He wants to have [4] “Kristeva’s theorization of the abject had a very sex with her, but she tries to evade him by continually different starting point from Bataille’s, one that was not transforming herself into another creature. With each primarily social—for all its chapters based on the transformation, Brahma tracks her down: “She anthropology of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger— became a cow, but he found her and became a but part philosophical and part psychoanalytic”(Krauss, bull. He made love with her [i.e., raped] and cattle 237). were born. Then she became a mare and he a stallion, she a ewe and he a ram. So the continued [5] The more discussions I have with viewers about my creating all the creatures”(Priya Hemenway, Hindu work, the more I witness the infinite complexities of how Gods: the spirit of the divine. 2003. San Francisco: pleasure and difference are regulated—in particular, Chronicle Books, 27).

38 Peter Lang. Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. New York:, 1993.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Indianapolis: [7] “Shiva is the link between lives (death) and between Indiana Press, 1995. moments (eternity). He is known as the fathomless abyss” (Hemenway, 32). Gusfield, Joseph R. "Nature's Body and the Metaphors of Food," Cultivating [8] “The abject would thus be this intermediary Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Michele Lamont position—neither subject nor object—for which the psychiatric term ‘borderline’ would prove to be and Marcel Fournier, Eds., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. extremely useful…In this, Kristeva’s conception of the Haraway, Donna, "Cyborg Manifesto" in Feminism/Postmodernism, Linda J. abject is curiously congruent with Sartre’s Nicholson, Ed., New York: Routledge, 1990. characterization of the visqueux (slimy), a condition of matter that is neither liquid nor solid, but somewhere Hemenway, Priya, Hindu Gods: the spirit of the divine.. San Francisco: midway between the two” (Krauss, 237, 238). Chronicle Books, 2003.

[9] Artifactuality, the reference is to Bernard Stiegler Hollibaugh, Amber, "Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in Passion and and Jacques Derrida, in the book "Echographie de Pleasure," Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Carole Vance, Ed., Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. la television” [Polity Press]. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge, 1981.

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Giroux, Henry A. "Pedagogy and the Critical Practice of Photography," Taylor, Sue. “Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body.” Mary Louise Reynolds Collection, The Afterimage. November, 1992. University of Chicago.

Turner, Bryan S. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Weber, Sam. Lectures on The Uncanny, European Graduate Studies Program, June, 2008.

Ulfers, Fred. Lectures on Nietzsche, European Graduate Studies Program, June, 2008.

Zizek, Slajov. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Other Related Dates. London: Verson, 2002.

Zizek, S. Lectures at NYU in Avital Ronell's Antigone and Hegel class, October, 2009.

Cara Judea Alhadeff, born in Boulder, Colorado, has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US, Europe, and Asia; receiving awards in surrealist, erotic photography and interdisciplinary art. Her writing and photographs have been published in European art journals and television programs. She recently exhibited her large-format color photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and continues to be part of their permanent collection. Cara Judea's work has been exhibited and reviewed with Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin, Sally Mann, Alfredo Jarr, John Coplans, and Dieter Appelt. Because her images have been subject to censorship on both US coasts, Freedom of Speech organizations such as artsave/People for the American Way have publicly defended her photographs. Currently, she is exhibiting in galleries, museums, and international art fairs in Germany, Portugal, Zurich and Belgium.

THE BIOMECHANICS

OF OBJECTS

Simone Racheli’s work is challenging and visionary. Through the simulation of biomechanical objects the artist questions our relationship with the world around us, and the psychological and philosophical ties we become

entangled with. Here he discusses his work in an exclusive interview with Zoe Peled. Questions by Zoe Peled Translation by Giovanni Aloi

imone Racheli has developed an materials of anatomical description with the “re- international reputation over the creation of evolutionary slants” of today’s biotechnology re- S fascinatingly disturbing objects combining invention of the idea of the body and I have the tradition of the Duchampian ready-made with aimed at representing its unsettling resultants. that of scientific of anatomical models. The artist, Florence born, trained primarily as a sculptor at An iron, a mixer. a bicycle, a chair. Why Florence’s Fine Arts Academy. In this interview did you choose to construct inanimate Racheli discusses his ‘meat-objects, the objects, and why did you select these signification of meat in his own work and why he specific ones? has been busy creating motorbikes and irons that resemble anatomical human-animal models. My work does not intentionally comment on household realities per se. However, domestic Pieces such as Telaio Bicicletta, Ferro da objects are transformed from contingent bodies Stiro, and Frullino, (Bicycle Frame, Iron to abstracted entities. I privilege the use of this and Spindle Mixer) are just three examples group of objects as it suggests a closer relational presenting a shift towards the “ hyper- introspection of the viewers own social reality. The real.” What prompted this shift? objects I transfigure are those with which we share our everyday life. Our society is “patho-plastic” as I started to look for a way that would enable me it self-forms its pathologies and likewise, objects to represent reality with its contradictions and are manipulated matter, adapted by man. monstrosity, as today’s reality does not coincide Through this manipulation, it is only to be with itself anymore. I became more interested in expected that objects may reflect pathological highlighting a “un-identity” of man with man and elements of society. of things with things. It is in the crevices between At first glance, my objects may appear as these disjointed entities that my works function. impossible anatomical sections of bodies that Therefore these works may seem as unlikely cannot function but a second look will reveal objects but simultaneously are part of reality. them as familiar ones. In front of these bodies I also tried to understand more closely how things suspended between the anatomical model and are inside, from an intimate perspective and I the electrical appliance, the viewer is brought to have used a suitable vision for this purpose, that reflect on their identity and diversity. of anatomy. I have fused the techniques and

Simone Racheli Ferro da stiro, (Iron) 2006 plastic, papier mache, wax. cm12.5x15x27h. Courte sy of PaoloMaria Deanesi Gallery © Simone Racheli

Simone Racheli Asciugacapelli, (Blow-drier) 2007 plastic, papier mache, wax. cm25x26x11h. Courtesy of PaoloMaria Deanesi Gallery © Simone Racheli

Several artists are eminent for the objects made of meat, both real and incorporation of meat in their respective fake? practices, two of which we will discuss later on in the interview. Of every other I guess that in a sense it means to cover the material that you could have chosen to object with a level of humanity whilst assuming a imitate, why did you select meat? critical approach to society. It means caricaturizing the everyday and in the case of my Meat represents the sensitive, the animal, man. objects this is achieved in the space existing The representation of meat creates a similitude as between the farcical and the dramatic. These it brings us together with the represented object. It objects function as a metaphor to our sleepy is only with the imitation of meat that I have been conscience, drunk by the excessive reality that able to blur the boundaries between real and brings us to become accustomed to the irrational fantastic as meat embodies a sense of reassuring and the ethically vacant. quotidianity. I have chose to copy meat because my My New York, part of the 2002 Whitney objects are anatomical models and therefore Biennal, was a performance piece by imply the concept of imitation. These objects are multidisciplinary artist Zhang Huan. generated as the resultant of the fact that objects Wearing a muscle suit made entirely of are not the opposite of the ego, but are instead steak, Huan transformed himself into a augmentations of human qualities and abilities. piece of meat and walked the streets of The imaginary anatomies of which my objects are New York. His work spoke of many themes, made highlight therefore the abstract side of the ranging from bodily restrictions, to relationship between men and objects. concerns of self-identity. Despite bearing the physical stature of a body builder, What does it mean for an artist to produce Huan has discussed the vulnerability he felt while wearing the suit. Why do you 43

Simone Racheli Frullino (mixer) 2006 iron, papier mache, wax. cm27x17x8h. Courtesy of PaoloMaria Deanesi Gallery © Simone Racheli 44

Simone Racheli Telaio di Bicicletta, (Bicycle Frame) 2006 iron, papier mache, wax. cm116x41x78h. Courtesy of PaoloMaria Deanesi Gallery © Simone Racheli

think he selected raw meat to discuss of meat in Schneemann’s piece is vulnerability? dramatically different from that of Huan, as she uses the material to represent In this performance the artist adds a layer of meat sexuality and eroticism. Establishing itself to his vulnerable body as a protective shield as a diverse material to work with, how creating some sort of super-body. However, this does something that was used to too is one that cannot escape decay reassessing represent vulnerability and fragility the inherent fragility of anything made of meat. become something used to speak of Meat is indeed a live matter subject to sexual empowerment and celebration of corruptibility; degeneration through time. This is the body? the condition of what “is”. This causes anxiety and avoids the unavoidable we put on masks and Meat can embody many different meanings and manipulate our looks. This of course is only a every artist seems to exploit a personal temporary solution to an irreversible process. perspective on the overall signification of such material. However I think that the softness and Carolee Schneemann performed Meat moist qualities of meat most readily suggest links Joy in 1964, shortly after Body Art gained to “the erotic”, but the smell of blood of mutilated in popularity in 1960. Male and female corpses and guts may bring to very different actors covered their bodies in meat realms. carcasses, raw fish, chicken parts, sausages and blood, writhing suggestively During my studies, the majority of my work and interacting sexually with both human sought to investigate and discuss the and animal alike. Taste, smell, touch and relationship of animals and artwork. Last sound were all employed within the piece. year, I gave a public lecture, titled “ Bearing obvious sexual resonance, the use Animals and Art: Provocative or 45

Simone Racheli Lampada, (Lamp) 2007 wood, papier mache, wax. cm15x48x54h. Courtesy of PaoloMaria Deanesi Gallery © Simone Racheli

Progressive”. The central inquiry of the discussion asked: where do we draw the line when using animals (dead and alive) in artwork? Who is responsible for drawing the line in the first place, and how may we, as both artists and viewers, serve to respect it?

I believe that the abuse, torture and death of any being is unacceptable, especially when not indispensible. But I do not in principle object to works of art involving the presence of animals, as long as they are of course treated with dignity and with an underlying respect for life. However, I find it particularly troubling that art, in the aim of creating discussion at all costs may simultaneously contribute to brutality.

What are you currently working on?

I am still considering the relationship between us and objects in consideration of the ego. My work will continue to explore the domestic sphere as well as the urban one. The aesthetic of the finished works will be different, but my enquiry on society and men will be further explored.

Simone Racheli was born in Florence in 1966. He studied at the Academy of Art in Florence and currently lives in Rome. He is one of the most prominent internationally contemporary Italian sculptures and has been extensively exhibited both in Italy and abroad.

Simone Racheli was interviewed by Antennae in Summer 2010 Antennae

THE PROBLEMATIC

EXP OSURE OF FLESH

For over a decade, plastinator Gunter von Hagen has enraged and fascinated audiences around the world through his always controversial Body World shows. His work is carried out in the name of education but at times ethical considerations around his work tend to focus on the inappropriateness of some displays. We interviewed the

scientist/artist as his show focusing on plastinated animals hits the road. Questions by Giovanni Aloi

Text by The Institution for Plastination

unther von Hagens' life reads like an The family lived briefly in Berlin and its archetypal scientist's resume— vicinity, before finally settling in Greiz, a small town distinguished by early precocity, where von Hagens remained until the age of 19. G scholarship, discovery, experimentation, As a child, he was diagnosed with a rare bleeding and invention. It is also the profile of a man disorder that restricted his activities and required shaped by extraordinary events, and marked by long bouts of hospitalization that he says, fostered defiance and daring. Von Hagens' two year in him a sense of alienation and nonconformity. imprisonment by East German authorities for At age 6, von Hagens nearly died and was in political reasons, his release after a $20,000 intensive care for many months. His daily payment by the West German government, his encounters there with doctors and nurses left an pioneering invention that halts decomposition of indelible impression on him, and ignited in him a the body after death and preserves it for didactic desire to become a physician. He also showed eternity, his collaboration with donors including his an interest in science from an early age, best friend, who willed and entrusted their bodies reportedly "freaking out" at the age of twelve to him for dissection and public display, and his during the Russian launch of Sputnik into space. "I role as a teacher carrying on the tradition of was the school authority and archivist on Sputnik," Renaissance anatomists, make his a remarkable he said. life in science. Anatomist, inventor of Plastination, In 1965, von Hagens entered medical and creator of Body Worlds—The Original school at the University of Jena, south of Leipzig, Exhibitions of Real Human Bodies—von Hagens and the birthplace of writers Schiller and Goethe. (christened Gunther Gerhard Liebchen) was born His unorthodox methods and flamboyant in 1945, in Alt-Skalden, Posen, Poland—then part personality were remarkable enough to be noted of Germany. To escape the imminent and on academic reports from the university. "Gunther eventual Russian occupation of their homeland, Liebchen is a personality who does not approach his parents placed the five-day-old infant in a tasks systematically. This characteristic and his laundry basket and began a six-month trek west imaginativeness, that sometimes let him forget by horse wagon. 48

Gunter von Hagens Blood Vessel Configuration of a Rooster © Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany,

Gunter von Hagens Midsagittal Slices of a Male and Female Body © Gunther von Hagens,50 Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany, about reality, occasionally led to the after obtaining his medical degree, he joined the development of very willful and unusual ways of Department of Anesthesiology and Emergency working-but never in a manner that would have Medicine at Heidelberg University, where he harmed the collective of his seminary group. On came to a realization that his pensive mind was the contrary, his ways often encouraged his fellow unsuitable for the tedious routines demanded of students to critically review their own work." an anesthesiologist. In June 1975, he married Dr. While at the university, von Hagens began Cornelia von Hagens, a former classmate, and to question Communism and Socialism, and adopted her last name. The couple had three widened his knowledge of politics by gathering children, Rurik, Bera, and Tona. In 1975, while information from Western news sources. He later serving as a resident and lecturer-the start of an participated in student protests against the eighteen year career at the university's Institute of invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact Pathology and Anatomy-von Hagens invented troops. In January, 1969, in the guise of a Plastination, his groundbreaking technology for vacationing student, von Hagens made his way preserving anatomical specimens with the use of across Bulgaria and Hungary, and on January 7th, reactive polymers. "I was looking at a collection of attempted to cross the Czechoslovakian border specimens embedded in plastic. It was the most into Austria and freedom. He failed, but made a advanced preservation technique then, where second attempt the very next day, at another the specimens rested deep inside a transparent location along the border. This time the authorities plastic block. I wondered why the plastic was detained him. "While I was in detention, a poured and then cured around the specimens sympathetic guard left a window open for me so rather than pushed into the cells, which would that I could escape. I hesitated and couldn't stabilize the specimens from within and literally make up my mind, and that decision cost me a allow you to grasp it." He patented the method great deal," he says. Gunther von Hagens was and over the next six years, von Hagens spent all arrested, extradited to East Germany, and his energies refining his invention. In Plastination, imprisoned for two years. Only 23 years old at the the first step is to halt decomposition. "The time, the iconoclastic von Hagens was viewed as deceased body is embalmed with a formalin a threat to the socialist way of life, and therefore injection to the arteries, while smaller specimens in need of rehabilitation and citizenship are immersed in formalin. After dissection, all education. According to the prison records for bodily fluids and soluble fat in the specimens are Gunther Liebchen, "The prisoner is to be trained to then extracted and replaced through vacuum- develop an appropriate class consciousness so forced impregnation with reactive resins and that in his future life, he will follow the standards elastomers such as silicon rubber and epoxy," he and regulations of our society. The prisoner is to says. After posing of the specimens for optimal be made aware of the dangerousness of his way teaching value, they are cured with light, heat, or of behaving, and in doing so, the prisoner's certain gases. The resulting specimens or conclusions of his future behavior as a citizen of plastinates assume rigidity and permanence. "I the social state need to be established." am still developing my invention further, even Thirty-six years after his incarceration, today, as it is not yet perfect," he says. During this Gunther von Hagens finds meaning and even time, von Hagens started his own company, redemption in his lost years. "The deep friendships BIODUR Products, to distribute the special I formed there with other prisoners, and the terrible polymers, equipment, and technology used for aspects of captivity that I was forced to Plastination to medical institutions around the overcome through my fantasy life, helped shape globe. Currently, more than 400 institutions in 40 my sense of solidarity with others, my reliance on countries worldwide use Gunther von Hagens' my own mind and body when denied freedom, invention to preserve anatomical specimens for and my capacity for endurance. All that I learned medical instruction. In 1983, Catholic Church in prison helped me later in my life as a scientist." figures asked Dr. von Hagens to plastinate the In 1970, after West Germany's purchase of his heel bone of St. Hildegard of Bingen, (1090-1179), freedom, von Hagens enrolled at the University of a beatified mystic, theologian, and writer revered Lubeck to complete his medical studies. Upon in Germany. His later offer to perform Plastination on Pope John Paul II foundered before serious graduation in 1973, he took up residency at a discussions. In 1992, von Hagens married Dr. hospital on Heligoland-a duty free island where Angelina Whalley, a physician who serves as his the access to cheap liquor resulted in a Business Manager as well as the designer of the substantial population of alcoholics. A year later, Body Worlds exhibitions. A year later, Dr. von 51

Gunter von Hagens

Hagens founded the Heidelberg-based Institute says, the burden he must bear as a public for Plastination, which offers plastinated anatomist and teacher. "The anatomist alone is specimens for educational use and for Body assigned a specific role-he is forced in his daily Worlds, which premiered in Japan in 1995. To work to reject the taboos and convictions that date, the exhibitions have been viewed bymore people have about death and the dead. I myself than 28 million people, in cities countries across am not controversial, but my exhibitions are, Europe, Asia, and North America. His continued because I am asking viewers to transcend their efforts to present the exhibitions, even in the face fundamental beliefs and convictions about our of opposition and often blistering attacks are, he joint and inescapable fate." 52

Apparently determined to exhaust the limits of College of Dentistry. He is currently in the process living in freedom, Dr. von Hagens has made a of designing the first anatomy curriculum in the concerted effort to travel and propagate his United States that will use plastinated specimens interests around the globe. He accepted a visiting in lieu of dissection. professorship at Dalian Medical University in China Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibitions are in 1996, and became director of the Plastination currently showing in North America. "The human research center at the State Medical Academy in body is the last remaining nature in a man made Bishkek/Kyrgyzstan. In 2001, he founded a private environment," he says. "I hope for the exhibitions company, the Von Hagens Dalian Plastination to be places of enlightenment and Ltd., in Dalian, China, which currently employs a contemplation, even of philosophical and staff of 250. In 2004, Dr. von Hagens began a religious self recognition, and open to visiting professorship at the New York University interpretation regardless of the background and 53

philosophy of life of the viewer." cost 3.5 million Euro to produce; it would have cost substantially more to complete in Germany. Body Worlds was first presented in Tokyo in 1995. The exhibition has since been Body World 3 featured the plastinated hosted by more than 50 museums and body of a giraffe which took three years to venues in North America, Europe, and complete – ten times longer the length Asia. Aside from the huge controversy that usually required by the plastination of the the displays initially received, what do you human body. Why did it take so long and think audiences take home from their what were the challenges involved? visit? The challenge with the giraffe was that we BODY WORLDS has been presented in 60 cities on needed to understand the detailed anatomy of three continents since its world premiere in 1995. this animal, including every small muscle up to a The exhibitions encourage people to reflect upon level not yet described in scientific or even the fleeting nature of life, and the habits and teaching literature. We thus had to spend a lot of lifestyles which impinge on individual wellbeing time on documentation. Since the giraffe was and longevity. Comparative anatomy of healthy monumental, we required additional Plastination organs and those in distress or disease encourage hardware such as lifting devices and large cooled visitors to consider habits such as poor nutrition, dehydration and polymer impregnation unhealthy diets, smoking, and substance and containers. So we had to add the acquisition of alcohol consumption. this hardware to the manufacturing time of the first Our frequent polling and post-visit surveys giraffe we plastinated. Ultimately, the indicate 10% of visitors saying that they smoked manufacture of this first giraffe took us 15,000 less and consumed less alcohol after their visit to working hours. the exhibition, 33% following a healthier diet, 25% engaging in more sports activities, and 14% Why did you deice to have a giraffe in the becoming more aware of their body. show?

Almost 340 assistants work in five different As the high public interest into dinosaurs shows, laboratories around the world in order to the general public loves the gigantic aspect of create the plastinated bodies for the life on earth. The museum audience is always show. The one located in China keen on superlatives – the bigger, the better! They specializes in animal bodies. Are there want to be astonished. And a standing giraffe is specific issues involved with the handling the tallest animal on earth with a height of 5 of animal bodies that justify this work meters. Especially the 50 centimeters long tongue being carried in China, or is it simply a is absolutely fascinating. The giraffe can use it like coincidence? a hand and is able to grab leaves from the trees with it. Moreover, I believe, it is the most funny Between 1995 and 2007, I educated 83 Chinese animal on earth with its long legs and long neck, curators and medical doctors in dissection in but a ridiculous short body. Heidelberg, Germany. Thus, the main human resource for Plastination skills is Chinese. In In 2003, Body Worlds included the addition, the Chinese mentality results in a more plastinated body of a Gorilla which was careful, skillful and patient approach to the donated by Hanover Zoo (Germany) where specimens. Their dexterity and fine muscle the animal had died of natural causes. coordination which is fundamental for high quality Animal rights organization filed a results, is far superior compared to German skills. complaint alleging that key paperwork There are structures in the human body, such as allowing for the plastination of the body the nerve knot which regulates the blood pressure were missing and the case went to court. (glomus caroticus) that are routinely dissected in Eventually you won the case and the China in anatomy classes, whereas in Germany animal was re-instated in the show. Why this is considered an impossible task. do you think animal rights activist The plastination of large animals is a huge intervened? Do you receive much undertaking and China offers the most financially resistance from animal rights activists with viable means to do so. The elephant “Samba” \ regards to the inclusion of animal bodies in your shows?

Because the reported complaint was based on What are the main differences involved in unfounded suspicion, the court dismissed the the plastination of animal bodies and case. Since the Gorilla complaint, we have not human bodies? faced noticeable opposition from animal right groups. It is now more widely understood that we The art of mastering the Plastination do not kill animals for Plastination, but that we technology is to avoid shrinkage. At best, the acquire already deceased animals from zoos tissue swells rather than shrinking. A special and others. By introducing plastinated animals in challenge is to permeate the dense connective teaching classes, we reduce the need for live tissue which encases muscles and organs as so animal dissections in bio-labs. Plastination is called fascias which secure the shape of muscles increasingly viewed as a method which supports and organs just as the so-called general the aims of animal protection groups rather than superficial body fasciae adds to the shape of the doing harm to the animals. whole body. The connective tissue as a whole is 55

therefore also called “the organ of body shape”. Most people are fascinated and even thankful as No doubt that the fascias in large animals such as we can see from their comments in our visitor´s horses, giraffes or elephants is much denser and books. Also students, professors, veterinarians and therefore more difficult to be impregnated with taxidermists find that the exhibition conveys 3D- polymer during vacuum forced impregnation. The anatomical knowledge that can never be shown readiness of shrinkage is much higher compared in 2D, whether in books or on TV. The large to human tissue. The denser connective tissue of transparent slices of large animals such as a large animals is the reason why the plastination horizontal slice through an adult elephant reveals process (acetone dehydration, defatting and interesting facts such as the position of the ovaries polymer impregnation) takes two to three times as never seen before, Those views support the longer than in human specimens. The sheer appreciation of efforts to care for protected volume of large animal tissue poses another endangered animals. problem which is overcome by cutting the muscles into stripes of 5 cm thickness which then One of the main ethical concerns have to be fused again before curing. Achieving revolving around the staging of human proper curing of the silicone polymers of bodies in Body World is that the bodies in cancerogeneous tissue poses another problem in questions are donated by their owners Plastination, because such tissue acts within the through the signing of documents prior to polymer simply as an impurity which retards or their deaths. How is this issue resolved in prevents proper curing. Animals rarely dye from the use of animal bodies? cancer. Therefore this problem does mainly arise in human tissue. The amount of tissue fat also has The animals on display all died of natural causes. to be taken into consideration. The relative They are donations from national and amount of fat within the bones, for example, is international zoos and animal parks as well as much less in large animals where bones contain from private persons who in the majority like to much more inorganic strengthening material such remain anonymous. Others agree with the as calcium. Because of this hardness, the sawing publication of the origin of the animals, such as of plastinated sheets from large animals requires the Hanover Zoo that donated gorilla "Artis" or the special bandsaw blades and proves especially Zoo Neunkirchen that donated the two elephants tricky. "Samba" and "Chiana" and a giraffe to the The experienced plastinator takes those Institute for Plastination. The Institute is dependent and other differences into account and will on animal donations and always interested in always achieve superior results over those who do future donations. not care about the differences. This is actually the reason why specimens in copycat exhibitions In presenting the human body you have often look so much inferior in quality. gone as far as staging different mundane occurrences involving sportsmen and Body World of Animals has recently lovers. How is the animal body presented opened at Neunkirchen Zoo, Germany. Is in your new exhibition? this exhibition, like the original Body Worlds going to tour the world, and is it going to All animals are presented in natural and true-to- be directly associated with zoos? life positions. Some of them like elephant “Samba” or the giraffe are expanded so that the The world premiere of our Body Worlds of Animals viewer can see the physiology of these giants in the zoo of Neunkirchen/Germany was a huge better. This is done without the sacrifice of having success, with more than117,000 visitors in 90 to take parts away since in plastinated days. We will be presenting this exhibition in zoos specimens, hardened soft tissue such as muscles and natural history and scientific museums can take over holding function, Other animals are around the world. presented in thin sagittal slices.

You claim that the show “will increase Can plastination be applied to insects appreciation for animals, especially and plants? endangered species, and remind us all of our obligation to animal welfare.” How Insects and plants are already being plastinated, have audiences reacted to the show so predominately as slices, because the scientific far? benefit of plastinated plant and insect slices is

Gunter von Hagens

naturally higher than to just preserve the insects and plants as a whole.

Gunther Liebchen was born in a Jewish family in Poznan, Poland. A haemophiliac, he grew up in East Germany and as a child spent six months in hospital after cutting himself. This stimulated an interest in medicine, and in 1965 he commenced studies in medicine at the University of Jena. He was arrested after political protests and an attempt to escape to West Germany. West Germany bought his freedom in 1970 and he continued his medical studies in Lübeck, and received a doctorate in 1975 from the University of Heidelberg. There he would work at the Institutes of Anatomy and Pathology as a lecturer for twenty years.

Gunther von Hagens was interviewed by Antennae in Summer 2010 Antennae

M EAT MATTERS

Meat is the moment when what remained hidden to us is opened up. The animal's insides become outsides. Its depth of form becomes a surface, and its depth of being becomes the thin lifelessness of an object exposed. Meat makes the animal insides visible, and through sight, the animal body becomes knowable. And while meat serves as a means for us to take in the animal visually and intellectually, it also marks the moment when the animal becomes physically consumable. Text by Ron Broglio

n meat there is a transformation from living to Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything dead, from hidden to revealed, and from (1996), to whole animals in formaldehyde, as with Iindigestible to edible. As the marker of this Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same change, meat has a visceral materiality. The Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (1991) material form of dead animal flesh is haunted by and Away from the Flock (1994). In some of these the trace of a life transformed into an object pieces, the animals or their parts are placed on through the violence of death. The willful life of an shelves as if in a natural-history exhibit or in a animal becomes an object that shows little ability biology laboratory; in others, the use of livestock to resist human understanding, manipulation, and animals—cattle, pigs, and sheep—recalls cutting consumption. animals for consumption. Many of Damien Hirst's best-known works Hirst has a long-standing interest in grapple with the seemingly alchemical, violent medical specimens. This fascination is evident in transformation of life to death, and opaque to an early show he curated called Modern knowable, as animals become meat. To Medicine (1989), and in his more developed understand the significance of such alchemy, this works that explicitly use laboratory instruments and chapter traces meat as the metaphysical specimens. Hirst’s citation of dissection and moment when the animal is killed for full vivisection provides a means of reading his use of presence, material, and meaning. Nature is laid animals as material for art. By leveraging this bare, made lifeless and exposed, in order to be history of cutting open animals, the artist is plying subsumed within cultural intelligibility. At the same animal death as an avenue for human time, the notion that nature can be made fully knowledge of nature and of ourselves, or as Hirst present to us is worth reconsidering. How do the says: "That whole idea of killing things to look at metaphors of “nature hiding” and “nature them." [i] As we shall see with Francis Bacon, one revealed” ground our understanding of animals, does not simply "look at them," but the insides are and how might we begin to think outside of this exposed as a visually accessible outside to be predominate approach to nature? interrogated for the benefit of human knowledge. Hirst has created a number of works that The relationship between meat and involve whole animals or cut-up animal parts. knowing can be found in Bacon's justification for These works range from animal parts in jars or dissection and vivisection. For this seventeen- tanks of formaldehyde, as in The Lovers' Cabinets century natural scientist, knowledge attained in (1991) and Some Comfort Gained from the cutting open animals helps restore humans to an

Edenic world. Such claims about the ability of impetus to lift the veil on nature and reveal what science to restore human well-being are furthered has been kept hidden from us. As shall be seen by G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy. For Hegel, through below, cutting animals open serves as one way of dialectic tension, the material world is subsumed lifting the veil, exposing the interiors as visually by consciousness into full knowledge and accessible exteriors. intelligibility. In his Encyclopedia, eating becomes Heraclitus' aphorism sets up an the transformation of dead matter into life, and antagonistic relationship with nature. Revealing intellectual consumption transforms matter into nature would be to go against its pleasures; what self-presence. These valences of dissection and nature "loves" is to hide. We go against nature's consumption provide a means of grappling with nature for the sake of human knowledge. Nature Hirst's work. At the same time, as we shall see hidden by a veil heightens the metaphors of throughout this chapter, meat is never simply the penetration, violence, and denuding, which animal made intelligible; meat has its own become the operative images of revealing and frictions that prevent human intellectual and knowing nature: for the sake of our pleasure in physical consumption of the animal. knowing, we rend the veil of nature's pleasure. In the spirit of Heraclitus, the early Cutting Open modern essayist Bacon pursues his experimental inquiry into various properties of nature. While Mother and Child, Divided (1993) is Hirst's first work Bacon's experimental method is not the detailed to display the full bodies of large animals cut procedures of modern science, his trials are novel open. The work leads to his winning the Turner Prize in their attempt to ground knowledge on in 1995. In this particular piece, the artist has repeatable experiences rather than on bisected the bodies of a cow and a calf by speculative reasoning alone. He models his cutting each from head to tail. The halves are inquiries into nature on early modern trial then encased in glass tanks of formaldehyde. The inquisitions; [iv] nature is on trial and must be four tanks with the animal halves are separated by tested in order to find its secrets. Because nature a narrow space of a few feet, and the calf and hides, artificial means are necessary to pry open cow are placed one in front of the other. The its truths: "The secrets of nature are better revealed animals appear to be pristine specimens in some under the torture of experiments than when they sort of natural-history display. Viewers are often follow their natural course." [v] Bacon's Novum repulsed or shocked at the visceral materiality of Organum, or "new instrument," provides both a the sculpture, yet at the same time are captured logic and an empirical instrumentation for by wonder at the insides of these domesticated experimenting on nature, or torturing "her" into animals. It is a double reaction often provoked by confessing what remained hidden. Its methods Hirst's work: a repulsion at the materiality of the are intended to supplant the speculative theory piece, and an intellectual curiosity about the and logic of Aristotle's Organum, which, at the animal and the making of the work. Hirst time, held sway in science and natural history. succinctly describes this: "Animals become meat. Bacon shows a similar spirit of inquiry in That's abstract." [ii] This move from material to his earlier work, The Advancement of Learning: abstraction is essential for understanding Hirst, as "Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering well as the historical and philosophical tradition of and penetrating into these holes and corners, dissection that informs his work. when the inquisition of truth is his whole object."[vi] Many pursuits of knowledge about Caroline Merchant parallels Bacon's inquiry into nature are conducted under the simple claim nature with "the interrogations of the witch trials made by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: and the mechanical devices used to torture "Nature loves to hide." Like much of Heraclitus' witches," including "the supposed sexual crimes work, this aphorism is incredibly suggestive, while and practices of witches." [vii] Added to the leaving basic assumptions and details unspoken. metaphor of nature as veiled and hiding secrets is His phrase has generally been taken to mean that that of witchery with its magical practices that nature veils itself, or that the essential nature of defy human understanding. Bacon's method was things is hidden. [iii] It is not simply that nature to bring nature from its hiding places into the light, remains unknown, but rather that it is in the nature from distance into full presence, and from of nature to hide. It "loves" to hide; its proclivity is witchery into reason and intelligibility. He shifts to remain unknown and out of human grasp. If nature from interiors, unseen and unknowable, to nature hides, it is not infinitely unknowable; rather, interiors, cut open as exteriors exposed for human hiding implies its opposite—finding. Inquiry from accessibility. the Greeks on has taken Heraclitus' phrase as Bacon's job is that of inversion: turning 59

the "holes and corners" inside out, and so bringing turned inside out and so made into easily the corners nearer and making the dark holes into reachable surfaces and nonvacuous objects. It is visible surfaces. Implicit in the Novum Organum is worth asking: Why can nature not retain holes and what contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida corners? Why must it become objective being calls the logic of presence. Simon Lumsden that can be disclosed to the human knower? It is summarizes Derrida's position thus: "This a set of questions that will be pursued throughout metaphysics of presence aspires to master this chapter, and a haunting witchery throughout objective being, it claims that being can be subsequent chapters as well. understood in Heidegger's terms ontically, and The metaphysics of presence is most that being is definable and knowable. Being is lucidly illustrated in Bacon's rhetoric concerning presented exclusively as something perceived, dissection and vivisection, where the prelapserian intuited and known, and is thereby reduced to an state of Adam's knowing and naming animals is expression of the perceiving and knowing restored by scientific inquiry. In Genesis, God subject." [viii] As Derrida notes, being, as a gave to Adam "dominion over the fish of the sea, fundamental category for an object, is here and over the birds of the air, and over every living dependent upon human perception. We make thing that moveth upon the earth." [ix] God brings things in nature present by our attention to them; each creature before Adam, who then names they become present to us. In the human them; he calls them by their name. [x] This original demand for intelligible presence, the vacuous act of naming is equated with knowing. The nature of holes and corners becomes objects of eighteenth-century physician Benjamin West calls scrutiny to be filled or penetrated or, better yet, natural history "the first study of the father of 60

mankind, in the garden of Eden." [xi] After the Fall and the word coincide, there is and the babble that follows in its wake, naming as no distinction between the knowing is lost. The difference between Adam signifier and the signified, the and the rest of us is succinctly summarized by inside and the outside. . . . Bacon's contemporary Thomas Adam in his What exists beyond, as a third Meditations Upon Some Part of the Creed: term—the referent—is the experimenter. There will always Thus God gaue the nature to be someone performing the his creatures, Adam must giue experiment, seeing the insides the name: to shew they were and the outsides, and it is the made for him, they shall be experimenter who is Bacon's what hee will vnto him. If human “for whensoever he shall Adam had onely called them be able to call the creatures by by the names which God their true names he shall again imposed, this had been the command them.” Adam the praise of his memory: but now original namer, is the great to denominate them vivisector: he sees beneath the himselfe, was the approval of skins. [Advocating vivisection as his Iudgement. At the first sight knowledge and control,] hee perceiued their Bacon's Eden is never Edenic dispositions, and so named for the animal.[xiii] them as God had made them. Hee at first saw all their Nature is turned inside out. The animal interiors insides, we his posterity ever become exteriors to be named and known. In since, with all our experience, cutting and opening the animal body, its witchery can see but their skinnes. [xii] and mystery are turned aside by the knife. Holes and corners become open surfaces that are As Erica Fudge notes in Perceiving viewable, namable, and knowable. Unlike Animals, Adam's ability to name beasts is vacuous dark holes and corners, surfaces equated with his ability to see deeply. Such sight become pliable objects under human dominion. was a gift given to him by God. Through naming In cutting, the experimenter changes the animal animals, the whole of the animal is made present and its otherness into flesh as an object to Adam and is knowable. Adam knows animals consumed by reason. As Bacon explains in The through and through. For Bacon and his New Atlantis, science is set upon the "enlarging of contemporaries, banishment from Eden resulted the bounds of human empire." [xiv] in our inability to perceive animals and thus Through empirical investigation, Bacon through perception, understand them. After the wants to transform the world into intelligible Fall, language is fractured and no longer objects. Underlying his method is an unspoken coincides with the fullness of being of the things metaphysics of presence in which all of nature is named. So, for Bacon, where language and opened to and made present by and for human perception lack utility, science must make up the inquiry. The foreignness of nature is overcome. In difference. terms of animals, their strange and mysterious God gives Adam the ability to see the worlds and lives are transformed through death essence, the nature or ontic being of each into objects of knowledge. Bacon justifies such animal. His seeing and naming are a knowing by violence as an act of dominion by which man which the intelligible aspect of each animal reinstates his preeminence and grasps at his becomes the truth of this animal. Here signifier prelapsarian state. Once placed on the and signified, sign and object, representation and dissecting table or preserved in formaldehyde, reality are in alignment. To know the name is to animals are no longer so foreign and know the creature. In The New Atlantis, as unknowable. elsewhere, Francis Bacon, who sees in science Returning for a moment to Hirst's work, the possibility of restoring humanity to a the opening of the animal and availability of prelapsarian state of knowing, equates dissection animal insides for human inspection are perhaps with just such a look below the skin. Nature is nowhere more evident than in Some Comfort tortured into truth. As Fudge explains: Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything. In the work, two cows have each In the new science the object been sliced into six even parts. The parts are 61

placed in transparent tanks of formaldehyde and reflecting on our own interiors and the interiority of positioned in a line. The steer and cow segments human thinking. The titles of Hirst's work move us are shuffled one after the other, with the animals from the material object to abstract reflection on facing in opposite directions. The animal body is human states of affairs. The Lovers' Cabinets is opened for interrogation. The outside hide, and one such example. In the work, the entrails of the inside flesh and viscera, stand visible behind eight cattle are placed in four jars in four the glass. The viewer cannot touch, nor be cabinets; each jar and cabinet is given a name: contaminated by the flesh, yet he or she has “The Committed Lovers,” “The Spontaneous access to it as sight becomes a means of Lovers,” “Compromising Lovers,” and “Detached knowing and possessing. Lovers.” Cattle flesh becomes a figure for an With Bacon, access to animal insides abstract meditation on human desire. facilitates a restoration to a purer spiritual state: For Hirst, the slicing and division of flesh the reinstatement of humans in the garden of operates as a figure for abstract diachronic Eden. For Hirst, the spiritual quality resides in the tensions. Bodies are joined yet separated in The abstract movement that comes after the initial Lovers’ Cabinets, Some Comfort Gained from the shock of seeing the carved animal. Recall Hirst's Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, and statement that "[a]nimals become meat. That's Mother and Child Divided. Bodies and parts, once abstract." [xv] In Some Comfort Gained, the together, are now separate, and those once abstraction appears in the title and in the separate are now intertwined. This dynamic arrangement of tanks such that, as the exhibition structure is analyzed by Mario Codognato in his catalog explains, "Hirst presents a physical and reading of Some Comfort Gained: spiritual union between partners, a desperate isolation in their merger." [xvi] The animals do not They [the cattle] combine to feel this union nor are they torn by its impossibility. construct a vision that is at As presented in the title, the "Lies" of such a once fragmentary and "spiritual union" are human fables, and the coherent, where our every "Comfort Gained" from debunking these fables is expectation is mystified in a a human comfort. At no point is the animal or its simultaneous perception of the world the subject of this art piece; [xvii] instead, the habitual external appearance full presence of its body as flesh is made and the internal structure of the available for the gesture of "that's abstract." The body, the mechanism of life movement to abstraction extends Bacon's and the condition of death, the "human empire" into the animal and its innards. stratagem of art and scientific No longer is the animal's body its own, nor is its investigation. The cross-over world of opaque holes or corners inaccessible to constructs a mental territory, us. If the animal has a world outside of human where sensorial perceptions knowledge, the logic of presence dictates that and reason temporarily enter such a world is of no import. Only that which is into a diachronic and present and presentable to "the perceiving and destabilizing relationship. [xx] knowing subject" has status as being. [xviii] Hirst's dissection and naming of his work takes up As in much of the writing on Hirst, Codognato Bacon's use of dissection to restore Adam's notes that the energy of the work resides in "a naming and power over animals. The lie mental territory" for the viewer who tries to overturned in Hirst's title is a human lie, and the reconcile abstract concepts presented in the title comfort gained is also human. If, as Fudge with the sculpted material forms. claims, "Bacon's Eden is never Edenic for the The epigraph to Codognato's essay on animal," then Hirst's art is never beautiful for the Hirst is particularly telling. He quotes Hamlet: "O animal. [xix] that this too sullied flesh would melt, thaw and While animals appear to be central to resolve itself into dew." [xxi] While for Hamlet the Hirst's dissection sculptures, they are not the focus "sullied flesh" was his own, in Hirst, the flesh is that of his work; instead, they are the material used to of animals. The animal and its flesh never prod viewers into reflection. The interior of the "resolve[s] itself into dew;" however, the flesh is animal is made exterior flesh so that we might resolved by the viewer into a purer form—a visually take it in and reflect upon it. These works translucent and shining dew of thought. It is the are not about the animal's death, though it may audience that transforms the material form into provide the initial shock; instead, if there is any unsullied concepts—mental images of love, lasting meaning in the work, it is gained in death, and desire. Dissection, in Bacon, is more 62

Damien Hirst 63 Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, mixed media, 1996 © Damien Hirst

than opening up the material of nature; in yet preserves, the lesser wholes that preceded it, opening the animal (exposing interior as exterior and from which it is constituted. In what is called flesh) and in naming the animal and its parts, the aufhebung, or sublation, nothing is lost or Bacon seeks a spiritual end for man and a destroyed; instead, each whole is raised up to a restoration to the Garden of Eden. In Hirst’s work, higher level of meaning and being as it gets animal flesh is put to human spiritual ends as well. subsumed into a more expansive wholeness. My [xxii] gambit here is that Hegel's organic logic of sublation is a means of describing the dynamics Eating the Other and tensions in Hirst's work, where matter is divided or opened up to create contradictions in need of In summary, we have seen in Hirst's work the use resolution. of matter as the base from which to build a Hegel maintains that the transformation mental conflict that resolves itself in the mind. It is undergone in sublation is not an interpretation or in human thought that the full presence of the representation of an object by a thinking subject, animal form and the conceptual tensions that it but instead is the most proper realization of the suggests find resolution. The work of the object: nineteenth-century philosopher Hegel establishes By the act of reflection a similar pattern of material violence and the something is altered in the way demand for full presence of nature—every nook in which the fact was originally and cranny—as a means to a higher end. presented in sensation, Perhaps nowhere is the voracious appetite of perception, or conception. human thinking more explicit than in his search for Thus, as it appears, an absolute knowledge. While Hegel's idealism alteration must be interposed contrasts with Bacon's empiricism, the two meet in before the true nature of the their transformation of the natural world through a object can be discovered. . . . metaphysics of presence. Hegel's clear Now, at first sight, this seems an articulation of this metaphysics, as well as inversion of the natural order, contemporary critiques of its violence, make his calculated to thwart the very work a useful means of explicating the cuts and purpose on which knowledge is corpses of Hirst's animal art. bent. But the method is not so As Lumsden explains, "[p]hilosophy has irrational as it seems. It has been concerned with establishing 'transcendental been the conviction of every schema' by which we discern the truth of objects age that the only way of and the world and then organize it according to a reaching the permanent rational and logical structure."[xxiii] Like Bacon, substratum was to transmute Hegel creates a schema meant to supplant the given phenomenon by Aristotle's logic. For Aristotle, objects have a self- means of reflection. [xxiv] contained singularity, and his logic proceeds by deductive reasoning as to the contents of these This "alteration" or "transmut[ation]" is the site of singularities. The essence of anything is metaphysical violence. [xxv] The witchery or determined by its properties and what mystery of nature (to use Merchant’s terms) characteristics are excluded. Man, for example, is cannot be left alone. Animals are not allowed a defined as a rational animal, which assumes that nook, or hole, or corner; instead, the mystery of man shares properties with other animals, but that nature is exchanged for the alchemy of reason is exclusive to humans. Aristotle's logic, transmutation, alteration, and sublation. In Hegel and his natural philosophy, proceed by drawing and in Hirst, all of nature is made present to lines of inclusion and exclusion; how these lines thought, and gains fuller presence by thought. are drawn and who does the drawing are the For Hegel, thought liberates the universal fundamental concerns of his transcendental from the singular and sensate instances of schema. Hegel considers Aristotle's logic as overly objects. Universalization—the move toward a static in its lines of inclusion and exclusion; totality and wholeness—is the fundamental therefore, Hegel sets out to create a system in project of philosophy. John Niemeyer Findlay which objects dynamically relate to one another. explains that In his dialectical thinking, negations or contradictions are resolved by transformation into it is that activity conceived as a a synthesis or higher unity. His system moves subject, itself universalised and toward a totality in which the totality overcomes, given to itself, and not merely 64

active in specific materials. The mental appropriation. liberating activity of the We have seen this move in Bacon's Universal or the Ego is further treatment of animals, and Hegel joins Bacon in said to be one that liberates opening up the animal body. Eating exposes the the essential, intrinsic, or true animal interiors as exteriors of flesh—meat—for nature of the object: it may the human subject. At issue is how Bacon and profoundly change the manner Hegel make sense of that which is foreign or other in which things stand before us than themselves. Hegel's dialectic logic pivots in sensation, intuition, or around its ability to ingest what is alien to the self, representation, but this change and so make it part of the self and sensible to of manner is no subjective oneself. Stated differently, "digestion names the distortion as maintained in the means by which the organism relates itself as an Critical Philosophy: it is a object, as other to itself." [xxxii] The outside—the bringing out of what the thing in animal—becomes a means by which human itself truly is. [xxvi] interiority can think itself. Damien Hirst's work functions as an Hegelian exercise inflected by In such a transcendental schema, there is no natural history's demand for the full presence of outside and no remainder. Nothing is lost nor nature in and through the death of animals. The destroyed; instead, it is transformed into "what the animal serves as the other, or outside, by which thing in itself truly is." With sublation, everything we reflect upon our own interiority. becomes available for examination by thought, every experience is present to the conscious Resistant Flesh subject, and every object is internalized by the thinking subject. [xxvii] Objects become It would be disingenuous to say that meaningful, and what they truly are, only as they Hirst’s art functions simply under Hegel’s dialectic, are made present to the knowing subject. because there are important exceptions. Not all Transmutation changes the object of knowledge of the animals in Hirst's natural-history works get from something external to the thinking subject to split open to expose their insides. His well-known that which is present to the subject, and then to The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of that which is internalized. In short, we eat the Someone Living (1991) proves a useful instance of other. an artist wrestling with animal flesh and interiors. Eating is more than a metaphor for The work consists of a fourteen-foot tiger shark knowing. For Hegel, it is a moment in the upward suspended in a tank of 5 percent solution spiral of sublation toward a greater totality and formaldehyde. The shark's jaws are opened as if unity of being. As Romanticist scholar David Clark to emulate the sublimity and fear invoked by the puts it: "For Hegel consumption and digestion are fictional shark in the pop-icon film Jaws (1975). not merely illustrations of consciousness [xxxiii] The shark piece was shown by Charles improperly borrowed from the naturalistic realm, Saatchi in 1992, along with Hirst's A Thousand but part of the underlying incorporative logic." Years, as part of the Young British Artists show. The [xxviii] Eating is "the power of overcoming the outer work is an immediate sensation. The popular press organism" and so building up the interior is aghast at the fish in a tank costing £50,000 to subject.[xxix] Hegel's philosophy is a dialectic- produce—£6,000 to acquire the shark (by hermeneutic circle; his Encyclopedia leverages commission from fishermen in Australia), with the the Greek root "circle" (cuclsV), by which all remaining expenses for preservation, construction objects are encircled within the philosophy. As of a tank, and transportation. Yet, despite or Howard Kainz explains, "this highly self-reflective perhaps because of the controversy swirling system is described by Hegel as a 'circle of around the animal sculpture as a conceptual circles.'"[xxx] Each circle within the dialectic turns artwork, Hirst is nominated for the Turner Prize. upon itself, but also like a spire, "gives rise to a Hirst goes on to garner fame and amass wider circle" to become a "massive self- a fortune with his art and celebrity status—itself a producing, self-justifying, and self-correcting sort of performance art. However, the shark does system which demystifies, and works out the not hold up so well. The Physical Impossibility of concrete details of Aristotle's primal presentation Death begins to decompose; the formaldehyde of the Idea as 'self-thinking thought.’" [xxxi] There is is intended to arrest death, sealing the animal nothing outside the self-reflexive subject other death into a singular moment prior to dissolution than that which is to be eaten—either physically, of the body. In this death without decay, the artist or at the more refined plane of abstraction and wants the viewer to experience the sublimity of 65

nature with teeth, yet the animal and not the frightening. You could tell it wasn’t real. It had no human is the one dead. The decay of the shark weight." [xxxiv] Interesting here is Hirst's investment in begins to cloud the pristine clarity of the problem the animal interior as that which was never meant of death to be contemplated by the viewer: the to be seen. His interest in an unseen interior is animal in decay obscures the sublimity of the contrary to his other natural-history works in which artwork. the insides are intended to be viewed. Visitors to The shark decomposes because it is not the Saatchi Gallery are not told about the adequately preserved. Getting the formaldehyde change, and most think that they are looking at solution to penetrate through the skin of the an entire shark. Because the audience sees what animal and into its insides proves a difficult task they believe is a shark, and not a hollowed-out that is never fully accomplished. Consequently, shark, Hirst's comments are curious. Others the animal begins to decay from the inside out. Its apparently do not see a massive animal corpse skin wrinkles and the tank becomes murky. Hirst with no weight, so why is it an issue for him? And attributes at least part of the decay to the Saatchi why would the lack of innards prevent the animal Gallery adding bleach to the shark tank. After its from appearing just as frightening? initial display in 1992, the tank becomes Contrary to his work with dissected increasingly clouded with decayed flesh and the animals, opening up the shark to insert an artificial shark seems to sag a bit. So in 1993, the gallery form violates the integrity of The Physical has the shark opened up and its flesh cut out. In Impossibility of Death. In this particular piece, Hirst place of the inner flesh, the gallery puts a seems interested in preserving a place for the fiberglass form and molds the shark skin around it. animal interior as something separate from the Hirst is not satisfied with the results: “It didn’t look as human world, something not to be opened. In this 66

Damien Hirst

instance, because nature loves to hide, it is animal insides are not only the interior of the allowed to hide. Perhaps it does not hide fully— animal, but they also mark a unique space, a the shark's death was commissioned, after all. space that we will never know—the space that However, the work can be seen to pivot around death has inhabited in this animal. Despite the the idea that the dead shark "knows" something prevalent demand for full presence of the that is "physically impossible" for the "mind" of the animal—a demand met in dissection—in this human viewer. The reflexive interiority of the work, absolute knowledge and full presence is human subject does not gain access to the denied to the viewer. We sense that there is animal interior. Its body is not cut open as meat, something beneath the surface of the animal, and the Hegelian aufhebung is thwarted by the and we know that Hirst and his team have taken thickness of the animal's skin and flesh. The shark's great pains to preserve this interior, which seems innards bear witness to the inaccessible interior of more significant than "mere" flesh, as if the animal the animal—an interior that the artist cannot had an interiority. Such interiority would be the penetrate with formaldehyde and that he intends animal’s means of knowing and engaging the to protect from the view of spectators. Yet it is this world outside of our ability to comprehend or preservation of the interior of the animal that colonize the animal. cannot be preserved by Hirst. The animal rotted from the inside out. The clouded tank, with its bits Revising an Architecture of Presence of decayed flesh, exposes the interior of the animal that is meant to be sealed off from sight. Hirst hints at something beneath the When Saatchi sells the piece to Steven surface of animals in his cleverly titled Something Cohen in 2006, Hirst proposes replacing the shark Solid Beneath the Surface of All Creatures Great with a new tiger shark. Cohen funds the endeavor, and Small (2001). Yet the "something solid" is most which costs in excess of $100,000. Buoyed by readily identified as the bare bones of the animal these finances and years of practice in working bodies put on display in glass cases as if in a with formaldehyde, Hirst takes to preserving natural-history museum exhibit. If there is an another shark and placing it in the same tank in animal interiority as “something solid,” we cannot which the former animal has failed to hold up to see it on display here. The work responds to The the artist's wishes. Some of the details of the Physical Impossibility of Death by showing that undertaking are worth noting in order to there is no empirical space of animal interiority, appreciate the degree of labor involved in there are only layers of interiors to be exposed. maintaining the artist's concept of a whole This inability to find a material interiority has been predatory animal suspended in a tank. Carol a historical rationale for licensing dissection. The Vogel describes the preservation project in her site interiority, if it exists, is immaterial—meaning that visit and interview with Hirst for The New York to humans, the animal place of its own is Times.[xxxv] In a pool-size tank, at an abandoned inconsequential; however, animal interiority may hanger of the Royal Air Force Station in be immaterial simply in the same way that human Gloucestershire, Hirst and five assistants stand in interiority is also not visible bones, nor flesh. 224 gallons of formaldehyde, working over a While Hirst's other natural-history works thirteen-foot tiger shark. The shark's body is open the animal for inspection, the restored The penetrated with hundreds of needles to inject it Physical Impossibility of Death and even with the formaldehyde. The needles vary in length Something Solid Beneath the Surface maintain the to reach various surfaces and depths—nooks and veil over nature. They allow for an interiority of the crannies—of the animal body. These needles animal as a space not visible, namable, and minimally open up the animal interior and so knowable to us. As traced above, the leave the body intact and removed from visual predominant strand in Western philosophy and inspection. science has been to demand a full presence While the extremity of cost and effort in from the animal; however, there is a less well- this work appears to be part of the "sensation," or known tradition that seeks to preserve the space sensational quality, for which Hirst is known, one of the animal as something inaccessible and wonders why he goes to such financial and unknowable. Cicero remaines skeptical. In his final physical expenditure for what will never be seen— dialogues on epistemology, he considers the the inside of the shark's body. It is precisely this value of cutting open animal bodies: "This is why invisibility that makes the work intriguing. The doctors . . . have carried out dissections, in order Physical Impossibility of Death is powerful because to see this emplacement of organs. As the of the interplay between the interior of the animal, Empiricist physicians say, however, the organs are its interiority, and the viewer's own interiority. The no better known, for it may be that if they are 68

uncovered and deprived of their envelopes, they of ontology, which he must delineate." [xxxix] are modified." [xxxvi] Cicero does not believe in an Reflective consciousness, from Descartes to Hegel agonistic struggle against nature; teasing nature to Merleau-Ponty, maintains the privileged from its hiding place is itself unnatural and results interiority of the human subject through which all in a perversion of knowledge. objects gain meaning in the act of human More striking is the claim by the German knowing—be it perceptual knowing or abstract Romantic philosopher and natural scientist reflection. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For Goethe, Merleau-Ponty observes that nature is visible, but we do not have a mind that phenomenology "succeeds in overcoming the can see her. As Valentine warns the wayward natural attitude by changing the beings into their Faust: meaning but is mistaken in defining the meaning itself as essence, namely, as something fully We snatch in vain at Nature's veil, positive and clearly determined, a plenitude She is mysterious in broad daylight, attainable by an intellectual intuition." [xl] We grasp No screws or levers can compel her to reveal the essence of the object through its The secrets she has hidden from our sight.[xxxvii] appearance—a natural attitude critically reflected on in phenomenology. However, phenomenology is mistaken in describing the Hadot notes that "her real veil consists in having meaning gleaned from appearance as the no veil. In other words, she hides because we do essence of the thing. The problem here is that not know how to see her, although she is right essence maintains a sense of plentitude, of before our eyes." [xxxviii] Visibility and knowability something full and fully present as grasped by an are turned upside down. While dissection opens intellect. Such perception implies a perceiving the invisible to make it visible and intelligible, subject with consciousness and a self- Goethe claims that nature is already in the light of consciousness. This subject discerns presence day though remains obscure to us: it is visible— from absence of contemplation, or nonpresence. already opened up—but never knowable. Perception of presence is equated with Following Goethe’s claim, opening up an animal knowledge. In Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty does not equate to knowing the animal. Light gestures toward a new kind of being "against the does not equal knowledge in this case, and philosophy of the thing and the philosophy of the presence is still a sort of absence or mystery. If idea. Philosophy of 'something'—something not dissection is meant to open a space for full nothing." [xli] Such a philosophy would allow for presence and knowledge—by which we "something" without the need for full presence, know/consume the animal flesh—then Goethe and a conscious subject to discern the seemingly has created a different sort of architecture of vague “something” as a "thing" or object rather knowing. Here nature is in the open, but remains than a nothing. Barbaras explains that Merleau- invisible, unintelligible. Ponty moves from a "philosophy of the positive Twentieth-century phenomenologist [full and fully present] thing to a philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty extends the significance something." [xlii] As the title Visible and Invisible of the invisible. While preparing his unfinished text implies, visibility and knowability are but the one The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty notices side of something: vision and knowing do not take a fundamental problem within his earlier work. place as immanent or transparent presence of Phenomenology made its break with Cartesian the thing known before the perceiving subject; philosophy and the mind–body problem by rather, vision and knowledge imply distance and pursing perceptual knowing, rather than abstract violence. They also imply an invisibility—what or disembodied knowledge. However—and cannot be seen, nor opened to our herein lies the issue—both abstract knowledge understanding. Such invisibility is "not nothing," as if and perceptual knowledge maintain a divide the object can only either exist or not exist. between subject and object. The persistence of Instead, the tension between the visible and such a divide troubled Merleau-Ponty. As Renaud invisible describes the opacity of the world of stuff Barbaras summarizes the issue, after itself within a world of perceptions, rather than a Phenomenology of Perception, "the relevant feature of human consciousness. [xliii] Opacity is opposition for him is not the opposition between a not a consequence of our failed sense organs, philosophy of reflexive consciousness and a but rather the nature of things in a world of philosophy of embodied consciousness, but perception. Withdrawal or invisibility is an essential between an ontology of the object—to which part of the being of beings: animals withdraw into both of these philosophies refer—and a new kind a space of their own. 69

[viii] Simon Lumsden, "Hegel, Derrida and the Subject," Cosmos and History:

[vi] Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Returning to Hirst’s Something Solid Beneath the Robert Leslie Ellis et al. (London: Longman,1875), 296. Surface of All Creatures Great and Small, there is [vii] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 168–69.The Journal of Natural and Social indeed “something” beneath the surface of Philosophy 3, nos. 2–3 (2007): 32–50, quote on 34. Emphasis in original. creatures. However, it is not necessary to open up the animal in order to find it. The natural-history [ix] Genesis 1:28, The New American Bible (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1986). display of skeletal forms exhibited by Hirst gives us only the bare bones, but not the solidity of the [x] In contemporary animal training, Vicky Hearn has invoked the story in animal’s “something”—its space apart from Genesis as a negotiated respect created between humans and animals in Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name. In Companion Species Manifesto, Donna human perception. Following Goethe, this Haraway invokes Hearn in her own training with dogs, but respectfully something of the animal is an open secret. Hirst’s distances herself from the hierarchy implicit in Adam's naming. Instead, she sees the human–dog relationship as one of co-evolution. Richard Nash works are a series of structures around the limits of outlines this issue of naming (and includes Carl Linnaeus and Comte de access to this secret approached through the Buffon) in his essay, "Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals," in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, tradition of lifting nature’s veil. Hybridity, Ethics, ed. Frank Palmeri (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 101–18. References [xi] Quoted in Michael Gaudio, "Surface and Depth: The Art of Early American Natural History," in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping [i] Luke White, Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730–1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince Art and Culture (London: Middlesex University, forthcoming). (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2007), 55–73. [ii] Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (New York: Monacelli Press, [xii] Quoted in Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early 1997), 298. Modern English Culture (New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 2007), 103– 4. [iii] Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of an Idea, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 8. [xiii] Ibid., 108.

[iv] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the [xiv] Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (Hoboken, NJ: Bibliobytes; NetLibrary, Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row 1980), 168–69. 1998), 19.

[v] Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael [xv] Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, 298. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81; Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 93. [xvi] Hirst exhibition program quoted in "Are Modern Animal Mommies Art?" Animal Mommies, 70

http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/animal/hirst.art.htm [xxxi] Ibid., 94. (accessed May 15, 2008) [xxxii] Clark, "Hegel, Eating," 129. [xvii] Correspondence with the Gagosian Gallery and Hirst's studio has confirmed that both cattle in Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the [xxxiii] See chapter 1, "Hirst and the Contemporary Sublime," in Luke Inherent Lies in Everything are females—namely, cows. While Hirst and many White, “Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Art critics discuss this piece as desire and the impossibility of union between and Culture,” http://homepage.mac.com/lukewhite/diss_wip.htm (accessed two cattle separated from each other though interlaced, the sculpture May 15, 2008). becomes increasingly complicated by the often-overlooked biological nicety [xxxiv] Carol Vogel, "Swimming with Famous Dead Sharks," New York Times, of the animals' gender. Biological sex of the animals affect their being and October 1, 2006, world, which is under consideration in this chapter. Millicent http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/arts/design/01voge.html (accessed May Wilner,"Technical specs inquiry for Hirst's cattle," May 20, 2008, 1, 2008). http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/soho-1996-05-damien-hirst (accessed May 20, 2008). [xxxv] Ibid. [xviii] Lumsden, "Hegel, Derrida and the Subject," 34. [xxxvi] Quoted in Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 32. [xix] Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 108. Hirst continues the theme of Eden as a haunted cultural past in Adam and Eve Banished from the Garden (2000), [xxxvii] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke Adam and Eve Together at Last (2004), and Adam and Eve Exposed (2004), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.4.672–75. among others. [xxxviii] Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 148. [xx] Mario Codognato, "Warning Labels," in Damien Hirst, the Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989 to 2004, ed. Damien Hirst, Eduardo [xxxix] Renaud Barbaras, "Perception and Movement: The End of Cicelyn, Mario Codognato, and Mirta D'Argenzio (Naples: Museo Metaphysical Approach," in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh, ed. Archeologica Nationale, 2005), 24–46. quote on 35. Leonard L. Fred Evans (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 77–88, quote on 78. [xxi] Ibid., 25; William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.2). [xl] Ibid., 78. [xxii] Much more could be said of Hirst's use of Christianity to suggest spiritual or failed spiritual teleology. He continually invokes Christian [xli] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working symbols in his works, from a piece in which twelve cattle heads are named Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, after Christ's disciples to a skeleton stretched on a glass crucifix. 1969), 109.

[xxiii] Lumsden, "Hegel, Derrida and the Subject," 37. [xlii] Barbaras, " Perception and Movement," 80. [xliii] Ibid., 82. [xxiv] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 34–35.

[xxv] Ibid.; in his foreword to this edition, John Niemeyer Findlay notes that Wallace's translation veers slightly from the spirit of Hegel's work: "Wallace's words 'of the object' are wrongly placed: Hegel does not hold that the mind alters its object, but that by altering the manner in which that object is given to it, it penetrates to its true, its universal nature" (ix). Wallace exchanges penetration for alteration. In his next paragraph of The Logic (23), Hegel goes on to say: "The real nature of the object is brought to light in reflection, but it is no less true that this exertion of thought is my act. If this be so, the real nature is a product of my mind, in its character of thinking subject—generated by me in any simple universality, self-collected and removed from extraneous influences—in one word, in my Freedom" (35).

[xxvi] Findlay, ibid., v–xxvii, quote on ix.

[xxvii] Lumsden, "Hegel, Derrida and the Subject," 35.

[xxviii] David L. Clark, "Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy," in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetitle: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 115–40, quote on 128. Also see Mark C. E. Peterson, "Animals Eating Empiricists: Assimilation and Subjectivity in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature," The Owl of Minerva: Quarterly Journal of the Hegel Society of America 23, no. 1 (1991): 49– 62, quote on 56–57.

[xxix] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. Arnold V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 367. The reference here is to the "Organics" section of Part Two of the Encyclopedia. In discussing the animal body and the concept of "assimilation," Hegel takes up the role of ingestion and internalization. The physiology of animal eating doubles the role of sublation for the human subject, where the outside is internalized materially and mentally with nothing lost or destroyed.

[xxx] Patrick H. Kainz, Paradox, Dialectic, and System: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the Hegelian Problematic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 93. 71

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