Metabody 1986

Making Sense Of: Pain (e-book)

"Flesh hooking is the act of suspending the human body from hooks pierced through the skin and flesh of the body. Two primary characteristics of flesh hook suspension stand out as being of particular interest: it is seen, meaning it is performed in various contexts (performance, play, ritual) as some kind of spectacle, and it is done, meaning the physical act is performed and not faked as a product of illusion. In spite of both these concrete aspects of flesh hooking, it is a physical act with illusory implications. Although it has a rich cultural history, flesh hooking seems to exemplify the postmodern, with shifting meanings or, as cultural theorist Peggy Phelan says, “extremely up-in-the-air…impossible to map”. In contemporary cultural logic, the symbols of performance, including the body and its response to pain, are slippery, and few meanings are fixed. In this paper I posit that flesh hook suspension is an apt metaphor for the coexistence of seemingly contradictory impulses, which I attempt to “map” here. The various cultural and historical instances of flesh hooking can be considered through Richard Schechner’s theories of performances and Victor Turner’s liminality and communitas construct. The concept of communitas is useful in understanding ceremonies that include flesh hooking performed by the Mandan and Oglala/Lakota Sioux peoples of North America and the Tamil Hindu kavadi ritual, as well acts of performance art and fetish performance. Witnessing pain in a performance context disorients the conventional spectator/performer relationship, lays bare the invisible contracts of participation, and reflects on the current social order. Owing to the inscrutability and uncertainty of the pain experience, pain in performance problematizes the audience’s position and makes an ethical demand of witnesses. Through the dynamic experience of witnessing pain, the possibility for unexpected shared catharsis becomes attainable. While flesh hooking and Aristotle’s concept of catharsis are both ancient, the contemporary use of flesh hook suspension in performance achieves catharsis through means that are quintessentially postmodern and resistant to categorization. "

This paper explores the relationship between live and virtual bodies in performance and how 'digital doubling' and the morphing of body images can produce an uncanny effect. I apply Freud's theory of the uncanny ('Das Unheimliche') to contemporary performance pieces arguing that the uncanny is an increasingly common occurrence in our digitised world and can be used as a framework for analysing how bodies are reconfigured and re-imagined through performance. Relating to my wider research on gender and the female body in performance, I will consider if the uncanny (with its visual stimuli often including animated dolls and disembodied body parts) is more likely to be provoked by the female body or the body in transition between genders. I will be illustrating these ideas with reference to the Polish performance group SUKA OFF, considering how its integration of morphing techniques via digital video evokes das unheimliche and how the employment of both digital and analog technologies render the bodies of the performers uncanny. The use of Polaroid photos of audience member's faces alongside the images being created and manipulated through digital technologies also complicates the performer/spectator roles. I relate the work of SUKA OFF to the theory of Laura U. Marks and her insights on the relationship between digital and analogue technologies and morphing. The combination of the morphing of body images through digital video technologies and the corruption of the body boundary through blood-letting and piercing in the performance render the live body abject and uncanny. The political potential of these techniques lies in the ability to destabilise traditional gender binaries and to consider a space in between male and female bodies in performance. In its aim to create a 'third gender' in their performances, SUKA OFF explores the liminal zones between male and female bodies and liveness and virtuality.

In this paper, I endeavoured to display the performance of the post human body in the art performances of contemporary artist Arthur Stelarc. The post human body is increasingly becoming the focus of interest in the fields of philosophy, techno-science, art and bio-politics. The term bio-politics took on a central role in the wide interdisciplinary field of the humanities at the beginning of the 21st century. A condensed interpretation of the definition of bio-politics is aimed at health policies and demographics, ecology and questions regarding the future of humanity. Foucault’s bio-politics is one of premonitions of cyborg politics - a very open field. The cyborg is not a subject of Foucault’s bio-politics, but rather, it simulates politics. Because of science, the body becomes immortal, it changes its status into post human. It exceeds all the limits of the human mind in an endless search for change and perfection. The body loses its identity, it becomes a fragmented body as Lacan calls it, and is in the end completely transformed. The metamorphosis that the body goes through has drastically changed since its very creation and original purpose. However, these changes exist exclusively within the frame of radical feminism, art, science and philosophy. When talking about the mechanical body, we imagine a mechanical machine, made from metal or some other alloy, operated by an engine. The mechanical body I am discussing is the product of science and technology, in line with the progress of the contemporary era. Modern medicine is working on uniting the human organism with machines, creating a coded device - more intimate and powerful than anything else in the history of sexuality. Keywords: post human body, performance, bio-politics, identity, mechanical body

2015

In this dialogue with Stahl Stenslie, Stelarc discusses his use of the body as an artistic material. He explains his own experience from the inside his own performance based artworks, disclosing a unique insight into somaesthetical matters representative of bodybased performance art.

This essay aims to study the ways in which artists, including myself, have embodied and expressed our broad relationship with gravity and to understand the influence of gravity on the development of art. To this end, I examine five specific artworks from artists across media, centuries and the globe. This analysis focuses on two aspects of the science underpinning a quantitative understanding of gravity – in physics and neuroscience – while simultaneously finding modes of artistic expression that indicate how man responds to this elusive force. Initially I provide a scientific context for gravity, highlighting how our perception of gravity has shifted from a concept of weight to a scientific definition of force as outlined by Newton. Then I give a brief overview of the current understanding of gravity including Einstein’s theories, followed by an explanation of how the human body senses gravity via the vestibular system. By analysing their work, I examine how each artist has expressed this force in distinctive ways that expose our relationship with gravity. The concepts and artworks include: spatial orientation in landscape painting (The Swing, painting, Jean-Honoré Fragonard); mass and associations with the body (Untitled, sculpture, Alexander Calder); emotional metaphors connected to gravity (The Great Wave, print, Hokusai); weightlessness and abstraction (Some Circles, painting, Kandinsky); and new perceptions of gravity (How the Earth Shakes When I Jump, photograph, Kiessling). Pertinent ideas in art theory related to composition and form that support the development of these works are brought to the fore. Throughout this discourse, I also consider the impact of these ideas on my practice by discussing a selection of my own artworks, including sculpture and installation, alongside the other artists’ work.

The Senses and Society

In microgravity, the astronaut's body is suspended in a void, separated from its surroundings except where measures have been taken to tether it to a surface. The experience of weightlessness can be characterised as ungroundedness-the feeling of being out of touch with surrounding surfaces. This sensation extends to clothing, which is suspended in the space around the body, not anchored to the skin as it is in normogravity. While on Earth, the weight of clothing on skin is a constant reminder of gravitational forces, equally, in space, the absence of the sensation of cloth against skin is a reminder that the body is located in an extraterrestrial environment in which the behaviours and sensations of everyday objects are defamiliarized. This article briefly considers the sensation of weightlessness from the perspective of the relationship between clothes and the body, and proposes ways in which these considerations could inform creative practice in fashion and costume design, and in depictions of the clothed, weightless body.

2007

This paper lays some of the philosophical groundwork for my other writings on the increasingly intimate relations between humans and machines and the impact of this relationship on our sense(s) of self/selves. 'Affecting Bodies' engages with some conceptions of the body in such a way as to welcome this intimacy and the subjective liquifiations it promotes. Dealing with concepts from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and with practices such as Capoeira, body modification and design, this paper provides an argument that bodies understood not in terms of form and function, but rather in terms of their affective capacities, their speeds and slownesses can lead to forms and practices of liberation.