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| ABOUT | PAINTINGS | EXHIBITION | STATEMENT | BIO |
Body as a Site of Social Critique: Introduction 1 Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego” in International Journal of Psychoanalyses, 34 (1953) :13 2 George Bataille, Eroticism, Death and Sensuality, City Lights Publishers, 1986 adopts an escapist position which never offers a remedy to the existing social problems. The search for the body as a whole, that exists outside of language and can act as a means of communication by itself as represented in David’s works, is a diversion that is symptomatic for the contemporary artist in the Armenian context. At last, I will try to connect David’s works to the Armenian social and cultural context and the narratives of the body that exist in the dominant discourses here. However, contextualizing the developments that the inner subject undergoes as elaborated by Lacan, and bringing them into the cultural and social context might pose methodological difficulty. The reason for this is that the Lacanian mirror stage during which the awareness of a bodily fragmentation develops through the encounter with the body’s image as whole in the mirror, refers only to the inner subject. In order to create an argumentative ground for my research and to contextualize the Lacanian notion of the body “in bits and pieces”, I adopt Kaja Silverman’s reading of Lacan where the awareness of the body’s fragmentation does not only happen in a single instant in subject’s life, i. e. during his/her encounter with the mirror where the body in “bits and pieces” experiences its image as a whole. Instead, this encounter of the subject with the image takes place repetitively; it is mediated by the cultural gaze and is always ‘socially ratified’3. The culture constantly shapes an idealized body image which the subject internalizes. However, this identification is often obligatory and 3 Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, London, New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 29 The Body Between Dominant Narratives The 70 years with the communist regime were characterized by stubborn attempts to reconcile this feeble physical body as preserved in the collective memory and necessarily associated with moral and spiritual strength, with the physically strong body of the Soviet person as propagated by the regime`. This 4 Ibid new iconography of the body was constructed by referring to the Spartan motto “healthy soul in healthy body” where the physical strength was the projection of spiritual vigor. However, both narratives were unfriendly to the needs of the body as such. While in the first case dematerialization of the body could be achieved through ignoring the corporeal needs for the sake of a higher spiritual realization, in the second case the body had to be cultivated, trained and constantly instructed. With the rapid industrialization of the country and extended cultivation of otherwise ‘untouched’ lands, a specifically Soviet rhetoric of work emerged, where the body was instrumentalized as a tool which through predetermined set of movements and techniques was to contribute to the construction of communism. Industrial and agricultural machinery were the extension of these almost automated bodily functions. There was only one kind of bodily satisfaction, and that was through labor. The last was aestheticized to a degree that Engelsian motto “Labor beautifies man” became common not only in everyday discourses but was also constantly reasserted through banners that were common for workers’ cafeterias, reading rooms and factory hallways. Within these two opposing but at the same time similar discourses of corporeality (similar in a sense that they both do not give a voice to the body and its needs), a new, post-Soviet discourse on the body and bodily representation emerged which was mainly characterized by the search for the whole. It had to both reject and compromise the previous dominant narratives of the body as preserved in history on the one hand and constructed by the Soviet regime` on the other, in order to define its identity in the face of new social and cultural conditions. These conditions, and especially the independence, which was perceived as a promise for democracy, brought many illusions for the emergence of a new body that would be liberated from the previous constraints of being a mere shell for the soul on the one hand and an instrument for labor on the other. However, already in the late 1990’s it was clear that the promise of democracy was only an illusion and in the face of this disenchantment, a new crisis of bodily identity emerged in the field of representation. Crisis of Identity and Body Image: David Kareyan’s Video Works 5 The most active artistic group was “Act” (1994-1996) that expressed its social message through art demonstrations and public actions. imagery of barbarism” which Armenian art historian and critic Vardan Azatyan describes as sexual-political rituals6. David’s works of this period did not only position themselves visa vise the cultural constructions of the body image as expressed in the dominant cultural discourses, but to the existing social and political situation of the late 1990’s in Armenia as a whole. In the video Dead Democracy (1999) through the repetitive act of rubbing blood onto his upper body, the artist’s body itself becomes a site of pain and violence. However, this pain is a cathartic sacrifice, while the violence is transgression from the accepted social order, which Bataille calls “the profane world” or “world of work”. The self-sacrifice, as expressed through automutilation, is symbolic. It acts as a catharsis from societal diseases and constraints while at the same time it cures the mutilator and vanquishes the feeling of inner powerlessness. Marking the death of democracy or the hope for it by revealing blood on the surface of the body and intensifying its psychological effect through repetition is a result of implicit automutilation. However, the source of blood is not made explicit and the very act of automutilation itself is hidden from the eyes of the beholder. This self-sacrifice is not a destruction of isolation of the subject from the society but a liberation of the victim since the very act of self-sacrifice through autopunition7, acts as a cure from shame and gilt. 6 Vardan Azatyan , “Art Communities, Public Spaces, and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art”, paper presented in the conference “Public Spheres: Contested Monuments, Meanings, Identities, and Spaces” in University of Plymouth, June 21st, Exeter. 7 The term has been widely used in the French criminological discourse in the first half of the 20th century in the context of searching for explanations for the crimes that had no explicit motivation. The term is borrowed from psychoanalytical theories and signifies “self-punishment”. What the automutilator deprives himself from is what becomes useful for his own revelation. Its motives can not be found out from the scientific cause and effect method, neither from desire and culpability but in the conjunction of these two: what is desirable is culpability and what is culpable is desirable. For Battaille, sacrifice is a passage from the profane to the sacred world, i. e. from the individual existence towards the non-existence through subject’s identification with the ideal ego, the Sun, the God, through the striving to join the absolute. However, this act of self-sacrifice provides an ultimate tension and violence but not a resolution. At the same time by distorting the body with blood, the subject refuses to identify with the (de-)ideal body-image imposed by the society. Here blood acts as a protective screen from the cultural gaze as it also is a mediator between the naked body which is more vulnerable to the gaze, and the beholder. However, the subject refuses the gaze not only through this symbolic act of “washing” the body with blood but also by not gazing back at the beholder. He is protected by the medium of video art as well which does not expose the subject to a direct confrontation with the beholder. In Dead Democracy blood acts as an alienating mechanism that refuses the de-idealized bodily identification. According to Lacan, the mirror stage is pre-linguistic, and the subject experiences his body as an image before its social determination. The mirror stage has a function for subject’s coming-into being and after the specular I is constituted through experiencing his body as an image, an alienation of I from this image has to take place8. However, for Kaja Silverman after this first encounter of the subject with the mirror in the imaginary 8 J. Lacan, Ecrites, W. W. Norton & company, 2002, p. 5. order (what Kristeva calls semiotic order), it takes place repeatedly in the symbolic order through subject’s encounter with the cultural gaze. According to Lacan, subject’s identification with the idealized-body image results with narcissistic gratification. But as opposed to this, Silverman does not reject the possibility of disillusionment and rejection to identify with the society’s body-image as a whole: When held by the cultural gaze to an identification with a deidealizing image, the subject often experiences it as an external imposition. At the very least he or she refuses to invest narcissistically in the image, and attempts in all kinds of ways to maintain his or her distance from it 9. This is not alienation in Lacanian terms at the end of the mirror-stage through the “deflection from the specular I into the social I”, but it is the rejection of the “social I” through this refusal to identify with the (de)idealized bodily image. The implicit act of auto-mutilation in David’s work is a manifest refusal to accept the body as a whole as constructed by the society. At the same time the body in blood becomes a metaphor for the society as a whole that ‘killed’ the democracy in Armenia and failed to create a body discourse alternative to the historical and soviet constructions of the body. In Eucharist (2001) an external object, an animal is sacrificed. It is no longer the self-sacrifice we saw in the previous case and it is meant to provide the illusion of the continuity of life by bringing death into such a close proximity to the subject who performed the act of sacrifice. According to Bataille, during a sacrifice the victim dies and the spectator shares in what his death reveals, it is a revelation of continuity though the death of a discontinuous being. In the Call of 9 K. Silverman, ibid., p. 21. Ancestors (2001), the priest who performed the ritualistic sacrifice in Eucharist, internalizes the death of the victim by chewing on its flesh. By this act, he does not only manifest that he is continuous by terminating the continuity of the victim but also that his own death can be overcome first by killing and second, by a carnivorous act of eating the flesh of the victim. If we follow Bataille’s definition of war and violence, we can paraphrase his argument by saying that the only choice human beings have is between war and violence. Since war is the organized violence that transgresses the taboo on killing, it belongs to the profane world while violence is in accord to the sacred world. For Bataille, the act of transgression takes the shape of religious rituals. By rejecting the war David embraces this sacred and religious world where violence is possible through transgression. However, this transgression happens because the ultimate, obsessive aim of the subject is to find the lost wholeness of the body. The awareness that the body is fragmented is painful itself , and within the existing dominant narratives of the body this fragmentatio n is viewed as happening because of the manipulation of the body and its desires by different discourses. However, before this conclusion is arrived at, the subject looks at the society as a mirror in the hope of finding the wholeness of the body. Since the society offers an image of the body as a whole that is not satisfactory for the subject and does not correspond to his own ideal body-image, this body image as a whole constructed by the society, has to be rejected. Nevertheless, the artist refuses to accept fragmentation either since it is also taken as being a work of culture that does not respect bodily desires, and fragments the body by externally ascribing different functions and identities to it (the body’s public appearance has to be different from that of the private body of a person. This way, the body as a social micro-organism is fragmented within different domains). He refuses to accept the symbolic order and searches for the real where a different kind of wholeness of the body exists. The Real is which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element which may be approached but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic 10. Thus, the real, according to Lacan, is neither symbolic, nor imaginary and remains “foreclosed from the analytic experience which is an experience of speech”, “the real is the impossible”. David Kareyan attempts to grasp the real and make it “visible”, and create the possibility of representing it. However, both the unity of the body as imagined by the subject and the graspability of the real are unachievable in the existing symbolic order, therefore, the “paradise” which is the ideal society in this case, can be achieved through only making possible the impossible, bringing the real into the level of the symbolic and abandoning the last. Since the real is “foreclosed from the analytic experience which is an experience of speech”, it can be strived for only in the absence of speech. The only way to regain the wholeness and happiness of the body is to go back to its pre-linguistic existence. In the World Without You (1999) the search for wholeness, which is viewed as something pre-natal and outside of language, is expressed through the metaphorical unification of the subject with the earth. Because of the 10 J. Lacan, Ecrits, p. x. instrumentilazation of the body by culture, it is no longer possible to experience sexual desire and pleasure. Here mud becomes both a metaphor for this primordial existence and the impossibility to go back to it. This absence of language in the World Without You and in most of David’s works of this period creates a mythological aura as any act of speech, any verbal communication would break the atmosphere of ritualistic sacredness. Language is viewed as being something that is necessarily dishonest and the only genuine communication can take place through the body. However, for this to happen, there has to be a necessary oblivion and the body has to forget its history, as the later is always mediated by the language. At the same time the body has to define its borders because the new way of communication, the bodily communication, requires a redefinition of both the subject and the object; there has to be a new separation between the subject and the external world. This new redefinition is possible by embracing the impossibility of desire. The act of tumbling in the mud is a vain attempt to regain the former identity and sexual pleasure, but it is vein because of the absence of the Other.11
In a wor ld in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task – a descent into the foundation of the symbolic construct-amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, close to it down, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression12.
As Hall Foster comments on Kristeva, “in the World where the Other has collapsed Kristeva implies a crisis in the paternal low that underwrites the social
11 Vardan Azatyan, “Art, Body and Society” in David Kareyan, Are t here Visible Things Impossible to Show? CD, David Kareyan, 200212 Kristeva, Powers of horror : an essay on abjection New York : Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 18
order”. 13 All speech is demand: it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed , whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation. 14 However, “in the world where the Other has collapsed”, there is no demand for speech as there is no addressee either. Since language is a demand and it does not provide a satisfaction of bodily needs, it is rejected. But by merely rejecting the language through rejecting the Other, the subject discards desire as well since it is the gap between the need and demand that constitutes it. Conclusion 13 Hall Foster, p. 156 14 Lacan, ibid., p.viii. functions marks his relation as a subject to the signifier”. 15 From this point of view, any search for the whole could be read as an escapist position as it is a way with which subject refuses to participate in the society. It also refuses social identification mechanisms as a whole. Without this active participation, the subject marginalizes him/herself and his/her claims for subverting the existing social order by merely denying it, is a pure negation that encloses the subject into his/her inner imaginary world. For David Kareyan, the “paradise” (the ideal society) which is the real can not be achieved here and now but it is always there and nowhere. The society creates its own image of a body that is meant to resist fragmentation and to seem to be a whole. However, the identification of the marginal subject with this body image is an undesirable and a heteronomous one. Such a subject has two means to deal with this crisis of identification, either to deny the imposed ideal body image and to accept its fragmentation or to create a different ideal of the wholeness of the body. David chose the second. For the body to be re-given a voice, we have to replace the ideal body image created by the society with another idealized body image created by the artist. In this radical act of creating a new society and offering a new body image, particular problems and needs are not addressed. What is outside of the whole, remains marginalized. 15 Lacan, ibid., p. 4 Bibliography Vardan Azatyan, “Art Body and Society” in David Kareyan, Are there Visible Things Impossible to Show? CD, David Kareyan, 2002 George Bataille, Eroticism, Death and Sensuality, City Lights Publishers, 1986 Kristeva, Powers of horror : an essay on abjection New York : Columbia University Press, 1982 Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego” in International Journal of Psychoanalyses, 34 Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, London, New York, Routledge,
________________________________________________________________________________________________________ WRITING Are There Visible Things Impossible to Show? by Eva Khachatryan ART, BODY, AND SOCIETY By Vardan Azatyan
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