Abjection:
The Theory and the Moment Amy Zurek Visual Studies Senior Thesis Fall 2010 – Spring 2011
Abjection: The Theory and the Moment Introduction: From the Origins to the Art THE THEORY Julia Kristeva and Powers of Horror Georges Bataille and the Informe Politics of A Signifier: Abject and Informe THE MOMENT Nineties Culture and Controversies Abject Art Cindy Sherman Jenny Saville Talking Dirty in the Institution Conclusion Contradictions Artist Statement
2
Introduction: From the Origins to the Art When we think of abject art, the aesthetic that comes to mind is one of rebellious filth: dirt, excrement, trash, decaying food, and other taboo substances employed precisely for their repellant effect on the viewer. Content that pertains to the marginalization of an individual, such as the disgusting corpulence of obesity or the societal rejection of homosexuality, presents a slightly subtler reflection of the concept. In a given work of art that has been grouped into this category, some critics argue that the abject component of the work is its subject matter, the real-world referent it employs or emulates, while others argue that it is the process it reflects, the act of exclusion, which makes it pertinent to the concept of abjection. The broad definition of the abject, therefore, is that which is base, lowly, prohibited, marginalized or excluded, but which we simultaneously feel some small attraction to or alliance with, that which unnerves us by perturbing our normative conceptions of how things should be. In this paper, I propose that there was a decisive window in art history when artists and thinkers were particularly intrigued by the concept of abjection. In the sense that works of art can be seen as artifacts or products of the time of their creation, I argue that this window coincides with certain events in the politics and popular culture of the United States, namely the culture wars of the nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties. I present the 1993 show Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art at the Whitney Museum as a kind of culmination of this moment as well as substantiating evidence of its prevalence, and discuss a symposium published in October magazine in 1994 on abjection and the related concept of the informe to demonstrate and explore the critical issues that surrounded these topics at the time. As case studies, I examine the work of Cindy Sherman and Jenny Saville to analyze the ways in which the aesthetic sensibility of the movement of abject art was applied to two-dimensional image making practices. Sherman’s photographs progress from a focus upon the façade, even the 3
stereotype of the female figure, to the more grotesque aspects of femininity, those which are not only viscerally disgusting by nature of the substances involved, but those which are hidden or rejected from view, addressing the process of exclusion so fundamental to the abject. Saville’s paintings of nude overweight women engage abjection in that not only are they painted in such a way as to make us recoil from the pasty undulating flesh, they present subjects that are undeniably excluded from the positive regard of popular culture. Whether it is the implied action or the content that links a work with the abject, the artist, and indeed the viewers, critics, and institutions that engage it are necessarily working with a concept of abjection that finds its roots in the writings of two individuals in particular. In 1934, Georges Bataille published the short essay “ L’Abjection et les Formes Misérables,” addressing the notion explicitly for the first time, and beginning to unpack its complexity. The term did not gain widespread academic acknowledgement, however, until Julia Kristeva analyzed it in her own extended essay, “Powers of Horror,” nearly fifty years later, in 1982. It is only by investigating these two respective conceptions of the abject that we can gain a complete understanding of the concept and its application to art. For while it was Bataille that associated the term with exclusion and indeed implicated human excretion as a particular of it, it was Kristeva who associated the term with other base substances and linked it to psychological processes described by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; both versions of the definition are fundamental to the resulting moment in art that I seek to describe in this thesis.
4
THE THEORY Julia Kristeva and Powers of Horror For Kristeva, the state of abjection is essentially a crisis of subjecthood. Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan, Kristeva assumes the essential distinction between the subject and the object. The subject, or self, is all that a person considers to be part of their personal identity, inherent to themselves, physically or psychologically. Under ordinary circumstances, there exists a clear delineation between this understanding of self, and everything else in the world, which we can call “others” or “objects.” The state in which this boundary between self and other, subject and object, is disturbed constitutes abjection. In Kirsteva’s words, “the abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.”1 There are a few instances in which the abject occurs most fundamentally for Kristeva. The first, also rooted in Lacan, assumes that during infancy a child has no self-awareness, and in its lack of consideration, views itself and its mother as part of the same undifferentiated network of life. As the child develops, however, it begins to conceive of its own perspective, its own self, as apart from the separate entity of its mother, and this state of flux, in which the child has begun, but not yet fully realized, the conceptual delineation between itself, the subject, and its mother, the object, constitutes the abject. This state is connected with Lacan’s mirror stage, a period in which both physical and psychological self-awareness develops, and also with the implementation of language. A concept of the bounded self necessitates a means of communication with those outside the boundaries, and hence, out of the undifferentiated network, the semiotic order of language develops. But before this delineation is complete, in the interim, lies the abject. The second instance occurs upon death, when the corpse of a human being retains its identity as individual or subject, but progressively returns to the state of objecthood, mere matter of the earth.
1
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia, 1982) pp. 1.
5
Lacan’s notion of the gaze is also fundamental to Kristeva’s concept of abjection. As the child develops self-awareness in the mirror stage, it realizes how it looks to the exterior world, and comes to feel that it is “looked at from all sides”2 by exterior objects, constantly under their look, a mortifying realization that paralyzes the subject, who feels threatened and unnerved, his subjecthood and its associated position of power undermined. If he is the object for some other subject, in fact many other subjects, his status becomes conflated. It is this status of indistinction between self and other that constitutes the abject. It is something that is, in Hal Foster’s terms “not only alien to the subject but intimate with it—too much so in fact, and this overproximity produces panic in the subject.”3 One can arrive at this status from either direction: the familiar becoming alienated, as in the case of the Lacanian gaze, or the alienated becoming familiar. Kristeva’s definition, as articulated by Foster, calls attention to the porous nature of these conceptual boundaries, their instability, and the definitively negative human reaction associated with this fact. In less abstract moments of explanation, Kristeva provides examples of the phenomenon, citing everything from the various substances excreted from the human body to the film that forms on the surface of milk as things that are in some way improper or unclean and therefore demonstrative of the abject. She modifies these examples by explaining that “it is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite.”4 Though she attempts to undermine the bonds of association between the concept and the substances she has used to demonstrate them, the ties are nonetheless forged for readers between the idea and the examples.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridian (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978) pp. 72. 3 Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 114. 4 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia, 1982) pp. 4. 2
6
George Bataille and the Informe Kristeva’s association of base substances with the term ‘abject,’ despite her attempts to avoid doing so, violates a key component of Bataille’s concept: the purely negative nature of its definition. Bataille himself, however, conceptualizes the abject in relation to the real world of social politics. Furthermore, upon defining the abject as the object of exclusion, he seeks to investigate the act of exclusion, and arrives upon anal eroticism as the more general real world correlation, of which excretion is a particular. He clarifies: “by anal eroticism we mean a composite of positive and negative attitudes while the imperative act of exclusion is by definition strictly negative,”5 and so Bataille’s definition begins to resemble the simultaneously alien and intimate relation Foster saw in Kristeva’s definition. The two concur that the abject consists of that which is marginalized, excluded or prohibited, but their definitions also differ substantialyl. While Bataille concedes to incorporate phenomenological references only insofar as they help delineate concepts within his writing, Kristeva references concrete phenomena that exemplify abjection throughout her text. Furthermore, the theoretical contexts into which the writers place abjection differ greatly. Bataille sees the abject specifically in relation to fascism and social politics; it is the state of poverty so incoherent and desolate that characterizes the lowest members of society who cannot even be unified into a class.6 Bataille also proposes that the abject cannot be positively described by enumeration of description, only negatively as objects of the act of exclusion.7 Kristeva, on the other hand, seeks to illustrate a concept she sees as rooted in psychoanalytic theory, and particularly in several concepts postulated by Jacques Lacan. She relates the idea d to concrete phenomena, a tendency that has inspired criticism since, in doing so, Kristeva creates a recognizable group of images, a referential language for abjection, despite the fact that this Georges Bataille, “Abjection and Miserable Forms,” More & Less, Ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Pasadena, CA: Art Center of College and Design, 1999) pp. 12. 6 Georges Bataille, “Abjection and Miserable Forms,” More & Less, Ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Pasadena, CA: Art Center of College and Design, 1999) pp. 10-11. 7 Ibid., pp.11. 5
7
system of concrete associations is in direct contradiction with the notion that abjection is only definable in negative terms, as that which has been excluded. Thus, while Bataille and Kristeva engage the same definitional framework, their conceptions of the abject differ in many respects. Another notion on which Bataille wrote extensively is aligned in many ways with his idea of the abject. The concept of the informe also resists positive definition since it has the characteristic of ambiguity, and it too deals with the anal and base substances, those excluded or rejected from societal norms, and for these reasons the abject and the informe are frequently discussed in tandem. In Formless: A User’s Guide, Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois distill Bataille’s ideas on the informe into four fundamental principals, all characterized by a type of breakdown or undoing. The first defining concept of the informe is pulse, a breakdown in the continuity of space and time. The second pertains to spatial mapping, the degradation of verticality, which recalls our upright stance and the advanced cognition associated with it, back down to horizontality and the brute qualities connected with this primitive state. Third, the disassembly of the stringent hierarchy by which we organize matter, the rules by which we value one object over another, raising up traditionally base substances and tearing down ones that are usually esteemed. Lastly, informe incorporates the concept of entropy, the increasing lack of structural order in a formal system.8 There is, then, some overlap between the abject and the informe. They share a general sense of marginalization, opposition to the normative, the lack of clear order or boundaries. As Krauss points out in her article “Informe without Conclusion,” however, the abject has, largely due to Kristeva, “a thematics of essences and substances, [which] is in the strongest contradiction with the idea of the informe.”9 In other words, by creating a system of associations for the term, Kristeva has turned the abject into a concretely defined language, in opposition to the breakdown of order suggested by the informe. 8 9
Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 105.
8
Politics of a Signifier: Abject and Informe One instance in the history of the abject moment is of particular relevance to the theory upon which was based. Work that directly engaged abject concepts and themes had emerged as early as the mid eighties, and by the mid nineties, confusion and disagreement had arisen within the art world about the theoretical foundations of the abject and the informe. In the winter of 1994, the debate about the abject, the informe, their correlations and their distinctions had become so heated that October magazine held a symposium to detangle the concepts. Six prominent art historians and theorists contributed to the discussion: Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Helen Molesworth. The primary question of the symposium arose from the term “scatterological” that was seen to characterize much of contemporary art. Did the term refer to the subject of the art, or to its structure? In the words of Benjamin Buchloh: “‘scatter’ suggests structure, and points to the informe. ‘Scatological’ involves the subject, and points to the abject.”10 Krauss expressed the firm belief that the informe is purely a structural description or a process, while the abject is a characterization (usually applied to bodily substances) that is founded in Kristeva’s concentration on the physical referent. Thus, depending whether a given work was characterized by lack of organization or grotesqueness of content, it would be aligned with one term or the other. The difficulty with this explanation, of course, is that the informe also engages base subject matter, and the abject involves ambiguity and the breakdown of systematic order as well. The idea that art had to be aligned structurally or in terms of subject matter with one of the terms at all was put into question. Perhaps a third possibility might exist. Judith Butler, a post-structuralist philosopher, wrote extensively on queer theory and feminism as they pertain to the abject. Although I do not discuss her theories in this paper, Butler’s general notion that homosexuality embodies a state of abjection helps to elucidate the third 10 Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier and Helen Molesworth, “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the "Informe" and the Abject.” October, Vol. 67 (Winter 1994), pp. 3.
9
possibility discussed in the symposium. The example of homosexuality as abject could be seen as structural in that it involves differentiation and exclusion on the level of social acceptance. Since the phenomenon takes place in the real world, however, it also occupies the realm of the phenomenological.11 The third option for any given instance of the abject or abject art, therefore, is to identify both structurally and in terms of subject with the informe and abject simultaneously. Ultimately, no true conclusion was reached by the symposium since even the extent to which Bataille would oppose referents or metaphors could not be agreed upon. Both the elasticity and complexity of the two terms in question had been demonstrated. The contributors did agree, however, that the contemporary work that involved the abject and the informe were aligned in their tendency towards transgression and desire to disturb the status quo.
11
Ibid., pp. 5-6.
10
THE MOMENT The concept of abjection, and with it the idea of l’informe, had been trickling through academia for decades when in the early nineties it met with a socio-cultural moment into which it fit perfectly. Though the theoretical concepts had been circulating since George Bataille defined them in the late thirties, it was not until Julia Kristeva re-examined abjection in 1982 with her book Powers of Horror that the concept drew the attention of psychologists, philosophers, art critics, and artists with such fervor that the said intellectuals were deemed “the cult of abjection” by some. It was as though nineties culture had stumbled upon the ideal vehicle by which to express and rebel; abjection was not only accepted but exalted in this moment, raised up as the truth that would burst the mold. Yet there is a sense in which, in their celebration of idealistic rebellion, artists of the nineties were inadvertently conforming to the very symbolic order against which they fought.12 Nonetheless, it was no coincidence that the moment in which the abject grasped hold was already abuzz with strife, itching for expression.
12
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) pp. 3.
11
Eighties and Nineties Culture and Controversies The late eighties and early nineties were not a domestically sound or peaceful time in the United States. The ever-increasing prevalence of drugs and crime, poverty and the emerging AIDS epidemic shook the country and enabled the implementation of conservative politics. This influx of neoconservatives—namely the Reagan and Bush administrations—attempted to prove their own efficiency by diverting public attention towards problems they viewed as more easily solvable. One of the many issues upon which they declared war was the trend of perceived obscenity that had become a pervasive force in American art since the early eighties.13 Indeed the battle between conservatism and the art world over censorship came to be an integral part of the national polemic phenomenon that came to be called the Culture Wars. The obscenity to which they referred stemmed from an increasing social awareness on the part of the public that had thoroughly saturated American art by the end of the eighties. Artists addressed such social and political topics as sexism and the reproductive rights of women, homophobia and the consequent pathologizing of gays and lesbians, the pervasion of racism, the looming threat of the AIDS epidemic, and their disapproval rang loud and clear in the directness with which they treated these topics.14 It was this explicit and confrontational mode of addressing the issues that many found objectionable. In a letter to potential subscribers of his publication, The New Criterion, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer wrote that you should be a regular reader if you feel “angry when you see museums putting on shows that are trivial, vulgar, and politically repulsive.”15 The overt engagement of socio-political topics in art was met with a swift wave of censorship, and it was this reaction, not only in the sense that it was an oppression of artistic expression but also
Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge, 1992) pp. 16. Ibid., pp. 4. 15 As quoted in Monroe E. Price, “Controlling Imagery: The Fight Over Using Art to Change Society,” American Art, Vol. 7, No 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 9. 13 14
12
a diversion from real issues, that made it apparent to artists and art theorists that a revolt was in order. In the war between radical expression and censorship, a few key battles are exemplary of the issues at stake. Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ (see page 11), which depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, was met with hysterical anger when it was exhibited in 1989 with the traveling exhibition “Awards in the Visual Arts.” Republican senator Jesse Helms labeled the work a “sickening, abhorrent, and shocking act by an arrogant blasphemer,” and called particular attention to the fact that the photographer had been granted $15,000 in taxpayer money via the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).16 A similar debate arose surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s traveling retrospective exhibition The Perfect Moment in 1989 (see page 12). Upon discovering the overt homosexual content of the images, the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. cancelled the show, eliciting an uproar from the art world, causing pop artist Lowell Blair Nesbitt to recant a promise to donate $1.5 million to the gallery, and ultimately forcing the director to resign. So heated was the debate that the director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati was later charged with pandering obscenity for agreeing to exhibit Mapplethorpe’s work. The director was subsequently acquitted, but the implications of the occurrence continued to resonate.17
16 Monroe E. Price, “Controlling Imagery: The Fight Over Using Art to Change Society,” American Art, Vol. 7, No 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 10. 17 Ibid.
13
Abject Art In his article Obscene, Abject, Traumatic, written in 1996, Hal Foster hypothesizes the two general directions for abject art, which was at that time contemporary art. He sees these divergent tendencies in alignment with two particular surrealist writers: Georges Bataille, with whom we are familiar, and André Breton. Surrealism, he argues, confronted notions of sublimation and abjection much as eighties and nineties art would do, and like Surrealism, eighties and nineties art would split into two factions. According to Bataille, explains Foster, Breton acted like a kind of juvenile victim, provoking the anger of institutional and paternal law in order to assure itself of its existence. He did not attempt to undo the law, but incur its punishment, thereby assuring order. Foster argues that “this Icarian pose is again assumed by contemporary artists who are almost too eager to talk dirty in the museum, almost too ready to be tweaked by Hilton Kramer or spanked by Jesse Helms.”18 In Breton’s view, however, Bataille was unable to rise above base subject matter, he was, in Foster’s terms, “fixed in perversion or stuck in abjection”19 somehow attempting to elevate these to the level of fine and beautiful art. These, then, are the directions Foster sees for abject art looking forward: “to act dirty with the secret wish to be spanked, or to wallow in shit with the secret faith that the most defiled might reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent.”20 As previously mentioned, abject art often employs or references base matter such as mud and bodily substances to obtain a viscerally disgusting result. Foster goes so far as to call it “the shit movement” and propose that it represents reversal of the move towards civilization, a return of the anal and the olfactory, “a symbolic reversal of the phallic visuality of the erect body as the primary model of traditional painting and sculpture—the human figure as both subject and frame of representation in Western art.”21 For this reason, Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 118. Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 18 19
14
much of the work surrounding the subject was three-dimensional, since the more tactile the object and the more it invades the space of the viewer, the greater the desired repulsion effect. Sculpture also refuses the conceptual verticality of classical two-dimensional art, a verticality that suggests our upright stance and advanced intellect, whose inverse, three-dimensional sculpture, is therefore aligned with lower, more tactile and less conceptual forms. The disgust and exclusion of abjection can also be evoked in twodimensional forms, however. Cindy Sherman uses substances such as those aforementioned, but arranges them and encapsulates them in photographs, Jenny Saville manipulates thick oil paint on the canvas to evoke flesh and fat, and both deal with the idea conceptually through their subject matter.
15
Cindy Sherman One artist for whom the idea of abjection certainly resonated is Cindy Sherman. Laura Mulvey illustrates the first sense in which the concept infiltrates Sherman’s work in the article “Phantasmagoria of the Female Body.” As Sherman’s work progresses over time, argues Mulvey, its focus moves from the exterior façade of the female figure to its interior. In “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Hal Foster describes a parallel progression in Sherman’s work: he describes the cones of vision emanating from both the subject and the object as they view each other in the Lacanian theory of the gaze, the image screen that mediates between these cones, and the way in which Sherman’s images position themselves at different points on the diagram at different times in her career. The final form of abjection in Sherman’s work is what Rosalind Kraus argues is the intentional way in which her photographs employ the informe ideas of horizontality and entropy or disorder to refuse a classical, easily interpreted visual language that operates on the level of superficial objects. In “Phantasmagoria of the Female Body,” Laura Mulvey traces Sherman’s evolution over the ten-year period from 1977 to 1987, a journey, she says, that moves not only through time, but also through space. Over the years, Mulvey proposes, “Sherman dissects the phantasmagoric space conjured up by the female body, from its exteriority to its interiority.”22 Phantasmagoria implies a phenomenon of both an illusory and a shifting nature, and the conception of the female body Mulvey describes is both; illusory in that it is purely conceptual and at times psychological, and shifting in that, as she will explain, it changes drastically over time. Sherman’s work begins as a form of masquerade in which she and the women she represents take on stereotypical personas by employing various visual guises, “glittering veils,” as Rosalind Krauss calls them in
22 Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,” New Left Review, No. 188 (July/August 1991), pp. 139.
16
“Informe without Conclusion.”23 At this point Sherman’s women are purely cosmetic, functioning on the level of the exterior, positioning themselves for viewing and thereby becoming objects in Lacanian terms. As time goes on, however, she steadily begins to refuse this position as the object, until finally the veil is dropped, the outward shell abandoned completely. At this moment, the feminine interior is revealed as a monstrous otherness, a wounded form that is the result of a phantasmatic castration. It is at this point that Sherman’s physical form disappears from her photographs, leaving only a direct confrontation of the wound: “the disgust of sexual detritus, decaying food, vomit, slime, menstrual blood, hair.”24 Sherman’s first series of photographs is the Untitled Film Stills (see page 16), in which the focus is on the female form as what Mulvey terms “the fetish semiotic.” By employing a particular, faintly reminiscent and recognizable version of mise en scène in each image, Sherman recalls a particular style of filmmaking and implies a female persona that corresponds to it. The images are furthermore vertically oriented and clearly readable; they rely on a language of visual cues, signs that cultural experience has given us the fluency to read and which Sherman’s formal choices do not impede. The woman we discover is a fetish object, in Freudian terms an object of sexual fixation that does not further procreation but rather is focused upon for its own sake. Thus by “fetish semiotic” Mulvey means a set of symbols, visual cues, that signify this recognizable female figure upon whom there is much fixation. Mulvey proposes that one could retrospectively see the women in the images as veils already constructed at this early time to shield from view the ugly interior truth, the parts of womanhood not popularized by culture because they are seen as gross.25 Krauss describes the early women thus: “the cosmetic facades that fit over the heroines of the early work like so many glossy carapaces of perfection were organized, like the fetish itself, as a
Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 93. Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,” New Left Review, No. 188 (July/August 1991), pp. 144. 25 Ibid., pp. 143. 23 24
17
monument to Lack, as a cover-up for the fact that the castrated woman’s body is the site of the ‘wound.’”26 Soon, though, the façade of the Film Stills begins to decay and reveal an undesirable, even grotesque, “truth” behind the superficial feminine typology. The original fetish semiotic is replaced by a new set of visual signifiers: the gross substances of Kristeva’s abject. This change begins to manifest in the Untitled series of 1983, the anti-fashion series, which seem to propose, in Mulvey’s words, “the binary opposition to the perfect body of the fashion model is the grotesque, and that the smooth glossy body, polished by photography, is a defense against an anxiety-provoking, uneasy and uncanny body.”27 The body is beginning at this moment to dissolve and reveal the ugly “reality”—a reality symbolized by the typology of the abject— that lies within. In the subsequent years the transformation continues until finally the female exterior form disappears entirely. Reference to the body remains in the form of prosthetics such as false buttocks or breasts (see page 26), but beyond that nothing is left but “the feminine interior as limp, moist, formless.”28 For Mulvey, “these traces represent the end of the road, the secret stuff of bodily fluids that the cosmetic is designed to conceal. The topography of exterior/interior is exhausted.”29 In an image such as Untitled #190 (see cover) from 1989, Sherman presents us with some such grotesque substances. In fact, she presents them in such quantity that they fill the entire surface of the photograph, creating a kind of wall of muck and slime, ready to confront and overwhelm us with disgust. The image contains feces, intestines, mud, worms, and even what appears to be caramel-coated popcorn, marinating together in a kind of monochrome sludge. This, not the recognizable women in the early images, is what exists beneath that superficial veil. Sherman has replaced her own feminine stereotypes with Kristeva’s vocabulary of abject matter, one provocative typology displacing another. Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 93. Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,” New Left Review, No. 188 (July/August 1991), pp. 144. 28 Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 93. 29 Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,” New Left Review, No. 188 (July/August 1991), pp. 144. 26 27
18
In “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Hal Foster illustrates a similar progression in Sherman’s work. He explains how in Lacan’s theory of the gaze, there exists the culturally established cone of vision that extends from the point of the subject outward to the object. This visual cone is the basis for the Renaissance principal of perspectival drawing and the scientific understanding of vision whereby rays of light are focused upon the retina. A cross section of it will produce a perspectivally accurate two-dimensional image. But Lacan proposes a second cone, emerging from the object being viewed and landing on the viewing subject, a proposition that follows from his concept that the subject is constantly under the examination of the object. When the cones are superimposed upon one another, the location of the image cross section becomes what Lacan terms the “screen,” a term whose meaning is slightly unclear. Foster understands the term “to stand for the cultural reserve of which every image is one instance. Call it the conventions of art, the schemata of representation, the codes of visual culture, this screen mediates the object-gaze for the subject.”30 Even more importantly, though, the screen protects the subject from the gaze of the object, allowing it to be tamed and negotiated. Foster’s proposition is that much of abject art, including Sherman’s later work, does not attempt to pacify the gaze by means of this image screen, but allows it to shine through by dissolving the screen and giving shockingly direct access to the object. In her early work, Foster argues, Sherman depicts “the subject under the gaze, the subject-as-picture… her subjects see, of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze.”31 As time progresses, Sherman’s work moves to the image-screen itself and begins to degrade it. Her disaster scenes are “suffused with signifiers of menstrual blood and sexual discharge, vomit and shit, decay and death,” and these images imply not only the internal, the taboo moving outside the figure, but also the “invasion of the subject-as-picture by the object-gaze.”32 In her late work, specifically the civil war and sex pictures, the Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 109. Ibid., 110. 32 Ibid., pp. 112. 30 31
19
subject is not only invaded by the gaze, it is overwhelmed or obliterated by it. Foster even suggests that the degree of immersion and intensity of some of these images allows us to “occupy the impossible third position in the Lacanian diagram, to behold the pulsatile gaze, even to touch the obscene object, without a screen for protection.”33 In addition to the transformations proposed by Mulvey and Foster over the course of Sherman’s career, there are many formal ways in which Sherman aligns her work with the concepts of abjection and the informe. Krauss proposes that Sherman employs procedures of the informe as a way of undermining the fetish’s semiotic, destroying it on the level of form. Firstly she engages the notion of horizontality that is so integral to informe by manipulating elements of the image: the point of view and the format. The elongated format of the centerfold images and the plunging viewpoint of later images serve this function (supplemental image 1). Horizontality undermines the notion of woman-as-fetish because the notion requires two components to function. Firstly, a complete Gestalt: a shape understood by the mind to be whole, unified, and continuous. Secondly, a vertical orientation, since the Gestalt always assumes a vertical orientation in the mental field, mirroring the viewer’s own upright stance. By negating verticality as a signifier, Sherman attacks the fetish semiotic and the conditions of form that enable it.34 Krauss also finds traces of horizontality in Sherman’s Old Master
Portraits (supplemental image 2). In these images, gravity seems to be weighing on the prosthetic devices attached to the sitters, and this gravitational force might be said to represent the implementation of horizontality in the obvious sense that it pulls all things to the horizontal plane of the ground and in so doing, destroys the formal wholes they originally made.35 Sherman’s lighting choices in many images, particularly the centerfolds, further serve to obliterate the gestalt in that the shadows are so pervasive that the outline of the figure is significantly obscured.
Ibid., pp. 113. Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 95. 35 Ibid. 33 34
20
Jenny Saville The U.S. was not the only place in which the themes of the abject resonated. The 1988 exhibition Freeze, organized largely by Damien Hirst, then a second year student at Goldsmiths College of London, was comprised of work from sixteen students at Goldsmiths, including his own. The show identified a group of artists that would later come to be termed the Young British Artists, individuals united not only by their proximity to each other but the nature of their subject matter, which coincides in many ways with abjection. The piece from which the exhibition derived its title, for instance, was Mat Collishaw’s work Bullet Hole, which was a large-scale image, composed of cibachrome mounted on fifteen separate light boxes that together formed the whole, of a gunshot wound to the human scalp in extreme detail. The term “freeze” was appropriated from the exhibition catalogue’s description of the work. Held in an empty Port Authority warehouse at the Surrey Docks in the London Docklands, the show did not receive a large amount of press exposure, perhaps due to its association with the ‘acid house’ London rave scene, but it did attract the attention of prominent art collector and gallery owner Charles Saatchi. Saatchi became Hirst’s main collector as well as the main sponsor for many other YBAs, including one he discovered a few years later: Jenny Saville. Upon graduating from the Glasgow School, Saville was awarded a sixmonth scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where, she has famously stated, she was exposed to “lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in."36 Charles Saatchi purchased Saville’s entire senior show and commissioned works for the following two years. In 1994 she was included in the highly publicized Young British Artists III show at the Saatchi Gallery, which served to make her images ubiquitous in the art world. That year, she also 36
Jenny Saville, Jenny Saville (New York: Rizzoli, 2005).
21
spent many hours observing cosmetic surgery operations in the office of New York plastic surgeon Barry Weintraub, which contributed not only to her knowledge and understanding of human anatomy, but to her understanding of the psychology surrounding the surgeries as well. Saville’s work is composed mainly of large-scale oil portraits that engage the viewer, enveloping them in their size and evoking the visceral sensation of flesh with the painterly quality of the artist’s mark-making. In “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” Michelle Meagher argues that Saville’s paintings, whose subject matter is the “big women” she was initially attracted to in Cincinnati, evoke a particular type of disgust in the viewer, one which forces them to admit and interrogate their own averse reaction, thereby de-mystifying it. The aesthetic of disgust is specifically feminist in the sense that it portrays what women fear most about their own appearance. Western women are conditioned by the media to consider the lean, smooth, tanned female figure of supermodels ideal and any divergence from this model highly undesirable, unappealing, even extremely distressing. Female bodies that diverge so extremely from this ideal, that present in fact it’s precise opposite— pale, sallow, pockmarked, bulging flesh—are therefore a nightmare in the female view of femininity.37 This is the worst possible scenario for the female self-image, and the immediacy with which Saville presents it forces the female viewer to consider the horror of having this appearance as ones own, and then observe this horrified reaction in oneself. Maegher suggests that in a sense Saville’s work is an example of “fat liberation,” a movement that considers the obese and overweight as a marginalized group within society and seeks to elevate their position both in their own esteem and that of the public. In the same way that Judith Butler suggested homosexuality was an abject status in that it was rejected from the acceptance of society, fatness too could be seen as a state of social abjection. “The movement for fat liberation thus shares the strategies of postwar
37 Michelle Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Autumn – Winter 2003), pp. 24.
22
liberation movements, which tended to demystify or pathologize disgust,”38 she explains. By forcing you to address your adverse reaction so directly, you begin to undermine and abolish it via guilt or simple confrontation. Maegher does not simply accept Saville’s work as an attempt to interrogate one’s own disgust in the name of pathologizing it, however. She probes further, investigating the very idea of disgust down to its roots in physiology. She draws upon the work of psychologists Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley to explain how disgust was initially connected to food rejection, a mechanism for avoiding harm to the body. Gagging, cringing, shuddering, or recoiling were reflexes designed for self-preservation. This is no longer necessarily the case, however: “they argue that core disgust—the biological drive to protect the body—has, over time, developed into something more like moral repugnance.”39 Disgust is then a physiological reaction with evolutionary roots, simply developed to refer to social situations. In a different sense though, Maegher cites the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas to explain the notion of “dirt” as some sort of pollution or disruption of order, something misplaced, which we strive to abolish not out of self-preservation but the sheer aesthetic desire for order and conformity.40 Both notions of disgust are applicable to the notion of abjection in that they inherently require rejection of something, be it a harmful pathogen or a socially undesirable contaminant. Saville’s paintings are abject in the sense that they evoke a sense of self-conscious aversion in women, but the blubbery figures are also unappealing in a more general cultural sense; they do not fit into our vocabulary of physical ideals, and this rejection is conducive to the notion of abjection. Furthermore, the paintings are composed in a very painterly way, the surfaces of skin becoming particularly evocative of sallow flesh and fat, which
38
Michelle Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Autumn – Winter 2003), pp. 28. 39 Michelle Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Autumn – Winter 2003), pp. 31. 40 Michelle Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Autumn – Winter 2003), pp. 32.
23
lends them a visceral and almost tactile power similar to that of the substances referenced in other abject works of art. In 1994, Saville participated in the Young British Artists III exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. By this time, she had already completed many of the works with which she would come to be associated. Propped from 1992 (see page 21), for example, depicts an overweight woman perched atop a stool, wearing only a pair of white shoes. The vastness of the painting’s sale—it measures 213.5 x 183 cm—forces the engagement of the viewer, enveloping them and becoming almost environmental, evoking the visceral sensation of flesh throughout its surface by nature of the artist’s markmaking. What is most unsettling about this image is the distortion of the figure’s thighs and the hands that seem to claw at them; not only does Saville not shy away from this area of the figure, she seems to emphasize it by enlarging it in relation to the rest of the form. It is as though Saville aims to exploit the viewer’s disgust by emphasizing the portion of the image that is least comfortable to view. Similarly, Plan (see cover), done in 1993, depicts a nude woman as seen from immediately below, assuming an unflattering degree of foreshortening and a proximity that makes the two-dimensional paint uncomfortably corporeal. Carved out of the paint are contour lines, evoking the preparation for a liposuction operation as well as the altitude of landmasses on a map. Compositionally, the figure takes up the majority of the space, bolstering the effect of imposing corpulence. The image is based on Saville’s own face and figure, as are many of her works. Saville has stated that she uses herself not only because it is convenient that she is constantly available and that it immerses her in the piece, but because it puts her in a position not only of the artist observer, but that of the object of scrutiny as well. This objectified position is frequently occupied by women of the past and present, and she hopes to undermine the division between the two positions by conflating them. The distinction, and more particularly the lack of distinction, between the subject and object in Lacanian terms is precisely Kristeva’s definition of the state of abjection, and the position in which Saville places herself by occupying the position of both 24
the model and the artist simultaneously. Both her interest in the marginalized figure and her desire to conflate the subject-object boundary that traditionally exists between artist and model align Saville’s work with the abject. In an interview with Simon Schama published in a book of her work, Saville expresses her interest in “bodies that emanate a state of inbetweeness,” which informs her decision to paint hermaphrodites and transvestites, who are in a state of gender in-betweeness, as well as carcasses and heads which exist between life and death (see page 21).41 This unsettling ambiguity of form is directly related to the informe, while death and slaughtered carcasses are both grotesque substances that pertain to abjection through our repulsion of them. In Shift, multiple female nudes lay next to each other and melt into each other in a physically impossible way; the ambiguity that results from the disruption of each gestalt is disconcerting to the viewer, as is the expansive wall of undulating flesh that emerges. Saville continues the interest in grafting flesh with Hyphen in which it appears that the figure has two heads stemming from a single torso. In Passage (see page 14), Saville paints a hermaphrodite, so the subject itself occupies a state of gender ambiguity. The model is positioned such that their genitals, that which makes their image contradictory and confusing, are highly apparent, and the paintings are furthermore very painterly and gestural. Like the overweight women, these subjects are rejected or excluded from the esteem of society, unable even to fit neatly into the societal categories of gender, and both their marginalization and ambiguity make them abject.
41
Jenny Saville, Jenny Saville (New York: Rizzoli, 2005).
25
Talking Dirty in the Institution In 1993 four Helena Rubinstein Fellows at the Whitney Museum of Art organized an exhibition that dealt with the issues of censorship and content by presenting the abject as the most shocking concept of all. It had been several years since Kristeva’s Powers of Horror had been published, the idea of abjection had by then been absorbed into the intellectual repertoire, and it was now apparent that abjection presented an ideal pretense under which one could insert a shocking degree of social and psychological explicitness into the gallery context. The exhibition was entitled Abject Art: Repulsion and
Desire in American Art, Selections From the Permanent Collection, and in the introduction to its exhibition catalogue, the organizers made it clear that sticking it to the censorial forces was precisely their goal: “employing methodologies adapted from feminism, queer theory, post-structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, our goal is to talk dirty in the institution and degrade its atmosphere of purity and prudery by foregrounding issues of gender and sexuality in the art exhibited.”42 It is also clear from this introduction that it was the actively oppressive political atmosphere of the late eighties and early nineties that necessitated the presence of such an exhibition. The writers state explicitly that their “project was deemed urgent partly because of a disturbing trajectory of ‘politics’ in America that dates from the time of Daniel Bell’s neo-conservative treatise, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, through the Reagan and Bush administrations, to the quiescent Clinton presidency.”43 The severe disapproval of the government is taken a step further, expressing that the organizers object firstly to the actions taken, but also to the ulterior motives for these actions: “the interrogation of state-funded art during the Republican presidencies helped the government deflect attention away from the
42 Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, Simon Taylor, and Jack Ben-Levi. Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993, pp. 7. 43 Ibid., pp. 7-8.
26
scandalous inequities of supply-side economics.”44 The criticism is quite extreme, reaching a pinnacle of disapproval when the catalog states, somewhat overdramatically, that “verbal attacks on artists… resulted in a climate of fear; with the suppression of free speech, comparisons to Nazi Germany abound.”45 While this is quite clearly an overstatement since few direct comparisons to the Nazi regime came forward in regard to the censorship of art at this time, the notion that the repression of free speech through art is fundamentally wrong and has powerful implications is quite apparent from the statement. In addition to its striking introduction, the exhibition catalog contained four essays written by fellows on sub-topics pertaining to the abject and the art in the exhibition. The first essay, written by Jack Ben-Levi, was entitled “A Sadomasochistic Drama in an Age of Traditional Family Values.” It describes Arshile Gorky’s painting The Artist and His Mother, an image adapted from a family photograph taken by the artist’s father, in which Ben-Levi sees multiple oedipal relations at play. In his analysis, the father’s position behind the lens, and therefore his absence from the image itself and Gorky’s young life, opens the door to issues of sadomasochism, the failure to balance autonomy and dependency, and family values, the attempt to compensate for anxieties about the boundary between one’s public and private life. In that it takes up these Freudian issues, particularly those pertaining to the mother, the image and its surrounding issues are relevant to the subject of abjection. The second essay in the catalog, by Leslie C. Jones, is entitled “Transgressive Femininity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and Seventies.” Jones contends that transgressive femininity, the use of taboo themes pertaining to the female body or psychology, has been restricted to male artists, particularly in the decades indicated by the article’s title. While artists like Claes Oldenberg and Robert Morris were celebrated for using the traditionally feminine themes of sewing and tactile sensation in their soft pieces, female artists that attempted to address or exploit themes of feminism were either criticized or misinterpreted. Eva Hesse’s work was regarded as purely 44 45
Ibid., pp. 8. Ibid.
27
emotional and biographical rather than a commentary on specifically feminist themes. Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures, despite their sometimes explicit nature, were classified as references to nature rather than conditions of sexuality. Most extremely, Jones feels, female artists such as Carolee Schneeman and Lynda Beglis were labeled narcissistic or pornography rather than fine art dealing with serious cultural issues. Transgressive femininity as a means of expression was simply not an option for female artists themselves. Simon Taylor’s “The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art” does not follow any such targeted theme, but rather meanders over a range of topics. He describes how abject art is an attack on systems and order more than being simply a lack of cleanliness; he addresses Cindy Sherman’s recent images and the way they recall horror or slasher films as well as pornography, punishing the spectator for their voyeurism; he analyzes the work of Kiki Smith and her hatred of the privilege mind and intellect tend to take over the rest of the body; finally he describes a kind of masculine abject embodied by Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists, later interpreted by Andy Warhol most specifically in his oxidation paintings. The final essay in the catalog, Craig Hauser’s “I, Abject,” addresses the notion that homosexuality tends to be implicitly linked to psychopathy in film, and investigates the ways in which, given this assumption, gays and lesbians choose to represent themselves. He finds that homosexual filmmakers tend to use stereotypes and symbols of deviance, disease, and psychosis as a tool to label themselves, only to do so in such overt excess that the absurdity of the original association between homosexuality and psychosis becomes apparent. The four essays address particular issues under the broad category of abjection and serve to demonstrate the vast number of themes and controversies to which the term is applicable. The essays also bring to light the fact that the Whitney show did not conceive of abject art as I do in this thesis, as a historical moment, but rather as a conceptual theme that can be appropriated in retrospect to works created decades earlier. In addition to artists such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Mike Kelly, Kiki Smith and others working in the decade leading up to the exhibition, the show included works from much earlier, including Arshile Gorky’s 28
aforementioned painting The Artist and His Mother from circa 1926-1936 and works from the 1950s by Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg. While the Whitney exhibition catalogue, especially its introduction, is representative of one trend in attitude at the time, its ideas were not without criticism, as one might expect given the extremity of their words. A review of the show in Woman’s Art Journal expressed that the organizers’ “youthful enthusiasm for abject art leads to a simplistic and naïve condemnation of all mainstream cultural organizations,” and asks: “does this rebellious naughtiness genuinely effect change, or is it merely once again the pastime of the angry, energetic, and over-privileged young?”46 The negative characterization of the writers certainly seems to imply the reviewer’s opinion.
46
Celia Y. Weisman, “Untitled Review,” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Autumn 1996), pp. 60.
29
CONCLUSION Contradictions A few fundamental issues arise when we take a step back and consider abject art as a tool and symptom of cultural rebellion in this moment. As the criticism of the Whitney show demonstrated, taboo concepts, when handled indelicately, do not serve their intended purpose of highlighting the pitfalls of society, but are instead interpreted as immaturity or extremism. It could also be argued that the rebellion is not actually as transgressive as it fancies itself, since dissidence characterized so much of the culture in the eighties and nineties. In this sense, the movement was in fact fitting in, demonstrating a predictable trend. Even when used with the utmost discretion and originality, however, bringing it into the realm of cultural expression may be inherently contradictory to the notion of abjection. Hal Foster phrases the problem succinctly in The Return of the Real: “if it is opposed to culture, can it be exposed in culture? If it is unconscious, can it be made conscious and remain abject? In other words, can there be a conscientious abjection, or is this all there can be? Can abject art ever escape an instrumental, indeed moralistic, use of the abject?”47 In essence, the use of referents, even in the form of art, seems somehow contradictory to a notion in which concreteness, consciousness, and indeed culture are shunned. This causes abject art to be a mere instrument of demonstration, rather than an actual instance of the phenomenon. The problem is similar to much criticism of Kristeva’s explanation of the term: that the use of exemplary substances is at odds with a critical part of the definition. The status of abject art as a transgression against societal norms is further conflated by one fundamental detail of Kristeva’s analysis. Many critics, including Krauss and Foster, have noted that Kristeva does not discriminate between the action and the status of abjection. Foster explains: “the crucial
47 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996) pp. 156.
30
ambiguity in Kristeva is her slippage between the operation to abject and the condition to be abject.”48 The distinction is crucial in that the two forms have opposite effects on the whole of society and the subject itself. “For Kristeva the operation to abject is fundamental to the maintenance of subject and society alike, while the condition to be abject is corrosive of both formations. Is the abject, then, disruptive of subjective and social orders or somehow foundational of them, a crisis in these orders or somehow a confirmation of them?”49 Whether we take abjection, and abject art, to be disruptive or foundational to society and the subject directly determines whether they achieve their purpose of disrupting these entities, and this distinction pivots upon whether abjection is an action or a status. Although the alliance between abject art and abject theory may be slightly complicated in light of these last reflections, it is undeniable that the concept had a profound impact, in one way or another, on the art and thinking of the eighties and nineties.
48 49
Ibid. Ibid.
31
Artist Statement In the aforementioned article “Informe without Conclusion,” Rosalind Krauss describes the figures in Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills series: “The cosmetic facades that fit over the heroines of the early work like so many glossy carapaces of perfection were organized, like the fetish itself, as a monument to Lack, as a cover-up for the fact that the castrated woman’s body is the site of the ‘wound.’”50 The ideas of lack and femininity are central to my study of abjection, a concept that implies negativity in its very definition: that which has been rejected or excluded. For this reason I wanted to create form out of negative space in my first series, Monument to Lack, the absence of substance coming to represent positive matter, and I have employed corrugated cardboard to do so not only because it is seen as a disposable, lowly regarded material, but because it possesses the brown hue characteristic of so many other base and grotesque substances often referenced in abject art. In creating the forms, I first had to cut into the surface with a blade, and then peel away the paper to reveal the corrugation beneath, so the process was, in a sense, like performing surgery on the skin of the board. The figures in this series, like Sherman’s early ones, are not grotesque themselves but rather somewhat alluring both in the nature of the figures and their poses, a stark contrast to and cover for the abject substances and psychological states lurking beneath. When considering negative space, I was reminded also of Matisse’s cutouts, which I reference loosely in my use of pink construction paper. The saccharine tones provide a binary opposition to the idea of abjection, though the imperfect patchwork-like quality of their application refuses any degree of polish so as not to stray too far from the aesthetic of the abject. The three untitled pieces I have created operate more directly within the realm of abject themes established in large part by Kristeva. These pieces, like the cardboard ones, create form out of negative space; I have carved the contours of the figures into foam, at times using the carved space as line, 50
Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 93.
32
other times as negative background space that allows the relief of the figure to emerge, and other times the positive form of the figure itself becomes the carved silhouetted portion. The figures themselves are furthermore very different than those in the cardboard series in that they are not overtly attractive either in form or pose. One is extremely thin, reflecting an almost Egon Schiele style body aesthetic, another is corpulent, reflecting a type of fertility goddess typology, and the third, while its figure seems to approach normalcy, begins to recede from view and turn in space, refusing the frontal confrontation and scale of the other two figures. I have slathered mud over the destroyed foam surface, creating a rough, crumbling texture conducive to the overall visual themes of dirt and decay, refusing the neatness of the typical canvas. In the “fertility goddess” image, there is even a small amount of red pigment incorporated in the mud, referencing the carnal tone of blood. The mud has been mixed into a slurry consistency and dripped, rubbed, and slathered onto the surface.
33
IMAGES: Cover: Cindy Sherman, Untitled # 190, color photograph, 1989 Jenny Saville, Plan, oil on canvas, 1993 Page 3: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, color photograph, 1987 Page 5: Jenny Saville, Host, oil on canvas, 2000 Page 7: cover of Formless: A User’s Guide by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois Page 9: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, color photograph, 1987 Page 11: Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, cibachrome, 60 x 40 in, 1987 Page 12: Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait with Bullwhip, black and white photograph, 1978 Page 14: Jenny Saville, Passage, oil on canvas, 2004 Page 16: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, black and white photograph, 1978C Cindy Sherman, Untitled, color photograph, 1987 Page 21: Jenny Saville, Torso 2, oil on canvas, 2004 Jenny Saville, Propped, oil on canvas, 1992 Page 26: Cindy Sherman, Untitled # 253, color photograph, 1992 Page 30: Jenny Saville, Branded, oil on canvas, 1992 Page 32: Amy Zurek, Monument to Lack 1, corrugated cardboard, 2011
34
Supplemental Image 1:
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #86, color photograph, 1981 Supplemental Image 2:
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, color photograph, 60 x 44 in, 1990
35
Bibliography Adams, Brooks, Lisa Jardine, Martin Maloney, Normal Rosenthal, and Richard Shone. Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Bataille, Georges. “Abjection and Miserable Forms.” More & Less. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Pasadena, CA: Art Center of College and Design, 1999. Benezra, Neal, and Olga M. Viso. Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century. Washington DC: Hirshhorn Museum, 1999. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Dubin, Steven C. Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions. 1992 Foster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October, Vol. 78 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 106-124. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. Foster, Hal, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier and Helen Molesworth. “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the "Informe" and the Abject.” October, Vol. 67 (Winter 1994), pp. 3-21. Houser, Craig, Leslie C. Jones, Simon Taylor, and Jack Ben-Levi. Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993. Krauss, Rosalind. “Informe without Conclusion”. October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 89-105. Krauss, Rosalind, and Yves-Alain Bois. Formless: A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Kristeva, Julia. “Fetishizing the Abject.” Interview by Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. Jeanine Herman. More & Less. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Pasadena, CA: Art Center of College and Design, 1999. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridian. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. Lotringer, Sylvère. “Les Miserables.” More & Less. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Pasadena, CA: Art Center of College and Design, 1999. Meagher, Michelle. “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust.” Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Autumn – Winter 2003), pp. 23-41. 36
Mulvey, Laura. “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman.” New Left Review, No. 188 (July/August 1991), pp. 137-150. Price, Monroe E. “Controlling Imagery: The Fight Over Using Art to Change Society.” American Art, Vol. 7, No 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 2-13. Saville, Jenny. Jenny Saville. New York: Rizzoli, 2005. Weisman, Celia Y. “Untitled Review” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Autumn 1996), pp. 59-60.
37
