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

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.

ANN HAMILTON / FACE TO FACE (2001) / and other mouths

Ann Hamilton - face-to-face

I’m late on my posting! For that I apologize. It’s a busy time of year – finals are well underway, I’m one term paper down with another due in less than a week. What better way to procrastinate than to look at some great liquidy art, hmm?

During our amazing ‘Team Liquid Intelligence’ field trip to visit with Fiona Annis a few weeks ago to learn about her use of the 19^th century wet-plate collodion technique, at one point we found ourselves talking about non-traditional pinhole cameras, and I was reminded of a photographic project by Ann Hamilton. Hamilton is an American-born artist who is well known for her highly complex installations that frequently explore issues of language and memory as they interact with the human body (her very well-known installation tropos, which included a room full of horse hair, has always been a particular favourite of mine). Starting in 2001, Hamilton has been working on a project called Face to Face, wherein she uses her own mouth as a pinhole camera. The resulting images of faces and landscapes – again, I’m digressing from video, but I’ll get to that in a moment, and these pictures are just too great not to pass up! – are strangely distorted, the curvature of her lips forming a shape that almost resembles an eye. 

Like the processes we observed at Annis’ studio – where images were printed onto aluminum sheets after being coated with a thin layer of the wet-plate collodion mixture – Hamilton’s Face to Face project is another liquidy format of photography. In a sense, we could consider her project as a fundamentally synesthetic one. Hamilton’s website describes the project as “making the orifice of language into the orifice of sight.” The orifices, even the gestures associated with speech and language (opening, closing the mouth) instead work to generate images. The ways in which we sensorially negotiate with the world become confused and Hamilton, in a way, is able to indicate how sensorial processes are never as firmly delineated as we would like them to be. The way we register engagements between people – between Hamilton and the subjects of her photographs – becomes complicated as well. What could otherwise be understood as a meaningful gaze between two bodies (between photographer and photographed, or two subjects ‘making eye contact’ as a standard form of social interaction) becomes distorted when our trace for seeing is relocated into another part of the body. What does it mean to see with your mouth, anyway? 

The project also toys with the boundaries of the body in a really interesting way. I find the idea that a photograph could generate in the warm, wet space of someone’s mouth to be both a beautiful and bizarre concept. The mouth as a space is a strangely liminal place to begin with, halfway between inside and outside, it acts as the frontier to our bodies and the gateway for a haphazard assortment of social and biological necessities (many of which, of course, overlap in distinct and interesting ways), from speech to nourishment to sex to breathing. Allowing the mouth to communicate in an unusual way, to create a trace of its own experience/perspectives (if you could call them that, I’m not sure), works to decenter the body, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside and allowing the space that exists between them to become productive in its own right. 

Ann Hamilton with her pinhole camera

            Or perhaps, this work is less about subverting bodily functions than exaggerating what they already achieve. Our flesh is already something like an interface with which we negotiate with the wide variety of physical and sensorial data that surrounds us. By registering the traces of this engagement (of Hamilton’s face-to-face interactions with her subjects) the Face to Face project is capturing and exaggerating the modes through which our bodies engage with space (and other bodies) on a daily basis. When looking at her photographs, I’m reminded of another mouth-related piece of video work that similarly renders excessive the communicational capacities of that orifice. 

Vito Acconci - Open Book

            Vito Acconci’s Open Book (1974) is both compelling and humorous, and repulsive and disconcerting. As his gaping mouth slurs through a series of pleading phrases – “I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out.... I’m open to you, I'm open to everything.... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside....” – his words distort, his tongue rolls around awkwardly, and we can hear the saliva welling up in his mouth. Rendering the communicational capacities of the body excessive and strange, I think there’s an odd similarity between Acconci’s video and Hamilton’s photographs. Both consider how the mouth (and consequently, the body) record and distort information, and the ways in which these modes of communication are always fundamentally embodied. Both projects imagine the borders of the body as a fluid interface that we use to both assert ourselves in the surrounding space, but which also leaves our bodies open and vulnerable to that space pressing back, leaving its imprints on us in turn – like ghostly, distorted images nestled in Hamilton’s mouth.

Ann Hamilton’s website, info for Face to Face

http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/prints/face_to_face.html

Ann Hamilton on art21

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ann-hamilton

Vito Acconci – Open Book on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQAcHsgIwY