Topic 5

The Body

Objective of this lecture: to introduce

theorizing on the body in art

Note: this material was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com, under “Syllabi.” Send all comments to jelkins@artic.edu
 Organization of this lecture
The lecture is a series of 9 concepts, based loosely on the organization of
chapter 4 of my book, The Object Stares Back.

1. Seeing as seeing bodies

2. Distortion and other concepts for figural representation

3.The senses

4. Empathy

5. Inside and outside

6. The skin as the locus of seeing and sensation

7. Two modes of representing the body: “pain” and “metamorphosis”

8. Visual analogy and visual desperation

9. Beauty, ugliness, and monstrosity

 1. Seeing as seeing bodies

I can be argued that vision itself is primarily oriented toward finding

bodies. (Object Stares Back, pp. 125-32; Pictures of the Body, pp. 1-32.)

You look at the world different when there is a body present: the eye’s
motions follow more circumscribed paths. I call this first seeing.

Second seeing is a more scattered, anxious kind of seeing which takes

places when there is no body present; the eyes move from one focus to
the next, restlessly.

Even bodies that are not human, and bodies that are inorganic (eg.,
furniture, buildings) attract metaphoric readings and are understood, often
unconsciously, as analogues to bodies.

In this sense seeing is seeing bodies, or the search for them. Concepts, names,
and works
Some examples:

First seeing
Second seeing
From a Polish book on cosmetics, showing how to apply makeup. The
directions are also like the directions of looking in “first seeing”: smooth,
repetitive, following contours.
An example of second seeing: the eyes scan the fossil surface, landing on
the little blind trilobite, which then becomes an object of sympathy...
 2. Distortion and other concepts for figural
representation
Distortion (from torquere, “to twist”) is a property of living bodies even aside from art and
representation. (Object Stares Back, pp. 132-36.)

Distortion is also a sine qua non of representation itself...

...and so there is a deep harmony between bodies and their representations.

Words to think about kinds of distortions: (Object Stares Back, pp. 135-36):

1, Deformation (from forma, “form” or “beauty”)

2. Distension (from distendere, “to stretch”)
3.Dissolution (from solvere, “to loosen”) Concepts, names,
4. Dissection (from secare, “to cut”) and words
5. Disruption (from rumpere, “to break”)

Distortion
Deformation
Distension
Dissolution
Dissection
Disruption
 3. Thinking about the senses
One of the interests of contemporary theorizing on the body is the problem of other senses:
how are they related to vision? To what degree, and for what reasons, do we continue to
privilege vision (especially in an art school)?

It helps, in thinking about this, to begin by simply listing the senses.

A preliminary list: (The Object Stares Back, pp. 136-37.)

1. Sight (is that one sense?)

2. Touch
3. Smell
4. Hearing
5. Taste
6. Proprioception (different from touch)
7. Balance (a function of the labyrinth
8. Pheromonal sense
9. others? Concepts, names,
and works
The doctrine that the sense are inextricably linked
in perception itself is synesthesia. It’s a fin-de-siècle interest,
proprioception
and it’s also found in some art—eg. Kandinsky.
pheromones
synesthesia
 4. The doctrine of empathy
Empathy (German: Einfühlung) has a technical meaning, different from the
usual English-language meaning. (The Object Stares Back, pp. 137-38.)

It is a doctrine, introduced by the German theorists Robert Vischer and

Theodor Lipps: it means the often unconscious, unavoidable emotional
effect of an artwork.

This is as opposed to sympathy, where your encounter with the person or

artwork is under your control.

Empathy is a useful way to describe the subtle but universal visceral or

bodily effects that artworks can have... they make you feel expansive,
crowded, uncomfortable, thin, swollen, etc. etc.
Concepts, names,
and works

empathy
sympathy
 5. Inside and outside
Another key concept in studies of bodily representation is inside vs.
outside.

In general, the skin has long been the “master trope” of the division
between inside and outside.

In art, representations of the inside are rare, and generally denote paint
and death.

In contemporary practice, however, the skin has become a very diverse

metaphor (it is used, for example, in fiber arts, fashion, and painting), and it
no longer functions as the simple dividing surface it used to be.

In fiber art, for example, skin metaphors vary extremely widely: felt, paper,
rubber, etc., can all function as skin metaphors, and inside and outside are
routinely mixed.

A better word for the uses of the boundary metaphor in current art
is”membrane”: the medical term for the many divisions within the body
that include skin as a special case.

There are many examples of membranes other than skin: fibrous

membranes, fascial sheets... they expand the expressive repertoire for
artists.
 6. Skin as the locus of seeing and sensation

The skin has several properties that make it especially interesting for
contemporary art practices:

1. It is the traditionally visible portion of the body, and yet it has always
been traditionally kept invisible

2. It is the place where sensations are most sharply delineated in space:

i.e., a pain is localized and visible on the skin, but diffuse and invisible
elsewhere on the body

Concepts, names,
and works

inside
outside
membrane
 7. Two principal kinds of bodily representations
All these concepts—empathy, proprioception, distortion—are the
opposites, in much of the history of bodily representation, of another kind
of representation: one that affects you intellectually—makes you think.

An example is Picasso’s portraits of Françoise Gilot, where her head

appears as a flower. That kind of representation doesn’t make you flinch:
you don’t feel it viscerally, but intellectually. (This is aside from the visceral
reaction you might get to its sexism.)

In Pictures of the Body, I divide all bodily representations into these two
large categories, which I call (just because they’re easy to remember) pain
and metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis is names after Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in
which bodily transformations are not painful.
Concepts, names,
and works
Pain is just the extreme case of all “visceral” reactions to
art.
“pain”
They are two fundamental strategies for representing the “metamorphosis”
body in art. Ovid

Examples:
X-Rays are a good
example of a kind of
image that is mostly
“metamorphic”: an X-
Ray metamorphoses the
body into a relatively
painless abstraction.

But the closer you look,

the more you find things
that elicit visceral
(”pain”) reactions:

-- the woman’s breasts

--her cross necklace
--the bubbles in her
stomach
MRI images are another example. Some, like this picture in which all the
“voxels” (3-D pixels) are summed, are very abstract.
If the 45 voxels nearest the surface are represented, and not deeper ones,
then the picture begins to evoke the viscera...
When only 8 voxels are sampled, the face starts to conjure skin more
effectively...
And with 4 voxels the transition is nearly complete from
“metamorphosis” to “pain.”
 8. What happens when the body is not
comprehensible as a body? Visual analogy and visual
desperation
Many kinds of objects can be assimilated to bodily metaphors when they
are taken as analogies to the body. For example, a building is like a standing
figure, etc.) (The Object Stares Back, p. 147).

This kind of seeing, by analogy, helps to make sense of the world in many
cases...

...but it also breaks down when something wholly new presents itself: I
call that state visual desperation.

It happened, for example in the 18th c., with the

new interest in microscopic creatures; and again in the
early 20th c., with the discovery of the Burgess shale Concepts, names,
and creatures like Hallucigenia. and works

analogic seeing
It is a strategy that is closely related to surrealist
visual desperation
experiments.
Leeuwenhoek
Burgess shale
For example:
Hallucigenia
Analogic seeing is a general term for what is commonly called anthropomorphism.

In television nature documentaries, it’s common to anthropomorphize the animals into

human-like characters.

But how similar to a human is this spiny anteater, Zaglossus? Is it really awkward? Shy?
Stupid? Analogic seeing, including anthropomorphism, is irresistible—
When the creatures in question
are phylogenetically distant from
humans, that becomes absurd.

In documentaries of coral reefs a

common “character” is the coral
shrimp, which is said to be
concerned with its hygiene--it is
always “preening.”

A closer look at the bizarre

brushes on its appendages makes
it clear the thinking is only
vaguely analogic.
An example of analogic seeing in inanimate objects: this tiny stalactite and
stalagmite in a cave in Kazakhstan has nothing to do with human life, but it
is nearly irresistible to see it as a “hanging” form, “reaching down” to
another form that “reaches up”...
In the 18th c., amoebae were the objects of special interest,
because they seem to violate all the laws of a body:
--no organs
--no apertures (mouth, anus)
--no symmetry
--no brain
They seem easier to
understand if they
are captured when
—or ducks
they seem like little
bunnies—
But most of the time
they resist analogies,
except visceral ones—
boils, pustules, paddles,
etc.
And there are many kinds
of amoebae that present
different challenges to visual
cognition. This is Filosea, a
mainly round amoeba with
filamentous, anastomosing
pseudopods (= stringlike,
branching and fusing)

How common is visual

desperation in ordinary life?
 9. Beauty, ugliness, monstrosity

A final theme is the difference between beauty, ugliness, and monstrosity.

In the West there is a useful distinction between a gryllus (a monster

comprised of nameable parts, like a centaur or griffin) and a monstrum
(this is my use of that word—to denote a monster comprised of
unnameable parts, like the Blob or an amoeba).

The former is classical, and the latter first appears in Bosch (in smaller
and background figures). The difference is an unusual way of marking the
difference between pre-modern and modern art.

It is echoed in the difference between analytic and synthetic cubism.

Beauty is differently defined at various times and places. Two definitions are especially
appropriate for contemporary art:

1. Beauty is the subject of aesthetic judgment, according to Kant: it is not expressed with
concepts.
2. Beauty is a euphemism for (among many other things) “I don’t really know what to say
about this work,” or “It’s good but maybe superficial,” or “I like it but it’s not very serious.”

Beauty as aesthetic idea, and beauty as euphemism or “place-holder”: two poles of the
beautiful.

In cognitive science, beauty is the attribute of symmetrical bodies; but that is (a) marginal to
the concerns of the art world, (b) possibly culturally relative, and (c) partly contradicted by
studies that show perfect left-right symmetry is displeasing.

The triad beauty-ugliness--monstrosity is part of the Western discourse of racism: it was

employed to make distinctions between acceptable races and unacceptable ones (and
animals). More on this later, when we discuss ideology.
Concepts, names,
and works

beauty:
three definitions
monstrosity
gryllus
(pl. grylli)
monstrum