Notes on Abjection and Prejudice

Catalogue essay for the installation of Eugenia Vargas The Abject Body 
Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus, Miami
January 1999 

“…Then another abyss opens between this body and the body that was inside it: the abyss that separates mother and child. What relationship is there between me or, more modestly, between my body and this internal graft, this crease inside, which with the cutting of the umbilical cord becomes another person, inaccessible? My body and… him. No relation. Nothing to do with one another”. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater”, p. 145 

bedtime story / crib death / snapshot 
A dark space. Six transparent tents. Inside each tent is a transparent hospital crib. Sweet nursery sounds cut the sterile air, as if covering up some big secret. In each crib there is a monitor, with its electronic components disemboweled and its wiring mechanism laid bare. This is where the secret, the heart and soul of the work and the source of horror, is revealed: screened on each monitor is a digital animated adaptation of a defective fetus. Six mangled monitors present six cases of embryonic defects – technological aberration versus natural malformation. Flashes of deformed, monstrous babies, natural defects, emanate from the screens like broken visions: skin, hypodermis, blood flowing through the veins, exposed nerves, short limbs, spilled out brain, a throbbing hole in a small head, the slight movement of a gradually tightening umbilical cord, the sounds of flowing fluid, dissociation of a body, intra-uterine floating, inhaling and exhaling, a swollen belly rising and falling, the sweet rolling sound of a baby’s gurgle, a lullaby. Aesthetization of horror protected in a transparent bubble. 

from ecology to pathology 
This is the first time Eugenia Vargas, a Chilean-born photographer, performance and installation artist, who is known for her unique combinations of earth art and feminist perceptions of body politics, deviates from the use of her own body and the preoccupation with quintessential social and ecological concerns, and goes all the way with a personal, disturbing work which contains such pungent images of abnormalities (the work’s nucleus is based on photographs of fetuses with genetic pathological defects and of deformed babies in different stages of development, extracted from a late 19th century Argentinean medical book dealing with female fertility and pregnancy complications.) Against the background of earlier, more conceptual works, this new preoccupation with the so-called perverse, distorted, defective, and rejected may seem peculiar. However, a retrospective look at Vargas’ oeuvre reveals just to what extent this work naturally and logically follows from her earlier works. Simultaneous leaps and shifts from social-ecological issues to feminist-personal ones have always been typical of her artworks, and at times have even coexisted within the very same piece. Even when she was engaged in ecology, Vargas maintained an intimate expression of refined personal experience. As she herself put it: “All of my work deals with organic materials suggesting life, death and rebirth as well as concern for the earth and for humankind.” 
Her most famous project, a floor installation entitled Aguas, introduced an ongoing photographic documentation of the polluted Lerma river in Mexico. Also known from that period (late 1980s and early 1990s) is her series of self-portraits by the river, in which she investigated the relations between the body and the earth (The Earth [Tierra] series). In this series, as in others from that same period, Vargas documented a pseudo-ritualistic choreography of women covered with a thick layer of mud. In her performance works, which were later documented and used as raw materials for large-scale photographs, Vargas explored her own body as a site for inscribing personal and collective narratives. In some of her works she posed with animal organs, or wrapped herself in elaborate straw costumes prior to photographing herself. Dramatic photographic self-portraits from her mid 1980s Organic Series were complex staged tableaux in which she performed private rituals with animal limbs and entrails. For her, the body serves as a witness revealing the marks and physical evidence of what happens to a person during his/her lifetime. The undocumented events we choose not to remember are permanently etched on the body. Thus, Eugenia Vargas perceives the human body as an intricate linguistic system, a repository containing the signs and memories of identities that may be re-constituted and re-coded. 

on the unbearable lightness 
In The Abject Body Vargas continues to delve into the human body, except that this time the body is no longer her own, and the emphasis is on the disruption, the mishap, on nature’s arbitrary, unbearable error. The repository of signs etched on that fresh embryonic body that had yet to live is disrupted from the outset. No identity can emerge from it and no story can be told about it. It seems this time Vargas has taken the vulnerability and transience of human existence to the limit of capacity. Can there be a metaphor crueler than this? The image of a dead child is in itself a cruel and harsh image rarely addressed in contemporary culture; the choice of a defective baby — all the more so, since a fetus is the ultimate image of the beginning of life, an image concealing the miracle of creation. Here, the embryo is discharged from the mechanism of reproduction for being a mutation. The exposure of the failure, the genetic defect, embodies the most radical, concrete possibility of violated life. 

In view of such harsh representations, one cannot avoid thinking about the standard visual and literary representation of babies in culture, a representation usually congruent with the sweet and perfect model of the “Gerber babies” or the depiction of the plump, angelic putti in Renaissance frescos. Generally, these are near-erotic depictions of a breathing toy-body — “the perfect creation”, “the epitome of creation”, “ultimate innocence”: red lips, rosy cheeks, chubby body creases, miniature clothes, embroidered socks, satiated gurgles and uproarious laughter. Thus, for example, Julia Kristeva describes her healthy baby: “forehead, eyebrows, nostrils, cheeks, marked features, a delicate, hard, pointed chin. No fold and no shade, neither existing nor fallen. neither present nor absent, but rather real; unattainable, weighty, heart-warming innocence and sublime aerial lightness. A child? an angel, glow on an Italian painting, unable to suffer, a tranquil dream…” (Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater”, Poetics Today 6:1-2 [1985], pp.133-152) 

The Abject Body challenges the cliché of the angelic baby and the way we react when our eye falls on a deformed human being. True, these are not cute babies. They do not evoke love. On the contrary: they elicit fear, guilt, embarrassment, rejection, repulsion, prejudice, and a wide range of sentiments generating exclusion — that popular ethos which caused mad women and children to be ostracized throughout history. However, the symbolic manner in which Vargas chose to “treat” “her 19th century babies” — putting them in cribs, separating them from “life”, isolating them from contamination, and “breathing life” into them through digital video animation (what a paradox: a simulation of life through technology!) — indicates that she would have liked us to look at them differently. Vargas provides them with life (albeit virtual), so that we can lay our eyes on them for one minute more.

distortion = impurity = evil
Since the Middle Ages, freaks and invalids were related to in a moral context. The physical distortion is regarded not only as a biological defect but also as a moral one, originating in mystic and religious perceptions of punishment. In Medieval imagery depictions of the monstrous, the distorted and the disfigured were relegated to the region of Hell and were always positioned on the left hand side of Christ (the side of Evil). Traces of this moralist perception can still be found today, in the intense horror and associations evoked in many of us in response to distortions, genetic defects, and severe illnesses. In her brilliant book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag focuses on the metaphoric place of diseases such as cancer and AIDS in culture. “Illness,” she maintains, “is the night-side of life. […] Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick…” (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metzphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, 1978, p.3)

Sontag, indeed, confined herself to disease, yet her assertions may also be applied to birth defects (for the cancerous growth is a mutation created within the body). In the course of history, illness has been perceived as divine punishment, a demonic obsession originating in Satan, a metaphor for evil. Endeavoring to remove the symbolic stigma that has been associated with cancer, Sontag argues that mythicization, fantasies and demonization stem from ignorance. The less knowledge there is about a disease, the more it triggers primal anxieties and prejudice, and thus, is perceived as taboo. Sontag compares the horror of cancer in modern society to the fear of leprosy in the Middle Ages. The cultural text of leprosy interpreted the disease as “corruption which was made visible.” The disease itself became a metaphor, and the horror has made it abject. In our time, the moral connotations are especially conspicuous with regard to AIDS, which due to its affinity to sexual promiscuity, replaced cancer in its mystical (apocalyptic) potential and associations with evil and tainted morality.

abject = animality
Social exclusion of sorts occupies a significant place in contemporary feminist discourse as well. Another key term in feminist theory since the early 1980s — the abject — is also worth considering in this context as a supplementary idea to Sontag’s perception of the disease, and as a fundamental concept for explicating Vargas’ work. The term was coined by scholar and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in her book Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. According to her definition, abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” (Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, 1982, p. 4 [trans. By Leon S. Roudiez]).

According to Kristeva, this process of rejection, exclusion, elimination, or removal of waste occurs, first and foremost, on the basic level of body tissues: blood, excretions and secretions, pus, urine, saliva, feces, vomit, breast milk, and all other liquids permeating the body, whose fluidity threatens to blur its own borders. However, from the private level of bodily tissues Kristeva expands the principle of abjection to more general levels of the social order: the dirty, the defective, the abnormal have always represented the borderline, the peripheral, the bestial, that which occupies the margins of the dominant culture and in any case belongs to the female domain. “Abjection, as an indication of animality, returns to haunt the subject, undermining the metalized, fascist body which armors itself as a defensive reaction against bodily ‘impurities’.” (Simon Taylor, “The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art”, in Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993, p.60). As theorized by Kristeva, “there is nothing either objective or abjectal to the abject… Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp.9-10).

The theory of the abject relies on the writings of Georges Bataille, who challenges dominant concepts of mind/body dualism and our established categories of social taboo through an investigation of degraded elements. From this context stems the term “abject art”; it refers to art engaged with a body that ceased to be an object of passion and has become abject — a despised object exposed in its base, inferior aspects. The term “abject art”, which is also a play on words alluding to “object art”, refers to a group of works incorporating or suggesting abject materials such as dirt, hair, excrements, dead animals, menstrual blood, and rotting food in order to confront taboo issues of gender and sexuality, and it has become synonymous with the work of Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, David Hammons, and Kiki Smith.

The female body, which for years has been socially structured as an abject body, is indeed absent from Vargas’ current work. Nevertheless, it is substituted by the defective fetuses — which metaphorically may be regarded as a physical extension of the mother; a product of her body (nature) which bore the mistake. The deformed anatomies from an antique medical book (social taboo) are thus linked to the so-called “female nature” within the prevalent dichotomy: woman=nature / man=culture.

In the current work Vargas undermines the validity of these categories, re-shuffling the cards of identity: the technological masquerades as organic (the exposed internal mechanism of the monitors looks like an umbilical cord or a spilled out brain); the organic (dead) is animated by the technological (the living). The work as a whole speaks in hybrid language, the language of ambiguity and intermediate states, the twilight zones of the perverse, the distorted, the aberrant.

In this context it is interesting to examine the function of computer technology in the process of artistic manipulation. In fact, technological intervention, which was not possible during the earlier, more primitive stages of late 19th century medical research, takes place here. By means of computerized video, Vargas penetrates the interior of the babies, infusing their blood, catheterizing, and resuscitating. Could they have been saved under different conditions?

life in a bubble
An important element of The Abject Body is the transparent vinyl “tent” enclosing each of the cribs. These plastic sheets isolate the defective babies (as if they were lab samples from the external world) far away from the viewer’s gaze. This division between interior and exterior brings to mind a possibility of contamination, infection, or virus; except it is not clear who is protected and who is trying to protect oneself. Is it the artist who wishes to protect the babies from the contaminations of life, or are they themselves the virus?

The French scholar Jean Baudrillard developed the bubble metaphor when comparing our lives to the life of that sick boy in America who grew up in a sterile, medical environment that protected his vulnerable body by means of an artificial immunization technology; a vacuum barring any possibility of germ penetration. His mother caressed him with rubber-gloved hands through a sterile sleeve built into a glass tent. He grew up in an ex-territorial atmosphere, under the constant supervision of science, threatened by his mother’s kiss. According to Baudrillard, we are all bubble children; we are all afraid of touch. Our brains and bodies have already become analogous to this sanitized sphere, a transparent envelope within which we seek refuge in vain. “The extermination of mankind begins,” he maintains, “with the extermination of germs.” For “man, with his humors, his passions, his laugh, his genitalia and his secretions, is nothing more than a filthy little germ disturbing the universe of transparency.” (Jean Baudrillard, “Rituals of Transparency” (1987), in The Ecstasy of Communication, New York, 1988, pp.29-44).

photography, kitsch, pornography, and death
Photography, as evidence of something that occurred in reality, as an objective representation of the truth , has always served Vargas as a point of departure for her installations and performances. The Abject Body is her first attempt to animate existing still photographs. The old (historical) images have been swallowed up in the computer, scanned, and ostensibly charged with a new energy which transformed their state of aggregation from a photograph in an outdated medical book to digital animation.

The practice of photography is like mummification, an attempt to freeze time – a type of death. During the past century, many discussions have been dedicated to the affinity between photography and death. The most famous and classic among them was introduced by Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida) who interpreted photography as a type of black magic – an attempt to return the dead embodied in the very act of preserving life. According to Barthes, every photograph bears death which is embodied in the desire to perpetuate the portrait, like preserving a specter. As for the representation of death itself in photography, Barthes maintains it is mere pornography. He believes photographs of dead people, like pornographic material, are intended to render shock.

Barthes’ assertion is anchored in the social taboo of exposure of the dead. In fact, it is an aesthetic convention deeply rooted in culture. One who challenged it was the French author Georges Bataille (Death and Sensuality), who referred to a detailed photographic documentation of an execution carried out in China in 1904, in the course of which a man was cut alive into “one hundred pieces” — a scene which Bataille found “intolerably beautiful.” Expressions such as Bataille’s concerning the representation of death, and of course, its spectacular presentation in the daily media, have influenced a long line of contemporary artists who, in their work, deal with the aesthetics of horror (Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano and Joel Peter Witkin are the most prominent among them), thus undermining established conventions of beauty.

The Abject Body belongs to that species of artworks which conceal multiple layers of meaning and hidden potential readings that are not immediately decipherable. In fact, it can be read as an onion, by peeling off its meanings, layer after layer. The work’s core, the source of its immediate, sensual, magnetizing impact, is undoubtedly the manipulated photographic images; but as you peel off all other layers of meaning, you realize that in this work Vargas manifests virtually all of the hot, politically-charged issues on the postmodern agenda. Articulated in a highly aesthetic manner, The Abject Body reveals an intimate relation with the rejected “others”, endeavoring to furnish them with a new life and draw our shunning, suspicious, gaze closer to them.

Translation: Daria Kassovsky