HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF ART AND DESIGN
Céline Samson
Subject:
Define Abjection. What is Abject Art? Discuss how this term informs the work of an artist of your choice. 2616 words
In this essay, I shall first attempt to define the concept of abjection or the abject as it was developed bythe feminist theoristJulia Kristeva. After Kristeva’s book was published in 1980, many artists became aware of her theory and chose to explore it in their work. In 1993, a group exhibitionorganised by the WhitneyMuseumin New York signalled the official birth of the ‘Abject Art movement’; however the roots of this type of art go back a long way.I shall attempt to summarize how the concept of abjection has been used in art throughout history, and finally I will examine how this movement is present on the contemporary art scene through the work of Cindy Sherman.
If we look to the Oxford English Dictionary[1], the word Abjection, which derives from the Latin “abicere” (to throw away), is defined as follows: “1.a. The state or condition of being cast down or brought low; humiliation, degradation; dispiritedness, despondency”.In general usage,it might beused to describe that which is deemed as having reached a high degree of abasement, and which elicitsrepugnance, fear, embarrassment, repulsion, prejudice, etc. (often some kind of physical remains). By extension, it can be used to describe the state of some often-marginalized or excluded groups (women, people of colour, queers, prostitutes, convicts, poor people, etc.), social cast-offsoften being equated with bodily remains. In critical theory, however, abjection is a more complex psychological, philosophical and linguistic concept. It hasbeen the subject of extensive study, first by the French writer and dissident surrealist Georges Bataille who was fascinated with the themes of sex, death, degradation, and the power of the obscene, and who worked on the concept of ‘l’Informe’ (the Formless) which he defined as “that which strives to evade classification” or that which has some abstract sense of “otherness”. [2]
The formless, which by essenceis without subjectivity or objectivity, is akin to what Julia Kristeva defined five decades later as 'abjection'in her illustrious essayentitled Powers of Horror. In this essay, where she attempted to analyze what constitutes the fundamental differentiations between the self and the non-selfand the conditions that might challenge the boundaries between them, Kristeva introduced the idea that abjection is one of those conditions. According to Kristeva, there is a moment in our individual psychosexual development when we recognize the boundary between ourselves and the (m)other. This traumatic moment leads us to reject (abject) the maternal in order to construct our own identity. Later on, in adult life, the confrontation with the abject (especially bodily fluids, an open wound, excrements, or by extension any aspect of the body deemed impure or inappropriate) has the potential to trigger a breakdown in meaning and a disruption of identity, system and order, and threatens to bring us back to the end of that primitive state of undifferentiated unity.
As Kristeva puts it:-
“Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.”[3]
The abject transgresses our sense of cleanliness and propriety. The primary example of what can cause such a reaction of repulsion is the confrontation with a corpse, as it represents the permeable border between life and death.[4] Kristeva notes:“Without make-up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”[5] Through this kind of confrontation, the abject stirs a sense of survival in the viewer — it provokes one’s will to live, to maintain the integrity of one’s corporeal existence.
Abjection, according to Kristeva, “is above all ambiguity”. It exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not.But in face of any kind of deep loss,she argues that art, like religion, may be a way of sublimating the abjectand the "borderline" states(through catharsis or purification).
After its publication, Kristeva’s essay generated great interest and later on, it was argued that art that depicts what people would rather not see, and especially art that incorporates either elements of the body in its least presentable functions or other ‘dirty’ materials such as hair, excrement, rotting food, etc. (for which the term ‘abject art’ was suggested), had an important part to play, as it couldbe used to break down societal taboos, confront primal anxieties and issues of gender and sexuality, and banish the hypocrisy of exclusion.
Kristeva’s essay gave rise to a wave of artists starting to implement Kristeva’s theories in their work, especially female artists (female bodily functions being particularly 'abjected' by the patriarchal social order). But although most people think that what is now called abject art isrelatively recent phenomenon, itactually existed well before it was given a name.
In fact, as early as the 16th century, the Council of Trent recommended the display of the wounds and agonies of the martyred, in orderto elicit the sympathy of the viewers and strengthen their faith. It said: "Even Christ must be shown 'afflicted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale and unsightly' if the subject calls for it."[6]This would be especially taken to heart by the 17th century Spanish catholic sculptors, whose sculptures are still venerated today.[1]
[1]
Later on, Goya alsodisplayed corpses in his etchings of the Napoleonic wars[2]. But this time, the dismembered bodies were rendered unholy, repulsive and grotesque, an indication of the grim reality of warfare and the barbarity of men.
[2]
In the early 20th century, the Dadaists, disgusted by the butchery of WW1 and refusing to subscribe to the aesthetic sensibilities of those responsible for it, advocated the use of babbling in place of beauty, silliness instead of the sublime. In the mid-1930s, Hans Bellmer produced a series of sexualized dismembered dolls[3], which would later inspire the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman. Created as a specific attack against the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany, the dolls were embraced by the Surrealists and inspired this comment by Bataille:
"Bellmer's psychological confrontation and violence may constitute a spiritual jolt that liberates from habit and known codings. He dragged terrible desires out of the darkness and into cognition so that we could assimilate the full reality of our passions and the content of evil in them. How else were we to transcend them (…) if not by first knowing them?"[7]
[3]
In the same vein but with a more humorous twist, in 1961, the artist Piero Manzoni, who allegedly had been told by his father that his work was shit, came up with the idea of canning his own excrement [4]and sell each can by weight according to the daily market price of gold. It was a great success and today these cans are actually much more valuable than gold (one sold for 124000 Euros in 2007 at Sotheby’s).
[4]
One should not forget tomention Louise Bourgeois, ever the pioneer, who for most of her career has explored the theme of the abject and the trauma, using her art as a way to re-experience symbolically painful events and maybe transcend or exorcise them.
So abjection is really nothing new, but if over the centuries, these kind of artistic productions wererecurrent, they werenonethelessmore peripheral,and the idea that art should be about ideals of form and beauty, about “retinal pleasure” (Duchamp), and that it should uplift and ennoble us, did prevail for a long time. However, as mentioned before, after the publication of Kristeva’s essay in 1980, the phenomenon that is now called “abject art” really started to take off.This also coincided with a time of deep social anxiety relatedamongst other thingstoan unstable political climate and the emergence of AIDS, where the human body ceased to be an incarnation of symbolic virtue, tobecome a victim of global disease.
Around the 1990s, quite a few radical artists started working with bodily fluids, amongst whom FrankoB, who explores the visceral and the transubstantiation of the flesh (using his own blood as a medium and his body as a canvas in an attempt to portray "the pain, the love, the hate, the loss, the power and the fears of the human condition" – performance and body art being a particularly fitting outlet for abject art), Kira O’Reilly, whose work involves cutting of her own skin, and Andres Serrano, who has produced “Piss Christ”[5], a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass container of the artist's own urine which has a kind of strange apocalyptic beauty. Thiscontroversial piece, which constitutes an obvious attack on Christianity, has now become an icon of abject art, and is in a way an exception as abject art is rarely beautiful.
[5]
In 1993, catching up on this new trend, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged an exhibition called “Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art”. As expected, the show caused quite acontroversy, a Christian leader even commenting in an article: “At the turn of the century, the famous artist Marcel Duchamp shocked the world by displaying a urinal and calling it ‘art’. Today, his successors are displaying what goes into the urinal . . . and calling it art”.[8][9]
There are many artists who have explored and who still explore the abject in their work and who deserve a mention (Gilbert & George, Kiki Smith, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, to name a few). One example is the artist Jayne Parker who in 1989 directed a film called K. in which a woman pulls her intestine out of her mouth and lets it fall in a soft pile at her feet. Then she knits the intestine using only her arms [6]. She has justified this work by explaining: “I bring out into the open all the things I have taken in that are not mine and thereby make room for something new. I make an external order out of an internal tangle”.[10] Her ritual of defilement is not an attempt to shock the viewer just for the sake of it, it is a way of showing she’s trying to protect her identity from the threat of dissolution. Ultimately, through confrontation and controversy, artists such as Parker call all members of the society whose identity may be violated to gain strength by facing up to their fears.
[6]
CINDY SHERMAN
As mentioned in my introduction, I shall now focus on the work of a contemporary artist, Cindy Sherman.
Sherman is an American photographer, born in 1954,whose career has evolved towards abject art and who today is often heralded as its high priestess. All her photographs are untitled (leaving them open to interpretation) and a good number of them are conceptual images of herself acting out various scenarios,dressed and made up to represent specificarchetypes (mostly women). She first came to prominence on the international art scene with her Untitled Film Stills and her Centerfolds,a series of ambiguous portraits of herself parodying B-movies actresses[7]. In these, as Sherman is always on show but never reveals her true self, the lack of distinction between self-representation and self-documentation renders the boundaries between subject/object unstable, which in itself is one aspect of the abject. Shermanappears to examine the question of the subject under a (voyeuristic) gaze aswell as the question of female identity, and she seems to suggest that this identity lies in appearance, not in reality.[11]With these series, Sherman hints at the implosion of the codes of femininity that insist upon ‘allure and elegance’ and at a monstrous void beneath the appearance, a psychological estrangement between the subject and her real self. Subordinated as they are to certain standardized rules of behaviour, Sherman’s women cannot even be called individuals.
[7] Sherman as the luscious librarian
Between 1985 and 1991, maybe in a move to drop the veil and depict directly her idea of what actually lies beneath thefaçade and the illusion of the feminine, Shermanstarted to adopt a more violent imagery and to deal more explicitly with elements of the abject, with what is often referred to as her Fairy Tales and Disasters series, her Disgust pictures and her Civil War series. Shermanthe model/subjectgradually vanished from her photographs, and with the disappearance of an already insubstantial identity came the use of props serving as pathetic reminders of human existence (blood, tears, vomit, decaying food, prostheses, etc.).Sherman depicted disintegrated/wounded bodies mingled with various fluids and debris. [8] According to Mulvey, these pictures representSherman’s literalization of the metaphoric relationship between women and bodily abjection. The female body has been turned inside out and Sherman’s approach is no longerironic or playful. [9]
[8]
[9]
The picture above [9]works on several levels. It appears there was a party but something has gone terribly wrong. The detritus and decay may represent the interior anxiety, the abject that lurks beyond the surface of the feminine masquerade, the secret stuff that the cosmetic is designed to conceal (Mulvey)or the hidden face of our society’s cult of normality.It also raises the spectre of bulimia/anorexia and of the horrific damage some women do to themselves in order to conform to feminine standards. But there is something even darker. The picture frame seems to have been invaded by the voyeuristic gaze and the woman, reduced to a small panicked reflection, has come to realise the horror of her condition – the rape that was symbolic is in fact literal. Shermancould be reminding us that throughout the ages many women have been broken down by the misogynistic revulsion that surrounds their body (according to Freud, the original provoker of castration anxiety), and that they may well have started to identify with this revulsion.[12]
Since these extreme pictures, Sherman has continued to denouncethe dangers of alienation to oneself throughout her career, notably with her Sex pictures where she mixes and matches prefabricated parts of anatomically correct dolls, to create prosthetic portraits of females that are no longer content to suffer passively but have become highly sexual, confrontational, mutilated and deranged.[10]
[10]
Her recent pictures are still strong and disturbing but lately she seems to have strayed from the abject and to have chosen to focus instead on the grotesqueand the caricature (which would be toned down versions of the abject) with her Horror and Surrealist Pictures, her “warts-and-all” Hollywood/Hampton Types and her gaudy grimacingClowns.
CONCLUSION
We have seen that abjection has been the subject of extensive theoretical and artistic exploration. We have also seen that within the framework of abject art, the body hasceased to be an object of appreciation to become an object of disgust, exposed in its inferior (interior) aspects. It is “an art of degraded things that resist formal shaping, let alone cultural sublimating or social redeeming”[13].
Despite appearances, the intentions of abject art are often positive; but being mostly non-aesthetic (one doesn’t have to be particularly gifted to create abject art, and the artist is often closer to a visual thinker or a philosopher), it can be difficult to defend.
Abject art is also difficult to connect to; it conceals multiple layers of meaning that are not immediately decipherable and requires elaborate exercises in interpretation.
Finally, having become somewhat mainstream, it runs the risk of soon beingirrelevant if it no longer subverts authoritybut becomes insteadan authority to be subverted. But abject artdefinitely has its place within our uneasy times, and should not be dismissed without recognizing the valuable cathartic role it has played and still plays today.
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1: ‘Dead Christ' (circa 1625-30), awooden polychromic sculpture by Gregorio Fernández;
Accessed 17/03/2010
Fig. 2: ‘An heroic feat! With dead men!', plate 39 from the series Los Desastres de la Guerra. Etching. Francisco de Goya (circa 1810-1820);
Accessed 19/03/2010
Fig. 3: Doll by Hans Bellmer (circa 1930);
Accessed 17/03/2010
Fig.4: Piero Manzoni; Merda d’Artista; 1961; Accessed 23/03/2010
Fig. 5: Andres Serrano; Piss Christ; 1987; Accessed 01/03/2010
Fig. 6: Fill still from K. by Jayne Parker;
Accessed 15/04/2010
Fig. 7: Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #13. 1978.
Accessed 14/04/2010
Fig.8: Cindy Sherman.Untitled #190. 1989.
Accessed 21/04/2010
Fig. 9: Cindy Sherman; Untitled #175. 1987. Accessed 23/03/2010
Fig.10: Cindy Sherman.Untitled #261. 1992.
Accessed 23/03/2010
Bibliography
Art since 1900; 1994a (pp 645-649). Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Formless:A user's guide /Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss. New York:Zone Books,1997.
Pouvoirs de l'horreur :essai sur l'abjection/ Julia Kristeva. Paris: Seuil, 1980
L’informe. Quelquesréflexionssur l’informe en esthétique. Nicolas Rouillot. Dec 2008. Accessed 15/04/2010
Signifiants et insignifiants de l’art contemporain. Chapter 3. De l’informe à l’abject, l'informel comme significant. P. Deramaix, 1997. Accessed 15/04/2010
Marcel Duchamp and the End of Taste: A Defence of Contemporary Art. Arthur C. Danto. 2000. Accessed 15/04/2010
Essays in philosophy - Lustmord in WeimarGermany: The Abject Boundaries of Feminine Bodies and Representations of Sexualized Murder. Katherine Cooklin. Texas Tech University