On Leviathan, nature-cultures, and visions of labour

I was lucky enough to get into that surprise screening of Leviathan this weekend, with some of my classmates (and a big thanks to Richard for letting me know about the screening!) – I’m thrilled that it came back to Montreal! I missed it when it was here a few months back. This “documentary” (a term I use with hesitation as even the filmmakers seemed ambivalent about its value) focuses on the industrial fishing industry off the coast of New Bedford, yet provides a radically non-narrativized, strangely intimate yet visceral glimpse into a oft-romanticized (think Moby Dick) or masculinized (think Deadliest Catch, or, well, Moby Dick) line of work.

            Leviathan was filmed primarily on small extreme-sports cameras, the kind that are often attached to a human body, yet not held up as a fetishized extension of the filmmaker’s ‘eye’ –as is typical with filmmaking or photographic work. Attached to the bodies of fishermen, or hung off the sides of the ship, these cameras weave in and out of the ship’s giant, ambiguous body; splashing in and out of water tainted red with the gory remains of bycatch and other fishing waste, traveling along large tattered nets and clanking chains, or lingering on the splattered and weary limbs of fishermen at work. If Donna Haraway imagined the deeply relational evolution of dogs and humans as a “nature-culture,” or alternatively, as training practices as “a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh,” (Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 62), then the nature-culture depicted through Leviathan involves an equal level of mutual relationality between “man”/industry/marine life, yet resulting in a very different form of fleshly response. Leviathan’s portrait of a nature-culture is one that leaks residue and viscera: as they interact, all of the varied bodies (human, mechanical, animal) leave traces of their presence upon each other, refusing full eradication. The men are spattered with seawater, grime, and fish guts, and the boat leaves a trail of smoke and bycatch in its wake, as an ever-present group of seagulls follow suit, infiltrating the ship and searching for scraps to eat. If nothing else, Leviathan is a portrait of deeply intersecting worlds. 

            Yet getting to vision: what struck me immediately about the filmmaking used throughout Leviathan was its evident “camera-ness.” This was not a disembodied and steady camera “eye” that works to depict the scene as neutrally and clearly as possible, disavowing its own existence in the name of a consistent and coherently communicated narrative. Its physicality as a camera was always evident, from jerky movements, to the splatters of water and viscera that occasionally blurred its “screen,” to even a muffled and distorted soundtrack. Ultimately, the assumption that the clarity of the senses (namely, sight and sound) works to effectively communicate a narrative has been abandoned here. What happens when the camera “eye” doesn’t attempt to “see” in a naturalistic way, but embraces the specificities of its own mechanical body? What kind of sensory and affective experiences are offered up by this alternative way of seeing? Additionally, this way of seeing can’t be entirely attributed to the mechanical, as many of these cameras were still attached to human bodies as they went about their daily work. It could be interesting to think about how Leviathan is a portrait of labour, of depicting the physicality of fishing in an alternative way. Do these cameras capture the affects of repetitive work, of sore muscles, of exhaustion, of human bodies submitting themselves to the larger body of the ship, which acts as a strange assemblage of mechanical, environmental, human, and animal matter?   

In the Q&A after the film, Lucien Castaing-Taylor took a hands-off approach to the interpretation of Leviathan that I found to be somewhat disappointing. Indicating that he wanted the film to be “authored by the world,” he indicated that the film couldn’t be ascribed as either a documentary or a fictive project, allowing it to remain open-ended instead. While I understand his aversion to over-determining the message of a beautifully ambiguous and complex project like Leviathan, I still wish he took more of a stance on some of his artistic choices. Instead of understanding his project as “authored by the world,” could it be thought of as authored by labour itself, as the product of attempting to see with labouring bodies in a different way, or allowing labouring bodies to articulate their experience without relying on narrative or objective vision? Instead of settling into a simplistic binary distinction that posits his film as either the product of his “intentionality” as a filmmaker (with Véréna Paravel) or as totally hands-off, as “authored by the world,” I think this could be the beginning of a productive middle ground.  

And finally, there was a large discussion during the Q&A regarding one of the film’s most memorable scenes, an extended shot of a fisherman slowly falling asleep while watching The Deadliest Catch in the ship’s eating area. While this scene is clearly important as a keystone for the film at large, I’d like to conclude by turning to another shot I found to be just as valuable. A few minutes earlier, the same worker was seen dismantling clams (shucking? Yikes I clearly have no fishing terminology). The camera travelled slowly along the back of his neck before finally settling in on a large tattoo of a mermaid on his left bicep. As the camera lingered on this tattoo for an extended period of time, I found myself wondering: does this mermaid stand in as the opposite of the vision of the ocean put forth by Leviathan at large? Her body is contained, coherent, and easily consumable, a fetishized image of the ocean as an object of desire – fake breasts and all. Alternatively, the ocean-ship nature-culture provided by Leviathan is impossible to comprehend in its totality: its ambiguous and monstrous shape takes the ocean into its metal belly while leaking out the wasteful excess of its destructive practices (namely, trawling). Organic and inorganic, living and dead, human and animal, metal and flesh, Leviathan’s monstrous body sees the intermingling of all forms of matter. This is not an idealized vision of the ocean, but one that embraces its own ambiguities and excesses.  Ultimately, it makes for extremely evocative (and queasy) viewing.

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Others, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Governor General's Visual and Media Arts Awards

So, this is pretty cool -

Two of my favourite (somewhat liquidy) Canadian artists have just been honored with the 2013 Governor General's Visual and Media Arts award!

One is Rebecca Belmore, the Anishinabe-Canadian artist I wrote about a few months ago (for her Fountain video) and the other is Gordon Monahan, an experimental sound artist who hasn't shown up on this blog, but I've shared his project Aquaeolian Whirlpool with the rest of the Liquid Intelligence crew before.

Here's a link to a video on Monahan's Aquaeolian Whirlpool project on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq3LS0GdY14

Here's the link to an article through Canadian Art:
http://www.canadianart.ca/news/2013/03/12/governor-generals-awards-2013/ 

Stay tuned! I just got back from another graduate conference in Toronto, I'll be sharing my thoughts here soon.

Thinking through the materiality of the body: Elizabeth Grosz, Vivian Sobchack, and Lisa Steele

Lisa Steele - Birthday Suit (with Scars and Defects) (1974)

So, I had a beautiful little moment of clarity today - let's see how long it lasted. I found myself thinking up some interesting ideas for this project while I was in the middle of researching for other things (that’s how it usually happens, for some reason!). I was doing some reading for my thesis work and started finding some really interesting connections (and disjunctions) to two book chapters I was reading side-by-side. They’re both chapters I’ve read before, they were fundamental both to how I began this research blog and to the direction my other research has taken as well. But I never really took the time to consider them together. I’m talking about Elizabeth Grosz’s chapter “Sexed Bodies” from the amazing 1994 book Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism and Vivian Sobchack’s “The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity” from the equally awesome Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. I’d like to think through them a little bit here, and additionally talk through a video by the Canadian video artist Lisa Steele entitled Birthday Suit (With Scars and Defects) from 1974.

Now, in brief summary: I introduced Grosz’s ideas in my introductory post to this blog, but the chapter “Sexed Bodies” ultimately attempts to think about how we can re-insert discussions of biology into feminism and the politics of gender inequality. She attempts to rewrite biologism not as something overly deterministic or ‘innate’ about gender, but still existing as an “irreducible remainder” to the way we understand or conceptualize gender difference. The particularities of men’s and women’s bodies provide corporeal specificities to the ontological statuses of each gender, which in turn becomes re-inscribed into the social values and inequalities that exist between men and women. Essentially, Grosz is considering how the materiality of the gendered body – its irreducible status as meat, as organic matter – contributes to intersubjective relations between men and women:

Instead of seeking sexual identities, the notion of two absolutely separate types of entity, men and women, I have attempted to seek out traces and residues of sexual difference, a difference impossible to unify, impossible to searate from its various others and impossible to identify or seal off in clear-cut terms. (Grosz, 208)

This of course leads to Grosz’s consideration of the female body as an ontologically liquidy, formless, leaking flow – an articulation of female corporeality as ‘abject’ that I’ve been working with throughout this whole project. 

            In “The Passion of the Material,” Sobchack is also focused on the brute materiality of the body, yet while she and Grosz seem to be starting with the same basic interest, they each take it in separate directions. While Grosz is working from a stance of difference (and building awareness of said difference without establishing men as the norm and women as the ‘other’) Sobchack is interested in our fundamental sameness as matter, as body-objects that exist in the world with other things that exert an influence over us that we cannot fully grasp. Through her ‘interobjective’ model, Sobchack is interested in mapping out how the human body creates resonances and influences in spaces beyond our subjectivity and control, but also how these external forces and objects can mutually influence us, undermining our subjectivities and treating our body as another object in space:

This is to say, as intersubjectivity is a structure of engagement with the intentional behavior of other body-objects from which we recognize what it objectively looks like to be subjective, so interobjectivity is a structure of engagement with the materiality of other body-objects on which we project our sense of what it subjectively feels like to be objective. [to be an object, to be matter] (316)         

Sobchack doesn’t really consider gendered relations in this chapter, but I think there could be an interesting discussion there. She does articulate that this vision would involve a set of ethics that understand the fundamental relatedness of all things, and the corresponding imperative to treat the world with ‘care’ based in an awareness that the features that differentiate matter (through gender, etc) are superficial and illusory. (In a discussion about Sartre’s character Roquentin in Nausea, she says: “He is merely differentiated rather than radically differentiated from the objective others and things that surround him.” 309). 

            From sameness to difference, both Grosz and Sobchack are interested in rearticulating relationality, thinking about a new way of imagining how we relate to each other and the surrounding world by foregrounding the materiality of the human body, without resorting to binaristic or hierarchical distinctions between men and women, subjects and objects. That’s why, despite the different directions of their projects (and the somewhat anachronistic time jump from Grosz’s 1994 book to Sobchack’s 2004 publication, forgive me for that) I feel as if these two authors are really working from the same place. Both wish to articulate a model of understanding how the material reality of the body impresses itself upon our relations with the world. Near the end of her chapter Grosz suggests the model of a Mobius strip – “a model which shows that while there are disparate ‘things’ being related, they have the capacity to twist one into the other” (209-210) – which I find particularly interesting in relation to Sobchack’s ideas – while articulating difference and distinction, the Mobius strip still retains connectiveness and pliability, indicating how things can shift and alter throughout time.

            So, that was a bit of a rant – what about Lisa Steele? This video – an extremely influential piece of Canadian feminist art from the 1970s – shows the artist on the occasion of her 27^th birthday, slowly and deliberately cataloguing all the scars and defects across her body for the camera. What is a scar, if not the perfect indication of Sobchack’s idea that the world can impress itself upon our bodies, creating an awareness of our irreducible materiality, our unavoidable state as a body-as-object? A scar is a literal trace of a place where the world exerted an influence over our corporealities, leaving its mark, turning the body into a slowly built-up archive of interobjective relations with the world. Steele’s tape, which “accepts the extent of the consequences” of her clumsiness, could be read as autobiographical, yet not an autobiography of a coherent subject’s actions and choices in the world. Rather, her autobiography of the body-as-object indicates that regardless of our subjective desires and trajectories in the world, our existence as matter – as liquidy, bleeding, flowing, oozing, scratched matter – cannot be erased.

            And incidentally, I just love how she spends so much time running her fingers along each scar, it’s as if she’s allowing her own materiality to come in contact with itself, in some strange way. I bet there’s a discussion to be had here with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas in “The Intertwining – the Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and Invisible – where he talks about his one hand touching the other? That chapter was also highly influential for Sobchack’s “Passion of the Material” text – I wonder if that’s something I should explore further – maybe the next step??

5 minute clip of Birthday Suit on Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak’s website:

http://www.steeleandtomczak.com/video/birthdaysuit.html

Revisiting Kusama, with help from Deleuze and Guattari, Mona Hatoum and Kate Craig

Mona Hatoum - Corps Etranger

So I’ve recently read the chapter “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” out of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for a course – its something I’ve been meaning to read for ages, its come up time and time again in different contexts, and I was thrilled to finally sink my teeth into it. I’ve never oscillated more frequently between being excited/thrilled/confused/irritated by a piece of writing before, haha. It’s a weird smattering of feelings, plenty of which I don’t really have the energy to work through yet, but I did find some resonance throughout the chapter for some of the concerns I raised in my last substantial post on Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration, and the questions it raised about the supposedly ‘utopian’ process of liquefying one’s body – and the subsequent anxieties, fears, or forms of phenomenological discomfort that this process could entail. A total loss of control isn’t necessarily a good thing, is it?

            Again, I should reiterate that I don’t believe that Kusama is naively attaching herself to these utopian claims of her “Self-Obliteration” – it strikes me that her work is far more complex than this. As Applin mentioned in her short book on the Infinity Mirror Room project, there’s a profound ambivalence to Kusama’s work that is quite interesting, a strange oscillation between these utopian ideals of the totally equalizing powers of free love and self-dissolution to form new collectivities, and the vaguely threatening experience of gazing off into the endless recesses of her Infinity Mirror Room while feeling potentially closed off, confined, and rendered claustrophobic in the name of the infinite and free. I think there’s something in the BwO chapter that can articulate this ambivalence in a productive way.

Kate Craig - A Delicate Issue

            I’m taking this Cultural Studies course at McGill with Professor Alanna Thain (who assigned the BwO chapter) and the one thing that struck me about her explanation of its significance in class was that it’s fundamentally a chapter about caution. Envisioning a BwO is about understanding the transmission of desire in a new way – of divorcing desire from its psychoanalytic conception as a ‘lack’ – and instead seeing the ways in which a body carries desire as something generative and productive in its own right, as creating a field of transmission across which one body can open up or connect to other bodies and spaces in the world (this is my loose interpretation!). Once systems of subjectification, identity-building, and language are taken away, all that’s left behind is pure desire, a pure need for relation with other creatures in the world, as I understand it: “The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole” (151). Here’s one place where I’m finding it hard to swallow their theories completely – while I find it compelling to attempt to rearticulate desire, can we really find a way to remove ourselves of our significations and subjectivities? Is such a “pure state” possible, or even warranted? Shouldn’t identity and subjectivity be productive features to discussing the nature of desire? I find this idea somewhat nebulous and hard to believe.

            However, Deleuze and Guattari get around this by discussing caution, which was the point in the chapter that I found the most compelling. I’ve just begun reading their work in A Thousand Plateaus but it strikes me that they are quite adept at articulating ideas that don’t become overly deterministic, that remain open to multiplicity and complexity. This deliberate ambivalence could reflect the practice employed by Kusama – they both espouse this utopian vision of a BwO while recognizing its fundamental impossibility as a perfect endpoint to any single individual’s understanding of their own body – that you cannot fully lose yourself in this philosophy. Here’s a long quote:

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to: and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistence, by wildly destratifying. (160)

I guess what remains, then, (and what I’m still working through) is to figure out how to use the BwO as a productive mode for understanding intersubjective relations (or relations between bodies) in a new way. I find it a really productive philosophy for thinking through the ways in which my body could relate to the kind of self-liquification espoused by Kusama, and it also helps to articulate the deliberately-elicited anxiety or discomfort felt when experiencing Corps Etranger by Mona Hatoum, or A Delicate Issue by Kate Craig. Both are video works that involve an extreme, highly intimate relationship between the artist’s body and a video camera. In Hatoum’s case, the installation makes use of footage from an arthroscopic camera that passes along Hatoum’s body and is inserted into her various orifices. Craig’s video also involves an extreme close-up camera, which travels across her flesh, yet without the additional penetrative function (which speaks to its own issues about bodily boundaries and the socially constructed vulnerabilities of the female body) and the medicalized context of Hatoum’s (better known, to be honest) project. However, both videos envelop the viewer into the image through magnified bodily sounds (heartbeats, breathing), and both use the extreme proximity of the camera eye to the body in order to complicate the distance required for ‘objectification’ or the creation of legibility. Mediating closeness and distance becomes fraught, and as a viewing subject before these videos, despite my distance from the screen, I still feel something like a phenomenological blurring between my body and the bodies of Craig and Hatoum. (In Hatoum’s case, this becomes even more pronounced, as the installation of Corps Etranger requires the video be projected onto the floor, which gives the impression that you could somehow ‘fall into’ these pulsating orifices).

Which such closeness, how are we implicated in relation to these (female) bodies being represented on screen? How does their supposed “liquification” or dissolution into long patches of indeterminate skin and tissue interpolate my body in relation to it? Or, to add to this series of difficult questions, Craig asks a series of her own throughout A Delicate Issue: “What is the dividing line between public and private?” “At what distance does the subject read?” “How close do I want you to be? How close do you want to be?”

It’s probably not great to end on a series of open-ended questions, hmm? Maybe Deleuze and Guattari would approve. Ultimately, I’m quite interested in this BwO concept and while I feel like I understand it’s basic premise, I’m still unresolved as to its productiveness and relevance to reconsidering relations between bodies and subjects (and ultimately, the visualization of relations between bodies is what this blog boils down to) – so it’s something I’d like to keep playing with as I continue. And, for my own sake (and given my academic stresses this semester) I’m going to attempt to come at this blog with a bit of a looser writing structure for the next few months. It’s been a bit of an exercise, trying to divorce my writing from the structural limits of academic organization, and to just allow myself to string together ideas in a more organic, less rigid way. It’s a nice breather, really – helps my writing style become more fluid (haha pun), and I get to force myself to play with new ideas in an environment with non-committally, and with less formal consequences (aka grading). Basically, this is a space where I get to rant and ramble freely, that’s really nice!!

installation shot and more details from Corps Etranger

Corps Etranger on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsci0WAd_Lk
A Delicate Issue on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixadKPhSUmk

The Weekend Report:

So, I've come back from my big liquidy weekend in Toronto! I had a good time, it was great checking out the conference and meeting some other students from U of T and elsewhere (a big showing from the States, actually - from as diverse a set of schools as Temple, Case Western, Yale, Columbia, and U of Boston. Aside from the students from U of T, I was the only other representative from a Canadian university. Neat!) It was an extremely busy time, the conference was a full day on Friday, I spent the afternoon on Saturday doing some research and visiting at Toronto's Vtape, and visited with my family in Hamilton (just outside Toronto).

So, the conference: (I didn't get around to taking actual photos at the event, but here are some screencaps of my presentation)

My presentation on Teresa Margolles was well received and I had some really great feedback. Our panel, entitled "Social and Political Landscapes," also included a talk on Francis Alys' performance of retracing an Israeli-Palestinian border on foot with green paint, and a talk on Yugoslavian modernist war memorial sculpture. Our panel moderator, U of T's Dr. Alison Syme, had some interesting suggestions regarding other art historical precedents for the kind of (albeit sparse) imagery that Margolles is working within - from memento mori to Warhol's oxidation paintings, and other audience members also chimed in with references from medieval iconography and minimalist sculpture. It was a really interesting constellation of references! I was slightly nervous talking about material that is so viscerally immediate - especially just before lunch - and considering I took a really phenomenological approach that emphasized my first-person experience engaging with the installation. But thankfully, the other presenters seemed to agree that this approach was appropriate for the material.

Margolles - Plancha (detail)

Andy Warhol - Oxidation Painting - 1978

Interestingly enough, I also found my talk had some parallels with the keynote speech, given by Princeton's Dr. Nathan Arrington, which explored the representations of dead soldiers in ancient Greece. He spoke at length of a series of vases which depict the living in contact with the dead - often represented through two figures reaching out to touch each other (but never fully making contact), with a funeral monument standing in between them. During the question period I spoke to him further about this displaced touch - as it seemed as if the funerary monument was acting as a stand-in for the body of the dead soldier, allowing the living person to retain a form of haptic engagement with their lost loved one. This resonated quite strongly with my interpretation of Margolles' work, and the way that her vapourized water also functions like a displaced sensorial engagement with the dead - how we somehow feel or are affected by a connection that carries no immediate sensorial evidence. He and I got to speak a bit about this during the reception, he had some interesting suggestions for my own project as well - he was curious about the significance of Margolles choosing ten metal plates for her installation - and he convinced me to look further into that detail of her work.










The Vtape Research Trip:

I had a great time at Vtape as well! I'm not sure if I already mentioned this, but I worked there temporarily last summer as a collections assessment assistant - so it was lovely catching up with my old coworkers, friends and bosses. Incidentally, they were setting up for a new screening and show on the work of Jorge Lozano, a Toronto-based Latino filmmaker, so I got to take a peek at some of the work they were displaying, which spanned his decades-long career exploring issues of cultural exchange and Latin-American identity.

So I spent a few hours watching some work in Vtape's massive collection - and I had some help from some of their resident experts, in order to pick out some awesome work that engages with the thematics that I'm exploring here. I found a really vast assortment of material from a variety of different perspectives - there's a lot of documentation of early feminist performances in the 1970s, and some more recent work by new feminist and queer artists who are taking up similar themes but complicating them in new ways, and a lot of material that explores bodily waste and the limits of corporeal excess in ways that I find both disgusting and alluring! I've certainly given myself a lot to talk about and think over - and piles of notes to sort through. But as I sort through some of that material, here's some photos of some of the work I watched - consider it as a 'teaser' for what's to come!





And other things I'm thinking over:
1. I want to readdress some of the ideas I was considering in my post on Yayoi Kusama, using Deleuze and Guattari's work on the 'body without organs' concept in A Thousand Plateaus.
2. I'm presenting at a second graduate conference in Toronto! This one's in March at York University. The paper's on a site-specific installation by a Montreal-based artist that looks at the entropic breakdown of domestic space - so I think there are some interesting correlations between that project and this area of inquiry. I might try to kill two birds with one stone (so to speak) and use this platform to work out some of those ideas further.
3. I've been speaking a bit with one of my fellow "Liquid Intelligence" teammates, Richard, about possibly joining forces in creating a weekly reading group/screening series/gallery visiting crew. I'm still pretty excited about the idea - there's a lot of places where are separate research projects intersect in some interesting ways - so I'll keep you, dear blog, posted as I continue developing that.

Ok, so that's about it! Apologies again for my long absence over Christmas and early January, now the Liquid Bodies Archive is back in full swing :)

- Daniella

Apologies and Updates!

look - proof that I'm hard at work!

Hello - I'm so behind on posting, my apologies! I have a good excuse though - not only am I settling into my last semester of my MA, getting used to my last course (which is already making me look at this project differently, I'll post on that soon) and settling into my final project work, but I am also preparing a mini-Liquid Intelligence research trip to Toronto, to present some of my research on Teresa Margolles and her morgue water (which I posted about earlier) at the University of Toronto's Graduate Art History Conference. I'm quite nervous and excited! I'm also planning to stop by Vtape, a really fantastic video art archive and distribution centre in the city, where I've hoping to watch some more cool liquidy videos to discuss. I'll take some photos of my travels and write a little follow-up to the conference and the ideas that were raised in conjunction with my paper here!

Here's the poster for the conference:

I'm really looking forward to this! There's a really wide range of speakers and it looks to be an interesting assortment of talks.

And here's a link to Vtape's website - it's a fantastic organization filled with some really nice people, and they have a variety of resources available online, from a full catalogue to a research library filled with documentation on video art that spans several decades. Check them out! - http://www.vtape.org/

YAYOI KUSAMA'S SELF-OBLITERATION (1967)

Happy Holidays everyone (anyone? Not sure how often this thing gets read, haha). Despite the holiday season, my interest in weird video art marches on. Today’s post is not particularly holiday-esque by my standards – although if this blend of orgies, 1960s psychedelia, and phallus-shaped objects is at all indicative of your holiday, I commend you – but it strikes me that I can’t really continue without discussing Yayoi Kusama. Kusama’s entire body of work definitely has a large, highly influential place in the body-as-fluid framework I’m attempting to explore; indeed, I feel as if her work, alongside Schneemann’s Fuses (discussed earlier) act somewhat as two originary nodes to the theories I’m attempting to explore. Both were mentioned frequently throughout Jonathan Katz’s lecture “Art, Sex, and the 1960s: Body Politics,” which was a large inspiration for this blog. And additionally if this was a different project – aka, had I more time! – I would need to delve deeply into the literature surrounding countercultural body/performance art developed in the 1960s, as the political/philosophical/cultural heritage provided by that era is extremely important and fascinating! 

Still from the film - Kusama and her polka-dots

            So, Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration was made in 1967 – and it ultimately acts as a productive way of showcasing a wide variety of her installations and sculptures while she (and others) perform throughout them. Many of her infamous works make appearances in the film, from the soft sculpture boats to My Flower Bed, and the final third of the film is an extended orgiastic scene where several performers play with and paint each other’s naked bodies in her infinitely mirrored Kusama’s Peep Show – Endless Love Show space. Other footage from the film includes Kusama wandering through a forest and into a river, covering all humans/creatures/plants/even the surface of the water itself, with her signature polka dots, along with scenes of the New York skyline also being obliterated with polka dots. In Kusama’s landscape, all is rendered uniform and connected through the utopian power of the polka dot. 

Kusama and My Flower Bed

 Kusama’s well-known biography/mythology centers around her battles with mental illness. As Jo Applin has mentioned in her new book from the Afterall One Work series on Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (a great quick holiday read) – Kusama has indicated that she suffers from extreme hallucinosis, dissociation disorder, and intense anxiety. The oft-quoted passage by Kusama discussing her experiences of ‘self-obliteration’ or ‘self-dissolution’ as a result of anxiety or hallucination is as follows:

I often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. (Quoted in Applin, pg 4)

So, Kusama’s performance/sculptural/installation based practice is an effort to recapture these feelings of dissolution and the loss of self. For Kusama, this vision of her body dissolving into the surrounding space is easily translatable into a 1960s-era radical political framework, as it emphasizes connectivity and unity over capitalist values of individuation and singularity. The ideologies she deliberately self-constructs around her artistic practice ring loud and clear in the tones of a 1960s free-love ethos, emphasizing the “oceanic bliss in that moment of feeling lost to one’s surroundings” (66, from Applin). Her orgy happenings (the orgy scene in Self-Obliteration is just one of many) are equally meant to coax out a sense of interconnectedness in her performers, which could ultimately extend outwards to viewers as well: “The spectators and performers seemed to melt into one, filling the studio with an indescribable sense of rapture” (quoted in Applin again, 66). Yet despite the positivities of rapture and bliss emphasized by Kusama herself, Applin rightly indicates that Kusama’s work itself is profoundly ambivalent in several ways. This is something I’d like to push further here.

Kusama in Endless Love Show

            Is self-dissolution or envisioning the body as liquid necessarily a positive thing? Up until now it’s been an idea I’ve been ardently searching for: assuming that it’s a framework that creates helpful or valuable connotations for envisioning political or colonial complicity in new ways, or for imagining of what sex/love could look like between two consenting bodies. It seems strangely ironic that, in given what could be the most blatantly “positive” or utopic example of a liquidy body I could find, the idea suddenly seems somewhat threatening or alienating. Applin discusses this strange ambivalence in the final pages of her book (I wish she would have elaborated on it further!), emphasizing that the lines between confinement and utopian freedom become blurred in Kusama’s strange enclosed (claustrophobic?) spaces, like Phalli’s Field and Endless Love Show (pictured in the film). These indeterminate mirrored environments leave their inhabitants to be constantly reminded of their own positions in relation to the space that surrounds them and the other bodies and objects they share it with. The lines between subject and object, viewer and viewed, performer and spectator become really blurry in this context – and is this always a positive or enlightening thing? Standing in the Infinity Mirror Room and seeing my body from every imaginable angle at once – both infinitively multiplied across space but also strangely enclosed and confined – could be both a narcissist’s dream and a nightmare for anyone with body image issues; or, for the vast majority of us who oscillate between both narcissism and self-loathing on a daily basis, this could undoubtedly be an extremely disorienting and ambiguous experience. Perhaps Kusama’s ‘utopia’ isn’t as firmly delineated as her  posturing would have us believe. 

still from orgy scene

            Likewise, while her film culminates in what is perhaps the ultimate group expression of the 1960s sexual-revolution imaginings – the performed orgy in the Endless Love Show space – the transformative power placed upon group/public sex (and the nostalgia for the remembrance of group or public sex) is a utopic vision that could be complicated as well. I’ve recently been reading a fair bit about queer utopias and nostalgia surrounding gay male subcultures in the pre-AIDS era, an age of sexual possibility and connectiveness that is now lost and mourned by the likes of Douglas Crimp and others (see his infamous essay “Mourning and Militancy” from 1989). Now, I don’t want to overly collapse the politics of identity that are happening here – undeniably some of the nostalgia surrounding gay male sex clubs/bathhouses was related to the reclaiming of space for a sexuality otherwise unacceptable in public society, of finding a marginal community – yet I think both contexts speak to the desires for transformation through connection, of dissolving the self into something larger, of finding coherence with your community, of a body becoming fluid and merging with its environment. Kusama’s ethos definitely speaks to those desires, yet just as her work also contains unavoidable kernels of ambivalence, others have critiqued the utopic nostalgia for pre-AIDS era gay sex for its erasures. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” from 1987, Leo Bersani has argued against romanticizing pre-AIDS era bathhouses – and the group sex they contain – as utopian, ideal, perfectly democratic spaces: “Anyone who has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable” (206). Yet in his more recent essay, “Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories,” from 2009, José Esteban Muñoz has acknowledged Bersani’s criticisms, yet maintains that constructing utopias is a helpful political act: “utopia offers us a critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be” (35).  While I cannot overstate the differences between Kusama’s context and the politics of gay male subcultures, pre- and post-AIDS crisis, I think these texts provide an interesting parallel interpretation for my reading of Kusama’s project.

creating polka dots across the surface of water

            Kusama’s environments are undeniably utopian ones – where rapture and “oceanic bliss” (a good liquidy phrase there) through the dissolution of the self are emphasized – yet like any utopia, these spaces ultimately reveal their imperfections and ambivalences. Can an utter dissolution of the self ever occur? What would it look like? Who would have access to it/ask for it, who would it be denied to, and who might be coerced or coaxed into its throes? Would it truly be as blissful as Kusama imagined, or could it induce anxiety or fear? These questions may seem silly, yet I think they offer a helpful framework for dealing with the kinds of visions of the body discussed here. Ultimately, instead of considering the actual parameters of this kind of utopic bodily self-dissolution, and rephrasing the question that Muñoz has posed, we could otherwise ask ourselves: what kind of political, social, or cultural ramifications or possibilities do these utopic imaginings offer up? Instead of invalidating my entire project, complicating the ‘liquid body’ theme in this way helps to further solidify its use. It allows me to read Kusama’s body of work both for its utopian ideals, and for the spaces in which these blissful notions fall short. 

            So that’s where I’ll end for today. Forgive my rambly post! It’s the holidays, my brain is somewhat addled with red wine and Christmas cookies – but I find Kusama’s work really interesting and I hope I’ve been able to work through some of my thoughts in a productive way here (it’s helped me, anyway!)

Some of my sources:

Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration on UBUweb:

http://www.ubu.com/film/kusama_obliteration.html

 Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration on Youtube (part 1), parts 2 and 3 to be found in related videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h0hExzfS5Q

Applin, Jo. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (London: Afterall Books, 2012).

Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Winter 1987): 197-222.

Muñoz, José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.