THE LIQUID BODIES PROJECT

 

The Idea

            In the essay that acts as the centerpiece to this project, Jeff Wall imagined the liquid, alchemical histories of photography – of uncontrollable chemistries, of liquids bleaching, dissolving, seeping – as exerting an influence (or ‘intelligence’) over the dry, mechanical, and optical modes that dominate how photographic knowledge-building is understood. “Photography and Liquid Intelligence” concludes with a reference to the malevolent oceanic planet in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris: as the astronaut-researchers encounter materializations of their long-dead loved ones, Wall wonders how “liquids study us, even from a great distance” (93). However, I believe that Wall’s choice in Solaris to exemplify the ‘liquid intelligence’ thematic can be pushed further. As the materialization of oceanic forces, Hari’s body is both liquid and solid, both coherent and radically decentered: her subjectivity and memories are beyond her control, and with each wound and self-imposed death, her flesh spontaneously regenerates. Hari’s fluid corporeality is central to the film’s narrative; she flows in and out of Kelvin’s grasp and her liquidy pull compels him to turn his back on planet Earth.  

            Liquid intelligences have also exerted their influence upon body-based artistic practices, feminist/queer/non-normative politics, and modes of identity formation over the last sixty years. In a recent lecture at Concordia University entitled “Art, Sex, and the 1960s: Body Politics,” Jonathan Katz discussed the “polymorphous perversity” of artistic practices of the Sexual Revolution (discussing artists including Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, and Lygia Clark) in order to build a body politic based in commonality over difference: a radical (deliberately utopian) mutuality that bridges bodies together instead of dividing them apart. For Katz, and the artists he discusses, this is a liquefied body; it seeps, flows, oozes, and altogether dissolves the social categories that demarcate difference. Even for Sigmund Freud, visions of the ‘liquid’ are intimately related to a sense of corporeal limitlessness: the pre-Oedipal child’s “oceanic feelings” are manifest in a stage prior to the demarcation of individual bodily limits, when bodily self-awareness is radically infinite and unbounded (Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, 723-725). Elizabeth Grosz has considered the gendered implications inherent within the notion of a “liquid body.” In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Grosz outlined how liquidity has become a central feature in the ontological status of women:

Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as a formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment – not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? (203)

Grosz’s assertion allows her to consider how certain bodily flows accrue social importance or taboo, and how the corporeal specificities of women’s bodies alter the ways in which social gender relations are built. Overall, it remains clear that despite the apparent coherence of bodies, their liquidy influences continue to seep into our collective imaginations. Therefore, what happens when artists surrender – like Kelvin releasing himself into Hari’s undertow – to these watery impulses? 

The Project

            With this project I intend to build a research archive that situates the ‘liquid intelligence’ thematic within performance, film, and video art produced during the last sixty years. By focusing on performative, body-oriented art production, I hope to consider how notions of ‘liquidity’ and ‘fluidity’ are essential to understanding how theories of gender, sexuality, and identity formation have developed across the last half-century. Using this blog format, once a week I will create a post on a chosen film or video work, including title and artist information, image stills, a working link or archive location information (where applicable), and a concise text that discusses how the video could be situated within the project theme. I will also use tags to organize each post under relevant sub-themes, while connecting each work to other pertinent articles, reviews, and critical theories. I hope to source most of the work through a variety of online databases (ubuweb, Youtube) while also making trips to physical archives and libraries within Montreal and Toronto (Vtape, le Cinémathèque québécoise, the McGill University library, and perhaps the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Artexte). Ultimately I hope to build a comprehensive (yet by no means exhaustive) archive that not only acts as a helpful research tool for my own academic interests, but also provides resources for others who wish to explore the ‘liquid intelligence’ thematic further while creating interdisciplinary connections across a variety of contemporary, body-based artistic practices. After accumulating a wide variety of video and film works, I hope to organize a screening of select titles in late Spring 2013. 

The Author

            I’m Daniella, an MA Candidate in Art History at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. My broad research interests include contemporary art, feminist and queer politics, diaspora studies, affect theory, embodiment, and phenomenology. Admittedly, studying film and video is somewhat new to me – my background is more aligned with performance, installation, and craft-based work – but it’s an avenue I’ve been really looking forward to exploring for some time. This blog archive is situated alongside Dr. Matthew Hunter’s broader ‘Liquid Intelligence’ research project at McGill University.