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.

REBECCA BELMORE / FOUNTAIN (2005)

Belmore - Fountain 2005

 So, I’ll begin with a question. How can we visualize complicity and connectedness in a postcolonial world? As I think my example of Teresa Margolles made clear, water and liquidy forces can provide an apt method of rendering obvious the ways both power and disadvantage flow, simmer, and cycle between nations, communities, and people – the ways in which we are all interconnected through a global postcolonial system that privileges the rights of some nations/bodies over others. I’d like to turn to another example that also speaks to the same themes: Rebecca Belmore’s video/installation piece Fountain, which was displayed in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Belmore is an extremely prolific Anishinaabe-Canadian artist (one of my personal favourites!) based in Vancouver. Her work frequently deals with the legacies of colonialism in Canada and the – extremely fraught – relationships that have existed between settler and First Nations communities since the country was supposedly “discovered.” In 2005 Belmore became the first Aboriginal woman to represent Canada at the biennale (I think the first Aboriginal male was Edward Poitras in 1995, thanks Wikipedia) and her piece was wonderfully appropriate for Venice, the globalized ‘art fair’ context, and for my own purposes here. 

            So first – I’ll describe the video (and full disclosure here, I’ve only seen what’s available on Belmore’s website, I wish I could have seen this in person!). The video opens to a fairly bleak, grey beach, and we can hear a plane flying overheard. As the camera rolls towards the water, a giant fire erupts upon a pile of driftwood to the right, the bright orange flames seeming all the more intense and hazardous against their dull gray surroundings. The image then cuts to Belmore submerged in the water, fully clothed, grunting and coughing as she struggles to shore, dragging a beat-up bucket with her. Her labour here is emphasized: she pushes herself forward but keeps falling back, sputtering and gasping for air. Finally she grows calm and manages to pull herself from the water, carrying her full bucket across the beach until she reaches the camera, throwing its contents into the faces of us viewers. The water from the bucket has magically transfigured into blood, and it coats the screen. Belmore remains visible behind this red liquidy curtain, and she slowly regains her breath as she stares coldly out at us. In Venice, this video was projected on a wall of cascading water. 

image of the video being projected on the wall of cascading water at the Canadian Pavilion

            Well, what I find fascinating about this video work is how Belmore makes use of water as a signifier for the breadth of colonialism. In the context of Venice specifically, a city referred to by Lee-Ann Martin in her essay on Belmore’s Fountain as “part of the colonial story […] a conduit for European world views,” it is water that connects this European port – its ideologies, its economies, its exchanges of power – with the rest of the world. It’s all too easy to argue that the issues of First Nations identity and representation that Belmore frequently tackles in her work are too specific, too rooted in a Canadian context to create much of a resonance in a worldwide, globalized art market. Yet as Martin’s essay argues, water (and its counterpart, blood) signifies the deeply rooted connectedness and mutual complicities and responsibilities shared across continents, across histories, in the legacies of colonialism:

 The blood in Fountain is a powerful metaphor for the burden of First Nations history. Here, as throughout Belmore’s art, she flings responsibility for the cycles of bloodshed found within the history of colonialism in the Americas back to their European source. Through her actions, an Anishnabe woman from northwestern Ontario recognizes the blood of all people who suffer because of others’ greed for power. 

Water becomes blood, and the visitors to the Venice Biennale – who are undoubtedly taking advantage of the uneven distributions of privilege and wealth that have provided them with the opportunity to travel to such an affluent, touristic, globalized art fair – are met with the remnants of these repeated violences as they are thrown back in our faces. Additionally, fountains are often symbols of wealth, prosperity, or the display of power. In this way, Belmore’s unorthodox “fountain” works to subvert many of the ideals this monumentalist form of architecture/sculpture often attempt to uphold: replacing the values of coherency and stability favoured by public manifestations of colonial power for a liquidy, messy vision of mutual responsibility in the face of a shared history of violence that literally disrupts our clear vision of the present. 

            Martin’s essay elaborates on these ideas very well (I’ve linked it below here so you can have a read if you’re so inclined) but the one thing I found interesting that she didn’t elaborate on was Belmore’s obvious labour. Belmore is clearly struggling in her attempts to collect the water in her bucket – she gasps, wheezes, and grunts as she wrestles it to shore, in danger of being overtaken by the current herself. It’s impossible to watch this video without being engaged on a bodily level with the work she is undertaking. I find this significant. For me, this level of visible labour speaks to the intense amount of work required to render these cycles of complicity obvious. It’s all to easy to just lie back and let the current overtake you, as uneven relations of power across gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, class, etc. continue on as normalized and unquestioned. They are woven into the fabric of everyday social relations and are either so ubiquitous that they go unnoticed, or their consequences are too far away that we are unable to see their effects. It takes work to render these processes visible, it requires a violent, disruptive action to wake us up to their problematic influences – for Belmore, they literally need to be thrown in our faces. In this way, I find Fountain an amazingly interesting video work. Not only does it coerce a sense of self-reflexivity in the visitors to the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but it uses water and other liquidy forces to build an alternative cartography of colonialism that favours the messy and the complex over the overdetermined and simplistic narratives supplied by traditional forms of history-making. 

 Fountain as displayed on Belmore's website -

http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/exhibit/Fountain.html 

Lee-Ann Martin's essay, The Waters of Venice - 

http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/the-waters-of-venice.html 

Youtube clip of the Canadian Pavilion display (not great quality but you get the picture) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAz8QT2kYQc 

TERESA MARGOLLES / PLANCHA (2010)

Plancha at DHC/ART

One post in and I’m already deviating from my intended structure! Oh well. This post is a bit more tangential, actually, but I’m hoping it’ll give a bit more background as to how/why I’ve come to Prof. Hunter’s “Liquid Intelligence” research project and it acts as an avenue for me to reconsider some of my earlier writing. One of my initial attempts to theorize the ‘body as liquid’ came from a paper I wrote last semester on an installation by a Mexican artist named Teresa Margolles entitled Plancha – which was on display at Montreal’s DHC/ART last winter. The installation consisted of a series of heated steel plates which extended across the gallery floor, and Margolles had rigged a tube across the ceiling which sent single drops of clear water down to hit the plank and evaporate into the gallery air. After reading the accompanying wall text, it became apparent that Margolles sourced the water from a morgue in Mexico City where it was used to clean the bodies of the anonymous/unclaimed dead after autopsy. I recently read Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence for a course, and it struck me how helpful her writing was for allowing me to reconsider my (conflicted) thoughts on Margolles work. Through Precarious Life, I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation for how ‘liquid bodies’ can create new intersubjective relationships between disparate people. So I’ve written up some of my thoughts here! 

            In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the politics through which legitimized mourning becomes unevenly divided across different lives and different deaths, ultimately asserting that some deaths attain status as publicly grievable over others: “we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more valuable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others.” (30) Plancha renders this division of value palpable in the gallery air: the traces of Mexico’s dead – rendered anonymous and unclaimed through uneven systems of power and privilege – linger in the air and are taken into my lungs, into my very body, in the gallery space. In a quite deliberate, jarring manner, her installation calls into question how the deaths of some are simply absorbed back into the status quo – calling the gallery visitors to directly attend to the ephemeral (or even invisible) traces left behind by a necropolitical regime. By taking the traces of the anonymous dead into my body, a twofold form of violence occurs: on the one hand, they infiltrate my boundaries, disrupting my sense of coherence/cleanliness, yet conversely, by breathing them in I assist in their further dispersal/dissolution, perhaps their continued invisibility. In Precarious Life, Butler is arguing for a redistribution of grievability, a reconsideration of intersubjective relations that emphasizes vulnerability and interdependence over hierarchies of value: “In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt” (29). In a beautifully (or perhaps frighteningly) simple gesture, Plancha encapsulates these complex layers of intersectional vulnerability: by entering the gallery space and participating within its atmosphere (whether or not the water is ‘actually’ sourced from where Margolles claims, which is a whole other issue I’ve considered at length) visitors become aware of their own corporeal vulnerability and fundamental interdependence with others who – due to systematic forms of violence and oppression – are no longer able to speak for themselves. Standing in the gallery space, I take that violence into my body, creating an awareness of complicity and intersecting forms of interdependence that allows me to take responsibility for my own position of privilege. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other,” (23) Butler writes: my boundaries are undone by the traces of the dead in the air, just as I participate in their undoing by taking them into my lungs.

Margolles’ ambivalence in relation to this still unnerves me. Her work is amazingly effective in calling forth how this interdependence functions on a personal, bodily level – and causes me to consider how the air I breathe implicates me as a citizen of Montreal, of Canada, as a participant within the systems of power that exist here – yet is this at the expense of enacting more violence upon those who have already experienced enough suffering – the doubled violence of death and subsequent social invisibility? Is Margolles participating in what Butler has named  “the derealization of the ‘Other’” (33)? As they disperse into the air, are the bodies in Plancha rendered invisible twice over, rendered unreal and left anonymous? Perhaps it is the extremely loaded nature of her (presumed) material that prompts me to wish for something more, to ask for a treatment of the traces of the anonymous dead that more directly differs from the cold, medicalized, unsympathetic system that they are already subsumed within. Even as I write that, I wonder how feasible such a demand could be/what such an installation could look like – at the end of the day I don’t think it would be as effective in illustrating these intersecting forms of vulnerability and interdependence that Butler discusses. All in all, Margolles’ work manages to say a lot with a surprisingly sparse visual vocabulary, and Butler’s Precarious Life has assisted me immensely in sorting through many of the ambiguous, conflicting, and disarming implications of her installation. 

Info on the exhibit that Plancha was included in - it was a great show! http://www.dhc-art.org/en/exhibitions/chronicles-of-a-disappearance