Some kind of beautiful: The grotesque body in contemporary Art

Candidate: David Cross

Queensland university of technology creative industries research centre

School of Visual Arts

Thesis Submitted for the qualification of phd 2006

Abstract



This thesis investigates, through a body of interdisciplinary artwork, the representation of the grotesque body. It examines how it might be possible to manipulate the iconography of attraction and repulsion in contemporary art with the aim of confusing the binary opposition of what signifies pleasure and disgust. Each of the three artworks function to draw the audience into a powerful and affective relationship with representations that are simultaneously appealing and revolting. Using a number of modes and techniques to disrupt the dyad, including audience interaction and the use of seductive visual forms, the work focuses on my body as a site for the development of new knowledge about the representation of the non-preferred body. By bringing together otherwise unrelated discourses such as horror and formalist abstract painting, the artwork in this study attempts to call into doubt received wisdom about the nature of beauty and ugliness. There are a lexicon of different artistic mediums explored in this project including performance, installation, video and photography. The engagement with these disciplines represents an attempt to speculate on how we know and experience the body in an increasingly mediatised world. This research is also a key means of highlighting how our understanding of the body is informed by the differing effects of timebased, photographic and performative media. By creating a series of dialogues between the live and the virtual, timebased and static imagery, and the fragmentary body and its relationship to the holistic body, this project seeks to activate in the viewer/participant, a critical self-reflexivity. I ask how it is possible to know and experience corporeality in a virtual world of digitally manipulated bodies.

Appendix Abstract

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Appendix

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List of Illustrations

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Statement of Authorship

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Methodology

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Chapter One

Key Theoretical Framework

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Section One

Navigating Beauty and the Grotesque

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Section Two

An Uncanny Affect

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Section Three

Do You See What I See

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Section Four

Fluid Subjectivity: Identity as Performance

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Chapter Two

Historical Contexts

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Chapter Three

A Discussion of the Practical Work

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Conclusion

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Endnotes

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Bibliography

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List of Illustrations



Image/s 1 + 2. 3 + 4. 5. 6. 7 + 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17 + 18. 19. 20. 21.

David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery David Cross Untitled (installation shot) (2005), Wellington City Art Gallery David Cross Distances (installation shot) (2006), The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. David Cross Distances (installation shot) (2005), Wellington City Art Gallery Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession (1996), mixed media installation Jasper Johns Untitled (1991), oil on canvas Gustav Corbet Burial at Ornans (1851), oil on canvas Hannah Höch The Melancholic (1925), photomontage Man Ray Marquise Casati (1927), photograph Salvador Dali & Horst P. Horst, Costume Design for the Dream of Venus (1939), photograph Man Ray Tomorrow (1924), photograph Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still 190 (1989), photograph Cindy Sherman Untitled 412 (2004), photograph Roni Horn Untitled from the series ‘Cabinet of’ (2003), photograph Bruce Nauman Clown torture (1988), installation shot and installation stills of Double No, video installation Bruce Nauman Clown torture: clown taking a shit (1987), single channel video projection Ugo Rondinoni If there were anywhere but desert (detail) (2000), installation

22. Ugo Rondinoni If there were anywhere but desert (detail) (2000), installation 23. Erwin Worm One minute sculpture (1997), performance/sculpture 24. Mike Parr Cathartic Action (1977), performance 25. David Blaine Above the below (2003), performance/stunt 26. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled: (Placebo-Landscape for Roni) (1993), mixed media installation 27. Hayley Newman Crying Glasses: an Aid to Melancholia (1995), performance 28. Mona Hatoum Roadworks (1985), performance 29. Claes Oldenburg Store (1961), mixed media installation/performance 30. Vito Acconci Seedbed (1972), performance/installation 31. Space Structure Workshop Blowup (1971), mixed media sculpture 32. Claes Oldenburg Icebag (1969), mixed media sculpture 33. Paul McCarthy Blockhead (2003), mixed media sculpture 34. Paul McCarthy Daddies Bighead (2003), mixed media sculpture 35. David Cross Untitled (installation shot) (2006), photographic installation, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. 36. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2006), performance/installation, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. 37. David Cross Distances (installation shot) (2006), three channel video projection, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. 38. David Cross Bounce (installation shot), (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery 39. David Cross Distances (installation shot) (2005), three channel video projection, Wellington City Art Gallery 40. David Cross Untitled (installation shot) (2006), photographic installation, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. 41. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery 42. David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery 43. David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery 44 + 45. David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery 46. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2006), performance/installation, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. 47. David Cross Untitled I (2005), photograph 48. David Cross Untitled II (2005), photograph 49. David Cross Untitled III (2005), photograph 50. David Cross Untitled IV (2005), photograph 51. David Cross Untitled (installation shot) (2005), photographic installation, Wellington City Art Gallery 52, 53, 54 + 55. David Cross Distances (2005), documentary photographs of Distances film shoot 56 + 57. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2006), performance/installation, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. 58. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

Statement of Original Authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature

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Date

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Acknowledgements



Who would want to be a PhD supervisor? The stress, the ease with which the student misunderstands, the handling of every complexity from the big picture to the smallest detail, and the constant and unreasonable demands for immediate email responses are unending. That your principal supervisor still talks to you at the end is a miracle. Mark Pennings has handled all the above and managed to teach me an enormous amount as well. His care and intelligence in educating me to think critically and consistently has been a hallmark of his stewardship. As a good supervisor should, he told me when the artwork or writing was not up to scratch and how it might be improved. No academic salary is recompense for the skills he has taught me. My second supervisor, Jill Barker has also been a source of wealth in directing the development of the practical component. Her thoughtful and intelligent suggestions significantly helped me to progress the work. A significant number of people contributed to the production of Distances. Struan Ashby (camera), James McCarthy (choreographic co-ordination). Stephen Rowe (stills photography), Andrea Clinton (hair and makeup) Maddie Leach, Kelly Joseph (technical support). The models were Regan Gentry, Andrew Jones, Markus McIntyre, Gary Bridle, Greg Sharp and David Shepherd. The inflatable structure for Bounce was made by the brilliant Canvasland International, Levin, New Zealand with design support from Cameron Lloyd, Wade Kenchington and Brendan Duffy. The trigger man for all photography was Stephen Rowe whose patience and good humour after endless photographs of bad horror masks was truly impressive. Thanks also to Artmount Auckland for laminating and mounting. The thankless and tedious task of formatting and designing this document was handled with aplomb and dexterity by Jessica Gommers from umbrella. Massey University School of Fine Arts has supported me through the process with research grants and higher degree awards. Special thanks to Pro-Vice Chancellor, Sally Morgan, and Head of School, Donal Fitzpatrick for consistently supporting the thesis through leave, funding and only the occasional ‘when is it going to be finished’. Thanks also to the support of my colleagues including Aaron Kreisler who read final drafts and told me that it at least made basic sense. Thanks also (in no particular order) to: David Clegg, Sarah Farrar, Emma Bugden, Johanna Mechen, Daniel du Bern, Pippa Sanderson, Mark Webb, Leanne Blazely, Brad Haseman, Paul Makin, Simon Morris, Tim Spite for the revelry and Monday night distraction, James McCarthy (again) for general technical wonderment on many levels, Brendan Wright, Leon van der Graaf, Bill and Brigitta Cross and Bruce Tulloch. Very special thanks to the enormous support, love and understanding from Ellie Boekman and the joyful Edie Cross who miraculously ‘appeared’ half way through. My mother, Megan Tulloch did not live to see the final resolution of this work. Her belief in higher learning and role as a passionate educationalist was the catalyst for this project and her unshakeable support and encouragement gave me another engine when I needed it. I dedicate everything here to her.

Introduction

When the gallery opened at 10am nothing happened for a short while. There was just the constant jet plane sound of the air blower keeping me inflated. I first made eye contact with an elderly man. He stood above me on the viewing platform at the top of the stairs. This platform was a convenient architectural feature of the gallery that enabled those too cautious to jump on the inflatable an opportunity to still see me inside the artwork. He looked at me with a serious penetrating gaze for what seemed like quite a while but in actuality was probably only a minute. He then backed away and was gone. Two hours later when a dozen people were jumping on the structure, I noticed that he was back again looking at me from the same spot. His facial expression was unchanged. I remember thinking how ghostlike and melancholic he seemed. This man continued to watch me for short intervals for the whole day. He either did not leave the gallery in that time or continuously went away and came back. His expression never changed. It was a particular combination of quiet disbelief and trepidation. I worried him and he in turn worried me.

‘Spooky, man! Is it a man? That’s not a man!’ said the father of three children all of whom were perched on top of the inflatable structure. For half an hour he pushed and prodded the canvas that masked my face, struck dumb with uncertainty as to whether I was real. No amount of blinking or excreting tears could sway the balance of probability in my favour. The children did not seem to care one way or another. I had the distinct impression however based on seven hours of observation that they knew I was real and that it was their father and his crusading curiosity that was weird. When the performance finished that day another man, a friend of the father, came up to me to apologise on his behalf. ‘He feels really bad about it but he just couldn’t accept that you were real. He thought you were a rubber robot’.



The first thing I felt were two fingers poked hard into my eyes. Then, when my eyes had recovered enough to focus, I saw the protagonist smiling down at me pleased 

with himself. He began to tell me that he was savvy to the conventions of this kind of performance work and knew what was required. He then stood up and with his elbow cocked dropped his shoulder into my face breaking my nose. When I recovered my senses, he had stopped smiling and told me ‘This is what you want isn’t it’. He then left by quietly sliding, not bouncing, off the inflatable. His assumption of my supposed masochistic orientation did little to mask the relish of his sadism. What was more disturbing was that I realised two young girls had been sitting there watching the whole sequence of events taking place. They smiled faintly at me when he left until told to get down by a guardian.

Images 1 + 2. David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

These three interactions took place when I first tested the work Bounce in the foyer of the Wellington City Art Gallery in July 2005. I cite them partly to illustrate the variety of responses this work elicited and partly because these anecdotes cannot be verified in video or photographic documentation. Bounce was a dangerous work in that my body was precariously placed inside an inflatable just beneath the top of the structure. Two small eye-holes were all that revealed the presence of my body inside the red

bouncy play structure. The audience were encouraged to jump on the structure and a number of small signs asked that they remove their shoes. Aside from this guideline there were no other rules.

The extreme responses from the participants was exhausting. A number of the audience members, especially the younger ones, engaged with the work in terms of unfettered physical pleasure. It was as if the stuffy art institution had declared a day of carnival and the rules about running, touching and screaming were turned on their head. The sense of unmitigated glee especially in the children was only exacerbated by the release that same day of the latest book in the Harry Potter series. Timing and context as they say are everything! One boy told his friends Voldemort was inside the structure and that they should spit on me. Unfortunately for him, the rules of carnival did not extend to spitting and he was ejected from the gallery by an agitated parent. The imploring words ‘but there was a man in there daddy, really’ trailed off into the distance.

For other participants, the work activated a different register of emotions. Amusement and delight were countered by revulsion, disgust, indignation or a clear sense of disquiet. For some, the carnivalesque pleasure of the work was overturned upon realising that I was below the surface of the structure silently and mysteriously gazing upwards. This disconcerting experience of finding me inside the inflatable play castle was heightened by my unusual physical appearance. My eyes, the only part of my body visible, were unusual. They peered out from under the inflatable and were for many people incongruous, absurd: evidence of an abnormal man sealed in a children’s recreational toy. The alignment did not make sense. It was grotesque. It was uncanny.



Bounce is one of three artworks in this project that investigate the representation of the grotesque body. Together with an Untitled suite of four photographs, and Distances, 10

a three projection DVD installation, these works constitute a body of art that grapples with the nature of attraction and repulsion in contemporary art. I examine how it might be possible to manipulate iconography associated with these two categories to confuse the binary opposition of what signifies pleasure and disgust. My aim is to draw the audience into a powerful and affective relationship with representations that are simultaneously appealing and revolting. I employ a number of modes and techniques to destablise this binary including audience interaction in Bounce and the use of seductive visual forms in the photographic and video works. These range from the infantile pleasure of jumping on a carnival inflatable structure in an art gallery, to the opportunity of enjoying the brilliant and saturated chromatic effects of colourfield abstraction in the photographs. These modalities are designed to offer the audience member a pleasurable or captivating art experience.

Images 3 + 4. David Cross Untitled (installation shots) (2006), The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct.

The sense of enjoyment however, is tempered by the nascent presence in the work of my abject body. Whether gazing from behind plastic horror masks or from under the surface of the inflatable structure, my body negates the possibility of the audience

member experiencing seamless beauty or pleasure. This is because my eyelids are scarred, distended and without eyelashes, and my pupils are bloodshot. My eyes also excrete a viscous material that is not normal. I appear as a disturbing character whose identity wavers along an uncertain faultline between the real and the fantastic. The audience have to decide whether I am a real person who is disfigured, or whether my grotesque features are fabricated by the use of prosthetic devices and makeup.

This dialogue between real and simulated disfigurement is for the participant a Gordian knot that defies easy resolution. While I might appear to be a macabre figure, a more disturbing quality is the extreme slipperiness of this identification. I am horrific but at the same time my body resists the escapist logic that characterises the horror genre. The obviously artificial and contrived character of the monster or the ghoul is only partly present in the work. However, there is also a profoundly human dimension that makes it difficult for the audience to read my body solely as a cipher of escapist fantasy. In these three artworks, I register as an inherently incomplete figure whose meaning wavers in an interstitial space between the unknown and the known.

The first chapter examines four key thematic reference points that inform the theoretical content of the artwork. They are: 1. Beauty and the Grotesque 2. The Uncanny 3. The Gaze 4. Fluid Subjectivity: Identity as Performance In each of these sections I attempt to underscore the significance of these terms in relation to the idea of the non-preferred body. This description was employed by Kaja Silverman in her book The Threshold of the Visible World (2001). Here she attempted to categorise bodies that were considered by society to be without value and were

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stigmatised for one reason or another. Her description marked an attempt to shift the meaning of these bodies from the pejorative taint of abnormality to a less derogatory 12

identification. As Michel Foucault has argued, the abnormal body is an entity of fear formed in correlation with a set of institutions of control. It is, he suggests, a laughable theoretical construction that nonetheless has harshly real effects.1 Silverman, with these effects in mind, attempted to challenge the pathological underpinnings of abnormality. Her aim was to shift the focus of what constituted acceptable and unacceptable bodies away from a typology of attributes towards the issue of individual choice. In other words, in place of a hierarchy between ideal and degenerative bodies, she argued for a distinction to be made between those bodies we prefer and those that we do not.

The first section of the chapter on theoretical contexts examines the idea of preference in relation to beauty and the grotesque. I investigate a range of thinkers including John Scotus Eriugena and Immanuel Kant who sought to locate the grotesque or the disgusting either at the edge of beauty or as a category outside of beauty altogether. I then go on to examine thinkers who have argued for the beneficial value of the grotesque or abjection especially George Bataille and Julia Kristeva. The final part of this section aims to develop a model for how aspects of beauty and the grotesque might be brought together to form a hybrid category. I argue for the establishment of an in-between space whereby these two terms are aligned at crucial points of intersection. The challenge, I contend, is not to champion the base or the beautiful, rather it is to find the blind spots in the spaces in-between beauty and ugliness whereby difference can potentially be located.

The second section of this chapter considers the idea of the uncanny as an operation that has been employed by artists to critically engage with an audience. I argue that

the value of the uncanny lies in its capacity to penetrate and unsettle the conscious self of the viewer. This process, Freud argued, is brought about because of the emergence of latent unconscious information. The uncanny destabilises the spectator and places them in a curious in-between space where the unfamiliar is curiously interpolated into the familiar and vice versa. The uncanny is then always fluid, somehow unearthed and clouded in the elusive spaces that mark out our memories and fantasies of lived experience.

Image 5. David Cross Distances (installation shots) (2006), The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct. Image 6. Distances (installation shots) (2005), Wellington City Art Gallery

The three artworks in this project all seek to engage with the uncanny as both a strategy and an affect. Each work revolves around disclosing, discovering and confirming the existence of something that is impossible, something that defies conventional conceptual schemes. By constructing an art environment that might be described as psychically confusing, I seek to create unresolvable conundrums. By destabilising the conditions by which the art is experienced, it is more difficult to distinguish between different categories. As stated, rather than clearly defining what is beautiful and what is grotesque, I am concerned to shift the participant’s decision making to a level of uncertainty.

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In the third section, I investigate a number of key issues in relation to ‘the gaze’. In particular, I investigate how the gaze functions as a mechanism of inter-personal 14

exchange. The gaze, as I outline, has often been discussed in pejorative terms, as an oppressive means by which bodies are either imbued with value or rejected. Yet avoiding being seen and becoming, as Peggy Phelan has argued, ‘unmarked’ is, I suggest, a fraught exercise. Each of the three artworks in this project attempts to grapple with key power relations inherent in looking. My aim is to identify specific blind spots in the operation of the gaze that frustrate attempts to survey, control, and locate the body in a hierarchical structure.

In the fourth section, I examine the idea of performativity as outlined in the writings of Judith Butler and Jon McKenzie. Performativity is a model of subjectivity that suggests we are not constituted by biological factors or essential dispositions; rather, subjectivity is defined as a series of accomplishments. The discourse of performativity, like the uncanny and abjection, is valuable for the study of the non-preferred body because it suggests that subjectivity is always de-centred, contingent and never fixed. Performativity is a liminal category that emphasises “in-betweeness” and allows for social norms to be suspended, played with, and transformed.2 The performative nature of subjectivity suggests that definitions of what constitute categories such as beauty and the grotesque can never be secured but are continually being made and remade.

The second chapter focuses on a number of pertinent art historical issues and a detailed investigation of related works of art. These issues include the representation of the grotesque in contemporary art, the role and value of performance art in a mediatised culture, and a critical view of Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of relational aesthetics. In reference to the work Bounce, I also examine the history of inflatable structures in art.

Robert Storr has suggested that the grotesque is one of the most significant cultural formations of our time. He claimed that at the beginning of this century, the grotesque is both a subject matter and a critical mechanism that is widely employed by artists for its ‘astonishingly protean artificiality’ and ‘its capacity for inspiring genuine delight as well as provoking disquiet’. I investigate practitioners such as Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman and Ugo Rondinone for whom the sometimes confrontational but frequently seductive manner of the grotesque functions to call accepted wisdom into doubt.

In an era of globalisation where the constant and fluid dissemination of information has become crucial for artists to communicate and network, performance art stands as a resistant and problematic medium. Because of its insistence on unmediated experience and embodiment, performance art has to be directly engaged with by audience members in situ. It is not a medium suited to conveying affect through documentation because the immediacy or ‘liveness’ of the work cannot be captured successfully in either video, photography or text. Yet for Philip Auslander, the greatest challenge facing performance art is the challenge to ‘liveness’ brought about by new communication technologies. According to Auslander, internet streaming and digital video have incrementally diminished the sense of liveness in our mediatised culture. I examine the efficacy of performance art in an increasingly mediatised world and argue for the continued importance of presence as an approach for affecting audiences.

As well as new media technologies performance art has also been called into question by Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics. I examine his manifesto of contemporary art practice with particular reference to its premise that performance has been largely superseded by artwork concerned with conviviality and friendship culture. I will argue however that relational aesthetics is based on certain aspects of performance art. In particular, the ideas of interactivity and audience participation.

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Where Bourriaud’s model departs from performance art is in its rejection of the idea of transformation through radical transgression. The challenge as I identify it is to find 16

ways of bridging the appeal of relational aesthetics with the agitational methods of performance art.

The last chapter is devoted to a discussion of the aims and objectives of the three artworks in this thesis. It examines each work in detail and outlines the reasons why I have utilised a range of different artistic mediums such as performance, installation, video and photography. My engagement with these mediums is not simply a response to the ubiquity of inter-disciplinarity in contemporary art (though this is important) but an important means of highlighting how our understanding of the body is contingent upon the differing effects of timebased, photographic and performative mediums. By creating a series of dialogues between the live and the virtual, timebased and static imagery, and the fragmentary body and its relationship to the holistic body, I have sought to activate in the viewer/participant a critical self-reflexivity whereby they begin to speculate on how they know and experience the body. In particular, I am interested in using fine art research methods to challenge conventional understandings of the preferred and non-preferred body and to confuse the significations of beauty and the grotesque. Using a number of strategies including masquerade and performativity together with devices such as repetition and duration, I have endeavoured to create a space between beauty and the grotesque that critically recasts conventional constructions of desire and repulsion.

Methodology Thesis Breakdown This thesis consists of a practical body of artwork and a written exegesis. The artwork comprises 60% of the project and 40% is devoted to the written component (exegesis).

Interdisciplinarity and Multidisciplinarity as Research Methodologies

I have employed a number of different methodologies in this project that encompass contemporary fine art practice and humanities research. I draw on a range of disciplines including art history, cultural studies, philosophy and gender studies to examine the representation of the beautiful/grotesque body. Within these fields, I have utilised psychoanalytic, structural and poststructural frameworks as models that offer fertile ways of understanding my fine art practise. These models also function as key theoretical tools informing how artwork might provoke responses that challenge the stability of thhe beauty/grotesque dyad.

The breadth of reference points highlights an interest in interdisciplinarity as both a theoretical and practice based model. Interdisciplinarity is a method of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a research area that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single field or profession. The representation of the non-preferred body is a good example of a topic that has been investigated from different viewpoints across the humanities and arts. Whether it is Foucault’s historical treatise on abnormality or Cindy Sherman’s photographs of grotesque bodies, I have sought to develop an academic research model where a variety of different knowledges’ are valued. Only by drawing these discourses together is it possible to construct a

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complex understanding of the broader cultural and social meanings that address the non-preferred body. 18

Forms of interdisciplinarity as well as multidisciplinarity are also a principal methodological approach in the practical component of this research project. I have employed a number of artistic mediums including performance, installation, photography and video as ways of capturing a complex understanding of the representation of the non-preferred body. In the work Bounce, I have sought to employ an interdisciplinary model drawing together performance, sculpture and installation in one work. I am concerned to extend the critical possibilities of each genre by fusing together key aspects to form an artwork that operates in-between existing categories. The key aim is to emphasise liminality as a critical method that challenges binary models of thinking.

This interdisciplinary model is also combined with the use of multiple mediums in a process of mutlidisciplinarity. The incorporation of different media such as photography and video in the one exhibition highlights a concern to chart how one’s experience of the non-preferred body type differs depending on the artistic media employed. I aim to examine how the affective resonances of, for example, photography engage the audience in significantly different ways than does media such as live performance.

As Teresa Brennan has argued, the transmission of affect is a complex social and psychological process whereby the specific nature of the atmosphere or the environment one occupies at a given time ensures that something physical and biological is present in any given moment that was not there before. This transmission of affect, she suggests, literally gets into the individual and results in bodily changes.3 Following on from Brennan’s ontological interest in charting how different circumstances subtly, yet

significantly, impact upon our experience of the world, I have sought to apply this model to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary art practice. I am interested in determining how different media including performance, video and photography ‘get into’ audiences. In other words, how does the atmosphere of a live performance affect viewers in ways that do not occur in the experience of video art or photography? Furthermore, I ask how it might be possible to utilise the polyvalent affects of each media to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the non-preferred body than would be the case if only one artistic media were employed.

The use of my own body as the fundamental basis of this research is a method of the project. As outlined in the introduction, my body is different from so-called ‘normal’ bodies in that I have a number of chronic eye conditions. The decision to utilise my body as the principal subject/site of representation is based on my interest in using fine art disciplines to resist its framing in derogatory terms. It is of course possible to research the grotesque body without first hand experience. However, artwork that grapples with this topic is more likely to evoke powerful resonances when there is a tension between the artificial and the real body. The specificity of my eye condition ensures that the audience’s experience of the artwork is based on an existent reality. In other words, the presence of my body makes it especially difficult for the audience to dismiss what they are experiencing as being contrived and fake. By positioning my ‘grotesque’ body into a dialogue with horror, abstraction and juvenile recreation structures, I aim to establish the preconditions by which an experience of the grotesque may be activated.

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Performance Art as Qualitative Research

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It could be argued that all forms of visual art are diminished when access to the work is only through reproduction. Issues of surface and scale in relation to painting for example are often lost in translation from originals to documentary copies. Yet a case might be made that performance art in particular is a medium whose impact cannot effectively be grasped via the second hand experience of photographs or video footage. This poses a dilemma when one of the components of this thesis is a performance that has already taken place. The critical issues surrounding Bounce that are described in this document are based on events that I cannot quantify through conventional academic means. Stated simply, this work as with all works of performance art, cannot be definitively documented.

The value of performance art is that it is a medium of the moment, a mode of practice that is contingent, genuinely interactive and often visceral. As I will outline in this thesis, performance by its very nature has to be experienced live and in situ. Because it relies on the audience member to help create and frame the nature of the art experience taking place, the work cannot be successfully documented with any great verisimilitude. One’s experience of photographs or video footage no matter how detailed can never approximate the experience of liveness, of actually being there.

Photographic documentation fractures the real time of performance into static frames. This process distorts performance’s temporal dimension and only serves to canonise specific moments that are chosen by the photographer and not by the artist, or perhaps more importantly, by the audience. Photographs also emphasise the visual over the haptic by removing the experience of sound, smell and touch from the original performance. Video as a tool of documentation operates as a technology that imparts

the temperal and aural features of the work, yet like photography it is defined by the imperatives of the camera operator and the monocular viewpoint of the lens. The audience’s experience of video documentation is thus inherently virtual, fostering a safe distance between the events taking place on the screen or projection surface and the viewer.

The value of performance art as a creative genre lies in part in its capacity to erase the distances between artist and audience by demanding an engagement of real bodies in real time. Yet one result of this ‘necessity of presence’ is that performance art always eschews the academic burden of proof. How for instance can I substantiate the claims made for this work when at the outset I have discredited the conventional means of demonstrating the empirical evidence of what has taken place? How might I, the artist, reasonably determine an accurate experience of the work and record its nuances for those who were not there at the time? It is not practical or desirable to personally photograph or video the work as these operations would seriously impinge upon the nature of my artwork and the experience of it. Nor can the performance be adequately evaluated through the utilisation of audience surveys that take place immediately after experiencing the work. This social science methodology radically interferes with the audience’s experience of the artwork by demanding a mode of thinking that is at odds with the multifarious and unquantifiable experience of a live artwork. This experience cannot be captured through formulaic questions because this approach prescribes how the performance might be described and defined. It also assumes that immediate responses to the work are somehow more definitive than responses that might take days, weeks or even years, to unfold.

One partial solution I have chosen to employ is to recount episodes or specific instances of events that took place in the performance of Bounce. These ‘stories’ are

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a means by which I can frame what took place in the performance and thereby claim agency over the work. By articulating certain anecdotes that marked the inaugural 22

performance, I aim to construct a highly personalised account of the breadth of experiences that took place. The selected anecdotes also colour the work in specific ways. They do not capture the overarching subtleties and nuances of what took place. The events I outline in this exegesis stand out as stark experiences that affected me in definitive ways.

While this form of documentation flavours my authorial experience of the work, like photographic documentation, it is not entirely satisfactory. Who is to say for instance that I did not embellish the stories for dramatic affect? After all I have no means of proving their veracity. I have thus chosen to use both anecdotal recollections and photographic evidence so that they both might offer traces of the work: partial glimpses into what took place. It is important however to emphasise that these have only a limited value as accurate indicators of what took place at the Wellington City Art Gallery in July 2005. The only viable means of engaging with the work is through live experience. This is the irrevocable principle of performance art.

Reading Audience Interpretation

In the final chapter I discuss the rationale for the three artworks. This often entails describing how the participant experiences each work. It is important to note that these speculations are necessarily contingent and based on my own interpretations of how the audience might engage with my art. One of the key principles of contemporary art is that regardless of authorial intention meanings can never be fixed or resolute. While I have aimed to build certain critical components into each work in terms of the

aims and objectives of this thesis, people can never experience art in the same way. Art is a contextual discipline/activity and the most powerful work eschews closure and certainty in favour of openess and liminality. My attempts to frame the artwork should be read with this in mind.

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Chapter 1 Key Theoretical Frameworks 25

They say there is always a moment when the most commonplace or the most masked person reveals their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity. And rather than seeking out the identity beneath the mask, one should seek out the mask beneath the identity, the face which haunts us and deflects us from their identity - the masked divinity which in fact haunts each one of us for a moment, at some time or other. For objects, savages, beasts and primitives, otherness is sure, singularity is sure. A beast has no identity, but for all that is not alienated - it is foreign to itself and to its own ends. As a result it has that charm of being foreign to their image but enjoying an organic familiarity with their bodies and all the others. Jean Baudrillard

Section 1 Navigating Beauty and the Grotesque 26

What is beautiful is loved; what is not beautiful is not loved.

Theognis

The beautiful is always strange.

Baudelaire

In their preface to the 1999 exhibition catalogue, Regarding Beauty, curators Neal Benezra and Olga Viso highlighted what they perceived to be the problematic relationship between beauty and art at the end of the twentieth century. They argued that in an art world increasingly focused on global issues and social concerns, artists and critics have questioned beauty’s efficacy and relevance for contemporary culture.4 Using highly emotive language, Benezra and Viso postulated that the contemporary art world had mounted an ‘assault on beauty’ leaving in its wake a ‘confused and baffled art viewing public’ supposedly uncertain about the traditional alignment of art with beauty.5 The important implication of this thesis (and a good number of others written in the 1990s) was that beauty as a staple component of contemporary art was vulnerable and urgently needed defending. Regarding Beauty attempted to display key contemporary art works that had turned towards beauty. This art was informed by the writings of a number of philosophers, art critics and cultural theorists. Including Arthur C Danto, Dave Hickey, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Umberto Eco who sought to define what beauty might mean in the twilight years of the twentieth century.6

The question of why there has been a ‘return’ to beauty in recent cultural discourse is a complex one and largely lies beyond the scope of this thesis. I aim to evaluate the shifting modality of beauty as a concept in the writings of a number of key recent

thinkers, and in particular, the implications of this for the non-preferred or abject body. Ostensibly this ‘return’ to beauty could be seen as an attempt to reassert a more conservative, idealised conception of aesthetic value. This is after a period where representations of grotesque otherness asserted a presence, albeit a tenuous one, in contemporary art of the late 1980s/early 1990s.7 It is undoubtedly the case that a neo-Kantian logic has permeated much of this new thinking in relation to beauty, although some writers have selectively appropriated Kant to push a narrow and reactionary position. Not all of the discussion surrounding beauty however, is concerned with celebrating floral art and gorgeous bodies to fight the creeping incursion of the grotesque. I want to examine how recent theories of beauty can be utilised and employed not to negate the non-preferred body but to include it in an interstitial identification that combines the beautiful and the grotesque. I will argue that only by working within the discourse of beauty and adopting its conventional frames is it possible to subvert the pejorative meanings attributed to the non-preferred body in contemporary culture.

The Construction of Beauty and the Monstrous

In the later Middle Ages thinkers began to extend an understanding of beauty to incorporate the ugly or the monstrous. Before this time, various aesthetic theories saw ugliness as the antithesis of beauty, a discordance that broke the rules of proportion on which both moral and physical beauty was based. Thomas Aquinas for example, writing in the Thirteenth Century, said that for beauty to exist, there must be not only due proportion but also integrity. In other words, all things must have completeness, and hence a mutilated body is ugly.8 The idea that the human body must be considered in balanced proportion can be traced back to Pythagoras who argued that when two

27

opposites confront each other, only one of them represents perfection, the odd number, and the straight line.9 This binary logic not only differentiated the beautiful 28

from the grotesque but also excluded the latter from any connection with the former. However, John Scotus Eriugena in his text The Contrast of Opposites (Ninth Century) highlighted the importance of the ‘deformed’ in establishing equilibrium. Rather than excluding the deformed from considerations of beauty, he suggested that it was a crucial part of beauty’s overall makeup. He argued “that anything that could be considered deformed in itself as a part of a whole not only becomes beautiful in the totality, because it is well ordered, but is also a cause of beauty in general”.10 Eriugena suggested that virtues win praise not only by comparison with the opposite vices, but also without this comparison they would not be worthy of praise.

Eriugena established a principle that Umberto Eco has stated is now observed almost uniformly: although ugly creatures and things exist, art has the power to portray them in a beautiful way, and the beauty of this imitation makes ugliness acceptable. In other words, the ugliness that repels us in nature exists, but it becomes acceptable and even pleasurable in the art that expresses and shows beautifully the value of ugliness. The German philosopher Hegel pointed to the significance of Christian iconography in this incorporation of the grotesque into conceptions of beauty. His discussion of the representation of suffering highlights Christ’s crucifixion as a scene that brings together in radically new ways the grotesque and the beautiful as a scene of sublimated masochism. Scenes of Christ’s death, he suggested, depict an intense hostility toward God, which brings in its train outer ugliness, coarseness, barbarity, rage and the deformation of the figure. In all these regards Hegel argues that the non-beautiful is represented as a necessary phase, which is not the case with classical concepts of beauty.11

While there are countless examples of art works that position the non-beautiful in a symbiotic relationship with the beautiful, it would be simplistic to suggest that such accommodations have legitimised the grotesque or the ugly. Beauty might be seen to need the grotesque as a form of critical context or contrast, but as Derrida has emphasised in his writings on deconstruction, one term always asserts a powerful authority over the other. Deconstructive critique sets out to undermine western metaphysics by contesting and undoing binary oppositions based on hierarchies, revealing their idealism and their reliance on what he described as ‘an essential centre or presence’.12 In relation to the beauty/ugly opposition, beauty has always dominated the more passive and non-preferred category of ugliness. For example, the history of western aesthetics from classical sculpture onwards has principally sought to elevate the study and contemplation of beauty over the study of ugliness.

Despite the fact that beauty is privileged in this historical dyad, the actual boundaries that separate definitions of beauty and ugliness are not and have never been securely fixed. The strange and elusive edict that beauty is in the eye of the beholder has to a large degree ensured that its parameters are difficult to secure.13 John Armstrong in his text The Secret Power of Beauty (2004), has suggested that this adage is employed to say there is nothing else to say about beauty. We might, he suggests, love the things we find beautiful but we are inarticulate when we try to communicate this love.14 Armstrong’s proposition as to why there has been a general reluctance to define beauty points to a possible blind spot in its structural coherence. Beauty may be the powerful term in the beauty/ugly binary, yet if we cannot definitively agree on what beauty is then might this suggest that its parameters are fluid? One of the key questions I ask in this project is what are the critical implications of this unwillingness to pin down beauty and could this serve to extrapolate a diverse and more inclusive definition of its forms?

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Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004) suggests that beauty is an enduring, which is to say unsated, state of desire. For him, the experience of beauty is 30

always erotic, is always a wanting, and since we all long, beauty is a universal object of human experience.15 John Armstrong argues along similar lines but substitutes the idea of love for desire in his examination. He suggests that the experience of beauty consists in finding a spiritual value whereby there is an inseparable connection between values such as truth and happiness and the objects and people we contemplate.16 Both writers draw heavily on the seminal aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. Kant, in his text Critique of Judgement (1790), goes into great detail about how beauty functions both in nature, and more particularly in art. He emphasises the relationship between beauty and pleasure while at the same time arguing that the experience of pleasure must be dispassionate. Beauty is thus an object of pleasure apart from any emotional interest.17 Both Sartwell and Armstrong reiterate Kant’s idea that even if the subject matter is ugly, it can still be depicted as beautiful. Hence an image can be delightful although what it represents might not be.

Disgust and the Grotesque Body

While Kant went to great lengths to expand the definition of beauty into forms, objects and bodies that might ordinarily be considered ugly or non-preferred, he emphasised that this had limits. In particular, he cautioned against the idea that anything could be incorporated within the boundaries of this term. Kant signalled that there was ‘one kind of ugliness alone that cannot be transformed into aesthetic delight and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust.18 This crucial caveat highlighted a late Eighteenth Century fear that the grotesque was a category that threatened the value and power of beauty and therefore one had to negate its presence.

Kant did not oppose the grotesque on moral or ethical grounds, rather, he argued that our interest in disgusting things or images could not be aesthetic. This attempt to segregate the grotesque from aesthetic value however highlights a major weakness in Kant’s position. He failed to adequately define what the parameters of disgusting imagery in art were, and thus conveniently overlooked the elusive and historically contingent nature of this category. Where Kant claimed in 1798 that disgust was a term of some broad social consensus (a consensus that seems highly questionable), from the Eighteenth Century onward its meaning became increasingly more contentious.19 For instance, Lesley Higgins in her book The Modernist Cult of the Ugly (2002) has argued that far from disgust being excluded from aesthetic concerns, it became one of the crucial tropes of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century aesthetic investigation.20

An examination of that which elicits disgust was undertaken in the writings of George Bataille. Bataille was a polemicist who operated on the fringes of the Surrealist movement in the early to mid-twentieth century. Bataille, like many of his artistic peers, sought to radically recast our understanding of beauty. Yet he, more than any other Surrealist, attempted to celebrate and reify the condition of disgust and move its meaning from a debased and abhorrent identification towards a position of significant cultural value. For Bataille, disgust was a manifestation of what he called base materialism. This was a type of matter that society had no idea of, that was nonsensical, and that had no rights in any sense. He argued that:

Base materialism has the job of de-classifying, which is to say simultaneously lowering and liberating from all ontological prisons, from any role model . It is principally a matter of de-classing matter, of extracting it from the philosophical clutches of classical materialism, which is

31

nothing but idealism in disguise. Most materialists have situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse types of facts, 32

without realising that in this way they have submitted to an obsession with an ideal form of matter, with a form that approaches closer than any other to that which matter should be.21

Bataille’s ‘matter’ as Yves Alain-Bois has identified is shit, laughter, an obscene word or madness: whatever cuts all discussion short, and whatever reason cannot drape with a ‘mathematical frock coat’.22 These types of ‘matter’ were for Bataille formless. They resembled nothing and refused the process of being assimilated to any concept or to any abstraction.23

The cleverness of Bataille’s argument was the way in which he inverted conventional notions of normalcy and difference. Instead of defining the grotesque as different from the norm he argued that difference (or his description, heterology) was in fact the norm.24 Nature, he suggested, produces only unique monsters; there are no deviants in nature because there is nothing but deviation.25

Bataille’s idea of heterology was bound up with what he described as the paradigm of attraction and repulsion. These two terms were fundamental states constituted by the centripetal pull of society that defined identity. Importantly, Bataille suggested that it was not the power of attraction, but repulsion, that unified social forces. For instance, society was more likely to agree on common parameters for what might be defined as repulsive than they were for a similar consolidation of what constitutes attraction. Central to Bataille’s idea of repulsion is a dread of abjection and the abject body. He identified the lack of control in abject bodies as a principal source of fear. Yet more disturbingly, the worst consequence

of abjection was the inability to fear and therefore care about repulsion or loss of control. 33

Bataille’s writings on abjection and base materialism were important for later radical thinking as he claimed that the condition had the capacity to positively effect social/ cultural change. Rather than being a condition of weakness and fear, Bataille believed that abjection was a mechanism that challenged social control. By actively re-assessing so-called degraded elements in art, Bataille sought to blur the distinction between mind and body and accordingly open up new subject positions outside conventional binary oppositions.

One attribute of the abject body was its capacity to transform our understanding of this body by projecting back onto society the fear that is attached to it. The act of crying is one example where the body temporarily loses control. While it is not particularly associated with fear, it becomes abject when it exceeds socially sanctioned limits. Crying is usually interpreted as a clear expression of particular emotional states. We cry because we are upset or suffer pain, or because we are ecstatically happy. While the shedding of tears is sometimes considered acceptable for men it is, except in extreme circumstances, traditionally cast as a sign of weakness. For example the interpretation of my body shedding tears is informed by social values that are associated with gender roles that determine that it is more acceptable for women to cry than for men. Male crying is occasionally sanctioned when the tears are produced as a temporary moment of catharsis or loss of control until such time as emotional and physical discipline can be restored.

Yet the meanings associated with crying are never straightforward. As Tom Lutz in his study, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999) argued, tears express

contradictory desires. While they largely connote physical or emotional pain we cry in part because it makes us feel better. Lutz explores the shifting historical meanings 34

of crying, and his study seeks to legitimise the cultural importance of this activity. He argued that tears function in western culture as a kind of language, a primal form of communication.26 It is often mixed emotions or competing desires – for instance, fear mixed with despair – that he suggested trigger the release of tears.27 Lutz however does not examine the social limits of crying, and in particular, the consequences of shedding too many tears. He also neglects to discuss that by continually or uncontrollably crying, one runs the risk of being branded with the stigma of abjection.

Psychoanalytic theorist, Julia Kristeva, examines the fear of abjection in her book The Powers Of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). She defines abjection as a process that disturbs identity and order because it does not respect borders, positions or rules.28 Kristeva connects this phenomenon to her study of the border between the inside and outside of the body in relation to the social expectation that we remove and hide all traces of bodily discharges. She highlights the social expectation that we rigorously police our bodies to prevent matter such as vomit, menstrual blood or weeping to be socially visible. To ignore these social sanctions risks being seen to be partaking in a non-preferred activity that is designated as ‘abject’.

One result of being cast as abject is that the individual can also be placed in an intermediary position where they are defined in an arrested passage from subject to object. She points to the inability of a child to separate itself from its mother, caught up in a suffocating, clinging maternal lining, as a primal abject scene. This idea of the in-betweeness of abjection is further explored by Yves-Alain Bois in his co-authored text with Rosalind Krauss Formless: A Users Guide (1997). Like Kristeva, he argued

that abjection is an intermediary position for which the psychiatric term borderline is useful. The abject as intermediary, he suggests, is a matter of ‘uncrossable boundaries’ and ‘undifferentiable substances’.29 He employs Sartre’s idea of the visquez (slimy) as a metaphor for how abjection operates between states. Slime is a condition of matter that is neither liquid nor solid but midway between the two. It clings as Sartre described it ‘stickily to the fingers, sucking at them, compromising them in the form of a gagging suction’.30

If, as Bois argues, abjection is a borderline between frontiers that hinders a clearly defined subject position, then what are the implications for bodies that are irrevocably abject? Is the border a ghetto of marginality where the best that one can hope for is to achieve a partial and heavily diminished subjectivity? Or, is this space in-between potentially a position from which to establish new subjectivities? Homi Bhaba is one theorist who has suggested that on the border or being ‘in-between’ is a powerful position from which to challenge and reconfigure conventional social identities and sexualities. While Bhaba is principally concerned with the subject under colonialism, his thesis raises issues about the nature of postmodern subjectivity and in particular the idea of hybridity. For Bhaba, identity is never coherent or fixed, but like migration, is subject to continual transformation and cultural inscription. He suggests that we are all hybrids of changing racial, sexual and national orientation and this means that there is no longer a clear distinction between inside and outside.31 According to this model, the archetypal figure now becomes the migrant who lives in transitional spaces where cultural differences coincide and clash.

Bhaba’s thesis has important implications for identity politics and in particular the dialogue surrounding beauty and ugliness. His notion of the in-between for instance challenges the legitimacy of binary constructions such as abject/normal and beauty/

35

ugliness. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of ‘difference’, Bhaba proposes a cogent critique of thinking that is dependent on binary oppositions. Like Derrida, he considers western 36

discourse to be founded on a series of such oppositions, in which one term of the binary is always privileged over the other. Beauty/Ugliness is a powerful example of a loaded binary. Deconstruction aims to destabilize such binaries and authorities of dominance. This theorisation has immense value when examining abjection and the beauty/ugliness dichotomy. For instead of seeing such binary constructions as fixed and unchangeable (as a good deal of humanist and structuralist thought does), deconstruction provides a framework by which subjectivity can be understood as moving in-between these poles. Hence, instead of being confined by the category of ugliness simply because one’s body does not conform to the conventional tenets of socially sanctioned beauty, deconstruction offers the possibility of questioning and destabilizing this hierarchical structure.

Against Abjection: The Return of the Beautiful

Bataille, and other theorists of alterity such as Kristeva and Artaud have brought about a radical re-casting of the representation of grotesque forms. Art theorist Simon Taylor writing in the early 1990s pointed to the dramatic increase in the number of artists using abjection as an artistic strategy. He cited the fact that “abjection can and does act as an assault on the totalising and homogenising notions of identity, system and order”.32 While a number of the practitioners Taylor mentions are discussed in greater detail in chapter two, the broader point to be made here is that by the early 1990s disgust had become a legitimate source of artistic interest and a trope of aesthetic investigation for many visual art practitioners. Artists working from a variety of perspectives including queer, feminist, and disabled utilised abject processes and

materials with the aim of subverting conventional definitions of the preferred and nonpreferred body. 37

While exhibitions such as Abject Art at the Whitney Museum (1992) and Bad Girls at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (1994) highlighted both the significance of art practices that examined abjection and the institutional support for this work, a groundswell against the grotesque in art was already taking place. By ‘uncanny’ coincidence a number of writers and theorists began a concerted campaign to highlight the value and significance of beauty in the visual arts. These writers, including Dave Hickey, Mathew Kieran, John Kirwan and Arthur C. Danto sought to challenge the incursion of the grotesque into art by mounting a rigorous defence of beauty as a crucial modality of social harmony and order. Their critiques of work that might be described as abject or grotesque were predicated on aesthetic grounds; namely that much of this work might have succeeded in its political aims but failed as art.

Danto in his text Beauty and Morality (1995), warned of the dangers in activist art of avoiding beauty and thereby jeopardizing the work’s value as an art object. While sympathizing with why an artist may wish to eschew beauty namely ‘because beauty induces the wrong perspective on whatever it is the activist wants something done about’, he argues that too often this leads to bad art.33 The crux of Danto’s argument is that there are things that art can do, but elevating the grotesque to the level of artistic value is not one of them. Danto cites Kant’s writing on beauty as a model for contemporary thinking about art. In particular, he employs Kant’s idea about the relationship between beauty and the universal. Accordingly, he argues that the beautiful can only be represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.34

This model of universal satisfaction is a useful (if problematic) way to critique the incursion of the grotesque into the field of contemporary aesthetics. By linking beauty 38

to the universal - and only to the universal - it negates the possibility of the grotesque ever being included. Mathew Kieran takes up this argument in his study Revealing Art (2004). In it he argues that the preoccupation in late 1980s and early 1990s with materials resulting from bodily processes and the base, disgusting or transgressive, is a fraught exercise designed to subvert Kant’s notion of beauty.35 Kieran highlights how the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Andres Serrano does not attempt to negate aesthetics so much as ask to be appreciated for its aesthetic appeal.36 It is this attempt to conflate the grotesque with pleasure that Kieran aggressively critiques. He justifies this position by arguing that while we can come to delight in things we would normally find thoroughly unpleasant,37 the aesthetic delight felt by such characters is perverse.38 Kieran, by linking the pleasure of grotesque forms with deviancy, attempts to mark out those who confuse beauty and the grotesque as abnormal.

Kieran’s animosity towards the blurring of the beauty/ugly binary and his attempts to characterise those that might not be repelled by the grotesque as being pathological, is constitutive of the wider reaction against the groteque as a legitimate subject and strategy of aesthetics. His position is not dissimilar to the sentiments outlined in the introduction to this chapter by the curators of Regarding Beauty, Neal Benezra and Olga Viso, who used the description ‘assault on beauty’ to describe the art world and its relationship to this term in the early 1990s. Common to all of these writers is a belief that the grotesque corrodes natural human bonds and that Bataille was wrong in arguing that the grotesque does not impoverish human civilisation.

While Kieran’s position signals a return to a more narrow understanding of Kantian inspired beauty, it is worth highlighting that there have been dissident voices in the

bevy of recent texts expounding the value of beauty. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is one writer who has recently called into question the value of beauty. He suggests that in late twentieth century culture beauty has actually shifted away from the sacred and ideal towards the banal and vacuous. Gilbert-Rolfe doesn’t believe there is anything to be gained in working to open up the blind spot between beauty and ugliness with the intention of making beauty a more inclusive category capable of encapsulating alterity. This is because beauty for him is ultimately frivolous and is part of a discourse that lies outside criticality and responsibility. For Gilbert-Rolfe, beauty is without value because it is not critical nor a product of criticism, and as such, ‘can only undermine the regime of good sense that is criticism’s search for meaning’.39

Between Beauty and the Grotesque

If, as Gilbert-Rolfe suggests, beauty is powerless, what is the value of incorporating beauty into an interstitial identification with the grotesque? Why bother to engage with beauty if its crucial meanings have been usurped by a culture industry that conflates beauty largely with the glamour of female supermodels?

While his argument that beauty has been dumbed-down to the banal level of fashion has some currency, it is also overly reductive. This paradigm of beauty in glossy women’s magazines, billboards and popular entertainment is without doubt a dominant one, yet it is not the only typology of beauty. While a principal definition of beauty has narrowed around the vagaries of fashion and glamour, many artists and cultural practitioners as it will be shown in the next chapter have pushed and cajoled the limits of beauty in the search for radically different identifications. The question is not whether beauty has a value or even if it is a category of universal currency; rather the key

39

question should be what are the limits of beauty and how can it be used to shift the otherwise pejorative connotations of alterity? 40

Bataille argued that the abject is powerful because it has the potential to unite society in a way that beauty does not, but this argument also has limitations. The most significant point of contention is that it could be construed as simply reversing the binary opposition and elevating abjection as the privileged term. By inverting the binary, the issue is not resolved but simply switched. Celebrating the base might be empowering as a strategy for subverting the stigma of otherness, but it is also a ghetto of sorts. For one thing, to elicit disgust is to be marked as not normal and outside the bounds of a coherent subjectivity. This entails being marked as always other, always beyond broader definitions of desire and attraction. Such an identification is a complex one and requires the subject to resist and negate the processes that enforce conforming to the dominant paradigm. It also suggests that it is impossible to modify the binary of beauty and ugliness to achieve a balanced accommodation, as the beautiful will generally be (contrary to Bataille’s idealist position) preferred to the base.

Disgust might unite us as Bataille suggests, but that does not necessarily mean we should aspire to privilege it over beauty. A more sophisticated and perhaps pragmatic model is to establish an interstitial space whereby ugliness and beauty are aligned at crucial intersection points. The challenge is not to champion the base but to find the blind spots in the spaces in-between beauty and ugliness whereby difference can potentially be located. This model, like Derrida’s idea of differance or slippage, emphasises fluidity and as a result is deliberately difficult to pin down. One might then deploy visual structures that are ‘uncanny’ and confuse and unsettle established approaches to beauty. The uncanny, as discussed in the next section, creates ambivalent distinctions between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, etc. This condition

potentially destabilises these categories and allows for the boundaries to be open to a process of continual shifting and contestation. 41

The value of beauty lies in part in its connection to allure and desire. Allure and desire operate as crucial methods for drawing audiences into an engaging relationship with people or objects. This is in contra-distinction to ugliness, whose affect is largely repelent. Only by engaging with, rather than renouncing beauty is it possible to shift conventional understandings of the beauty/ugly divide. Beauty, as Kirwan has argued, is a powerful stimulus and is a crucial mechanism by which audiences engage and respond to works of art.40 By employing pleasurable (beautiful) visual devices in my artworks, whether via appealing colour schemes, or representations of alluring bodies, the audience can be immediately attracted to the pleasurable affect of these forms. This strategy of seduction effectively brings the audience member into an engaged dialogue with art.

In this art project, as I will outline in chapter 3, I engage with beauty in tandem with the grotesque to build hybrid artworks that are appealing and repulsive because they are both beautiful and grotesque. The critical aim is not to elevate beauty or the grotesque to a privileged status, as was the goal of Kant and Bataille. Rather, the challenge is to blur the border between these categories by identifying and extending key points of connectivity.

Section 2 An Uncanny Affect 42

The uncanny is what comes out of the darkness.

Nicholas Royle

The first entry in the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1997) defines the meaning of abjection in terms I have just outlined in section one. Specific mention is made of Kristeva, Bataille and Artaud and the abject is defined as that which disturbs identity, system, and order. Yet, the final sentence of the entry introduces a new and compelling idea into the discussion of abjection. It states ‘At the same time, it (abjection) possesses an uncanniness that is as tempting and fascinating as it is revolting’.41 The linking of abjection with the uncanny suggests that there is a strangeness to the abject that is more disquieting than disgusting. In addition, the inference is that representations of the abject are affective because they are by nature ambiguous. In this section, I will examine the idea of the uncanny with particular reference to its value as a model that obscures the fixed meaning of artworks. The value of the uncanny as both a device and operation is that it destabilises both how works of art are experienced as well as the clarity of meaning that might be recovered.

The idea of the uncanny was first theorised by Ernst Jentsch,42 but is best known as a concept defined at length by Sigmund Freud. It is a slippery category that eludes clear descriptive terms. The term ‘uncanny’ is the English translation of the German word unheimlich, which literally means unhomely.43 Jentsch, according to Freud, associated this state with uncertainty. Jentsch cited as key examples of uncanny experience the doubt as to whether an apparently animate object is really alive and conversely, whether

a lifeless object might perhaps be animate. Freud, in his 1919 study of the unheimlich, attempted to explain the uncanny and the nature of its affects: 43

An uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes, and so forth.44

Importantly, Freud’s interest in the uncanny was not simply as a symptom of a psychoanalytic condition or pathology, although this was important, but as a broader psychic phenomenon that affected everyone in various ways. Freud wanted to make sense of why our response to certain objects and situations created a chasm of uncertainty. He cited a number of examples of bodies that perform in weird and abject ways including severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm, feet that dance by themselves, as all containing something highly uncanny about them, especially when they are credited with independent activity.45 What interested Freud was that the uncanny was manifested in a limited taxonomy of forms.46 Aside from the fragmented body part he also mentions the automaton and waxwork figures as objects that are imbued with uncanny qualities.

Freud’s key premise was that the uncanny is connected to factors relating to repression and the body. He postulated that every affect arising from an emotional impulse of whatever kind is converted into fear by being repressed. Among those things that are felt to be frightening it follows that fear is something that has been repressed and now returns. This ‘species of the frightening’, Freud tells us, would then constitute the uncanny. Crucially this uncanny is not new or strange but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only because it was repressed. The

repressed memory/experience now defined as fearful, re-emerges as something unfamiliar and thereby unsettling. Freud connects the link with repression to Schelling’s 44

description of the uncanny which was ‘something that should have remained hidden but has come into the open’.47

Kristeva has argued in The Stranger Within (1991) that the uncanny is an important effect of abjection. This is because both are concerned with foreignness. For her, Freud’s essay is important because it teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. Exploring the idea that the basis of what all humans share is our own foreignness Kristeva writes:

With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquillity of reason itself, and without being restricted to madness, beauty, or faith anymore than to ethnicity or race, irrigates our very speaking being, estranged by other logics, including the heterogeneity of biology… Henceforth, we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others.48

Kristeva’s use of the term ‘foreignness’ extends the uncanny into critical dialogues surrounding subjectivity, self-knowledge and otherness. Because as she argues, the uncanny reinforces a level of ‘foreignness to ourselves’, it plays a crucial role in rendering otherness not as a marginal but as a universal identification that is common to everyone. Her extension of Freud’s ideas emphasises the crucial role the uncanny plays in self-awareness and, relatedly, in heightening individual self-reflexivity. The uncanny is also an important mechanism in social relations for it has the potential to disrupt the hierarchy of otherness that underpins contemporary power structures.

Nicholas Royle, like Kristeva, identifies the uncanny in terms of ‘beginnings’. He argues that ‘the uncanny is not a secondary affect of the world around us but that it exists at the origin of consciousness. In other words, from day one we are already haunted’.49 Where Kristeva’s interest in the beginning relates primarily to socialisation and the origins of the processes that allow us to relate to others, Royle examines the poetic resonances of the ‘originary uncanny’.50 For him, the uncanny is ghostly, a state in which suddenly one’s experience of oneself seems strangely vague.51 He is at pains to point out however that the uncanny is not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or something strange and unfamiliar arising in a familiar context. The uncanny, he suggests, has to do with unsettling framing and borders and for this reason Royle describes it as a liminal operation.52

Royle attempts to locate the uncanny outside the domain of psychoanalysis claiming it belongs primarily to the realm of feelings. The uncanny, he tells us, is not what Freud or anyone else thinks. Yet paradoxically, he discusses the uncanny in classic psychoanalytic terms by claiming it has to do with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves.

Art and the Uncanny

Where definitions of the uncanny in the writings of Jentsch and Freud were applied largely to the literary arts, Hal Foster in his study Compulsive Beauty (1993), identifies the significance of the uncanny to Surrealist visual art practice. Foster attempts to contextualise how the uncanny came to be a concern of artists such as Max Ernst, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer.53 He examined a number of the key traits of Surrealism as

45

identified by Andre Breton in his two seminal manifestos and highlighted the way in which these traits sought to exploit aspects of the uncanny. The first of these points of 46

connection, Foster argues, was Breton’s interest in the making of artworks where the real and the imagined become indistinct. This he suggested was a basic aim of both Surrealism and the uncanny. Breton also alluded to the confusion between the animate and the inanimate as exemplified in wax figure dolls, mannequins and automatons, all of which he highlighted as key images in the surrealist repertoire.54

Foster’s principal argument is that the uncanny is the phenomenon that the Surrealists termed ‘the marvellous’. Quoting Freud who defined the uncanny as:

the most remarkable co-incidences of desire and fulfilment, the most mysterious recurrence of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises 55

Foster draws attention to its correlation with Breton’s description of the marvellous. By equating the uncanny with the marvellous, Foster is able to establish a register of visual forms that he claims constitutes an uncanny and enigmatic animation of signals, objects and persecutors.56

Foster identifies the gaze as a key determinant in surrealist manifestations of the uncanny. While I explore this idea in greater detail in the next section, for him the gaze has two specific effects: aura and anxiety.57 Aura is a particularly slippery term that concerns a “strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand.58 Foster’s understanding of aura is borrowed from Walter Benjamin who developed a theory of affect in relation to the human engagement with objects. Benjamin argued that the experience of an aura rests on the transposition of

a response common in human relationships to the connections between the inanimate object and man. The person we look at, Benjamin argues, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. Such an experience, he suggests corresponds to the data of the memoire involuntaire or involuntary memory.59 Benjamin’s idea of aura relates to the notion that in auratic experience the object takes on a human dimension. This process involves an involuntary memory of a forgotten human dimension, or a return of the repressed. This idea was in part drawn from what he saw as the original atmospheric character of works of art that contained a unique quality of the here and now. The charismatic quality was destroyed by the process of mechanical reproduction that transformed the object’s ritual value into what he termed ‘exhibition value’.

While there are limitations to Benjamin’s argument, not the least the dismissal of photography as a contemporary art form, Benjamin’s notion of the affective power of aura is important.60 He outlines a model of how objects that we imbue with cultural value can exceed their status as inert matter and can be made to assume human dimensions. He also provides a cogent account of how the relationship between the auratic object and viewer might function to shift the audience’s understanding of how and what they know. For Benjamin, the value of aura lies in part in the way it establishes a strange distance that he describes in terms of inapproachability.61 This distance between the real and the imaginary, between stasis and the possibility of movement has direct parallels with the uncanny.

David Bate has focused on the uncanny with special reference to Surrealist photography. In his study Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (2004), he explains how a Surrealist image and its uncanny effect is produced. It is

47

not created by visual ambiguity (polysemy) but by ambivalence in fundamental distinctions (e.g. fear and excitement, good and bad, love and hate) and a condensation 48

of these conflicting values at the level of a signifier. This produces enigmas and compels our wish to resolve them and to see beyond the already seen.62

Bate identifies how in Surrealist photography potential meanings are propelled towards a rhetoric of contradiction. The signifier plays with the status of signs thereby manipulating what Barthes called the stubbornness of the referent in photography. This process of manipulating signification was what the Surrealists hailed as the marvellous.63 Bate argues that certain Surrealist images work because the viewer cannot assimilate the scene. Unable to draw the image together it can only function as a fragment of a message which has not been signified, an enigma that the spectator is unable to symbolize in a coherant manner. But it is precisely this enigma that provokes curiosity. The process is one of finding a meaning for the enigmatic message.64

Hal Foster also raises Roland Barthes’ ideas on photography in Camera Lucida (1980) in relation to the uncanny. In particular, he emphasised the importance of Barthes’ idea of punctum in relation to photographic practice and how it provides a crucial insight into how an uncanny effect is produced. Barthes used the term punctum to describe photography’s capacity to prick its viewer with the news of death/loss. He cited as evidence of this a photo of his mother as a child that brought about the startling revelation that she was going to die. Whether or not the subject is already dead he suggested that every photograph stages this catastrophe.65 Barthes’ idea of punctum is closely connected to the uncanny. Both categories are resistant to language, because language will not help the spectator to make sense of the image being contemplated. When he said ‘whatever I can name cannot really prick me’,66

he was pointing to the traumatic nature of an encounter with a nonsymbolizable real, a real that is uncanny in that it addresses us with a vague recognition of our own death about which there is nothing that can be said.67 Barthes’ punctum is a blind spot in the visual field and like the uncanny is closely connected to trauma and repression.

Why The Uncanny?

The uncanny is an operation that has been employed by artists to critically engage with an audience. Its value as a strategy lies in its capacity to penetrate and unsettle the consciousness of the viewer as it elicits the emergence of latent unconscious information. The uncanny affect destabilises the spectator and places them in a curious in-between space where the unfamiliar is curiously interpolated into the familiar and vice versa. It is an operation that is always fluid, somehow unearthed and clouded in the elusive spaces that mark out our memories and fantasies of lived experience. In art, David Bate has argued, the uncanny is a mechanism that challenges the spectator’s propensity to be ambivalent about the material they are viewing. In place of a safe and passive viewing distance from what is being experienced, Bate highlights how the uncanny establishes an unsettling relationship between spectator and artwork whereby distinctions between categories such as love and hate, attraction and repulsion are confused.

The urge to make sense of an artwork, to locate and order it, creates the preconditions for an intense curiosity. It is precisely this curiosity that makes the uncanny such a valuable strategy for transforming what and how we know. Even if the affect of uncanny displacement is short lived, it provides a different framework for experiencing reality that may lead to a broader and more permanent transition of

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perception and hence knowledge. Because the uncanny, as Royle suggests, seems to involve a special emphasis on the visual, on what comes to light, on what is revealed 50

to the eye,68 artists have the opportunity of thinking through the uncanny to achieve marvellous resonances.

The three artworks in this project all seek to engage with the uncanny as a strategy that functions to pierce the protective defenses of the spectator. Each work revolves around proving, disclosing, discovering and confirming the existence of something that is indefinable, something that defies standing conceptual schemes. Each work, from the performance/installation to the series of photographs, is familiar and eeiry at the same time. By confronting the participant with uncanny images and situations, I seek to create artworks that trigger a return to earlier traumatic experiences. The key aim of this work is to push the audience off balance so that they may view the artwork in a less comfortable light. By constructing an art environment that might be described as psychically confusing, I seek to create conundrums. This process of destabilising the conditions by which the art is experienced, highlights my attempt to make it difficult to distinguish between different categories. Rather than clearly defining for example what is beautiful and what is grotesque, I am concerned to shift the participant’s decision making to a level of undecidability.

Section 3 Do You See What I See? 51

I see myself seeing myself. Jacques Lacan

A key question asked in this thesis is how is the non-preferred body seen? The obvious answer is of course with the eyes. While the eyes are ‘the instruments of visualisation’ as described by Donna Harraway,69 they are only an organic form of technology that help us to distinguish shapes and define spatial orientations. The eyes are little more than a lens for capturing light and provide no clues as to the meanings of the forms we see. The issue of what meanings are attached to seeing is extremely complex and is tied up in a range of issues to do with subjectivity, language, biology and power. The act of looking, as Rosalind Coward has outlined, is not a neutral activity but subject to the complex machinations of manipulation and desire.70 When we look, we are demonstrating an ability to scrutinize and this activity is intricately connected to issues surrounding the formation and exertion of social control.

In this section, I will examine a number of key issues in relation to looking or ‘the gaze’ as it is widely known in academic discourse.71 In particular, I will investigate how the gaze functions as a mechanism of inter-personal exchange. The gaze has often been discussed in pejorative terms as an oppressive means by which bodies are ‘seen’ to be validated or rejected. Yet avoiding the gaze and becoming, as Peggy Phelan has argued, ‘unmarked’, is a fraught exercise. Each of the three artworks in this project attempt to grapple with the power relations of looking. My aim is to identify specific blind spots in the operation of the gaze that frustrate attempts to survey, control and locate the body in a hierarchical structure.

Extensively considered by Jacques Lacan, the gaze has come to be a principal rubric in the study of sexuality and the politics of identity. Lacan’s interest in the gaze was 52

based on the role he believed it played in subject formation, particularly in the formative mirror phase when a child learns to differentiate his or herself from the world.72 His definition highlighted that “in the scopic relation, the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended in an essential vacillation is the gaze”.73 What Lacan was attempting to describe was a dialectic of desire whereby a split takes place between what he called the eye and the gaze. For him the gaze was the unattainable object of desire that made the other complete. The eye on the other hand functions not to look out but to be looked at, to reflect. Lacan cited as an example of this the famous story of the sardine can floating in the water. Lacan is out in a boat when a fisherman points to a floating sardine can and says ‘see that can? Do you see it? Well it doesn’t see you’. Lacan argued on the contrary that the can does indeed “see” for the gaze is actually projected and imagined by the observer. The gaze is everything in the visual field, including in this instance the sardine can, except the look of the person looking.

The Gaze as a Mechanism of Control

Where Lacan identified the gaze as corresponding to the desire for self-completion through another, a number of other writers have examined the gaze in terms of the inequitable functioning of power.74 Michel Foucault for example in his discussion of panopticism emphasised the gaze as a coercive mechanism of social control. Foucault cites Jeremy Bentham’s Nineteenth Century model of the mutli-purpose panoptical building as an instance in which the gaze was employed to control the behaviour of individuals. In this model, Foucault argues power has its principle not in a person but

in a concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, and gazes.75 This is an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. For Foucault, surveillance in the form of the gaze has, since at least the Seventeenth Century, been the crucial means for measuring, supervising and correcting what he terms ‘the abnormal’.76 The aim of this surveillance is to separate out the abnormal from the normal by firstly branding selected individuals and then subsequently attempting to alter or normalise them.77

Foucault’s argument that the gaze is intricately connected to surveillance and discipline techniques has concerned a number of feminist writers including Laura Mulvey and Kaja Silverman.78 Mulvey’s seminal text ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) took Lacan’s idea of the gaze as the starting point for an investigation into the framing of women in Hollywood cinema. For Mulvey, cinematic viewing could be understood as the interplay between narcissistic identification and erotic voyeurism.79 In a world that she claimed was characterised by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining gaze is male and projects its fantasy onto the female figure. Women play what she described as a traditional exhibitionist role where they are simultaneously looked at and displayed and their appearance is coded for strong visual and erotic impact. This is what Mulvey meant when she employed the description ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ which could also be described as women displayed as sexual objects.80

Mulvey’s article is significant because it theorised how the gaze operated as a mechanism of patriarchy and clearly demonstrated (using carefully selected films) its diminishing and disempowering effect on women. While this thesis proved to be hugely influential in emphasising the scopophilic obsession with which men look at and survey women’s bodies, Mulvey’s critical position is predicated on the construction

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of a series of binary oppositions: male/female, look/seen and active/passive. The fixity of these positions together with their exclusion of a number of key subjectivities has 54

led a number of writers to question the inclusiveness of her theory. As Nicholas Mizoeff has argued, Mulvey’s theory is questionable because it has difficulties accounting for forms of looking that do not fit into the opposition between (straight) male looking and the feminine place of being looked at.81 Similarly, Margaret Olin points to the absence of a theory of the female gaze or the gaze of individuals who might claim a subjectivity based on multiple identifications.82

Gender and technology theorist, Donna Haraway, takes up the idea of the gaze s that operate outside Mulvey’s fixed oppositional mode. In her text, The Persistence of Vision (1999), she counters Mulvey’s position by arguing that vision can be used for actually avoiding binary oppositions. As part of her critique, Haraway questions the idea of the gaze as something that signifies a leap out of the marked body.83 She suggests that this idea constitutes a ‘mythic gaze’ and that vision is by nature always embodied. In effect, Haraway is attempting to establish a model for the gaze that is not formulated in terms of a broad overreaching abstract model, but is determined with specific reference to the uniqueness of each individual subject. By suggesting that we should insist on the particularity and embodiment of all vision, she argues that it is possible to construct a usable model of objectivity.

Haraway rejects the idea that the gaze functions largely to oppress women. While acknowledging the existence of the male gaze, she argues that it is not monolithic and all-powerful but subject to transformation. The challenge is to establish a model of looking that emphasises what she calls ‘situated and embodied knowledges’ that can be made accountable. This she defines in opposition to the idea of the gaze as infinitely mobile and interchangeable which allows for individuals to avoid being made

responsible for their looking.84 Haraway’s demand that individuals be held accountable for their looking suggests one way in which the gaze can be reconfigured as a powerful but not necessarily oppressive operation. Her belief in joining partial and not panoptical views into a collective subject position whereby embodiment is finite and always living within limits and contradictions, offers an interesting model for how the gaze can function beyond the exclusive limits of surveillance.85

This optimism is not shared by other writers using deconstructive and psychoanalytic models. Jose Esteban Munoz and Peggy Phelan downplay the capacity of visibility to challenge fixed categories of subjectivity. Munoz has argued that the issue for marginal or non-preferred subjects is that they suffer from being forced to identify too closely with the dominant models of identities. Drawing on the writings of Louis Althusser, Munoz proposes a theory of ‘disidentification’ which he suggests can overcome the hegemony of subject positions. Munoz argues that the real challenge for those wishing to resist dominant identifications is to learn to disidentify from them. He, like other post-structural thinkers including Butler and Phelan (who are discussed in the next chapter) is interested in developing theories of subjectivity that move beyond the nature/nurture divide. He argues that enacting a radical and empowered selfhood takes place at precisely the point where the discourse of essentialism and constructivism short circuit, and that these identities are the fruits of a practice of disidentificatory reception and performativity. Munoz proposes the idea of ‘identities-in-difference’ as the model through which subjectivity should be understood and enacted.86 Their appearance is therefore predicated on an ability to disidentify with the mass public, and establish what he calls ‘a counter-public sphere’.87

Where Munoz focuses on identification, Peggy Phelan argues that visibility is a major issue in the marginalization of non-preferred bodies and subjectivities. In her book

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Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), she argued that the cult of the visual does not enhance visibility but actually hinders the possibility of resisting conventional 56

definitions of identity. She suggests that using strategies for subverting conventional identity today are not dependant on visibility politics (or being “seen”) but on avoiding the limelight and being ‘unmarked’.88 For Phelan subjectivity cannot be understood by what is presented or represented. Rather, following on from Lacan she suggests there are always blind spots, or meanings that exist beyond the visual field. Her concept of ‘the unmarked’ attempts to locate a site of value for that which is not really there, or that which cannot be surveyed within the boundaries of social reality. By exposing the blind spot that lies just beyond the ways we see, it may be possible, she argues, to construct a way of knowing that does not privilege the surveillance of the body, visible or otherwise.89

To Gaze or Not to Gaze

What does it mean for a performance or visual artist to be unmarked? Working in such an overtly visual medium, how can one appear but at the same time avoid surveillance? The limitations of Phelan’s position are that she equates visibility almost entirely with vulnerability and that being marked in this way is somehow always disempowering. While she emphasises that representation always shows more than it means and is therefore open to the possibility of critical intervention, it is unclear from her writings how one can intervene in its meanings. Her argument for cultural practices that emphasises haptic or non-visual dimensions, while valuable as a way of extending knowledge about the body, is fundamentally flawed. This is because it avoids rather than tackles the mechanisms by which the body is represented. The logical conclusion of this thinking is that hiding or dis-appearing is somehow a viable strategy for

performance artists, rather than directly engaging with and challenging the dominant representations of marginal bodies. 57

Phelan’s argument is indicative of a number of post-structural writers who have discounted the significance of knowledge that is acquired visually. As Martin Jay in his study Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1993) has argued there is a suspicion of vision in post-structural thinking.90 While this suspicion is to some extent predicated on the critique of vision as a means of surveillance, there are significant shortcomings in this mode of thinking. In Phelan’s critique, vision consigns marginal or non-preferred bodies to an entrenched position of outsiderness. Rather than using the visual field as a site in which to contest narrow and denigrating representations, her model suggests this field can never be successfully negotiated. If visibility is a trap, as she suggests, then invisibility is a greater trap. By avoiding the limelight and assuming a kind of guerilla position, she proposes a model for practice that is superficially active and powerful but in reality only serves to further disempower non-preferred identities.91

Foucault’s powerful mantra ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ functioned as a call to resist the mechanisms of control that underpin western liberal democracies. He emphasised the need to resist the coercive power of surveillance mechanisms while alerting us as to how surveillance transformed the modern era.

Never have there existed more centres of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere.92

This diffusion of power suggests that bodies are increasingly less subject to polyvalent scrutiny and are instead determined by a multiplicity of forms of scrutiny. Foucault’s 58

observation does not imply that the abnormal body is no longer under surveillance, but rather that the modes of observation are now so diverse as to allow for the multiplication of blind spots or gaps to appear between these networks of power. These spaces suggest greater opportunities to engage in a critical dialogue about vision and its role in determining the agency of the non-preferred body.

The gaze is clearly redolent with relations of power yet its need not function in an exploitative way. The act of looking is after all a vital human operation that is alive to our own presence. As both Olin and Haraway have argued, the gaze is an essential means of understanding both others and ourselves. Olin’s argues that we not only need to see ourselves as others see us, we also need to see ourselves seeing one another,93 and this highlights the role that the gaze can play in establishing empathetic relationships. Because the making and meaning of the visual body’s cultural message is, following Judith Butler, a dynamic process under constant re-vision, it is possible to challenge established paradigms. Art plays a vital role in this process by working to shift perceptions about the nature of what is being experienced and how we might learn to see differently.

Section 4 Fluid Subjectivity: Identity as Performance 59

Performance will be to the twenty-first century what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth, that is, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge. Jon McKenzie

Performance as a category has historically been associated with live arts such as theatre, dance and performance art. More recently however the category of performance studies has been coined to draw together a vast array of fields under the one rubric of performance. Today performance may entail the activity of playing Grand Theft Auto on Playstation or undertaking cosmetic surgery for an audience live via satellite. The growth in performance studies highlights the significance that is being placed on performativity as a key trope in the development of individual subjectivity and gender formation. The performing arts and performance theory share an interest in the body as a fluid construction whose subjectivity is not enshrined or fixed but is continually formed over time. The performance theory of key thinkers such as Judith Butler, Jon McKenzie and Peggy Phelan radically revises theories of the body and identity because they challenge essentialist or narrow definitions of subjectivity. Rather than arguing that subjectivity is determined by biological factors or essential dispositions, subjectivity is seen by these writers as accomplishments. In other words, gender is not something that is innate but rather is something we continually seek to acquire.94

There is immense relevance in this model for the study of the non-preferred male body for it suggests that postures such as heroic masculinity are not inviolable but subject to intervention and transformation. In this section I will examine how performance

theory challenges essentialist theories of subjectivity and how this relates to visual art. I will begin by examining four key models of subject formation: Butler’s performance 60

theory, biological determinism, social constructionism and Jacques Lacan’s theory of sexuation. Each offers a different perspective on the construction of subjectivity. I then examine theories that seek to transform subjectivity. I will argue for an idea of subjectivity that is never fixed but is always in the process of being made through performative acts and gestures. The rubric of performativity offers a cogent framework for critiquing essentialist understandings of identity by arguing that subjectivity (and gender in particular) is determined by reiterative behaviors that are subject to modification.

Theories of Subjectivity

Biological determinism is concerned with the idea that identity is defined through biology. This line of thinking has developed in part from the writings of Charles Darwin and has most currency in medical and psychological discourses about the body. Biological determinism privileges an essentialist idea of the body and holds the view that behavior is the result of so-called ‘hard wiring’. This line of thinking has been expounded in texts such as John Gray’s Men are from Mars Women are from Venus (1997) where he claims that gender difference cannot be overcome. He argues that it is only through acknowledging and accepting biological difference that a meaningful understanding between men and women can take place.95

This argument underpins what Renato Seleci has described as the ‘New Age Jungian re-sexualisation of the universe’.96 He argues that these views attempt to reassert an underlying, deeply anchored archetypal identity that offers a safe haven from the flurry and confusions of roles and identities that exist in the contemporary era. From this

new age perspective the ultimate origin of today’s crisis is a disturbed balance in modern man who places excessive emphasis on male rationalism to the detriment of the feminine-compassionate. This variant of biological determinist theory is also quasimystical in its belief that male behavioral traits, such as aggression, are innate and are therefore not responsive to easy modification. The same canon applies for women for they are seen as innate caregivers because of their biological propensity to be mothers and nurturers.

The problem with this model is that there is little or no possibility of affecting any form of change in relation to subjectivity. By casting gender identity into archetypal forms, this mode of thinking highlights masculinity as an aggressive and contestatory category where strength is valued above all other attributes. This model is highly reactive and yearns for a return to pre-modern gender identities where gender roles were more starkly demarcated.97

The Social Body

Unlike biological determinism, social constructionist thought seeks to locate human behavior through the orbit of social relations and language. Emanating out of structuralist thinking and the writings of Saussure, Barthes and Levi-Strauss, this mode of thinking emphasised nurture over nature as the primary determinant for identity. Structuralism was also a philosophical movement that attempted to unify the human sciences by applying a single methodology. This methodology was developed by Ferdinand Saussure who created a system called semiotics.98 Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss later applied this theory to develop a universal semiology applicable to all areas of human activity. This theory of signs sought to

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break with essentialist or humanist ideas that located man as the centre and repository of all meaning. 62

Structuralism argued that meaning resides not in humans as such but in the mechanisms of language that are used to communicate information. Stemming from this supposition is the idea that our subjectivities are not inherent and pre-programmed but are created out of languages. In other words, identities are shaped out of pre-existing social and cultural structures. Cultural conventions such as girls wearing pink and boys wearing blue are claimed to be the result of an adherence to pre-existing social codes. These roles, structuralists argue, are rigidly enforced and difficult to escape.

Social Constructionist thinking was first proposed as a specific field of study in Berger and Luckman’s study The Social Construction of Reality (1967).99 The significance of this model is that unlike biological determinism, it emphasised the possibility of changing human behavior. While roles such as Mother or Father are heavily codified and regulated by social conventions, Social Constructionism hypothesised that patterns of social performances are not ‘given in the world or’ pre-scripted by the culture, but are constantly constructed, negotiated, reformed, fashioned, and organised out of scraps of what theorist Alfred Schultz called ‘recipe knowledge’.100

Psychoanalysis and the Body

While social constructionist thinking posits the possibility of transforming gender categories, its adherence to fixed gender roles serves to limit the degree to which this can take place. By focusing entirely on language as the determinant for behavior, social constructionism largely ignores the influence of the unconscious in the

development of gender and sexual identity. Psychoanalysis on the other hand incorporates theories of sexual difference that move beyond the conventional nature versus nurture debate. For Freud, the process of differentiation between man and woman is an extremely complex one that related to the development of the sexual drives, and occurred quite late in childhood development. Moreover, the result of sexual development was never entirely predictable. Freud wrote that in human beings ‘pure masculinity and femininity does not exist either in a psychological or a biological sense’. In Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), Freud also claimed that human sexuality was fundamentally bisexual, in both the anatomical and psychic senses.101

For Jacques Lacan, whose psychoanalytic theory was informed by semiotics, sexual difference is not a firm set of static symbolic oppositions and inclusions or exclusions. Instead, it is the name of a trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its symbolization. Sexual difference in Lacanian psychoanalysis stresses that what we call sexual difference is first and above all the name for a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order.102 Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic oppositions, Lacan argues, is doomed to fail, and it is this very impossibility that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what sexual difference will mean.103

The significance of Lacan’s rethinking of subjectivity lies in his rejection of the notion of the unified subject that underpins biological determinism. Lacan denounced as illusory the mastery and self- knowledge that the subject accords itself. For him, consciousness is continually betrayed by the process of evasion that is endemic to the workings of the unconscious.104 As Elizabeth Grosz argued, the subject, considered as a natural individual, is problematized by Lacan. She highlights how:

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he proposes a theory of the socio-linguistic genesis of subjectivity which enables male and female subjects to be seen as social and historical 64

effects, rather than pre-ordained biological givens.105

Lacan inserted the question of sexuality into the centre of all models of social and psychical functioning. To be a subject at all, he suggested, the individual must take up a sexualised position, identifying with the attributes socially designated as appropriate for men and women.

Performativity

In Lacan’s idea of sexuation however sexual identification was not a straightforward process. An example of this was his idea of the phallic signifier. Instead of the phallus being a direct sign for the male penis, Lacan suggested its meaning was more discursive. By proposing a model of sexuality that was fluid, Lacan highlighted the possibility that sexuality was not fixed but was subject to shifts in the semiotic field. A number of feminist writers saw in this model a critical framework for shifting our understanding of sexuality away from fixed biological definitions of gender to the idea of gender as a performance. Writers including Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz have utilised Lacanian psychoanalysis to destabilise supposedly normal conventions such as heterosexuality and masculinity by locating the functions that normalise these constructions within the field of the unconscious. For these writers gender is a performative process that begins when someone says of the neonate: ‘it’s a girl’.106

Performativity is a term that originates in the speech act theory of the British philosopher J. L. Austin. Austin suggested that human identity was in large part constructed

through complex citational processes in the speaking and reading of words. He argued that meaning in language was greatly affected by how it was ‘performed’ by the speaker and how this was then understood by the persons listening. This theory proposed that the way in which language was performed was as crucial to its meaning as the words themselves.

The suggestion that meaning in language was, in large part, determined by the act of speaking was taken up by the feminist philosopher Judith Butler who applied the term ‘performativity’ to the study of gender. In her book Gender Trouble (1990), she extended Austin’s idea to propose that gender like language could be understood as fundamentally performative. She argued that gender was a cultural meaning that is ascribed to human bodies and not an inherent attribute of personhood or subjectivity. Butler thus privileged the performative as the key determinant in the construction of subjectivity. For her, the implications of defining gender as performative were radical. It enabled her to argue that gender is in fact inseparable from the cultural and political intersections within which it is produced and maintained, and more significantly that it does not derive naturally from the biological sex of the individual. By this she meant that because gender is expressed by actions, gestures and speech there is no inner core of sexual identity.107 The notion that we do not have a gender as such, but seek to attain it, has important consequences for an understanding of subjectivity. For Butler being a man or being a woman is an unstable affair, since the process of gendered identification is never complete.

The idea that there can be no gender outside or prior to the discourse and performativity that names it, suggests that it is not a fixed category but one that is subject to change. If, for example, identities such as the heroic male are not fixed but are continually performed or reiterated then they are subject, as Butler tells us, to subversion or to

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being ‘queered’. The crucial breakthrough that Butler makes is that masculinity, or gender more broadly, is never finally embodied in individual subjectivities but largely 66

exists as a complex series of performances. The repetition of these socially coded and mediated acts of masculinity and femininity are, she suggests, predicated on the fear of homosexuality and in particular the blurring of the distinction between homo and hetero-sexuality. Masculinity can thus be defined as an unstable cluster of fears about effeminacy and repressed homosexual desires.108

Elements of Butler’s theory of performativity are useful to apply to the non-preferred body. Her use of the term “queering” suggests that it is possible to subvert supposedly normal masculine identifications through the introduction of a range of counteridentities. She cites drag performers and their use of female masquerade as a means of obscuring clear delineations between genders. Butler stresses that this is but one of many possible strategies available to those who seek to expand our understanding of masculinity through performance. The idea of queering is a potentially powerful one that is not confined to homosexual resistance. While the term initially focused on subverting the hegemony of heterosexuality, its meaning has since been broadened to include a range of subjectivities. These include non-preferred bodies or bodies that exist outside what Foucault called the dominant paradigm of socially acceptable body types. The term queer has been a key description in Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s writings on sexuality. She defines queer as the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meanings when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify in a monolithic manner.109 Queering is a strategy aimed at de-stabilising received notions of subjectivity and in the process extending the diversity of potential subject positions.

The Liminal and the Good Enough

Jon McKenzie in his study Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance (2003) also champions the idea of subjectivity as a fluid category. Like Butler, he emphasises the radical possibilities of performativity as a critical strategy of transformation. Where Butler is concerned with philosophy and queer studies, he applies the term to a number of disciplines to argue that “perfomativity has come to govern the entire realm of social bonds and that it is the mode through which knowledge and social bonds are legitimated in contemporary societies. McKenzie argues that the subject is continually evolving through performances and as a result is fragmented rather than unified, de-centred rather than centred, and unstable rather than fixed.110 He also points to the radical possibilities inherent in performance based creative disciplines such as performance art because meanings in this medium are constantly being formed or staged. In particular, he argues for the value of what he calls liminal performance. This is defined as a mode of activity whose spatial, temporal, and symbolic ‘in-betweeness’ allows for social norms to be suspended, challenged, played with, and perhaps even transformed.111

Film theorist Kaja Silverman examines the idea of liminality in her discussion of bodies that transcend or elude social/cultural ideals. In the Threshold of the Visible World (1998), Silverman claims that ideal representations serve only to obscure and marginalise people who do not conform to established codes of beauty. By way of countering the ideal, she proposes a liminal category of ‘the good enough’ a category that encapsulates the majority rather than the minority of people. The idea of ‘the good enough’ is borrowed from D.W.Winnicott, who maintained that the Mother need not be ideal, only good enough. Indeed, he claimed that the good enough mother is to be preferred to her ideal counterpart, since she does not attempt to fill the void upon

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which desire is predicated. Implicit in this principle is the knowledge that since no one can ever become the ideal, there is no such thing as either natural entitlement or 68

organic insufficiency in relation to it. All that is available to us is the possibility of effecting a good enough approximation. Silverman, in line with post-structural thinking, has sought to re-draw the boundaries of subjectivity with the aim of dismantling the binary opposition of ideality and abjection. By emphasising ‘the good enough’ Silverman argues that we might identify with dysfunctional bodies that we would otherwise reject.112

The idea of ‘performativity’ is valuable for the study of the non-preferred body because it suggests that subjectivity is always de-centred, contingent and never fixed. Performativity is, as I have demonstrated, a liminal category that allows for social norms to be suspended, played with, and transformed. The performative nature of subjectivity suggests that definitions of what constitute categories such as beauty and the grotesque can never be secured but are continually being made and remade. The value of this model for performance-based art practice is immense. As Adrian Heathfield has argued, performance art shares many of the features of performativity. The physical entry of the artist’s body into the artwork can be a transgressive gesture that confuses the distinctions between subject and object and life and art. The performance artist’s exploration of the meanings and resonances of contemporary embodiment can be, he suggests, ‘received in and through an inter-subjective phenomenal relation with others over time’.113 This relation aims to activate audiences to engage with different kinds of meaning to destroy pretence and break apart traditions of representation.

Chapter 2 Historical Contexts 69

Introduction

The striking feature of modern art is that it has ceased to recognise the categories of tragic and comic, or the dramatic classifications, tragedy and comedy. It sees life as tragicomic, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style. Thomas Mann

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Images 7 + 8. Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession (1996), mixed media installation

In Sean Topham’s book Blowup (2002) there are two different photographs of Yayoi Kusama’s installation Dots Obsession (1996). One of the photos is a distance shot of the space which shows the gallery filled with bulbous inflatable structures. From floor to ceiling the installation is covered in a sea of yellow and black polka dots. While this photograph suggests that the artwork is an immersive fun house of multi-sensory

excess, the second and related photograph tells us something very different. In the second photograph, we see the artist herself in the installation dressed in an outfit 70

that perfectly matches the yellow and black polka dot interior. She stares blankly and somewhat disturbingly at the camera and her presence completely transforms the ambience of the work. Where the first photograph suggests an exhibition of madcap, albeit disorientating, pleasure, the second image is avowedly grotesque.

The major shift in the meaning of the work that occurs with Kusama’s ‘appearance’ in the installation is brought about by a number of factors. Firstly, the presence of the artist dressed as if she is part of the décor of the space suggests it is not a gallery we are viewing, but a strange and fantastical domestic dwelling. Secondly, her attempt to become one with the space connotes a disturbing level of psychic imbalance as the artist has attempted to erase the divide between subject (herself) and object (the gallery). Thirdly, her facial expression is blank, almost lost, as if the photographer taking the picture is not present in the gallery with her.

This photograph is grotesque because it is fundamentally unnerving. It resists our attempts to assimilate it into language and radically confuses fantasy and the real. Kusama’s persona in the work is elusive. She straddles a slippery divide between the evil witch in a fairytale, a 60s psychedelic princess, and an artist with a history of mental illness. This elusive identification challenges our understanding of who the artist is and our attitude towards her. She is for an art audience in the know an old mentally ill woman, and possibly a figure of fear and revulsion. Yet she is also a conjurer of strange beauty who creates wondrous electric environments. It is Kusama’s manipulation of these two registers that function to successfully draw the audience into an affective engagement with the work.

This combination of fantasy and horror is a powerful manifestation of the grotesque in contemporary art, and is a topic I will investigate in this chapter. I examine a number of practitioners for whom the sometimes confrontational but frequently seductive manner of the grotesque functions to call received wisdom into doubt.114 I will also explore a number of other art historical themes and issues that have informed the artwork of this project. These include the grotesque and the representation of the clown, horror and the uncanny, ideas of performative affect; as well as Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of relational aesthetics. Instead of an exhaustive study of the representation of the grotesque, the uncanny and other key ideas that inform my work, the emphasis will be placed on specific case studies. My aim is to chart a trajectory across disparate artists, movements and mediums so that a number of contexts may be established for engaging with the practical component of this thesis.

Defining the Operation of the Grotesque in Contemporary Art

When writing about his recent 2004 curatorial project Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, Robert Storr suggested that the grotesque is one of the most significant cultural formations of our time. He claimed that at the grotesque is both subject matter and a critical mechanism that is widely employed by artists. In this exhibition, Storr sought to recast thinking around this term and highlighted the grotesque’s ‘astonishingly protean artificiality’ and ‘its capacity for inspiring genuine delight as well as provoking disquiet’.115 He argued that:

The grotesque is the indissoluble, though far from changing marriage of opposites. In contrast to the kinds of aesthetic juxtaposition that

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emphasises fleeting, simultaneous, or dynamic incongruities destined to explode in the viewer’s face.116 72

While identifying the centrality of the grotesque in recent art practice, Storr also sought to rectify what he saw as crucial distortions in our popular understanding of this idea. He cited the often careless use of the term grotesque and its gradual evolution from a concept to an epithet and from a noun with a past to an adjective for whatever strikes someone today as aberrant or offensive.117 The significance of Storr’s insights is valuable because he deftly identifies the grotesque in the work of many seminal practitioners of the last thirty years. He also redefines its critical parameters and emphasises the grotesque’s interstitial characteristics, pushing ‘the grotesque’ to the centre stage in the critical discourses of contemporary art.

While recognising the value of Storr’s scholarship and attempts to legitimise the grotesque, two key points need to be made about his argument. The first is that the scope of his chosen examples are limited. Most of the artists he includes employ graphic or painterly modes of expression and there is only a tiny smattering of works that utilise video and photography. While he attempted to mark out new territory for painting and drawing (to legitimise these medium’s current value as leading edge disciplines) the argument is diminished by the work and mediums being excluded. For instance, he did not include any performance works. This seems strange when one considers that the history of performance proposes a powerful language with which to explore the abject and transgressive body. Furthermore, there is little video work other than Paul McCarthy and no installation work apart from Bruce Nauman. The omission of artists, who offer cogent contemporary explorations of the grotesque, such as Matthew Barney, Pipiloti Rist and Ugo Rondinone, significantly diminishes the value of Storr’s argument. Storr’s selection is conservative in his reassertion of the

hierarchical privilege of objects over process-based work. Ultimately he defines the grotesque principally through artwork that illustrates an iconography of the grotesque over work that highlights the grotesque as an operation or process. He thus canonises a grotesque aesthetic rather than identifying the grotesque as a historically contingent affect that is continually transformed over time.

A second criticism of Storr’s application of the grotesque is that he over emphasises what he terms the protean artificiality of the grotesque. The alignment between artificiality and the grotesque is certainly a key aspect of the work of artists cited by him including Jim Shaw, Christian Marclay and Tom Friedman. For these artists, fantasy and popular conventions of the macabre form the basis of their engagement with the grotesque. In their work, the grotesque is rendered weirdly distant in an almost caricature-like sense and seems to become a phantasmagoria of pleasurable strangeness in the manner of a circus sideshow. Ultimately, the work of these artists is about using the grotesque as entertainment and it is precisely this quality that Storr attempts to reclaim. He is interested in highlighting the ways in which the grotesque can inspire genuine delight as well provoking disquiet.118

While the protean artificial is one component of the grotesque, it is not grotesque in its own right. Only when it is located in association with real images, symbols or events does it function to affect the spectator in ways that could be described as grotesque. Storr seems to be aware of this fact when he tells us that ‘the grotesque emphasises the bond’ that exists between incommensurable things or feelings, and adds that the grotesque works to freeze consciousness at the moment of its impossible resolution.119 Yet this argument is undone by his emphasis on the protean artificial over the real. In most of the works Storr highlights, the grotesque errs on the side of pleasure and steers well clear of the genuinely frightening. Artists such as Carroll Dunham, Jasper Johns

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and Elizabeth Murray play with a lexicon of faux-disgusting graphic forms originating in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. They reference the history of grotesque 74

iconography with an emphasis on organic protuberance and metaphoric or stylised abjection. Yet the work fails to register as grotesque because it is too removed from a contemporary sense of fear and as a result the forms are too aestheticised and easily assimilable as fantasy.

This image is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the QUT Library

Image 9. Jasper Johns Untitled (1991), oil on canvas

It may be the case that the blobby creatures in Jasper Johns Untitled (1991) would have rattled the equilibrium of pre-Hollywood horror generations, but this work appears tame to a generation who have grown up on the gore games of Playstation and horror films such as Evil Dead (1981). It thus tells us little about the fault line along which the contemporary grotesque runs.

Storr in his selection of examples argues for a definition of the grotesque that is insipid. It is a cartoon grotesque that fails to disturb in any significant way. For the grotesque to function effectively it needs to draw together both the artificial and the real so that an uncertain register between the two is established. Like the effect of the uncanny, the grotesque functions in art most cogently when the audience are locked into a

state of undecidability. Only when the work of art is simultaneously both pleasurably engaging (the protean artificial) and frighteningly revolting (the experience of the real) can it be grotesque.

As I have argued, the principle reason why many of Storr’s artists do not successfully activate a visceral and intense sense of the grotesque is that the artificial, the fantastic or the wondrous are emphasised at the expense of the real. The delicate balance between what we know and experience in our daily lives and the imaginary is thus pushed out of alignment. While the grotesque image is, as Frances Connelly has suggested, defined in terms of deformation and decomposition, it is also concerned with combining disparate things in order to challenge and redefine established realities.120 The work that Storr champions fundamentally lacks this all-important quality. For art to activate a grotesque response in the spectator, it has to be grounded in and against widely held beliefs that are understood to be ‘real’. When this alignment ceases to be carefully negotiated, the grotesque collapses into the safer realm of escapist fantasy.

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Case Studies of the Grotesque in Art

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This image is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the QUT Library

Image 10. Gustav Courbet Burial at Ornans (1851), oil on canvas

Gustav Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1851) is not an artwork that one would ordinarily identify with the grotesque. It is painted in the realist tradition and eschews fantasy and protean artificiality in favour of a heroic celebration of the harshness of peasant life in Nineteenth Century France. Yet Francis Connelly in her book Modern Art and the Grotesque (2003) has argued that this work contains grotesque aspects. The ruddy ordinariness of the individuals portrayed in this work merge with fleshy, trowelled paint. These figures were castigated as ‘grotesque’ by critics accustomed to the surface perfection of academic classicism.121 Connelly argued that Courbet’s deliberate subversion of this convention creating a jarring visual register for painting that made the work appear grotesque. Yet it was grotesque only because these deviations were at the same time mollified by key aspects of the work that were conventional. The grotesque qualities of the work were activated by Courbet’s decision to abstract his figures from the norm while at the same time reiterate familiar themes such as death, poverty and the hierarchical power of the church. In other words Burial at Ornan was both intensely real and fantastic at the same time.

Viewed from a contemporary perspective it is difficult to define Burial at Ornan as grotesque. It is too real and lacking in a sense of the protean artificial. The fact that certain critics of the day claimed this work was grotesque highlights on the one hand their resistance to modern art but more significantly it highlights how the grotesque is a historically contingent category whose meaning changes and evolves over time. What this work does allude to however is that by activating a liminal space between abstracted representation and the real it is possible to establish a relationship in the work that might potentially be grotesque.

Hannah Höch radically extended this relationship between abstraction and the real in her photomontages. Höch along with John Heartfield was a key figure in utilising photography and montage to build disturbing hybrid images of the human body. Höch embraced the grotesque by constructing images based on a radical visual disjunction as a critical strategy to challenge social and political orthodoxies. As Maria Makela has argued, Höch used the aesthetic of the grotesque for a number of purposes. She sought to highlight the way in which visual disjunction lies at the heart of montage and that this effect was implicitly grotesque. Höch used montage to reconfigure reality and make it new. Yet she also drew on the transgressive nature of the grotesque to counter what has recently been described as the Weimar-era obsession with ‘Gesichtlichkeit’. Makela, in defining this term, emphasised that there is virtually no single word in English that similarly contains within it the accrued meanings of face, sight and visibility. Gesichtlichkeit is a term that refers to Weimar Germany’s fascination with the face and what it could say about character.122 This obsession was particularly disturbing for Höch who wanted to highlight the recent and fundamentally traumatic experience of war.

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These images are not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the QUT Library

Image 11. Hannah Höch The Melancholic (1925), photomontage. Image 12. Man Ray Marquise Casati (1927), photograph

In work such as The Melancholic (1925), Höch employed the aesthetic of the grotesque as a foil to such obsessive classification. This small photomontage depicts a man looking directly at the viewer out of one strangely distorted eye. The eye seems too large for the face and has been moved slightly towards the left ear. The effect is simultaneously familiar and uncanny because of this bodily distortion. The confusion in this work is compounded by the mascara painted onto the figure’s eyelashes. This added androgynous dimension establishes a fluid identity in the subject that deftly parallels his uncertain, indeed peculiar, facial structure.123 The Melancholic also subverts the possibility of determining precise typological analysis by muddying the waters of anatomy and subjectivity. Höch presents a figure that is both fantastic and real. It is fantastic in the sense that the artist does not hide the obvious artifice of cutting and pasting different body parts to form the artwork. Yet at the same time, the image might also be seen to accurately capture the disfigurement of soldiers grossly

maimed during the Great War. The power of The Melancholic is that it continually oscillates between fantasy and the real. The work highlights how the grotesque is an operation that signifies meaning most successfully when the spectator is forced to confront a state of undecidability.

Like the Dadaists, the Surrealists understood that the grotesque challenges aesthetic conventions, for it picks away at beauty, rationality, harmony, and shape ‘like fingernails worrying a scab’.124 As Kirsten Hoving has argued in her essay on the treatment of anatomies of Surrealist photography, ‘the grotesque sucks its life from what it is not, becoming misshapen, deformed, unfocused, indistinct, disintegrated, and antithetical’.125 These features and their impact are clear in a number of Surrealist works. Man Ray’s portrait of Marquise Casati (1922) is a striking example of how the manipulation of photographic processes added a new vocabulary to the representation of the grotesque.126 By doubling the exposure, Ray created an image that slightly distorted the facial features of the sitter to achieve dramatic ends. The Marquise’s two sets of piercing eyes vacillate wildly as if possessed demonic forces. The grotesque effect is also the result of the artist developing a visual stammer whereby duration is caught up and compressed into a static moment. Man Ray messes with photography’s supposed connection with mimesis and deliberately abuses this conventional belief to stimulate our fear of difference. The Marquise Casati is real but at the same time she is also horrifically different activating a sense of uncertainty that is profoundly grotesque.

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These images are not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the QUT Library

Image 13. Salvador Dali & Horst P. Horst Costume Design for the Dream of Venus (1939), photograph. Image 14. Man Ray Tomorrow (1924), photograph

Hoving claims the grotesque lies at the very core of Surrealist thought, but there are examples in Surrealism where the grotesque is little more than a trite frisson of difference that recalls Storr’s protean artificiality. Salvador Dali and Horst. P. Horst’s Costume Design for the Dream of Venus (1939) is an image that is so overloaded with ‘strange components’ that it signifies nothing more than a kind of whimsical and slightly fetishistic curiosity. The same could be said for some Man Ray photos that employ doubling. Tomorrow (1924) is an almost symmetrical doubling of a female nude. It is nearly entirely devoid of grotesque qualities containing instead a lyrical formalism that speaks more about abstracted beauty than the grotesque. The problem with reductivist claims such as the one made by Hoving is that they attempt to connect a simplistic conception of the grotesque to diverse cultural movements such as Surrealism. As a result, the grotesque becomes a style or elicited lexicon of

forms rather than an operation whose endgame is to destabilise the viewer’s sense of the order of things. While there are a number of Surrealist works that address and evoke the grotesque, including the sculptural objects and drawing of Hans Bellmer and certain assisted ready-mades by Meret Oppenheim, there is also a good deal of work that is only superficially engaged with these concerns.

In more recent times the work of Cindy Sherman investigates how the grotesque functions in contemporary art. Since 1984, her practice has mined the self-presentation of the grotesque body. After initially experimenting with exaggerated makeup in her post-film still series, Sherman proceeded to manipulate prosthetics and fake body parts to construct a range of ‘horrific’ characters. Sherman’s parade of identities include a pig/human hybrid, a demon, a decomposing corpse and a litany of abject witches. These were part of a project to construct a typology of contemporary and historical grotesque creatures. Using her own body as the armature or ground for these characters, Sherman attempted to mark out the parameters of the grotesque by linking art historical icons with the characters from 1980s and 1990s Hollywood horror films. While her ability to capture the repulsive was impressive, Sherman was at pains to point out the highly artificial nature of the exercise. She described how:

In horror stories, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable…That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound. It’s much easier to absorb-to be entertained by it, but also to let it affect you psychologically- if its done in a fake, humorous, artificial way.127

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Sherman was suggesting that artists cannot represent the grotesque directly. Rather, the grotesque needs to be quarantined in accessible languages that allow the viewer 82

multiple entry and exit points. As Elizabeth A.T. Smith has argued, Sherman’s major device in this regard is humour. She points out that Sherman has investigated the comedic potential of the grotesque in a way that is never really terrifying, but succeeds in mirroring and mocking a collective set of artistic, literary and theatrical conventions about the dark side of human nature.128 The result is a tragi-comic version of postmodern pastiche whereby Sherman parodies the idea of a self-generated style.

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Image 15. Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still 190 (1989), photograph

Sherman’s ‘accessible’ route into the grotesque has taken a number of forms. In photographs such as Untitled Film Still 190 (1989) a monstrous face lies just beneath the surface of putrid and abject waste. The face seems to roar in delight while appearing to launch itself forward towards the viewer in the style of the ‘creature from the black

lagoon’. The effect is entertaining in the manner of a ghost train amusement ride. While the photograph connotes a certain grotesque quality through its abject cocktail of vomit, blood and mud, it does so in a self-consciously parodic manner. The gore conjures up a frisson of revulsion, yet this is tempered by Sherman’s clear interest in giving the image a strong sense of ‘protean artificiality’. The photograph is so obviously derived from the horror genre that the viewer can laugh and enjoy the tongue in cheek nature of the experience. The image therefore might be about the grotesque but it does not elicit a powerfully grotesque response from the viewer that might be equated with confronting a real exposition of this phenomenon. Instead, Sherman distils the grotesque into a highly packaged and easily consumable syntax. This ensures that it is accessible and pleasurable rather than ambiguous and disturbing.

The Clown and the Grotesque

In a 2004 series Sherman has examined the grotesque through the visual typology of the clown. The artist performs a litany of clowning mannerisms, from the maniacal to the mauldlin in a range of hyperreal colourful portraits. As Maik Schlüter has pointed out, Sherman doesn’t present the sad Pierrot. Instead, we see the exaggerated and highly conventional variant of the clown. Schlüter refers to Sherman’s use of ‘strident and aggressive makeup to transform the individual into an eccentric product of permanent and above all irritating gaiety’.129 Sherman’s grotesque is therefore funny but also at the same time ‘lustful and sadistic, mean and impenetrable, brutal and deceiving’.130 Unlike Film Still 190, Sherman builds a stronger sense of contradiction into these works. While still emphasising an overt theatricality, there is a disturbing, more authentic, human aspect that underpins certain images. In Untitled 412 (2004), the blonde pigtailed clown meets our gaze with a peculiar mix of shock, laughter and

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uncertainty. Her slightly deranged demeanour is intensely slippery and pivots at an intersection of conflicting emotions that are difficult to define. 84

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Image 16. Cindy Sherman Untitled 412 (2004), photograph

Sherman thus successfully navigates the liminal space between protean artificiality and the real. The horror here is less fake because it is woven into a broader dialogue that connects this subject matter to everyday life. The clown is unnerving, not because she is fantastic, but because her pose and facial expression connect so closely to actual human experience. She demonstrates all the vulnerability of a girl attempting, but failing, to look well adjusted in a high school photographic portrait. Sherman’s clown thus synthesises play-acting with genuine human fragility. Accordingly, the viewer feels considerable empathy because they know the painful effect of trying too hard. This image is properly grotesque because Sherman aligns a fractured, strange and contingent human subjectivity with an identity that is complete in its imaginary otherness.

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These images are not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the QUT Library

Images 17 + 18. Roni Horn Untitled from the series Cabinet Of (2003), photograph

Sherman’s use of the clown as motif is part of a wider dialogue in contemporary art surrounding the clown and its relationship to the grotesque. Roni Horn, like Sherman, has recently completed a series of clown portraits entitled Cabinet of (2003). This work proposes a particular form of the grotesque sensibility. Yet unlike Sherman who plays with different characters, Horn’s series focuses on the various permutations of one clown. Her suite of 36 images depicts the face of a blurry ghostlike clown who displays a variety of facial contortions. Whereas Sherman borrows from the convention of photographic portraiture in her adoption of pose and picture clarity, Horn pushes her images into more abstract fields of misty double exposed landscapes that obscure the clown.

This technique, reminiscent of Man Ray’s Marquise Casati, establishes an uncanny context for the work by pushing the image into a space of diminished visibility. The effect is disconcerting because we can never get a clear look at the face. It bobs in a sea of fog sometimes appearing to smile and then, in other images, appearing to grimace or scream. The atmosphere of the work seems particularly charged because

of the elusiveness of the clown. We want to know if he/she is entertaining a crowd or in a heightened state of mental anguish. Horn encourages both readings by depicting 86

the clown as an ambiguous symbol. Her aim with this work is to make particularly unclear images. She is concerned to nudge the viewer towards a highly engaged role in the artwork by asking them to develop their own narrative structures from small sequences of fragmented information.131

Horn’s engagement with the grotesque is based on her interest in constructing photographs that function as mirrors. She aims to challenge the viewer’s understanding of the space between portraiture and self-portraiture. Richard Brilliant has examined this relationship describing how portraits contain a complex transaction between the implied viewer and the subject, an allusion he describes as essential to the viewer’s role. He points out that:

portraits come to the viewer’s conscious mind like the magical, unsettling reflections exhibited by the trick mirrors in popular carnivals and circuses. They reflect an image of the person standing in front of them, often with such distortions, or so unstably, that the connection between the image and its source seems uncertain effectively complicating the relationship between the seeing I and the seen you. They may also confront the viewer with an image so apparently different from the expected that the portrait seems to be of a stranger, yet not completely so, thus forcing the viewer, upon due reflection, to respond to the artist’s interpretation.132

It is precisely this space between the ‘seeing I’ and the ‘seen you’ that Horn examines. This realm of uncertainty in which the viewer oscillates between seeing the clown as other and seeing the clown as self, generates the grotesque dimension in the work.

This problematic disposition of subject/object relations is immensely disturbing. The ghostlike apparition not only negates a clear figure/ground divide it also hinders the development of a clearly defined identity for the clown. As a result it is immensely difficult to distance the clown as ‘other’ and is easier to project onto this form one’s own understanding of a disturbed sense of self.

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Image 19. Bruce Nauman Clown Torture (1988), installation shot & close-up stills of Double No, video installation Image 20. Bruce Nauman Clown Torture: Clown taking a shit (1987), single channel video projection

Where Sherman and Horn have sought to investigate the grotesque clown through the static medium of photography, Bruce Nauman and Ugo Rondinone have employed timebased mediums to explore this character. Nauman’s clowns, whether having infantile tantrums, as in the twin channel work Double No (1988), or sitting in a public toilet in Clown Torture: Clown Taking a Shit (1987), are grotesque because of the way they exaggerate and disturb conventions. Nauman’s clowns have crossed the threshold of pleasurable mania into the realm of pathological disturbance. They display traits ranging from autism to dementia suggesting that clowning is in fact a practice that operates on the edge of degenerative madness.

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For Nauman, the conjunction of pleasure and mental disease is another form of the grotesque. In a number of different videos the clowns are placed in untenable and 88

humiliating physical situations. These include clowns trying and failing to balance goldfish bowls and buckets of water; scenes of torture and interrogation, and clowns floundering as they attempt to play absurd word games. These scenes might be amusing if it were not for the fact that they are captured on surveillance cameras. The clowns are not entertaining an audience but are caught in a series of private and unguarded moments. The scenes are thus not performances so much as ordeals and this confusion of the public and private spheres makes the work particularly disturbing. The sense of bewilderment that the artist creates is further heightened by overlaying multiple and competing soundtracks. This maelstrom of aural noise results in a sensory overload for the spectator. The combined effect of jarring sound and video footage creates what Neal Benezra has described as ‘a cacophony of image and sound’.133

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Image 21. Ugo Rondinone If there were anywhere but desert (detail) (2000), installation

Where Nauman’s grotesque operates at the fulcrum of visual and aural overload and social marginalisation, Ugo Rondinone frames the clown in more self-reflexive terms.

In a series of installations, Rondinone constructed lifelike sculptures of clowns that are lying down or leaning against gallery walls with their eyes closed. They are not inebriated but seem to be resting, meditating or thinking deeply about something. If There Were Anywhere But Desert (2000) shows a clown propped up against a wall dressed in a sackcloth costume. He is a passive figure who does not return our gaze but is nonetheless disturbing on a number of levels.

At a distance the clown looks real, and therefore suggests that the work is not a sculpture but a performance piece. This lifelike quality helps Rondinone build a palpable tension and a sense that at any moment the figure will burst into life. On another level, the clown has been disempowered as he is depicted in a catatonic state. Rondinone, by removing agency from the clown, allows us to scrutinize him without fear of reciprocal engagement. Unresponsive and unaware, there is, as Laura Hoptman has suggested, nothing funny about any of Rondinone’s clowns. Exhausted from their passive acquiescence to their role as clichés of saccharine sentiment, they are, in their silence, in an almost expired state, and are profoundly pitiful.134

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Image 22. Ugo Rondinone If there were anywhere but desert (detail) (2000), installation

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It is precisely this inactivity that makes Rondinone's clowns grotesque. The grotesque is not located in the clown’s performance or posturing so much as in the audience’s 90

response to their uncanny inertia. Because Rondinone’s clowns, as Pierre-Andre Lienhard has suggested, refuse to gesticulate or to shoulder their social role we no longer laugh with them, but instead, pity them.135 We are unnerved by their shame and vulnerability. Yet our response is the truly grotesque feature of this work. By rejecting the dysfunctional clown as disturbingly abnormal, we are forced to confront a disconcerting aspect of human nature. This is our propensity to condemn and punish those that we consider to be unnaturally passive or who can/do not perform designated social roles. The clown is then an archetypal symbol of our idea of the grotesque, which operates in a constant tussle between the pleasure of the protean artificial and the latent violence of the real.

Relational Moments: Messing with Conviviality

Wellington based art critic Mark Amery wrote in his newspaper column early in 2006 that my performance/installation Bounce was an example of an artwork that bears all the hallmarks of relational aesthetics. He cited the fact that people could climb on the structure as evidence that the work was concerned with the idea of entertainment as art. Amery was correct in highlighting that this work was informed in part by Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential study Relational Aesthetics (1999). In this text, Bourriaud argued that artists where increasingly ‘concerned with the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of a private and symbolic space’.136 Yet there are crucial aspects to Bounce where I aim to critique the ideas of social exchange and conviviality that Bourriaud champions. In this section, I will examine relational aesthetics with particular attention to its discussion of performance and

performativity. I will argue that relational aesthetics is a distillation of certain aspects of performance art - in particular ideas of interactivity and audience participation that at the same time rejects the idea of transformation inherent in this medium.

In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud emphasises the role that performance plays in contemporary art practice. The word performance however is rarely employed in this text. When Bourriaud uses this description he does so to mark a historical moment in the 1960s and 1970s when artists created radically transgressive works that sought to transform both self and audience. Thus he mentions Fluxus performance, Yves Klein’s Anthropometries (1960), Beuys’ American Coyote adventure I Love America and America Loves Me (1974) and the work of Chris Burden. He uses these examples to illustrate formative developments in what he termed ‘relational aesthetics’ but does not discuss or legitimise performance art per se. The underlying premise of Bourriaud’s argument is that performance art as a genre no longer operates as a critically viable or relevant art language. Instead of the artist performing something for an audience- whether hacking off their prosthetic arm or engaging in cosmetic surgerythe relational artist creates social experiences whereby theatricality is replaced by a kind of laid-back conviviality. Bourriaud suggests that artists are now principally concerned with examining the various ways of exploring social bonds, not radically attempting to subvert these bonds.137 Bourriaud does not mention the work of artists such as Orlan, Bob Flanagan, Franko B, or Hayley Newman, presumably because he sees their methodologies as largely obsolete.

Rather than categorising these practices as performance or performance art, Bourriaud refers to them in terms of participation, conviviality and encounters. Artists, he suggests, wish to engage with existing types of relations within their own social groupings and establish participatory situations that constitute aspects of the cultural

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flavour of that grouping.137 This may be about sharing food, as in the case of Rikrit Tiravanija, or having a party as in the work of Phillip Parreno. The relational artist 92

then materialises or forms into art experiences particular lifestyle dynamics. These experiences tend to be friendly and enjoyable and might be described as ‘microutopic’ friendship cultures.

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Image 23. Erwin Wurm One minute sculpture (1997), performance/sculpture

Bourriaud’s relational artist has to varying degrees taken on the role of chronicler of lifestyles or ‘communities’. This is what Hal Foster refers to when he describes relational aesthetics as an ‘arty party’.138 What this work and Bourriaud’s discourse reveal is that contemporary artists are less performers than managers of social situations that have a carefully structured performative dimension. The performancesif we can call them that- are more likely to involve the actions of other people, as in the models employed in the work of Vanessa Beecroft. The audience also plays a crucial performative role.139 They are encouraged and expected to participate so as to bring the work to life. They might dance on the dance floors, eat Tirivinaja’s food or make his one-minute sculptures for artist Erwin Wurm.140 The relational artist manages the party but brings in professionals to MC it.

Bourriaud’s argument has a number of shortcomings not least the idea that performance should now be primarily concerned with conviviality. Reducing inter-personal engagement

to the idea of friendship culture suggests that it is only through gregarious socialising that meaningful exchanges can take place. Bourriaud takes Jean-Francios Lyotard’s idea of ‘little narratives’ to the extreme by atomising human relations into fragments so small that political effect is an inadvertent consequence, not a prime motivation, of social interaction.141 As Claire Bishop has argued, Bourriaud’s interest in ‘microtopia’ arguably gives up on the idea of transformation in the public culture and reduces its scope to the pleasures of the people in a private group who identify with each other as gallery goers.142

Performance Art: Antagonism or Friendship Culture?

Bourriaud’s disregard for performance highlights a number of contemporary challenges for making performance-based artwork. Since the late 1970s, many assumptions about performance art have been called into question. These relate to the logic of the medium as well as the principal subject matter of performance. In an era of globalisation where the constant and fluid dissemination of information has become crucial for artists to communicate and network, performance art stands as a resistant and problematic medium. Because of its insistence on the value of unmediated experience and embodiment, performance art has to be directly engaged by audience members in situ. It is not a medium suited to conveying affect through documentation because the immediacy or liveness of the work cannot be captured successfully in either video or photography.

Kathy O’Dell has analysed the ambiguous relationship between performance art and photographic documentation. She suggests that this relationship has always been fraught because performance artists in the 1970s sacrificed the coherence of

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their projects for a fractured document that could be disseminated as both proof and promotion.143 This accommodation, it could be argued, became even more 94

complex in the 1980s and 1990s with the growth of photography and video art.144 Where initially these mediums were employed by performance artists as secondary tools of documentation, they increasingly came to be employed as artistic medium in their own right.

Performance artists have also had to deal with changing attitudes towards the idea of an engaged and willingly active audience member. The idea of transgressing physical and psychological boundaries were crucial components in performance art and marked a good deal of performance practice in the 1960s and 1970s. In many performance works, from Viennese Actionism to the body art of Marina Abramovic and Mike Parr, the audience was forced to confront the artists body in extreme and potentially dangerous situations. In Parr’s Cathartic Action (1977), he played out highly traumatic events in order to provoke visceral responses from the audience, which in turn added energy to aid his own act of catharsis. Parr symbolically hacked off his prosthetic arm to the extreme consternation of the audience. They were unaware that he only had one ‘real’ arm and that it was an act of artifice, not a deranged and life threatening act of self-mutilation.

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Image 24. Mike Parr Cathartic Action (1977), performance

Of the many aims of this kind of body art, one in particular stands out. This is the interest in eradicating the divide between art and life by radically narrowing the separation of the audience from the art they are experiencing. In other words, artists constructed performative experiences with such a strong physical and psychological effect that the audience could not successfully distance themselves from what they see or feel. Peggy Phelan has suggested that the best body art of the 1970s employed endurance and physical pain as tools for exploring bodily limits. For her, body artists claimed their own bodies as a medium and a metaphor for the relationship between self and other, performer and spectator, art and life, and life and death.145 This approach opened up new ways of experiencing the real body and in particular had an impact by transgressing the assorted taboos that surround it. These artists pushed the audience to confront knowledge about the limits of their own bodies in palpable and visceral ways. They also provided an effective language to resist conventional identifications and representations of the body and to put forward new representations.

However, artist’s desire to shock the spectator had a number of clear limitations. The first of these was flagged as early as the late 1970s when art audiences began to develop resistance to these strategies. Instead of being radical and advanced, these extreme actions became conventional and almost de rigueur so that the effect was severely diminished by expectation. Another limitation of this practice was its recourse as a course to force audiences to go through various ordeals. The intensity of this process, whether watching an artist suspended by hooks through their skin or someone being shot, to some degree limited the range of emotional nuances that could be engendered from the audience.

In a myriad of ways we are also less responsive to such transgressions partly because they have been incorporated into mainstream cultures in the form of body piercing,

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cosmetic surgery and television shows such as Fear Factor. It is also partly because shock for its own sake is not fashionable for an audience attuned to the conviviality of 96

relational aesthetics. The appropriation of body art strategies by popular entertainer, magician David Blaine is a good example of this phenomenon. Blaine encased himself in a glass cabinet above the river Thames for forty days in a kitsch spectacle that was a salient example of how popular entertainment masquerading as ‘live art’ has to some extent usurped the critical project of body art.146

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Image 25. David Blaine Above the below (2003), performance/stunt

A key factor at play here is the shift in the function of art that began to take affect in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century. This shift might be described as a move away from the idea of art as a radical and critical activity that was concerned with challenging social relations. Art became increasingly a cultural industry principally concerned with leisure and entertainment. Rosalind Krauss has flagged this shift by pointing to what she described as ‘an international fashion of installation and intermedia work which essentially finds itself complicit with a globalisation of the image in the service of capital’.147 For Krauss and others associated with the October group of writers, market forces have diminished the critical function of art and have subsumed the radical possibilities of art practice. Benjamin Buchloh, a writer associated with

this group, points to the withering away of what he calls ‘the space for criticality in late twentieth century capitalist culture’. This he takes to be a direct consequence of the encroachment of corporate power into the realm of avant-garde aesthetic production and display.148

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Image 26. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled: (Placebo-Landscape for Roni) (1993), mixed media installation

While it might be argued that these polemics are too ready to surrender art to the agenda of market capitalism, there is significant evidence to suggest that artists in the last decade have sought to build a more accessible and harmonious relationship with audiences. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres is an example of someone whose approach to audiences differed greatly from the transgressive strategies of forebears working in the 1960s and 1970s. While Gonzalez-Torres embraced the political project of 1960s and 1970s avant-garde practice, his methods differed greatly from the minimalist, conceptual and performance art practitioners his work was influenced by.

The artist chose to engage his audience not with negation or repulsion but with pleasure. He used candy in a number of works to sweeten the experience of engaging with art. In Untitled: (Placebo-Landscape for Roni) (1993), he created a glistening carpet of 1000 pounds of gold candy disposed across the floor of the gallery. The obvious pleasure of this work and other candy pieces was that the audience

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could literally consume the work by reaching in and taking a candy. This moment of pleasurable consumption also served to temper the overtly political issues that 98

the artist was exploring; namely the AIDS crisis and the pathologisation of the gay male body. For Simon Watney, Gonzalez-Torres’ candy works enact and embody the instability of life, and its extreme unpredictability and transience. Watney asserts that the candy works are not trivial markers of crass gallery populism but actually attempt to take the audience seriously.149 They encourage the participants to make as many connections as they like while deftly linking the politics of AIDS with intimacy and the small pleasure of sweetness.

The work of Gonzalez-Torres, an artist championed by Bourriaud, highlights the accord that has gradually evolved between artist and spectator since the early 1990s. This accord suggests that audiences are not indifferent to political content but that this content needs to be couched in the micro-politics of the personal and the everyday and not through the strident and didactic means that marked the strategies of critical theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the challenge, as I have argued, is to avoid diffusing political content to the point where its effect is largely anodyne. Gonzalez-Torres is one of the few artists championed by Bourriaud whose work does not get lost in the mire of consensus and togetherness that marks the work of Tiravanija, Parreno and Wurm.

In place of Bourriaud’s model of art as consensus, Claire Bishop has argued for the idea of relational antagonism. Developed out of the antagonistic theory of democracy proposed by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, this model of thinking puts forward the idea that in a functioning democracy the frontiers between different positions are never consensually agreed upon but are rather continually contested. As a result of this lack of social connectivity, the subject, Laclau and Mouffe argue, is always devoid of structural coherence meaning that they are irremediably decentred and incomplete. In

this socio/political model, it is antagonism that is the type of relationship that emerges between such incomplete subjects. 150 99

Bishop’s particular target is Bourriaud’s use of the terms ‘inclusive’ and ‘egalitarian’ that he employs to describe the work of Tiravanija and his peers. Bishop points out that contrary to Bourriaud’s claims, these terms do not necessarily equate to the idea of a democratic art experience. Rather, the public sphere remains democratic ‘only insofar as its naturalised exclusions are taken into account and made open to contestation’.151 She highlights the significance of Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that a fully functioning democracy is not one in which frictions between people have disappeared; rather, democracy only occurs when the frontiers between different positions continue to be drawn up and brought into debate.152

Bishop emphases that subjectivity is always incomplete and points to the significance of antagonism, not consensus, as the principle type of relationship that emerges between individuals in democratic societies. When applied to performance art, this model suggests that contestation and conflict are a more democratic means of engaging with an audience than the idea of ‘dialogue for its own sake’. It could be argued that Tiravanija’s art embodies just such a creed because underpinning the work is the idea that the art audience always has something in common. This is in contrast to the works of Gonzalez-Torres, where the emphasis is less on communion than on what Jean-Luc Nancy calls ‘a community at loose ends forever slipping out of grasp’.153

Liveness: Performance Art and Mediafication

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For Philip Auslander, the greatest issue facing performance art is the challenge to ‘liveness’ brought about by new communication technologies. According to Auslander internet streaming and digital video have incrementally diminished the sense of liveness in our mediatised culture. He argues, following Baudrillard, that mediatisation is a socio-political process whereby all discourses are brought together under the dominance of a single code.154 This code is not what comes off the daily press, out of the tube or on the radio, rather it is what is reinterpreted by the sign form and articulated into models.155 Auslander outlines how far the cultural shift has moved over the past sixty years that live performance now takes its lead from mediatised culture and actually attempts to imitate this culture.156 While he does not see this process in negative terms, he is at pains to point out that liveness is irrelevant in our television world, which has supplanted qualities such as proximity and intimacy. The incursion of mediatisation into live events can be understood, he tells us, as a means of making those events respond to the need for television intimacy, thus fulfilling desires and expectations shaped by mediatised representations.157

While the proposition that the diminishing role of liveness in certain aspects of cultural production has critical currency, Auslander fails to account for the continuing appeal and value of performance practice. His suggestion that audiences can only access the immediacy of performance in television is overly reductive and underestimates the cultural and haptic significance of interacting with real bodies. He argues that rather than mediatised culture actively distancing spectators from the real, it in fact opens up access to a new hyperreal that is as meaningful as the old ‘live’ real. What Auslander attempts to repress is the value of presence in cultural interaction.

Yet curiously a significant number of artists sought to re-connect with presence in the 1990s. Adrian Heathfield, in his essay ‘Alive’ (2004), has argued that ideas of immediacy, the immersive and interactivity demonstrate a new relevance to the live at the start of this millennium. He argues that visual art continues to offer immediacy and interactivity as reflective spaces through which to interrogate the highly atomistic nature of western society with its densely mediated examples of cultural experience.158 Heathfield suggests that liveness functions in part to hold off, contain and control the threat of a completely mediated and virtual reality.159 A comparison might be made here with the idea of the grotesque and the role that the real plays in tempering protean artificiality.

The currency of liveness in contemporary art has taken a number of forms. Bourriaud’s idea of conviviality provides one aspect of artistic practice that emphasises bodily engagement, and there are other examples of artists who seek to revisit and expand upon the trajectories of 1960s and 1970s performance art. In the 1980s performance art became subsumed within other genres such as stand-up, theatre and cabaret, but in the 1990s a number of emerging practitioners sought to reject this approach to performance. Artists including Hayley Newman, Oleg Kulik and Mona Hatoum avoided the idea of performance as entertainment, particularly the theatrical distinction that was set up between audience and performer in the work of practitioners such as Laurie Anderson, Annie Sprinkle and Karen Finley.160

Newman is one of a number of younger British live artists who rejected the idea of performance as a theatre/cabaret-style event in nightclubs, bars and black-box studio theatres. Her practice, unlike Anderson and co, is located within an anti-theatrical fine art tradition that discards surface treatments and staging in favour of greater emphasis upon its three-dimensional (often public) setting. Her work, as Aaron Williamson has

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suggested, seeks to vigorously interrogate the structure of performance art by placing a strong emphasis on developing a heightened sense of conceptual resonance.161 102

Crying Glasses: An Aid to Melancholia (1995) was a performance undertaken on public transport in a number of European cities. In this work Newman wore a pair of specially designed glasses that pumped water out of the frames to produce a trickle of tears down her cheeks. The glasses were conceived by the artist as a tool to express the representation of feelings in public spaces. They became, over the months of wearing them, a mechanism for demonstrating externally, internal and unidentifiable emotions.162

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Image 27. Hayley Newman Crying Glasses: An Aid to Melancholia (1995), performance

Newman’s performances like earlier work by Valie Export and Marina Abramovic sought to directly engage with the public. Yet unlike her predecessors, Newman attempted to build a subtle and non-intrusive dialogue with the strangers she encountered. The Crying Glasses attempted to examine the ways in which people relate to one another in the public sphere. Specifically, how do individuals respond to public expressions of grief. Newman was particularly interested in the ambivalence of her fellow passengers who appeared to take no interest in her state of affairs. Rather than seeing this as a

failure of the work however, she believed that it enhanced the experience of fractured social relations for those who did respond to her act of crying. 103

Where Newman is interested in developing a subtle dialogue between artist and audience, the performance work of Mona Hatoum eschews such a connection. In her piece Roadworks (1985) the artist trudged through the streets of Brixton pulling behind her boots that were attached to her ankles. She encountered many people in the process though most ignored what she was doing. The performance, as Guy Brett has suggested, is about establishing paradoxical role reversals, to achieve a liberating effect.163 He was alluding to the fact that Hatoum’s feet were naked and vulnerable, yet they had at the same time a devout strength as they dragged along behind them massive military, police or skinhead boots.

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Image 28. Mona Hatoum Roadworks (1985), performance

Hatoum suggests the idea of the artist alienated from the social sphere, but Newman’s work examines the possibility or impossibility of conviviality between artist and audience in public settings. Her work functions as an interesting counterpoint to the significance of this term in relational aesthetics. Newman highlights the way in which conviviality is largely absent from performative interactions outside the safety of the art gallery. However, by attempting to engage with the public in a variety of social spaces, Newman seeks to subtly affect the lives of those people she encounters.

While performance art can no longer assume a cultural legitimacy simply because of its adoption of radically transgressive means, its value as an artistic language is still 104

immense. Heathfield captures this potential when he describes:

the shocks to perception that are frequently deployed by contemporary live (performance) artists, which take the spectator into conditions of immediacy where attention is heightened, the sensory relation charged, and the workings of thought agitated. The artwork is alive. Such conditions, it seems, bring us as spectators into a fresh relation; into the now of enactment, the moment by moment of the present.164

The challenge for the performance artist is to establish fresh relations by bringing the participants into an engaged and sustained dialogue with the art experience. Such a relationship can and does take a number of forms, from the convivial to the disturbing. Unlike the 1970s, today the onus is now on creating a non-confrontational dialogue that carefully draws audiences into the work. This is in contrast to putting spectators through an ordeal that often marked early performance work.

As I argued in chapter one, performance by its ephemeral nature is a medium of memory, never fixed and rarely resolved. Its contingency is constitutive of human subjectivity, always fluid, strangely complex and subject to shifts through social interaction. The performative nature of subjectivity suggests that definitions of what constitute categories such as beauty and the grotesque can never be secured but are imbricated in a shifting broader power/knowledge nexus. As a result, performance art functions best when what is conveyed takes place at the edge of recognition. As Henry Sayre has pointed out, the power of the medium is that it captivates through its elusiveness so that its meanings are always on the tips of our tongues.165

Install - Inflate - Intensify

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Install One of the three artworks produced for this thesis is an installation/performance entitled Bounce. This work seeks to draw together these two disciplines with the aim of extending the performative aspects of installation art. Claire Bishop has argued in her text Installation Art (2005), that installation is a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the viewer physically enters, and which is often described as ‘theatrical’, ‘immersive’ or ‘experiential’.166 There is a strong aspect of performance in installation practice though this largely relates to the role of the audience. Bishop highlights how artists working with installation often position the audience as a performer with the aim of heightening their awareness of bodily responses to objects positioned in space. With Bounce, I have incorporated a further performative dimension by locating my body within the installation environment.

The combination of performance and installation is not new and has its own tradition of sorts. The Happenings of Allen Kaprow, certain performance works by Joseph Beuys, including I like America and America Likes Me (1974), as well as Bob Flanagan’s Visiting Hours (1994) are just three works that sought to fuse spectator, space and object/s. They emphasised a nascent inter-disciplinarity and explored the extended possibilities of working across artistic mediums. This approach is in stark contrast to the idea of medium specificity, and in particular, the discrete autonomous art object as championed by late modernist critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.167

As Foster, Krauss, Buchloh and Bois have argued in their recent treatise on Twentieth Century art Art Since 1900 Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004), inter-

disciplinarity - which includes installation - was a broad post World War Two cultural discourse that espoused a break from modernist ideas of opticality, quality and value. 106

These writers argued that as well as reacting against late modernism, installation was also constituted by two key cultural shifts. The first of these was the critique of political institutions and the expansion of cultural spaces in the social movements that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The second involved the erosion of a number of hierarchies at this time- of high and low cultural forms, elite and popular audiences, and fine and media arts.168

A third and crucial category that these authors do not mention is the role of performativity in art practice. From the late 1950s, the idea of the artist as performer came to prominence in the work of practitioners such as Allen Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Dick Higgins, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. These artists emphasised the presence and manipulation of their own bodies in works of art, but there was also at the same time a concomitant interest in heightening the role of the spectator in the art experience. Whether it was via direct involvement in performing acts and gestures, as in the work of Kaprow, or simply animating spaces containing reductive and hermetic objects in the minimalist sculpture of Morris, the spectator’s enhanced role in the art experience soon became a staple trope of advanced art practice.

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Image 29. Claes Oldenburg Store (1961), mixed media installation/performance

As performance and installation practices evolved in the 1960s there were a few examples in which performance and installation operated in tandem. Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961) used the presence of the artist in combination with an installation of his sculptural plaster objects for sale. He confused the roles of artist and dealer by working in the store each day for the duration of the exhibition. Nick Kaye in his study Site-specific Art: Performance Place and Documentation (2000) has argued that Oldenburg’s store derives its form from the imperatives of the real store it mimicked. In this respect, he points to the artist’s affinity with Kaprow and his (Oldenburg’s) statement that ‘the only reason I have taken up Happenings is because I wanted to experiment with total space or surrounding space’.169 At the same time Oldenburg was concerned to distance his work from the term environment that was a precursor to the term installation. He suggested that the form of The Store was not so much environmental as fragmentary and wanted the viewer to imagine the negative space or absent material rather than simply engaging with what could be seen.170

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Image 30. Vito Acconci Seedbed (1972), performance/installation

Vito Acconci in his work Seedbed (1972) sought to examine the connections between performance art and installation with specific reference to Minimalism. For Acconci, Minimalism’s confrontation with the body, its demand that one recognise the relation between art and the viewer, ‘implied an engagement with the performative transactions underpinning the site’.171 In Seedbed the artist positioned his body within a minimallike installation. He constructed a sealed wooden ramp in an otherwise empty room and lay beneath it for the duration of the show. The aim of the piece, as explained in hand lettered wall posters was to activate the room “by my presence underground …by my movement point to point under the ramp.” The goal was to scatter the artist’s seed throughout the underground area by means of “private sexual activity” aided by the sounds of the spectator’s footsteps on the ramp. “What I wanted, Acconci explained, “was a way that my presence could effect a space into and out of which people passed”. I saw myself as a sort of undercurrent to whoever was there. One physical way to achieve this was to be under the floor.172

Seedbed has largely been interpreted as dealing with gender, sexuality, masculinity and the transgressive nature of body art. Amelia Jones for instance has written how in Seedbed, as in all of Acconci’s body artwork, the artist exaggeratedly performed a chiasmus - an intersubjective erotic intertwining - of the interpretive exchange

between artist and audience.173 While the issue of exchange is clearly fundamental to a reading of this work, the nature of this exchange has been dominated almost entirely by gender politics. A good deal of the writing and scholarship surrounding Seedbed has emphasised its supposedly shocking extremity and bodily transgression.174 What is overlooked in this discussion is the artist’s attempt to extend the logic of minimalism into a performative exchange. Acconci, by inserting his body with all its libidinal and psychosexual complexity, into the minimal system of audience, site and object, moved both installation and performance in important new directions.

One of the radical features of this project was the way that Acconci shifted performance away from a relationship between performer and a larger audience to a relationship based on the possibility of individual and intimate exchange between artist and audience. In this sense, his interaction with audience members was intimate: not in a sexual way - although this is obviously a feature of the work - but in the opportunity of one-on-one dialogue between artist and audience member. He utilised the logic of installation art to surprise the audience who may have thought they were engaging with a minimalist environment.

Inflate The use of inflatable structures in art has a small history. The practice of building architectural and sculptural forms that are given volume by air rather than solid matter dates back to the 1960s when it was first employed by artists and architects. Roger Dent, in his book Principles of Pneumatic Architecture (1971) believed that the development of inflatable buildings in the 1960s offered a new and fertile area for architectural investigation. He envisaged a new ethos in building that emphasised portabilitiy and ephemerality as environmentally sensitive design solutions.175 Dent listed the benefits of inflatable structures: namely that they can be erected or dismantled quickly, are

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light, portable and materially inexpensive. They therefore offered a possible solution to a wide range of problems of a social and commercial kind. All that was required, he 110

argued, was a suitable container for this manufactured environment.176

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Image 31. Space Structure Workshop Blowup (1971), mixed media sculpture

The idea that inflatability marked a new mindset for the future had parallels in visual art in the work of British art group Space Structure Workshop. In a series of large-scale projects this group developed structures that emphasised tactility, monochromatic colour and the haptic experience of art works. Their work Blow-Up (1971) was an enormous white inflatable structure that permitted hundreds of people to interact with it. The rough and tumble aspect of this work was especially focused on bringing children into an active engagement with art works.177

Where Space Structure Workshop was interested in inflatability as a something that could enhance interactivity, Claes Oldenburg used inflatability to produce monumental

sculptural forms. He had initially experimented with materials such as plaster and wood before he became interested in vinyl for its flaccidity and as a material that could be inflated.178 He was particularly interested in the biomorphic qualities of inflatable vinyl structures. He talked of these forms as ‘object-bodies, artificial devices endowed with unique qualities’. They are, he suggested, ‘tactile forms that swell and dilate, fatten and bend, withdraw and expand, into which one can sink one’s hands, mouth or sexual organ, as one might into any body, human or animal’.179

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Image 32. Claes Oldenburg Ice Bag (1969), mixed media sculpture

The anthropomorphisisation of inflatable forms was evident in his huge Ice Bag (1969). This everyday object, usually employed as a remedy for bruising, was rendered uncanny by its shiny bright red colour and huge scale. For Oldenburg, the bag was an object that was simultaneously both alluring and repellent. He highlighted the way in which the object drew the audience into considering its human like qualities such as ‘its consistency of flesh’ and the fact that the object was ‘desired but forbidden, hard,

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yet inaccessible to touch’.180 This was in contrast to the glossy veneer of the object’s skin, which functioned like a reflective surface. The incandescent glow that resulted 112

from the object’s lustre worked to deflect the gaze of the audience and kept them at a distance. Oldenburg was interested in constructing a tension between attraction and repulsion while also emphasising the ambiguity of this material/technology. In particular, he sought to confuse the audience by incorporating contradictions such as ‘whether this thing is animate or even anthropomorphic and also whether it has autonomy with regard to human beings.181

While deeply interested in the possibilities of the inflatable structure, Oldenburg was nonetheless aware of its kitsch qualities. He explained that the inflatable as an art material was in ‘a primitive state’ and that it was crucial to resist its mundane associations.182 His call to work against the kitsch associations of the inflatable has proven to be highly prescient as this device has increasingly become a tool of commercialisation. Roger Dent’s optimism about inflatability as a trope of social transformation or artistic innovation has to a large degree waned; usurped by the popular entertainment and advertising languages he sought to critically navigate.

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Images 33 + 34. Paul McCarthy Blockhead (2003), and Daddies Bighead (2003), both mixed media sculpture

Paul McCarthy is another artist who is attuned to the inflatable as a largely debased visual art medium in the new millennium. Since 2002 he has sought to find ways of shifting the signification of the inflatable back from a commercial and functional object to an aesthetic associated with visual art. In an interview with James Rondeau he spoke of trying to ‘subvert inflatables away from commercial spectacle’. He argued ‘that they can be about another dialogue- other issues, sculpture for instance’.183 McCarthy made inflatables in the late 1960s that like Space Structure Workshop were conceived as social spaces to house performances and events. These experiments informed two large-scale inflatables exhibited outside the Tate Gallery London in 2003: Blockhead and Daddies Bighead. For McCarthy, inflatable sculpture:

is pretty lively. People rally around events sculptures in a party mood. They are huge they flap in the wind, but the blackness of Blockhead and the putrescence of Daddies Bighead take the frolic and fun away from them. They appear to be inflatables but they are another kind. A kind that does not talk about what the McDonald’s inflatable talks about, doesn’t talk with Disney, doesn’t talk about what the spider man inflatable from the movies does. By being the colours they are they ask you to think differently.184

The artist asserted that the monochromatic form of his figures remove them from the panoply of colours that are usually used in advertising and popular entertainment. The blackness of blockhead for example recalls the relationship McCarthy has with Minimalism and particularly the work of Tony Smith. Blockhead’s head is a square black box similar to Tony Smith’s Cube produced in the early 1960s. The cube also functions in McCarthy’s work as a skull and as a cardboard box on the head. The effect of McCarthy’s black box, as Francis Morris and Sarah Glennie have suggested, is that it functions ‘like a mask but it has no eyes’.185

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While the monochromatic nature of these works is crucial in distinguishing them from what the artist sarcastically referred to as ‘event sculptures’, it is not simply the colours 114

that ask the audience to think differently. It is also the grotesque forms McCarthy employs, for he invests children’s play figurines with overtly sexual-almost pornographicdimensions. By transgressing the acceptable limits of family entertainment, McCarthy successfully pushes the inflatable as spectacle away from the popular realm and into a dialogue with contemporary art. McCarthy’s hybrid figures are firmly rooted in his ongoing fascination with body as architecture, theme park spectacle and a critique of the ‘Disneyfication’ of the American dream.186

Conclusion

While I have outlined a diverse range of art historical references in this chapter, there are clear points of connection around a cluster of key themes. These include the grotesque, the clown, performance art and relational aesthetics, as well as the lineage of inflatable structures in art. In all of these subject areas, I have sought to examine the ways in which specific artists have created a context through which my own practical work might be located. I have also sought to examine how particular artists have employed key devices and techniques to draw the audience into a self-reflexive relationship with grotesque content. In the work of artists including Hannah Höch, Bruce Nauman, and Ugo Rondinone, I contend that they have captured a grotesque sensibility by carefully balancing the real with the protean artificial.

Against the claims of Philip Auslander, I posit the fundamental value of presence in art. His argument that performance has been usurped by mediatised culture fails to take into account the continued legitimacy of performance art as a valuable medium

for contemporary artists. He also underestimates the capacity of performance art to engage audiences in unique and affective ways. Yet at the same time the terms of engagement for performance art have shifted markedly since the 1970s. The challenge in our current climate is to find a way to link the transgressive and antagonistic methods of performance art with the ‘convivial’ appeal of relational aesthetics.

In the last chapter I will further address these issues and questions by outlining the aims and objectives of the artwork.

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Chapter 3 Discussion of the Practical Work 117

Introduction

Images 35,36 + 37 (all installation shots, The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct, 2006): David Cross Untitled (2005), photographic installation; Bounce (2005), performance/installation; Distances (2005), 3 channel video projection

The question of how to critically engage the audience and get them to reconsider the representation of the non-preferred body is central to this thesis. Each of the three art works that make up the exhibition: a large-scale inflatable installation/performance work; a three-projection DVD video work of a catwalk modelling shoot; and a suite of 4 large-scale colour photographs attempts to utilise particular strategies to draw the audience into a powerful and affective relationship with the non-preferred body. Rather than relying on one of the key subjects of the work - my body, and its physical difference - I have employed a number of strategies to attract and maintain their interest. Underlying these is the desire to foster audience interaction by using seductive visual effects that offer the viewer a pleasurable or captivating experience. These range from the infantile excitement of jumping on a carnival inflatable structure in an art gallery, to the opportunity of enjoying the visually appealing effects of colourfield abstraction. These operations function to specifically temper and defer what might be described

as the nascent content of the work; the representation of my body. By carefully layering the non-preferred body into visual languages that might be described as beautiful, or 118

at least pleasurable, the works seek to recast the boundaries by which attraction and repulsion can be defined.

One of the key mechanisms in this process is the construction of art experiences that are defined by a heightened level of visual uncertainty. I have used art to make it difficult to distinguish what is beautiful and what is grotesque. My aim is to establish for the participant what could be called an uncanny space of uncertainty. The uncanny, as discussed in chapter one, is a powerful effect that comes to the fore when the boundary between reality and fantasy is blurred. By working to establish an uncanny space in each of the artworks, I aim to call into question the existing hierarchies that determine which bodies are preferred and which are non-preferred.

Each of the cultural forms employed in the artwork: from male modelling, to abstraction and children’s recreation, have been carefully chosen for the way in which they serve to order and define sanctioned definitions of the body. Modelling and horror for example function as languages that determine what is included and excluded from definitions of the ideal male body in western culture. Catwalk modelling, like fashion and cosmetics advertisements, is a ritualised means by which male beauty is displayed and canonised. The men involved are chosen for their physical beauty and their staged and regimented moves are designed to elevate their status as objects of desirable contemplation.

Horror on the other hand, serves as a cultural marker where boundaries of the grotesque and the abject are demarcated. Horror movies fulfil a cultural need to give form to bodies and subjectivities that are not considered to be ideal. These identities

include mythological personas such as vampires or werewolves that are feared for their grotesqueness. Importantly, horror is also a genre that enables people to confront or sublimate their fears of the grotesque through fantasy and pleasure. As Robin Wood has argued, it is a genre that highlights the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses or oppresses.187 Because the grotesque body is an example of this repression, horror is employed as a valuable discourse for challenging clear distinctions between attraction and repulsion.

Image 38. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

Inter-Disciplinarity - Multi- Disciplinarity

In this project I have chosen to utilise a number of art mediums including performance art, installation, video and photography. Each of these media constructs and defines our knowledge and experience of the body in various ways. My work seeks to examine

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the crucial differences between these media in terms of how they identify, frame, and define the non-preferred body. Each one has a different set of operations that 120

form and inform our understanding of the body and determine how we can or cannot experience it. For example, the stasis of photography marks the body as an instant in frozen time from the reality of our temporal existence. This effect, as Roland Barthes has stated, ensures that the body in photography unlike other mediums deals with what was rather than what is.188

In contrast to photography, video depicts the body shifting and changing over time. Like photography, video is often understood as a technology that captures or documents ‘the real’. However, the images it produces are influenced by the ideological imperatives of the person capturing the footage as well as the logic and formal qualities of the technology itself. Social setting and cultural assumptions of the audience are also significant factors in creating meaning.

I am interested in the ways in which video captures a sense of self that differs from the one that appears in a live performance or photograph. The editing process also has an important role in constructing images of the body that influences our understanding of subjectivity. I am interested in how the editing process enables the body to be manipulated and how this might be used to transform our understanding of subjectivity. Video also allows for the careful construction of different durational signatures, scales and the possibility of dissolving from one time sequence into another. Its capacity to manipulate and control the representation of the body in this way is not possible in performance art. For this reason video is a technology that provides an interesting

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counterpoint to the experience of viewing the live body. Images 39. David Cross Distances (installation shot) (2005), three channel video projection, Wellington City Art Gallery

Video may capture movement over time but in actuality it offers no greater access to the real than photography. It is a virtual technology that like photography abstracts and filters subject matter in particular ways. Whether it be slowing down or speeding up time, looping or repeating footage or manipulating the clarity of the picture, video offers us a different body from the ones we experience in everyday life. The video body might be understood as a distortion of the ‘real’ body and as a manufacture of an entirely new bodyform/image that is grainy, often pixelated and subject to endless manipulation.

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Image 40. David Cross Untitled (installation shot) (2006) The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct, 2006

The hybrid medium of performance art/installation is employed as an interdisciplinary form that plays an important role in relation to photography and video. Unlike these mediums, performance/installation emphasises the live body and builds on unmediated experiences between performer and audience member. The principal value of performance art lies in its ability to affect participants by encouraging them to become active engaged in the works’ construction. The inter-personal affect of performance art stands in contra-distinction to video and photography. The latter establishes a critical distance between the spectator and representations of the body. This affect has been referred to by new media theorist Gerhard Lischka as mediafication, whereby direct communication is replaced by the immateriality of mass-communication, a process that determines the dominant instruments of information we have access to.189

In contract, performance art emphasises the presence of the human body and seeks to eliminate a comfortable distance between the audience and the artwork. The

quality of ‘liveness’ activates distinct cognitive and haptic responses from viewers regardless of the quality of the performance. These responses are incredibly varied but are predicated on a connection with another ‘real’ body in real time. Depictions of the body in video however create a different experience for the audience. The body is rendered virtual and two-dimensional and can be constructed and manipulated by editing techniques, and the body (while real to a degree) can be rendered fake.

Yet it is important to the critical aims of this thesis to work with video for two related reasons. On the one hand, video is a highly accessible medium with clear connections to image forms that are captivating and easily consumed, namely in television and film. I thus utilise these qualities to draw audiences into engaging with an artistic representation of the non-preferred body. It is also necessary to employ the medium to demonstrate how the process of distancing or removing the viewer from an unmediated experience operates. I aim to reveal to use video to make it easier and safer to consume real-time images of bodies without fear of having to actually engage with those same bodies.

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Component 1 Bounce Installation/Performance - A Discussion of Audience Responses 124

Image 41. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

Bounce was a performance/installation first performed at Wellington City Art Gallery in 2005. The work consisted of a structure made from bright red canvas that when inflated became a child’s bouncy play object. Upon entering the exhibition space the audience encountered this strangely shaped structure that was 7 meters long, 6 meters high and 1.8 metres in height. The object resembled a sculptural form but it was not geometric like a minimalist object and it was not flat like a conventional children’s bouncy castle. There was little other information that might ground its function or purpose. The constant sound of the inflating fan provided a strange soundtrack to the work. On closer inspection it became apparent that there was a small protection barrier or skirt around the object that suggested the sculpture could and should be climbed on. This moment of realisation that the sculpture might be played with and not

simply contemplated was a critical moment in the experience of the work. At this point the object ceased to be an abstract form and became a recreational structure for play and pleasure. The taboo normally associated with touching an artwork was thereby removed and the audience attempted to find a way to climb on to the structure.

The shape of the inflatable as mentioned was peculiar and it was not straightforward to climb onto. It required a long running jump and leap so that there was enough momentum to make it up to the top. This process of negotiating the structure was quite amusing as people often failed to co-ordinate their ascent. Whether it was not gaining sufficient speed in the run-up or a poorly timed leap, the result was the same, a slow slide back on to the protection barrier. The challenge seemed to be enjoyable for a number of people as the sculpture became a test to be overcome and conquered. The experience resembled the ordeal of surviving carnival rides or negotiating an obstacle course. Crucially, the physical challenge removed the audience from thinking about the structure in aesthetic terms and shifted away from art towards recreation.

By the time the participant (if they chose to) had made it to the top, the satisfaction of successfully scaling the object and then being able to jump on the artwork was evident. An almost infantile sense of conquest was activated and this was shared by people who were watching. Unbeknownst to the participant, this pleasure was crucial to the denouement. On reaching the top the joy of play would soon be undermined by the realisation that there were two human eyes looking up from underneath the top of the structure. The sense of shock was often immediate when it became clear that there was a body inside the structure directly below the top of the sculpture. The sense of pleasure and recreation was at this moment recast towards a range of associations to do with, among other things, horror, fear and possibly a bleakly comic sense of the macabre.

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Image 42. David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery, 2005

The audience had been caught off guard. The speed and intensity of this transformation sometimes lead to irrational responses from the audience. These included anger, violence, nervous laughter or the desire to flee. These responses are natural coping mechanisms when one is scared in such an unexpected way.

This dramatic shift created an uncertain and uncanny moment of uncertainty whereby the audience was positioned in a fractured space between the real and fantasy, between pleasure and fear. I aim to destabilise the audience by throwing accepted norms into question. After recovering from the surprise, the participant usually attempted to make sense of the surreal conjunction between my body and its location inside a recreational object. Questions that likely came to mind included: Is this person real or are the eyes fake? If the person is real who are they and why are they inside the structure? What happens if I jump on their face? Do I have license to jump on their face? Such questions would have most likely materialised quickly yet the answers are

not readily apparent. What was clear was that a recreational experience has shifted away from leisure and into the territory of art: specifically, the murky and fraught terrain of performance art.

After the initial surprise, which may have taken a few seconds or several minutes, the performance took on a different dimension. For some the work finished here and they quickly removed themselves from the structure. For those prepared to engage with me inside the structure, the experience became more interactive and a dialogue of sorts was established. The participant in some instances attempted to make sense of me by closely examining what information about the body was made available. In this instance there were a pair of eyes that seemed different from normal. There was little else for the audience member to draw on. An interactive dialogue could only be built up through the act of mutual gazing. Some people asked me what I was doing there as a means of securing immediate answers. However I chose not to respond from inside the structure asIwas careful to maintain a heightened level of uncertainty.

The shift from pleasure to the grotesque was not a straightforward transition. The uncanny qualities of the work ensured a multi-faceted response from the audience member that continually wavered between comfort (familiarity) and discomfort (strangeness). The uncanny qualities of the work were manifest in the peculiarly ambiguous and contingent status of my body. There was uncertainty as to whether my body was real or a mannequin. Furthermore, the fragmented nature of what was revealed of my body - a disembodied pair of eyes - suggested the possibility of organs that functioned independently of a body. As Freud noted, there is something highly uncanny about individual body parts when they are credited with independent activity. My moving eyes disturbed the sense of order in part because they appeared to move on their own, but also because it is difficult for the audience to decide whether

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they were trapped inside the playcastle or whether they were located there for more benign reasons. 128

The number of participants on the structure determined the nature of dialogue between performer and audience. If there was only one person, the relationship between performer and audience was often intimate and cautious. Gestures seemed to be subtler and the interaction took place over a longer duration. If there was a number of people, the group dynamic changed and often became more boisterous and confident as people sought to impress others on the structure. These individuals were less concerned with establishing a dialogue with me and more with negotiating and bonding with others. It may be deduced from this that the work functioned more successfully when there was only one person on the structure at a time. However, the sociability of small groups did add a different dimension to the work when based on the shared mediation of reactions to fear. These responses sometimes sublimated fear into violence as some attempted to damage me in some way. Conversely, the fear was also transformed into laughter. Such responses highlighted the need for groups of people to employ different coping mechanisms from individuals in their negotiation of the work.

While the work was performance based, Bounce also drew on the logic of installation art. Like installation, the duration of the art experience for the participant ranges from a few seconds to hours. What was crucial was that audience members could come and go as they pleased and that their experience of the work was not mediated by a set time limit imposed by the artist. As in installation art, Bounce was designed so that the work was animated by the presence of the spectator for the time in which they were in the space. The audience may have had an intimate engagement with the work or they may have experienced it as one of many participating at the same time. My interest in

utilising the durational aspects of installation was that the audience may unexpectedly encounter me as a component within the inflatable structure. Furthermore, by extending the duration of the work to accommodate the galleries opening times (eight hours) it was possible that the audience could engage with me in a more personalised way over the course of the day.

Image 43. David Cross Bounce (detail) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

Beauty and the Grotesque - An Analysis

Fundamentally Bounce is an artwork that engages with the conventions of beauty and the grotesque. It does so by establishing a context whereby the initial pleasurable experience of the work is supplanted by one of disruption and horror. The seamless, almost spectacular, quality of the inflatable object combined with the pleasure of playing on it, establishes a context that can be aligned with beauty. This context however is

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destabilised by the presence of my body inside the structure. The presence of my two disembodied eyes gazing at the audience through small peepholes, conjures up 130

a range of horrific associations to do with what lies beneath the conscious realm and strongly refers to the abject divide between the inside and outside of the body.

The set-up also relates to the figure of the Peeping Tom, to menacing creatures hiding in dark caves, or other popular constructions that manipulate our fear of annihilation. These forms play on our fears of the unknown and are directly associated with the grotesque as an anxiety-producing condition. However for some people, and this is manifest in the writings of Bataille discussed in chapter 1, the grotesque is a source of fascination that can draw them into an immersive and pleasurable encounter. While I attempted to activate a shift from beauty to the grotesque, I did not wish to negate the initial construction of beauty nor did I seek to privilege the grotesque and make it dominant in the overall tenor of the work. Rather, there is an attempt to establish an negotiation between these categories in which the lines of demarcation are blurred. To this degree, I have attempted to create a liminal space where beauty and the grotesque overlap. In attempting to coax the audience into this space, and develop a performative experience that continually oscillates between pleasure and pain, I challenge them to rethink the basis of the beauty/grotesque divide. By forcing the viewer to engage with a confusion between boundaries, my aim is to create an art experience whereby the audience are drawn into a space of emotional and psychic intensity.

The use of my actual body in a performative context seeks to engage with the idea of undercutting the distance between artist and art viewer. The nature of this experience is complex, based on a combination of empathy, rapport and personal space. This live response is significantly different from our experience of virtual bodies in video and photography because these media technologies allow the viewer to establish a

safe distance from what are clearly artificial projections of another time and space. Sometimes this distance is not clearcut and people confuse the different registers. The presence of the real body establishes the preconditions for a reciprocal dialogue based on the possibility of exchange and as a result a relationship based around rapport can be established. This connectivity is largely absent in virtual forms where the line between what is real and what is fantasy is consciously blurred.

The representation of violence provides a useful illustration of this difference. When Bounce was performed, a number of audience members recklessly jumped on my face and in one instance broke my nose. The response from other audience members was to attempt to protect me from further harm. This consequence could only have been established in a live setting where the effects of violence are overt. Virtual depictions of violence, even those that are real such as news footage of war zones, command a less engaged reaction from the viewer. This is because in virtual representations the audience has no ability to affect the events they are witnessing. As Lishka has argued, mediafication can also tend to remove individuals from a meaningful relationship with other humans. This ensures that the principal experience of bodies is a virtual, and hence distant, engagement.190

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Images 44 + 45. David Cross Bounce (detail shots) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

While the rapport built-up by the viewer in virtual representations such as in footage of famines or war for example, the possibility of strongly responding and interacting with this content is limited. By placing my body into the art work, I aim to subvert and disrupt the process of distancing that takes place in the experience of virtual representations of the human body. The performative aspect of the artwork allows me to develop a direct and unmediated relationship with the spectator over an unspecified time period so that an immediate and genuine exchange (even if it is fleeting) can take place. I do not wish to argue that all virtual images of the body cannot match the power of the live body for this would totally discount the efficacy of photographic and video practices. These practices are ubiquitous and are technologies that determine and define the prevailing conceptions for how the body and subjectivity are expressed and understood. What the various components of the exhibition are meant to achieve is to bring together the live and virtual body to build a fuller and more complex understanding of the non-preferred body.

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Image 46. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2006), The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct.

Colour and Inflatability

Bounce is coloured a bright chromium red and this colour serves a number of functions. The first is that bright red is a highly attractive and resonant colour that it is often employed in children’s inflatable structures and playground equipment. This colour assists in inviting and engaging participants with the structure. Secondly, the monochromatic use of red directly references 1960s sculptural practice. Artists such as Anthony Caro, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Morris imbued their objects with a single coloured skin that served to unify their sculptural aesthetic. This treatment also sought to highlight that the objects were in fact works of art and not industrial products. The use of colour, for example, disguised the pre-fabricated steel and plywood parts that Caro and Morris used. These components were not at the time conventional

materials for sculpture. In the same way that these artists sought to camouflage their use of building materials so that the objects would be read as art, I have attempted to 134

play down the cacophony of colour that is traditionally employed in children’s inflatable structures. By utilising instead a monochromatic colour scheme, I aim to broaden the signification of the inflatable making it both a carnival object and a work of art.

The third reason I use colour is that it relates to the condition of my own body. The redness of the inflatable is constitutive of the redness in the whites of my eyes that is the result of my medical condition. I want to build a correspondence between the inflatable structure and my eyes so that formal and content-driven issues can be amplified. In the same way that children with blue eyes are often dressed in blue clothing, I am interested in employing a similar logic to accentuate the specificity of my eyes. By emphasising rather than hiding the redness, I want to challenge the stigma of this difference by re-directing what this redness might mean. Moreover, rather than the redness being suggestive of debilitation, I am interested in how it might connote something that is beautiful.

To this end I have attempted to develop a formal dialogue between my eyes and the inflatable that might in part be read through the logic of abstract painting and sculpture. Such a linkage draws on the logic of Caro and Morris as well as geometric abstraction whereby a figure/ground relationship is established when one colour is laid down next to another.

While colour is one means of connecting the artwork to a particular art historical lineage, a number of other features of the work are informed by and respond to specific artists and movements. The inflatable soft object for instance references Pop art and particularly the inflatable and vinyl sculptures made by Oldenburg in the 1960s.

Like Oldenburg, I am interested in the seductive and alluring qualities of these forms and their iconic possibilities. Oldenburg relied on the audience recognising the soft sculpture as a copy of a real and familiar object, but the pleasure of this conjunction is largely absent in Bounce. The reason for this is that such a direct mimetic connection would serve to close down and prescribe the meaning of the work in unhelpful ways. It is crucial that the audience’s initial location of the work be deferred by a number of different art historical reference points. On the one hand, this level of visual ambiguity works to ensure that the all-important denouement in Bounce takes place without unnecessary distraction. Yet, I am also interested in the possibility of constructing hybrid forms that draw on a number of different and even antagonistic art movements. By layering aspects of different art movements together I am seeking to extend the level of confusion for the adult spectator with the aim of maximising the dimension of undecidability.

It is for this reason that Bounce draws on certain traits of Minimalist sculpture. These conventions relate primarily to the use of unitary and monochromatic forms in the work of Robert Morris, Donald Judd and John McCracken. There is also an interest in the role of the spectator in Minimalism that Michael Fried famously described as theatrical.191 These artists, particularly Morris, sought to develop relationships between the object, its site, and the spectator. Morris was interested in Gestalt psychology because it emphasised the idea that simple geometric forms provided the strongest visual effect for the spectator.187 Like many Minimal objects, Bounce is concerned with wholeness, uniformity of colour and a certain geometric coherence. The surface is smooth and there is little in the way of complicated internal relationships and thus establishes a simplified, direct environment. The only significant internal relationship that exists are between the object and the incursion or location of my body within it.

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By inserting my body into the minimalist sculptural form, the work moves towards a performative context. In addition, the presence of my body functions to challenge 136

the Minimalists’ emphasis on objectness and subjectivity in the performance. I am concerned to examine how ideas of beauty operate within Minimalism and whether the aesthetic function can be maintained through the presence of a human body.192 In particular, I want to establish whether my non-preferred body corrodes the pristine beauty of the Minimalist object. Or, alternatively, whether such beauty serves to diminish the abject qualities of my body. My aim is to establish a liminal sense of play between my body and a minimal-like object whereby new conceptions of beauty might be established.

Component 2 Untitled Photographic Installation

Upon entering the exhibition space the first thing the audience encounters are four large square photographs. These images are spread at a equi-distance across the temporary wall in the gallery space. The photographs are brightly coloured and each one has a slightly different tonal scheme. The figurative images are highly magnified but exactly what is being depicted is initially unclear. In each image there is an eye that peers out from behind a plastic or rubber shield or wall. Yet this eye appears to be slightly different from a normal human eye because it has almost no eyelashes. It is difficult to determine whether the eye is actually human. This ambiguity is curious, almost disturbing, and pushes the viewer to try to make sense of what they are looking at. The strange conjunction of eye behind coloured membrane is slightly tempered by the fact that the eye does not confront the gaze of the spectator but looks away at an angle. The audience can thus scan this picture knowing they are not being looked at.

The four photographs beg a number of questions: namely, what is this creature, and what exactly are the abstract patterned forms shielding its face? After a more detailed examination of the photographs, it becomes clear that the eye is human and that the plastic and rubber shields are masks of some kind. The shiny surface, cartoon colour schemes, and carefully cut eyeholes indicate that these are mass manufactured masquerade props. It is also evident that as the eyelid in each image is distinctively scarred, the same eye appears in each of the four photographs. This is as much information as the viewer is given. Exactly who this person is however is not made clear either in the images or the titles of the work.



Images 47, 48, 49 + 50. Photographs (all 2005): David Cross Untitled I; Untitled II; Untitled III; Untitled IV

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These photographs are depictions of my face wearing an assortment of children’s horror and clown masks. They are self-portraits that are linked by a series of shared 138

characteristics. Each photograph is square, has the eye as the centre-point of the image, and reveals only a fragmented section of the depicted subject. There is in addition a carefully developed tension between the power contained in each image and its relationship with the other photographs. The photographs have their own distinctive traits as each has a different coloured patterned mask and the eye is positioned slightly differently across the four images. This creates a sequence as the face gradually moves from one image to the next. As the sequence shifts from left to right, the eye gradually disappears behind the plastic mask, until it reappears again in the fourth photograph. This structure, therefore develops as a narrative unfolds from one image to the next. The tension between the individual photograph and the entire series is part of broader strategy to construct a visual system that commingles the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Image 51. David Cross Untitled (installation shot) (2005), photographic installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

The uncanny condition thus creates another manifestation of the relationship between abjection and beauty. Unlike Bounce, which only obliquely engages with the abject body, the photographs bring this state to the fore and deal with two different kinds of abjection. The first is the cartoon horror of children’s masks where the grotesque body is rendered as an absurd caricature. The mask, whether it is a witch, vampire or ghoulish clown, functions to parody the abject body and deprive it of menace or threat. Any fear that these archetypes might have commanded in the popular imagination is absent in these forms. They are instead humorous ciphers of camp or infantile playacting. This cartoon abjection is juxtaposed against a second and far more visceral abjection, which is the viscous and bloodshot appearance of my eye. This form of abjection is grounded in the real. The tears, eye lubricant and inflamed conjunctival vessels are not cosmetically added through clever makeup or Photoshop techniques but are constitutive of my physical condition. Yet because of the layering of the fake and the real in these photographs and because the audience may not know my condition, this divide is not at all clear.

By juxtaposing these two codes of abjection, I am interested in constructing a dialogue that plays off the artificial and the real. My aim is to confuse the signification of what is real and what is fantasy in the photographs by carefully blurring these opposing poles together. I have sought to merge two different kinds of abjection, the fake and the real to construct a hybrid form that defies easy categorisation because it is simultaneously fake and real. This effect is achieved by heavily magnifying and enlarging the images to the point at which their subject matter is significantly abstracted. In other words, the photographs are heavily distorted by zooming in on only a fragment of the masks to the point at which they cease to be masquerade props and become instead also abstract fields of colour. This shift aims to create a level of uncertainty for the spectator as a liminal space is formed between representation (the masks) and non-representation

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(the formal qualities of the masks). A slippage could be seen to occur between the form and content of the photographs as the process of magnification confuses or 140

even subverts the conventional meanings of the horror mask.

I aim to create a sense of uncertainty by activating measured levels of attraction and repulsion. The peeping, grotesque eyes disturb yet do not disturb absolutely. This is because the eye floats in a field of colour that is pleasurable and even captivating. The colours of the masks are saturated and luminous creating visual effects not dissimilar to day-glo abstract painting. The intensity of these effects is alluring and significantly tempers the repulsive aspects of the eye. By manipulating the images in this way, I want to create a situation in which the spectator is forced to confront a disquieting sense of foreignness. The audience must continually oscillate between allure and revulsion, between reading the work figuratively and abstractly and between regarding them with a sense of familiarity and foreignness.

One of the key reasons for utilising photography in this thesis is that it captures a unique way in which to know and understand the body. Pioneering photographer and theorist Henry Talbot described the photographic effect as far back as 1839 as an impossible conjunction of transience and fixity, a visual simultaneity of the fleeting and the eternal. According to Geoffrey Batchen, Talbot saw the photograph as emblematic for something, “a space of the single minute” in which space becomes time and time space.193 Like Talbot, I am interested in the impossible conjunction of transience and fixity that is a crucial component of the allure of photography. In particular, I want to identify how photography establishes and maintains a very particular kind of distancing effect between spectator and the representation of bodies. Such an effect utilises stillness to captivate, but at the same time distance the spectator from what they are experiencing.

This effect is distinct from other art forms and has been discussed at length by Jean Baudrillard in his article ‘For Illusion is Not the Opposite of Reality’ (1998). Baudrillard argues that the dramatic quality of the photograph comes from the discontinuity between the subject’s desire to impose itself in its immediacy. In the best photographs, he suggests, the object wins and the photographic image is an image of a fractal world that has no summation, which is contained in no equation. The key thing, he tells us, is there should be a fracture in this excessively well crafted machinery of representation. In this way photography differs from art and cinema, which by way of ideas vision or movement always tend towards a totalising pattern.194

The photographs in this artwork are all square in format. While this shape is not unusual in photographic practice, it is distinct from the more conventional rectangular structures. There are a number of reasons for working in this format all of which relate to the aim of maximising the uncanny qualities of the work. The first relates to the careful juxtaposition of order and entropy in the photographs. The square is a perfectly proportioned symmetrical shape. Its sense of order is heightened by the location of my eye within its borders. The abject eye with its viscous excretions and distendered lids significantly tempers the rational qualities of the square. As a result of this juxtaposition, attention is established between order and chaos that cannot easily be resolved. This quality of undecidability highlights my attempt to confuse signification with the aim of establishing liminal in-between beauty and disgust.

The second reason for the use of the square relates to compositional structure and the manipulation of the audiences retinal movement through the work. The square subverts the conventional left to right reading of the work that occurs in rectangular works of art. The drawback is that it a square makes it comparatively easy for the eye to leave the image. By working with the square and also positioning a circular hole in

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the middle of each image, I have attempted to draw the spectator’s eye into the centre of the work. The use of the circle then functions to hold the spectators attention inside 142

the photograph and hinder the establishment of an easy route out of the photograph. For the work to establish an uncanny effect, it is necessary to keep the spectator in the work over an extended period. After the initial sighting of the work, I am concerned to ensure a period of sustained interest as the spectator tries to make sense of the photograph’s meaning. My aim is to develop a continuous push-pull effect between the mask and the eye that lies beneath it. While the subject matter of the work fulfils this function, it is also necessary that the formal compositional devices of the photographs provide support in this process.

The photographs draw on aspects of Surrealist photography, particularly work that sought to elicit an uncanny response from the spectator. As Freud in his essay of the same name suggests, the uncanny is something repressed that returns. But it is not merely the return of the repressed that makes an uncanny experience. Rather, a catalyst has to provoke the feeling since not all return repressed feelings necessarily re-emerge. From this observation, Freud deduces two major events through which the uncanny is achieved. One, is by effacing distinctions between imagination and reality, which, creates an intellectual uncertainty. The second is through the evocation of infantile complexes and surmounted infantile beliefs.195 However, he claims it is most successful, when the two are combined.

In these images the uncanny sense generated by the irresolution between the real and the artificial is predicated on the contingent status of the body in the photographs. As Hal Foster noted in his discussion of surrealist photography, the uncanny is activated by a confusion that takes place between the animate and the inanimate. He cites as examples of these, wax figure dolls, mannequins and automatons.196 These figures

continually threaten to come to life, just as my abject eye operates in a palpable moment between stasis and movement. Its strangeness is determined by the uncertainty as to whether the eye is actually a component of an elaborate mannequin and hence safely inanimate or whether it can transform from this state and become disturbingly real.

There are a number of ways in which the photographs seek to evoke infantile complexes. The use of the horror mask connotes early responses to the fear of the other. The mask is also a metaphor for the slippage of identity that may hide a repressed identity below the surface. The ways in which representations can just as easily connote fear as they can merriment and happiness is manifest in phobias such as childhood fears of Father Christmas or in the macabre appearance of clowns. This is perhaps a reason why clowns are popular signifiers of fear in horror movies. Their costumes and behaviour function as an elaborate disguise and we are never sure what lies beneath this ruse. I am interested in using this double coding to highlight how representations such as the non-preferred body are fluid rather than fixed.

As discussed in chapter one, David Bate has argued that a surrealist image and its uncanny effect is produced not by ambiguity around the image (polysemy) but by ambivalence in fundamental distinctions (e.g fear and excitement, good and bad, love and hate) and a condensation of these conflicting values at the level of a signifier. This is what produces the enigma and drives on our wish to resolve it, and to see beyond the already seen.197 In the horror photographs I have sought to establish a particular ambivalence between beauty and the grotesque that creates an enigma. My interest is constructing an enigma that might potentially be difficult to resolve. This relates to whether it is possible to construct a visual system in which the audience cease to become concerned with asserting a hierarchy between preferred and nonpreferred bodies. As a result the non-preferred body is defined as neither bad nor

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good but, following Winnicott, is understood as being ‘good enough’.

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In all of the photographs there is an ambiguity surrounding the eye. What is the eye looking at? Is it surveying another person, or is the eye itself being watched? The dynamics of the gaze are complex and have been articulated in some depth in chapter one. Writers including Foucault and Mulvey have sought to explore the power dynamics inherent in looking, and have highlighted how hierarchies are established in these representational structures. As with the performance/installation and video artworks, I am interested in incorporating key aspects of critical thinking about the gaze and in particular how it operates as a mechanism of control. Importantly, I have also sought to establish equivalence in the power relationship between the audience and myself. In the photographs I have attempted to create a scopic situation whereby looks are exchanged between my eye in the photograph and the audience’s gaze in such a way that does not privilege one over the other.

By combining horror masks/fantasy with my ‘real’ abject body I have sought to develop a critical dialogue about the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. I have sought to de-stabilise the distinction between the cultural fantasies associated with such masks and my ‘real’ body by focusing on the distinctly peculiar qualities of my body. The eye without eyelashes and with distended eyelid is more easily assimilated within the imaginary languages of horror or science fiction where such features may be conventionalised. The alignment of horror with my body is an attempt to free the representations from being understood solely through a kind of didactic realism. Such a realist discourse, I contend, whether it is manifest in the form of portraits of noble suffering or other related content, is incapable of fundamentally shifting how audiences know or become engaged in the representation of the non-preferred body. Horror functions in the photographs like children’s recreational structures in Bounce:

as a critical means of luring the audience and creating a state of captivation. Only by positioning my body within accessible representational systems of fear or pleasure, I argue, is it feasible to recast its potential meaning.

Component 3 Distances-3 Screen DVD Projection

Located on the opposite side of the wall to the photographs in the exhibition space is a series of three video projections. Each projection is large, approximately 3 metres by 3 metres, and positioned so that there is no gap between each image. The work appears as one large projection split into three screens. In each screen, a succession of different male faces appears from the darkness. Each one performs the same gesture of looking left then right, before disappearing to be replaced a few seconds later by another face. All of the men appear to be young and conventionally good looking with makeup and styled hair. The typology to these men is that each one displays attributes of male beauty.

Images 52, 53, 54 + 55. David Cross, Distances (2005), documentary photographs of Distances film shoot

After thirty seconds or so of viewing the footage, it becomes apparent that there are only six models and that the footage is continually looped. Furthermore, the same footage appears on all three screens, though each screen is synchronised slightly differently creates the appearance of a random sequence. The overall ambience is of a rhythmic

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sea of handsome faces moving forward and back and the young men are always crisp and fresh in their performance. The continuous repetition of the sequence creates 146

what could be described as a mesmerizing effect for the spectator. The audience are caught up in the sanctioned act of looking at ideal bodies though the audience’s response to these bodies is by no means uniform. Heterosexual women and gay men for instance are more likely to respond to these men in terms of a pleasurable and libidinal engagement, whereas heterosexual men will respond in significantly different, less erotically charged, ways.

The monotony of this sequence however is broken by the appearance of my own face in one of the three screens. Like the other models, I am made up and styled, yet my appearance is significantly different. My face is abject as a combination of tears and lubricant leak from my eyes. While I perform the same gestures, the difference of my body renders it aberrant and foreign marking it out from the sequence as a whole. My presence significantly changes the ambience of the piece. Initially, the work suggested a seamless quality through the consistency and repetition of the male models, but the appearance of my face ruptures this system. This is because a contrast is established between the beauty of the other models and the grotesque features of my face.

The insertion of my abject body in the footage functions in a similar way to its role in the performance/installation and photographic components. Common to all these works is that my body intervenes in the specific discourse, whether it is catwalk modelling or children’s leisure, and significantly recasts the audience’s experience of these forms of entertainment. In all of these works my body is configured specifically to conjure up an uncanny sensibility. In Distances, this uncanny quality is created in part by the way in which my body seems to impart a ghostly presence. My body does not appear at regular intervals as is the case with the other models, but seems to randomly waft

in and out of the footage. The uncanny quality is also emphasised by the fundamental incongruity of my body as it is positioned within the performance of ideal beauty. The audience is pushed to consider why I am oblivious to my obvious physical limitations in amongst paragons of youthful male beauty.

Juxtaposing my body against those of the other models in this way activates a critical dialogue about male beauty and revulsion. By placing my abject body into a field of desirable bodies, I have constructed what appears to be a clear-cut beauty/ ugly binary opposition. The male models are beautiful and preferred, whereas my body is abject and hence non-preferred. Yet where it may appear that Distances reinforces this divide by starkly contrasting these types, specific aspects of the work actually function to call this dyad into question.

The principal means by which this opposition is challenged is through my manipulation of the video footage. Specifically, I utilise repetition in the form of looping and extended duration as devices that alter in key ways the meaning of the video sequence. By looping the footage and then continually re-playing it over and over again, I gradually shift the meaning of the work over time. Where the experience of the models performing is initially alluring and engaging for the audience, this may not be maintained over an extended time period indeed, the aura and charisma of the models may be diminished through over exposure. By slowly pushing the audience to a state of boredom as their interest in the appearance of the models wane. I attempt to negate their interest in enforcing the dualistic hierarchy between the models and my body.

In the same way that extended duration and repetition may be seen to diminish through overexposure the beauty of the models, I am also concerned to employ this technique to shift the signification of my body. Where its appearance is initially read by the

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audience as abject, and as a result aberrant, this may also change over time. I contend that as the audience becomes less interested in the beauty of the models over time 148

they also become less interested in the significance of my ugliness. The difference between the two body types, it could be argued, is subsequently bridged over time so that similarities become as important as differences. In other words the act of my performing the same maneuvers as the models over time leads to an alignment of the bodies based on shared characteristics.

The blurring of the boundaries between the beautiful and the abject is also brought about by other issues. These include the formal features of the video such as colour, line and movement. For example, the visual motions of heads appearing and disappearing together in a regulated and rhythmic pattern is an effect designed to captivate the audience. I aim to engage the spectator by exposing them to the relentless monotony of this activity. I seek to achieve this by creating a contrast between the lightness of the faces, and the darkness of the background and by establishing formal similarities between the models and myself. The consistent syncopation of this effect might be described as a visual mantra that blinks on and off. By manipulating the figurative aspects of the work so that they might be read as a sequence of moving fields of colour and line, a crucial shift of emphasis can be established. The attraction of these formal aspects in the video could be seen to diminish the audience’s concern with the specificity of each model and thus works to temper the act of comparing bodily features.

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Images 56 + 57. David Cross Bounce (installation shots) (2006), The Block, QUT Creative Industries precinct

Video Distances

Video as a medium establishes a particular kind of distancing. Firstly, the entire screen or projection wall demarcates the moving images from the spectator’s space. It also renders the body in a variety of different scales often larger or smaller than the human body thus shifting our sense of reality. Video’s close connection to television allows the viewer to read televisual languages that are often artificial or unreal. Even the grainy and pixilated aesthetic of video often distorts the human bodies form and tone. However, it is the timebased quality of video and its ability to edit and manipulate real time that distinguishes this medium from photography and performance. Because video footage can be copied and repeated a relationship is established between the real and the simulacra. The ability to repeat, loop and digitally manufacture video footage enables the artist to manipulate the aura and charisma of the material

examined. One can increase or reduce it depending on the amount of repetition. The looping or continual repeating of material establishes the preconditions for the state of 150

disinterest to develop in the spectator and it is from this disinterest that the conditions for establishing a critical distance are activated.

Rosalind Krauss in her essay Video: An Aesthetics of Narcissism (1977) described the genre of video art as inherently narcissistic. She was responding to a number of video practitioners including Vito Acconci and Les Levine who turned the camera onto themselves to investigate the complex dimensions of experience.198 Like Acconci and Levine, I have used video as tool for self-investigation in a way that Krauss would define as narcissistic. Yet Distances plays out a compensatory even confused elaboration of narcissism. The pleasure of seeing myself is muted, not by the appearance of my abject body as much as the relationship I establish in the video with the other ideal bodies.

In Distances, I attempt to critically engage with narcissism without the work being narcissistic as such. According to Freud all narcissists display something of the very young child’s self- contentment and inaccessibility.199 Distances, rather than capturing a self-contentment, seeks to examine a lack of self-contentment in the social construction of my body. Where the work directly addresses narcissism is in the examination of the ideal. A narcissist, according to Freud, may also love what he would like to be and thus provides the libidinal basis for identification with ideal figures.200 By locating my body alongside a social setting with six ideal male bodies, it could be construed that I am attempting to be understood as ideal like them and that I am somehow willfully ignorant as to the physical differences that separate us.

While this reading of repressed self-delusion may be recoverable for the audience member, a number of other factors come into play that challenges a simple view of my narcissism. The first is the way in which the abject features of my body are emphasized and magnified. I make no attempt to beautify or idealise my body by covering up or editing out my abject appearance. Furthermore, the alignment of my body with attractive male bodies initially serves to heighten not reduce this condition. The second issue is that the processes of editing the footage have been concerned with altering the aura of the bodies. The continual repetition of the same shot ad finitum serves to diminish the allure of each model and as a result the obsessional focus on appearance.

Like Bounce, Distances plays with time signatures so as to manipulate the audience’s experience of the work. Rather than prescribe the length of the art experience by having a clear starting and finishing point, the spectator enters the work at an arbitrary point in the video sequence and may leave at a point of their choosing. My interest here is in part to heighten the role of the viewer in making defining decisions about the parameters of the work. The audience are charged with demarcating what they perceive to be the appropriate duration of the piece all the while making sure that they have experienced the entirety of the work.

The indeterminate duration also negates the possibility of a fixed narrative sequence in the work. Narrative structures in film and television traditionally function to guide the audience through a story and there is often the expectation that the narrative will provide a degree of closure. The narrative also allows the audience to distance themselves at the outset from what they are watching because they don’t play a role in the decision making process. The experience of watching so-called popular narratives in film and television is largely a passive one. By denying such a sequential structure,

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I am concerned to do two things. Firstly, I aim to encourage the audience to construct their own understanding of the footage based on the fragments of information available. 152

Specifically, I want them to actively engage in constructing the meaning of the footage rather than have clearly defined meanings drawn for them by the narrative. Secondly, I want to heighten the significance of the formal aspects of the work to confuse the issue of male beauty in the work.

One possible interpretation of Distances is that the juxtaposition of my body in relation to the models is farcical to the point of being ironic and that the work is a parody of male performance as a form of ideal beauty. I am interested in the absurdity of modelling with its series of clichéd moves and artificial poses and the use of humour can be a powerful mechanism to undermine cultural hierarchies. Yet a parodic critique of this form of beauty, whether it be through the employment of camp gestures or other forms of exaggeration, is only effective critique to a limited degree. What this form of critique does not do is to challenge the audience to think through how they formulate an understanding of beauty and what are the mechanisms that they employ to reinforce its privileged status. By endlessly re-playing the catwalk moves I am concerned to erase the audiences fascination with the beauty of the models. The aim of this process is to build in the audience member a fundamental disinterest in marking out and enforcing the beauty/grotesque binary. To achieve this it is important to draw the viewer into a self-reflexive engagement with how they come to define these parameters. The work attempts to make them aware that their conceptions of beauty are always contingent and that this divide is never fixed but subject to continual modification. Only by allowing the audience to engage and disengage with the beauty/grotesque dyad is it possible to destabilise this divide.

Chapter 3-Conclusion

The task of engaging with the politics of representing the body is becoming more complex as contemporary art audiences respond to work that is subtle, nuanced and free of didactic content. Today, it is not enough to make artwork that simply highlights the marginal standing of a group or individual and expect that somehow a major shift in attitudes will automatically take place. The period of visibility politics in the 1990s where representing marginal bodies seemed as important as what was represented is no longer valid. Audiences for art, it could be argued, are more aware than ever about difference and the politics of the preferred and non-preferred bodies. Therefore the ideas of raising consciousness or enhancing visibility, which were endemic to political art of the 1970s through to the early 1990s, no longer have as much currency.

Marginal bodies whether they be queer, coloured or disabled are more prevalent in galleries the world over. Yet as a result of this mainstreaming of difference in the art world, there has been a concomitant call for greater complexity and depth in art that engages with difference. It is not enough simply to represent physically deformed bodies on gallery walls for audiences to be critically challenged. Instead, art that examines the politics of representation needs to embody sophisticated forms and contents for it to be successful in drawing the audience into an affective engagement.

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Conclusion 154

The three artworks in this exhibition ask a lot of the audience. Whether it be physical activity, psychological disturbance or states of boredom, the meaning of the work is heavily determined by the willingness of the participants to actively engage in a variety of different contexts and mediums. This level of commitment might be construed as excessive for audiences geared towards the more convivial activities of relational aesthetics. After all, Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of a meaningful art experience is eating dinner with the artist at an opening or kicking soccer balls across the gallery floor. In contrast, I propose a relationship that is as much about discomfort as comfort. My work aims to shift perceptions about the non-preferred body and for this to occur it is necessary, indeed essential, to bridge the distance between the audience member and an affective engagement with the work.

Each of the artworks in this exhibition tries to pierce the protective zone that a good deal of contemporary art celebrates, a zone that locates art solely within the bounds of pleasurable entertainment. As art audiences increasingly embrace the idea of art as a convivial experience predicated on dialogue and social gregariousness, it has become even more important to offer a counter-model that questions, even antagonises those engaging with the work. Only by constructing an art experience based on the persistence of friction, awkwardness and discomfort is it possible to create a critically self-reflexive relationship with viewers of art.

While challenging the ideal that art should function as a mechanism for nurturing and reinforcing existing value systems, I am at the same time aware of the need to attract audiences to the work. There is little value in making artworks that transgress social and cultural conventions if they fail to attract respondents. As I have argued, the

mechanisms of shock, extreme transgression and the breaking of taboos that were employed by body artists in the 1970s do not guarantee interest today and are more likely to result in the viewers disengagement. The implication of much of the body art produced during that decade was that erasing or diminishing the divide between art and life could transform the spectator. That aim has now been called into question by, among other things, the cultivation of an art audience who increasingly want to be entertained and as a result are more averse to strident and cathartic gestures.

I am not suggesting that audiences have rejected an interest in the real politics of bodies and identities, but rather, that our experience of the real now needs to be tempered by operations that make it more accessible and less damaging. As Cindy Sherman has argued, it is very important to mesh the [protean] artificial with the real because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound. It’s much easier, she points out, to engage with the real in a fake, humorous, and artificial way. To this list I would add the categories of beauty and pleasure. Both terms offer a valuable means of drawing participants into a sustained engagement with art that explores ‘difficult’ content. The value of beauty as a device or strategy lies in its connection to allure and desire. Unlike ugliness, which always affects but does so in a way that largely repels and distances, beauty functions as a popular means of enticing the participant into a dialogue with the real.

In this art project, I have engaged with beauty in tandem with the grotesque to build hybrid artworks that are appealing because they contain these qualities at the same time. The critical aim of this enterprise is not to elevate beauty or the grotesque to a privileged status, as was the goal of Immanuel Kant and Georges Bataille respectively. Rather, the challenge has been to blur the border between these categories by identifying and extending the key points of connectivity. Only by working within a

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vocabulary of beautiful forms, whether they are the formal languages of abstract art or representations of ‘ideal’ bodies, it is possible to fundamentally shift conventional 156

understandings of the non-preferred body. I seek to challenge the audience to perform in an art environment and at the same time confront their individual investment in the ideal body. I aim to build a more complex understanding of why we prefer certain human forms to others and crucially how this operation might be reconfigured.

The uncanny is also a crucial means by which I have sought to blur the distinction between the ideal and abject body. I have argued that the value of the uncanny lies in its capacity to penetrate and unsettle the conscious self of the viewer. This process, as Freud argued, is brought about because of the emergence of latent unconscious information. The uncanny destabilises the spectator and places them in a curious inbetween space where the unfamiliar is curiously interpolated into the familiar and vice versa. The uncanny is always in flux and shrouded in the intangible spaces that codify our memories and fantasies.

I have sought to engage with the uncanny as both a strategy and an affect. Each work in this exhibition revolves around proving, disclosing, discovering and confirming the existence of something that defies standing conceptual schemes. By constructing a number of art experiences that could be described as psychologically confusing, I have endeavoured to create conundrums that cannot be resolved. This process of destabilising the conditions by which the art is experienced highlights my attempt to make it difficult to distinguish between different categories. Rather than clearly defining, for example, what is beautiful and what is grotesque, I try to shift the participant’s decision making to a level of undecidability.

I have employed a variety of artistic mediums in the development of this exhibition. These include performance/installation, video and photography. This diversity is not simply an attempt to champion inter-media practice, but a crucial means to show that our understanding of the body is dependant upon the differing effects of each medium. By creating a series of dialogues between the live and the virtual, timebased and static imagery, and the fragmentary body and its relationship to the holistic body, I have sought to activate in the participant a critical self-reflexivity whereby they are made aware of how technology determines the ways in which we can and cannot engage with the body.

By juxtaposing the real body with virtual manifestations I demonstrate a concern to articulate the crucial differences between the presence of corporeality in performance and the distances that operate in our experience of the body in the mediums of photography and video. Having said this, I have not attempted to privilege performance over video because it is somehow more real and visceral. Nor, have I sought to critique video and photography because these mediums remove us from a direct engagement with live and unmediated bodies. Rather, I have asserted the value of presence in combination with recorded technologies such as video and photography, in creating a more complete understanding of the body.

The notion that ‘liveness’ still has currency in contemporary art when there is considerable evidence to suggest that mediatised forms such as video have usurped presence is contentious. Yet presence as a key aspect of performance art retains to confuse the distinctions between subject and object, life and art. By exploring the meanings and resonances of contemporary embodiment, performance encourages audiences to engage with different kinds of meaning, to destroy pretence and break apart representational traditions of representation. It is this transgressive value that

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makes liveness a crucial means by which an audience can be challenged to negotiate unique dialogues with my body. These dialogue have the potential to dramatically 158

affect the corporeal coordinates of the participant by creating a highly charged interactive relationship. Only by forming this relationship is it possible to confuse and thus disorient the value of preferred and non-preferred bodies.

Image 58. David Cross Bounce (installation shot) (2005), performance/installation, Wellington City Art Gallery

One example of the continued efficacy of performance was an interaction that took place in Bounce when it was first performed at the Wellington City Art Gallery. A woman climbed onto the structure by herself and spent a few minutes jumping up and down. I noticed she occasionally closed her eyes as if she wanted to avoid being looked at by those on the ground. I could just make out that she was humming. After a while she sat down near my face completely oblivious to my presence. I was happy to let her sit there so I reached for my water bottle and as I did so a lock of my hair was caught by the air pressure inside the inflatable and propelled through the eye holes.

The woman let out a blood-curdling scream that made me drop my water bottle. When I looked up she saw my eyes and screamed again. All she could do was point at me with her hand over her mouth. Her expression was frozen for at least a minute while she tried to calm down. Slowly, like a Butoh dancer, she lowered her arm and sat down looking at me. I was slightly bemused by her almost pantomime-like theatricality yet at the same time captivated by the intensity of her response. Her gaze changed from fearful to quizzical. She ran her hand across the eye slots and felt the air gushing out. I thought she was going to put her fingers through the holes and touch my face. Yet she just kept feeling the air on her hands all the while never breaking eye contact. Then she laughed. A deep primal laugh and she was gone.

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Endnotes

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Foucault, M, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-75, Verso, London, 2003, pp55-8 McKenzie goes on to highlight how the concept of liminality has not simply been applied to performances; it has also helped us to construct objects of enquiry by guiding the selection of activities to be studies, their formal analysis, and their political evaluation. See, McKenzie, Jon, Perform or Else, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p50 Brennan, Teresa, The Transmission of Affect, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2004, p1 Benezra, N and Viso, Olga, M (eds) Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, Hirshhorn Museum/ Hatje Cante, Washington, 1999, p11 The authors suggest that beauty has come to suggest frivolity, the machinations of the art market, and a lack of seriousness and social purpose. They also quote Barnett Newman who stated in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty. This seems both overstated in terms of its avant garde rhetoric and outside of the authors concerns with contemporary practice at the end of the century. Ibid, p11 Gilbert-Rolfe preferred to validate the idea of the sublime over beauty. See, Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, Allworth Press, New York, 1999, pp41-45 Here I am thinking of the significance attributed to practitioners as diverse as Cindy Sherman and her grotesque series of horror photos, Bob Flanagan’s performance and installation work through to the paintings of Jenny Saville and the self-consciously offensive sculptures of Jake and Dinos Chapman. A number of these artists where featured in the exhibition Abject Art held at the Whitney Museum in 1992. Others including Saville and the Chapman brothers featured in the Royal Academy exhibition Sensation in 1998. Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, 1, 39, 8, in Eco, U (ed), History of Beauty, Rizzoli, New York, 2004, p88 Ibid, p72 Eriugina goes on to suggest that all virtues not only win praise by comparison with the opposite vices but without this comparison they would not be worthy of praise. Eriugina, John, Scotus, ‘The Contrast of Opposites’, De Divisione naturae, V, in Eco, U (ed), Op. cit, p85. A more contemporary idea surrounding the duality of beauty is outlined by Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche described two forms of beauty Apollonian and Dionysian. One’s serene harmony he argued could be understood as order and measure. This beauty was a screen that attempted to conceal the presence of a second disquieting Dionysian beauty. This was a joyous and dangerous beauty, antithetical to reason and often depicted a madness. See Nietzsche, Frederick, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, III and XVI, 1872, in Eco, U, Op. cit, pp55-56 See Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, ‘The Representation of Suffering in Aesthetics, III, II’, c1798-1800, in Eco, U (ed), Op. cit, p135 Derrida emphasises that philosophy at its outset distributed language into an active and passive voice thereby constituting itself by means of this repression. See Kamuf, Peggy, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p59. For a clear introduction to post-structuralism see Salih, Sarah, Judith Butler, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, p21 Crispin Sartwell has questioned the claim that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. He suggests this idea is false because beauty is a feature of the situation that includes the beholder and the object. See Sartwell, Crispin, Six Names of Beauty, Routledge, New York and London, 2004, p3 Armstrong, John, The Secret Power of Beauty, Allen Lane, London, 2004, p4 Sartwell, Crispin, Op. cit , p4 Armstrong, John, Op. cit, p163 Kant, Immanuel, ‘The Critique of Judgement, I, I, III’, 1790, in Eco, U, Op. cit, p264 Kant suggested that the singular sensation of disgust depends solely on the imagination. The object because of this is represented as if - so to speak - our enjoyment of it were obligatory, while we in fact reject it violently. Thus as far as our sensation is concerned, the artificial representation of the object may no longer be distinguished from the nature of the object itself, and hence it cannot possibly be considered beautiful, see, Eco, Op. cit p135 Derrida describes Kant as a thinker who is unable to keep the ideas apart because in defining the beautiful as that which is complete and may in that be framed, he seems to separate it from the sublime, which is for him by definition formless and unframeable. For a discussion of this see, Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, Op. cit, p39

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Higgins uses the example of a character Reverend Brown from Alice Herbert’s novel Heaven and Charing Cross to highlight the modernist interest in ugliness. Responding to the notion that beauty is truth he suggests, “Yes of course. But their are lovely aspects of things to be truthful about. You moderns despise them, and only care to be truthful about the ugly ones. You are always facing facts but they are invariably ugly facts. Why doesn’t one of you face a symmetrical fact in his picture or a melodious one in his music or a musical one in poetry? Surely the only truthful beauty does not lie in thin green women with crooked noses”. See Higgins, Lesley, The Modernist Cult of Ugliness, Palgrave McMillan, New York, 2002, p1 See Yves-Alain Bois’ entry ‘The Use Value of Formless’ in, Bois, Yves-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind, (eds) Formless: A Users Guide, Zone Publications, New York, 1997, p29 Ibid, pp29-30 See Yves-Alain Bois’ entry entitled ‘Base Materialism’ in, Bois, Yves-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind, (eds) Op. cit, p47 Heterology, Bataille writes, is the science of what is entirely other. According to Yves Alain-Bois, Bataille specified that the term agiology would perhaps be more precise, but one would have to catch the double meaning of sacer, soiled as well as holy. But it is above all the term scatology ( the science of excrement) that retains in the present circumstances (the specialisation of the sacred) an incontestable expressive value as the doublet of an abstract term such as heterology. See Bois, Yves-Alain, ‘Base Materialism’, in Bois, YvesAlain and Krauss, Rosalind(eds), Op. cit, p52 Ibid, p54 Lutz, Tom, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, Norton, New York, 1999, p23 Ibid, p22 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p4 Ibid, p237 Ibid, p238 Bhaba, Homi, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, p45 See Taylor, Simon, in, ‘The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art’, in Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Whitney Museum, Independent Study Programme, New York, 1992, p60 Danto, Arthur C, Beauty and Morality, in Shapiro, D (ed) Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty, In, Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics, Allworth Press, New York, p36 Ibid, p26 Kieran cites the examples of Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville as artists who have sought to give value to the grotesque through visual form. In Saville’s work he suggests: “the queasy sense of disgust and repulsion arises from the sense, intrinsic to the visual experience of confronting something which is essentially human and yet which threatens our categorical assumptions about how the living face and its features should look. Here, that which is found to be disgusting and repellent is what grabs our aesthetic interest, is what drives the way in which we attend to the facial features and the interrelations of structure, tone and colour. Thus the disgusting, grotesque, ugly and incoherent, which are normally aesthetically offensive can be turned into aesthetic virtues” see Kieran, Mathew, Revealing Art , Routledge, New York and London, 2004, pp77, 81 Ibid, p78 Ibid, p81 Ibid, p85 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, Allworth Press, New York, 1999, pp1-3 Kirwan, James, Beauty, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, p92 Childers, Joseph and Hentzi, Garry (eds), The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, Columbia University Press, New York ,1995, p1 See Jentsch, Ernst, ‘The Psychology of the Unheimlich’, psychiatrisch- neurologische”, Wochenschrift, 1908, No 22 and 24 Freud highlights the crucial relationship between the heimlich and the unheimlich. For instance, he emphasises that the word heimlich is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets of ideas which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other - the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden. Unheimlich is the antonym of heimlich only in the latter’s first sense, not in its second, See Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), reprinted in Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, Penguin Books, London, 2003, p132 Ibid, p150 Ibid

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It is important to note that Freud’s analysis of the uncanny was based on a limited number of case studies. He was not concerned to mark out the broad diversity of its forms but to use particular examples such as Hoffman’s famous horror story of The Sandman. Ibid, pp147-8 Kristeva, Julia, Strangers to Ourselves, trans Leon.S.Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York 1991, p191 Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny, Routledge, London, 2003, p1 Unlike Freud, he is concerned to build an extensive lexicon of uncanny affects some of which are psychoanalytic in orientation others phenomenological. Royle, Nicholas, Op. cit, p1 Ibid, p2 Foster does not discuss Salvador Dali in relation to the uncanny though his paranoid critical method could be seen to embody similar concerns. This method that Dali described was concerned with visual mistakes whereby at first site a pile of gleaming diamonds where on closer examination the distended inner workings of a dead animals stomach. Foster, Hal, Compulsive Beauty, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, p7 Freud, Sigmund, Op. cit, p153 Foster, Hal, Op. cit, p193 Ibid, pp193-4 Ibid, p194 Benjamin, Walter, ‘On some Motifs in Baudelaire’ in Illuminations. Trans Zohn, Harry (ed). Arendt, Hannah, Harcourt Race and Court, New York, p188 Adorno remarked that Benjamin appeared to be nostalgic for and critical of the phenomenon of aura. He both regrets the loss of the non-recuperable experience of perceiving the artwork in the here and now while welcoming its liberation from parasitical dependence on ritual, arguing that it can now be based on the new practice of politics. See, Macey, David, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, Penguin, London, 2000, p23 Foster, Hal, Op. cit, pp196-7 Bate, David, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, I.B. Taurus, London, New York, 2004, p43 Ibid, p42 Bate also highlights how the surreal image offers a meaning to the spectator while another message is nevertheless hidden or designified. Ibid, p44 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York ,1981, p96 Ibid, p51 Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Uncanny’, in Bois, Yves-Alain, and Krauss, Rosalind, Formless: A Users Guide, Zone Publications, New York, 1997, p 193 Royle, Nicholas, Op. cit, p108 Haraway, Donna, ‘The Persistence of Vision’, in Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Visual Culture Reader, Blackwell, London, 1999, p677 Coward, Rosalind, ‘The Look’, in Thomas, J, Reading Images, Palgrave, New York, 2001, p33 Olin, Margaret, ‘Gaze’ in Nelson, Robert and Schiff, Richard (eds), Critical Terms for Art History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p209 In The Mirror Stage, Lacan posited an initial identification with a mirror image that caused the child to identify with an externalised image of itself. See Olin, M, Op. cit, p214 See Lacan, Jacques, ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit’ a, in Thomas, Julia, Op. cit, p140 Olin, Margaret, Op. cit, p215 See Foucault, Michel, ‘Panopticism’, in Thomas, Julia (ed), Op. cit, p82 The key event that Foucault highlights is the great plague in the late 1600s which led authorities to instigate a rigorous system of observance. Every person in the town had to make themselves available to visual scrutiny by key officials on a daily basis. Ibid, pp76-80 Ibid, p80 Silverman employed the term suture to describe how in popular cinema the audience is made unaware of the constructed quality of the gaze. Olin, Margaret, Op. cit, p211

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Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Wallis, B (ed),, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Godine, Boston, 1984, p366 Mizoeff, Nicholas, ‘Introduction to The Gaze and Sexuality’, Op. cit, pp593-594 According to Mulvey’s model, the male non-preferred body must assume the active position of voyeur. Furthermore as part of this privileged position this body is not subject to the scrutiny of other men or, because of their supposedly inherent passivity, the gaze of women. While it is important to emphasise that Mulvey was focusing on the field of Hollywood cinema where the non-preferred body has traditionally only been represented as a body to fear or pity, her broader theorisation of the gaze emphasises pleasure at the expense of control. She fails to take into account the way in which the gaze functions, as Foucault has argued, diagnostically across all subjective registers. see Olin, Margaret, Op. cit, p213 See Haraway, Donna, in Mizoeff, Nicholas (ed), Op. cit, p677 Ibid, p679 Ibid, p684 The French linguist Michel Pecheux developed a theory of disidentification that was based on Louis Althusser’s influential theory of subject formation. Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970) was among the first texts to deal with articulations of the role of ideology in theorising subject formation. For Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm in which subjects are called or hailed, a process he calls interpellation. Ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The location of ideology is always situated within an apparatus such as the state and its practice or practices. Pecheux built on this theory by describing a number of modes in which a subject is constructed by ideological practices. In this schema the first mode is understood as identification where a good subject chooses the path of identification with discursive and ideological norms. Bad subjects resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology. They then proceed to rebel, to counteridentify and to turn against this symbolic system. See, Munoz, J.E., Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1999, pp11-12 Identifying, as Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick explains, is never a simple project. Identifying with an object, person, lifestyle, history, political ideology, religious orientation and so on means also simultaneously counter identifying, as well as only partially identifying with different individual and collective aspects of the social and psychic world. Op. cit, p8 Phelan was referring to one of the key concerns that minority groups identified in the early 1990’s. These groups, she suggested, were principally concerned with being visible and raising their profile in artistic and popular representations. Phelan questions this strategy suggesting that it served to mark out representations of difference and in the process open up marginal identities to control through surveillance, see Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, London, 1993, p2 Phelan goes on to argue that visibility is a trap. She lists the problems with visibility as follows. It summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, and the colonialist/imperialist appetite for the possession. Ibid, p11 For a discussion of this see Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, University of California Press, Los Angeles,1993 Phelan by coincidence cites the guerrilla girls and their anonymity as a powerful model of ‘the unmarked’. See Phelan, Peggy, Op. cit, p19 Foucault, Michel, ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’, in Rabinow, Paul, The Foucault Reader, Penguin, 1984, p328 Olin, Margaret, Op. cit, p218 Butler, Judith, ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’, in Watson, S, Berger, M and Wallis, B (eds) Constructing Masculinity, Routledge, London and New York, 1995, pp24-25 Grey, John, Men are from Mars Women Are From Venus, Harper, New York, 2004 Saleci, Renato, Sexuation, Duke University Press, Durham, 2000, p1 A similar model of thinking can be found in the new age writings of Robert Bly. Bly is best known for his book Iron John which argues that men have lost touch with their essential masculinity and need to reclaim their maleness through group bonding exercises. In particular Bly emphasises men’s supposed innate warrior instincts which have been blunted by the functioning of modern life. See Bly, Robert, Iron John, De Capo Press, Los Angeles, 2004 Semiotics was defined by Saussure as the science of signs or the study of the life of signs within social life. See Macey, David, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, Op. cit, p347

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Both psychology and performance studies emphasised the notion of socially constructed behaviour in the 1960s in the development of what was called “role theory”. This term, coined by behavioural psychologists Sarbin and Allen, utilised the theatrical process of playing roles in a clinical situation to modify human behaviour. Role theory focused upon the theatrical concept of catharsis and saw role-playing as a method of freeing the client’s spontaneity, allowing a breakthrough into a new social/ psychological configuration. See, Carlson, Marvin, Performance, Routledge, London, 1996, p47 Recipe knowledge is a pragmatic piecing together of pre-existing scraps of material recalling the process known as bricolage, see Schutz, Arthur, ‘The Problem of Rationality in the Social World’, in Schutz, Arthur, Collected Papers, vol 2, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, pp72-3 Freud, Sigmond ‘Three essays on Sexuality’, in Richards, A (ed) Sigmund Frued: On Sexuality, Penguin, London, 1977, p52 Ibid, p2 Salecl, Renato, Op. cit, p2 See Lacan’s chapter ,’The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis, in Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, W.W.Norton and Co, New York, 1977, pp30-114 Grosz, Elizabeth, Jacques Lacan : A Feminist Introduction, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p148 For a extended discussion of this process see the introduction to Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, New York and London, 1993, pp1-27 Butler further extends this idea when she states that “performativity is not the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains. Furthermore sex is not a given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but is a cultural norm which governs the materialisation of bodies”. See Butler, Judith, Ibid, pp2-3 See Macey’s discussion of queer in Macey, David, Op. cit, p321 Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Eve, Tendencies, Duke University Press, North Carolina, p18 McKenzie, Jon, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p14 McKenzie goes on to highlight how the concept of liminality has not simply been applied to performances; it has also helped us to construct objects of enquiry by guiding the selection of activities to be studies, their formal analysis, and their political evaluation. Ibid, p50 Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World, Routledge, London, 1999, pp220-221 Heathfield, Adrian, ‘Alive’ in, Heathfield, Adrian (ed), Live: Art and Performance, Tate Publishing, London, 2004. p7 Storr, Robert, Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque: The Fifth International Site Santa Fe Biennial, D.A.P Publishers, New York, 2004, p13 Storr, Robert, Op.cit, p13 Ibid, p230 Ibid, p12 Ibid, p13 Ibid, p29 Connelly, Frances, ‘Introduction’, Modern Art and the Grotesque, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p2 Another prescient example discussed by Connelly is the work of Otto Dix whose mutilated figures are at once a kind of bricolage, patched together with the most unlikely objects, but also function as caricature and mediate a living horror too real to dwell on. See Connelly, Ibid, p2 Makela describes how “everything from handwriting and hair colour to sexuality was elaborately categorized and classified so as to produce “Verhaltenslehre” (behaviour guides) that would help those of the 1920s negotiate their increasingly complex society”. Connelly, Op.cit, pp200-202 The figure is identified as male through the German title, Der Melancholiker. Hoving, Kirsten, ‘Convulsive Bodies: The Grotesque Anatomies of Surrealist Photography’. In Connelly, Francis (ed), Op. cit, p220 Ibid, p220 This it should be noted is in distinction to Höch’s use of photography which was manipulated after the photo was made. Man Ray along with other surrealist photographers including Claude Cahun and Brassai, sought to manipulate exposure often with aim of doubling the image. Cruz, Amada, ‘Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks: Twenty Years of Cindy Sherman’, in Cruz, A and Smith, Elizabeth. A.T (eds), Cindy Sherman Retrospective, Thames and Hudson/ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, New York, 1997, p8

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Smith, Elizabeth A.T, ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, in Cruz, A and Smith, E A.T, (eds) op.cit., p23 Schlüter, Maik, ‘Fun That is No Fun’, in Gorner, V and Shlutter, M, (eds), Cindy Sherman: Clowns, Shirmer/ Mosul, Hanover, 2004, p12 Ibid, p12 Merilyn, Kerr, ‘Roni Horn The Luxury to Aprehend’ Flash Art ,March-April 2004, p74 Brilliant, Richard, Portraiture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p141 Benezra, Neal, ‘Surveying Nauman’, in Simon, Joan (ed), Bruce Nauman, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1993, p41 Hoptman, Laura, ‘Love Invents Life- And Then What Do We Do?’ in Matt, Gerald (ed), Ugo Rondinone: No How On, Kunsthalle Wien, Wien, 2002, pp12-13 Lienhard, Pierre-André, ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Clown: From Flight to Immobility’, in Matt, Gerald (ed) Op. cit, p23 Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses Du Reel, Paris, 2002 (English Translation), p14 Ibid, pp28-29 Ibid, p31 Foster, Hal, ‘Arty Party’ in London Review of Books, vol25, no 23, 4 December, 2003, URL, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n23/fost01-html The work of Beecroft, it should be noted, is an exception to this process. Wurm’s one minute sculptures take a number of forms. They exist both as drawn and verbal instructions. The wall drawings are accompanied by props and a platform in which the viewer can enact the one minute sculptures such as holding four bananas (one in mouth, two underarms and one between legs) or balance two felt-tip markers on your shoes while thinking of Descartes-all for the duration of one minute. See Molesworth, Helen (ed), Work Ethic, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, 2004, p197 For a discussion of Lyotard’s ideas of meta-narratives see, Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Conditiion: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984 Bishop, Claire, Installation Art, Routledge, London, 2005, p119 O’Dell, Kathy, “Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s”, Performance Research vol 2, no 1, 1997, pp73-81 Phelan, Peggy, ‘On Seeing the Invisible: Marina Abramovic’s The House with the Ocean View’, in Heathfield, Adrian (ed) Live: Art and Performance, Tate Publishing, London, 2004. p7 The gonzo reality television series and film Jackass is an example of this. Krauss, Rosalind, A Voyage in the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Postmedium Condition, Thames and Hudson, London, 2000, p56 Buchloh, Benjamin, ‘Critical Reflections’, Artforum, January, 1997, pp68-9 Watney, Simon, ‘In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzalez- Torres’, in Parkett, Number 39, 1994, p42 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London, 1985, p55 Bishop, Claire, Installation Art, Op. cit, p119 Bishop, Claire, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, in October 110, Fall, 2004, pp65-66 Ibid, p119 Auslander, Philip, Liveness, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p5 Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Charles Levin (trans), Telos Press, St Louis, 1981, pp175-6 Auslander, Philip, Op.cit, p7 Ibid, p159 Heathfield, Adrian, ‘Alive’, in, Heathfield, Adrian (ed), Op. cit, p7 Ibid, p7 While the shift from performing in galleries to theatres marked one area of concern for these artists, another was the tendency in the work of Anderson and Sprinkle to charge significant ticket prices. The commercialisation of performance pushed it squarely into the realm of entertainment and away from the radical artistic origins of performance. This brand of performance sought to re-establish a clear divide between art and life by removing the audience from a direct role in the work. p8 Williamson, Aaron, ‘An Introduction to Hayley Newman’s Performancemania’, in Hayley Newman Performancemania, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2001, p6 Ibid, p42

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Brett, Guy, ‘Itinerary’, in Blazwick, Iwona, Mona Hartoum, Phaidon, London, 1997, p52 Heathfield, Adrian, ‘Alive’, in, Heathfield, Adrian (ed), Op. cit, Sayre, Henry M, ‘In the Space of Duration’, in Heathfield, Adrian, Op.cit, p42 Bishop, Claire, Op. cit, p6 For a discussion of late modernist theory that sought to privilege the discrete art object over the theatricalisation of art see, Fried, Michael, ‘Art and Objecthood’ in Battcock, G (ed), Minimal Art, Dutton, 1968, p116-147 Foster, Hal; Krauss, Rosalind; Bois, Yves-Alain; and Buchloh, Benjamin (eds), Art Since 1900: Modernism, AntiModernism Postmodernism, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, p627 Kaye, Nick, Site-Specific Art: Performance Place and Documentation, Routledge, London and NewYork, 2000, p113 Oldenburg, Claes, Store Days, Something Else Press, New York, p49 Kaye, Nick, Op.cit, p155 Bourden, David, ‘An Eccentric Body of Art’, in Battcock ,G and Nickas, R (eds) The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, Dutton, New York, 1984, p191 For a discussion of these readings see Jones, Amelia, Op.cit., pp104-5 RoseLee Goldberg for instance describes it as notorious, see Goldberg, RoseLee, Performance Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979, p156 Dent, Roger, Principles Of Pneumatic Architecture, The Architectural Press, London, 1971, p13 Ibid, pp13-14 Henri, Adrian, Environments and Happenings, Thames and Hudson, London, 1974, p74 Rosalind Krauss has highlighted that though softened and veiled by irony, the relationship Oldenburg’s work has created with its audience is one of attack. The softness of the sculptures undermines the conventions of relational structure and its associations for the viewer strike at his assumptions that he is the conceptual agent of the temporal unfolding of the event. There is also, she points out, a heightened emphasis on theatricality. See Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977, p230 Celant, Germano ‘Claes Oldenburg and the Feeling of Things’, in, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, pp14-15 Ibid, p14 Ibid, pp14-15 Ibid, p28 Rondeau, James (ed), Blockhead and Daddies BigHead, Paul McCarthy at Tate Modern, Tate Publishing, London, 2003, p178 Morris, Francis and Glennie, Sarah, ‘Hollow Dreams’, in , Rondeau, James (ed), Op.cit, p178 In 1966 Tony Smith is quoted as saying ‘More and more I have become interested in pneumatic structures. In these all the material is in tension. But it is the character of the form, which appeals to me. The biomorphic forms which result from the construction have a dreamlike quality for me, at least like what is said to be a fairly common type of American dream’. Ibid, p175 and p180 Wood, Robin, ‘The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s’ in, Jacovich, Mark (ed) Horror: The film reader. Routledge, London and New York, 2002, p28 Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p31 Lischka, Gerhard Johann, ‘Performance Art/Life Art/Mediafication’, in Discourse: Journal for the Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Vol 14.2, Spring 1992, pp124-25 Ibid, p125 See Fried, Michael, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Battcock, G (ed), Minimal Art, Dutton, New York, 1968 Morris, Robert, ‘Notes on Sculpture Part 1’, in Battcock, G (ed) Op. cit, p226 Batchen, Geoffrey, Each Wild Idea, Writing Photography History, MIT Press, Boston, 2001, p132 Baudrillard goes on to say, “In this sense the photographic image is the purest because it does not simulate time or movement and keeps the most rigorous unrealism. All other forms of image cinema video etc are merely attenuated forms of the pure image and of its break with reality”. Baudrillard, Jean, ‘For Illusion is Not the Opposite of Reality’, in, Campany, D (ed), Art and Photography, Phaidon, London, 2003, p236. See Bate, David, Op. cit, 2004, p39 Foster, Hal, Op. cit, p7 Bate argues that in each of three categories mimetic, pro-photographic and enigmatic, a photograph can

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be made surreal by the fact that it draws attention to itself as sign as in the emblem, which perplexes the spectator as to its proper meaning. The surrealist signifier plays with the status of signs, troubling what Barthes called the stubbornness of the referent in photography with what the surrealists hailed as the marvellous. Ibid, p42 Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, in, Battcock. G (ed), New Artist’s Video, Dutton, New York, 1978, pp43-63 Freud. Sigmund, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), in Richards, Angela (ed), Sigmund Freud: On Sexuality, Penguin, London, 1977, p318 Freud. Sigmund, ‘Female Sexuality’, in, Richards, Angela (ed), Sigmund Freud: On Sexuality, Penguin, London, 1977, pp375-376

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The Secret Power of Beauty, Allen Lane, London, 2004

Auslander, Philip, Liveness, Routledge, London and New York, 1999 Barthes, Roland,

Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York ,1981

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Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, I.B. Taurus, London, New York, 2004

Battcock, Gregory, Minimal Art, Dutton, New York, 1968 Battcock ,Gregory and Nickas, Robert (eds) The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, Dutton, New York, 1984 Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Charles Levin (trans)Telos Press, St Louis, 1981 Benezra, Neal and Viso, Olga, M (eds) Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, Hirshhorn Museum/ Hatje Cante, Washington, 1999 Bhaba, Homi,

The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994

Bishop, Claire,

Installation Art, Routledge, London, 2005

Bly, Robert,

Iron John, De Capo Press, Los Angeles, 2004

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