Tag: Sarah Lucas

Language and Embodiment

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Bitch: Language and Embodiment

Sarah Lucas Bitch, 1995

 

What do we make of this sculpture, Bitch? It is a base, if rather humorous, representation of a female body on castors – mobile, accessible – a vacuum packed kipper nailed to its tail end –  two melons for breasts, suspended from a T-shirt.

People often do have a giggle once all the constituting parts and attendant meanings become clear –  despite its degradation, despite the makeshift aspect of it, or the disgust elicited either by the pool of brine that collects underneath the fish’s head, or the violence of the sculpture itself.

What is the joke? Are we having a laugh at the expense of womankind and setting back feminism a few generations? Well humour is an odd state from which to view the world: like pushing a reset button. Humour suspends us in a state of momentary disbelief – of excitement even. We get the joke.

But humour also has a dark underbelly.  Jokes, puns and witticisms are true manifestations of social and intellectual processes/signification because they illustrate collective cultural phenomena, and how infrequently we consider our habituated behaviour as shaping and reinforcing our attitudes towards certain things.

Reflect upon how we experience things. To look upon the object is already to inhabit it through our senses. One can perceive objects in the world relative to their purpose and significance to the lived body’s needs and capacities

The condition of seeing the object as a rigid Other, humorously identifiable through a grotesque sexuality renders it devoid of self. Through it we become disconnected from our common humanity.

By deconstructing the ‘natural’ sexed body through the familiar – food and a table and otherwise objectifying the objectified in the absurd – we are caught up in momentary state of suspension granted to us by humour. We take up the object through the lived experience of our bodies, the phenomenology of the self.

Lucas’ Bitch sculpture is a concrete expression of immutable sexual differences, that are reified by symbols, corrupted words and social practices that perpetuate the myth of the feminine, the truth therein. A word for a female dog, has become, over time, an unforgiving, fixed representation of woman, is firmly entrenched in language, culture and thought. Even representations that try to claw back some power from this derogation cannot redeem the word bitch. Meaning is no longer derived solely from reference to external reality, but is constructed from the relation of the signifier bitch to other signs in the universe of meaning-constitution, including objects that represent the female body, the socio-cultural signification of the female, and the indignities of the body to which the female self is bound: from menstruation as taboo[i] to rape as war crime.[ii]

References and Additional Reading

[i] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

[ii] Catharine MacKinnon , Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)

 

Sarah Lucas
Bitch, 1995

Table, t-shirt, melons, kipper

80.5 x 101.5 x 64 cm
© Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

The Phenomenology of the Breasted Self

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The Phenomenology of the Breasted Self

In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the chest is the centre of our being-in-the-world.[i] The philosopher Iris Marion Young agrees: ‘the chest is importantly the center of a person’s being,’ albeit with a sensibility particular to the nature of breasts  atop these chests.[ii]Women’s chests have breasts: ‘the primary things…this reification of breasts is at the heart of the reification of women.’[iii] Without conscious effort, when one wants to indicate to others who one is, one generally points to oneself at the level of the chest to signify I, not to the head or brain, the ‘seat of consciousness, identity.’[iv] For women, this simple identifying movement is laden with signification.[v]

Breasts, a primary signifier of female bodies, are everywhere. These lumps of variable, vulnerable, multi-functional tissue affect physical movement and subjective and psychic identity. They form the landscape of the everyday, as objects of fascination, desire and even disgust. And yet women’s own accounts of breasts, or the lived experienced of having breasts, as opposed to being a breasted entity generally, do not extend beyond the discourses of medicine and pathology.[vi]

The ‘slit aesthetic’ is a term used by Young (1990) to refer to clothing that is cut and arranged to reveal the erogenous zones of the female body. The slit aesthetic is a sublimated attempt at titillation, a contrast to sexualised images of the female breast that assault the eyes in places where one would not necessarily expect to see them, such as on public transport, offering little in our understanding of what it means to exist within the public body as a breasted individual. The acceptability (in Western countries) of showing cleavage, but never the nipple (considered obscene and classed as a misdemeanour in some countries), indicates the breast to be an active, independent zone of ‘sensitivity and eroticism,’ mediated by ‘patriarchal taboos,’[vii] or instances when the fetishism that permeates the breast ebbs, making it just another signifier of feminine functions, such as breastfeeding.

The ideal breast shape –coaxed by restrictive garments or surgery – is round, full and perky. Aged or lactating breasts hold no interest in Western visual culture, which has laid a claim on the female form by suggesting – from the sculptures of classical antiquity, after the fourth century BCE to the tabloid breasted body – that a woman’s body is an ideal of beauty.[viii] Mary Beard argues that the preponderance of breasts in visual culture is not  incidental. Yalom adds that the breast’s evolution into a symbol of excess and lechery in society has to do with politics and economics, noting that in Asian and South Pacific cultures where the breast has not been sexualised, the bared breast is viewed indifferently.[ix]

Sarah Lucas, Mumum (2012)

Popular expressions that are used to refer to women, such as bitch or ‘tits and ass,’[x] become, involuntarily, central to a sense of self in many capacities: through anxiety, mortification, and in some cases, pride. Breasts are fluid matter: ‘in movement they sway, jiggle, bounce, ripple …’[xi] They are like ectoplasms. Without a supporting garment they would shift and shape in tandem with the body’s movements. In this sense they are not inert matter, and in the social and cultural sense they take up a persona that defies the Cartesian worldview,[xii] a persona characterised by Young as ‘breasted individuals.’[xiii] Breasted is a term usually reserved for describing a jacket, or for identifying birds. Unlike that other sexual marker, the vagina, breasts are easily co-opted and appropriated. Menstruation is a deeply personal and hidden aspect of the feminine lived body,[xiv] so breasts are truly the only visible sign of a girl’s trajectory into womanhood: they are objects of shame, inquiry, exploration and exploitation.[xv] British artist Sarah Lucas’ notion of ‘perviness’, however, celebrates, albeit awkwardly and impishly, the pleasure of the breast through visual and tactile examination in ways that offset the indignity of being qualified as a walking pair of breasts.

Breasts are ‘de trop’ (Sartre’s term),[xvi] the ‘contingency of presence,’ hidden behind clothes and artifices, but never disguised. When these are thrown off, what remains is the ‘pure intuition’ of flesh, what Sartre defines as ‘not only knowledge,’ but the ‘affective apprehension of an absolute contingency[xvii] The ontological contingency of being-in-the-world is reflected in the gap between oneself (or what one thinks one knows) and objects (more a reflection of reality than one is willing to concede). Subjective embodiment is the way humans make sense of the world – it is the channel through which people ‘make space, the object or the instrument exist for us and through which we take them up, as well as to describe the body as the place of this appropriation.’[xviii] However, as Young argues and Lucas demonstrates, when the focus is on the perceived thing (the breast, for instance) and not the relation between the embodied subject and the world, it is easy to miss how this correlation becomes an exchange between, and, for the epistemological subject and the object. Therefore, in phenomenology, ‘bodily organisation’ is governed by affective states, affected, in turn, by the objective world.[xix]

References and Additional Reading

[i] Merleau-Ponty could be described as a philosopher of the body. Whereas Husserl had already addressed embodiment as Leib (intentional living aspects as opposed to the body’s thing-like aspects, or körper), Merleau-Ponty, by drawing out  ‘the un-thought thought’ of Husserl’s work (The Body and the World, p. 27) declared the body as the site of the material and of consciousness. It is the subjective, lived body that is in constant dialogue with the world. Merleau-Ponty calls the lived unity of the mind–body-world system ‘the lived body.’

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945),  Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York,  2012)

[ii] Young, 1980, 1990. Young uses de Beauvoir’s theory of constraint and Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on perception to consider the ways in which women are unable to occupy the spaces they inhabit: they see themselves as objects, not subjects. Young notes that a body’s relationship to space and to objects, according to social and cultural norms, dictates the modalities of movement and of being.

Iris Marion Young develops Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to focus on embodying and occupying gendered spaces, in ‘Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality,’ Human Studies 3:2 (1980), pp. 137-156.

Simone de Beauvoir (1949) The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009),

[iii] Young 1990: 195

Iris Marion Young On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

[iv] Young 1990: 189

[v] Prior to Young’s challenge of the phenomenological body – male by default – de Beauvoir (1949) had posed a challenge of her own, conceptualising the embodied subject through the erotic and how the erotic perceiving body is situated in the world.

[vi] There is a dearth of literature on women’s experience with breasts, Young being one exception. On the other hand, there is a lot of material on vaginas. See Emma L. E. Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

[vii] Young, 1990:196

[viii] Mary Beard reflects on the reason for the sudden appearance of female statues after this date, with the Venus Pudica thought to be an early example. The Greek statue of the Aphrodite of Knidos, popularly known as Venus Pudica, is thought to be the earliest, and is typical in its attempt to conceal the genitalia with the artful placing of the model’s hand.

Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013)

The ancient Greek figure of the single-breasted warrior Amazon (from the Greek a (without) mazos (breast)) was, in contrast, deliberately contrived to be threatening. The Amazons were women ‘who had cut off one breast so they could draw a bow. The remaining breast nursed only female children: male infants were discarded.’

Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014)

[ix] Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Ballantine Books,1998), p. 49

[x] American slang for ‘tits and bums,’ itself British slang for woman. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

<https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/tits_and_ass> [ 20 November 2015]

[xi] Young 1990: 195

[xii] See Susan Bordo (1989) quoted in Young (1990) who argues ‘that 20th century advanced capitalist consumer culture has gone beyond the Cartesian mechanical understanding of the body, to a view of the body as plastic, moldable, completely transformable and controllable according to a variety of possibilities.’ (p.91)

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

[xiii] Young 1990

[xiv] See Iris Marion Young, ‘Menstrual Meditations,’ in On Female Body Experience, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 97-122. Young discusses how female bodies move as a result of the parameters enforced by having breasts.

Young is credited with transforming our understanding of lived phenomenological experiences by grounding this discourse on events and situations specific to female bodies: breasts; pregnancy; menstruation; body positionality and space.

[xv] Young (1990) commented on the absence of women writing about their experiences with breasts (not just the body in general). Writing about breasts tends to focus on medical, health or aesthetic concerns and  breasts are a recurring site for exploring issues around gender, subjectivity, desire and power. But writing about feelings or ideas related to this changing part of the body – on both the physical changes and the function and meaning of breasts – is scarce. One notable exception is a 1979 collection of essays on the body experience of having breasts called Breasts: Women Speak About Their Breasts and Their Lives, edited by Daphna Ayalah and Isaac J. Weinstock (New York: Summit Books).

[xvi] Sartre in Being and Nothingness.

[xvii] Sartre, 1943: 367

[xviii] Merleau-Ponty 1945: 156

[xix] Ibid

Sarah Lucas, Mumum, 2012
not signed or dated
tights, kapok, chair frame
145 x 110 x 90 cm
© Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Violence and the Absurd: The Body in Pieces

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The Body in Pieces: Mangled Language

It could just as well be a dead donkey, for example…Things have broken free from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic, and it seem ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of Things, which cannot be given names.[i]

From the bimbo, to the vampy femme fatale; from bitch and ballbreaker, to spinster and hag –  the stereotypes foisted onto women support the claim that gender informs a system of social expectations, yet suggest that it is often played out at the level of representation of sexual difference.

Sarah Lucas, Five Lists 1991

A series depicting slang words about women, genitalia, bodily excretions and sexuality, Lucas’ lists are not exhaustive compilations of associated ideas, and are far from subtle – they monumentalise a certain crudeness of popular culture. These bald pronouncements may offend, or tickle, certain sensibilities, such is the power of words. Thus Five Lists compels me to address the issues raised by this compendium of puerility, before moving on to Lucas’ worldview, which presents us with a different way of conceptualising sexual difference.

Kristeva (1982), in respect of abjection towards the sign of sexual difference, argues the social processes, sorts and demarcates bodies to render them proper, conforming to, but not exceeding cultural expectations. The excessiveness of things pushes the limit set for the organisation of the body and its processes: bodies become de trop, ‘superfluous, that is to say amorphous and vague, sad.’[ii]

Ranging from the base and the animal to the supernatural, this alphabetised list is not only a colourful compendium of the names of body parts: it also refers to the woman to whom such parts belong. Far from subtle, these slurs monumentalise a certain crudeness of culture, the mangled language that informs sexism. As their centralised, columnar arrangement on the page suggests, the words are central to the way in which women are often spoken about in colloquial speech.

It is a representation of desire, and not an impetus for it. It is a work of classic pervery;[iii] one that moves beyond its own explicitness, wresting the body back from rationalism, and allowing it to wallow in its own immanence. Five Lists reminds us that for an artwork to possess aesthetic value, and to be engaging, does not imply eschewing insalubriousness.  If it offends or shocks in a visceral way, this nausea is what prompts us back into the body.

Sexual difference is really a fundamental difference, as any ascribed to material entities. One can identify with being female or male, as one can with religious views, or what race or ethnic group one belongs to. To a certain degree, these can vary, presenting their own difficulties or set of challenges: I may identify as a woman; I may take up a nationality that is different to the one I was born into; I may convert to a different religion; I can obscure my ethnicity, speak a different language and erase linguistic accents and quirks; I can change my identity as easily as I may change my name. But why is it that I cannot escape the elements that come to signify my sex? Five Lists, clearly a work that addresses embodied looking, raises questions about the experience of the lived body.

The Absurd

‘To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and our body is our anchorage in a world.’[iv]

The objective material body is intentional. That is, at the level of consciousness, it apprehends things. Human embodiment also implies an incarnated mind.[v] The mind (life, soul) is bound to our corporeality, with physiology and materiality framing the set of possibilities that present themselves to us. But as humans are also psychological and cultural beings, the body does not entirely bind existence. Mental and physical processes – mind and body – intertwine or overlap. The body is not an inert mass to be orchestrated and prodded into action, but the ‘living envelope’ of our intentionality as the incarnated subject.[vi] I will examine the nature of this dialogue through the absurd.

‘From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.’[vii] Here, Camus refers to Sartre’s Nausea:  ‘This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.’[viii]

Nausea and the absurd both derive from a mounting feeling of anguish at the discovery that the structures and frameworks of our existence are fragile, and subject to collapse. It is Camus’s claim that an appeal to transcendence is a ‘betrayal’ of the human condition, a condition in which Lucas’ project is entirely situated. Camus, like Sartre, makes the case that despite our awareness of the absurdity of life, the meaninglessness of it is offset by the voluptuous vitality of the physical world and the objects that surround us.

For Sartre, awareness of absurdity is an understanding of a lived relationship to the world and of the ambiguous unity represented by subject/object and mind/body existing across planes of signification rather than mutually-exclusive categories of being.[ix] A collapse of these planes, or a re-direction through a different signification of the thing that is known, is channelled through the absurd, triggered by the experience of nausea, best illustrated by Roquentin’s attempts to identify with objects and glean meaning from them. Nothing has intrinsically been disordered, outwardly all remains the same, yet he is assailed by a mood.

Lucas’ works do something similar. For the reader of Five Lists, nothing has changed, yet they may not be able to see themselves in her words and be either nonplussed, or profoundly troubled by this eye-opening disclosure. Unlike Roquentin, floored by the arbitrary nature of world, Lucas has taken charge, pointed ‘a finger to what is there,’ celebrating the restless sensationalism of the everyday. In this endeavour, Lucas – unlike Descartes who only let back in the world those things which could be proven; unlike a Lacanian philosophy of lack – explores being, not from the start or the end of situations, but as entirely present in the contemporary experience: the ‘ongoing banter. It can trigger something that can be handily applied later on.’[x]

‘all roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word “no”. To “no” there is only one answer and that is “yes.” Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.’ ( Hugo, 1862)[xi]

The possibilities resulting from nihilism create a chasm, a gap – a nothingness according to Heidegger – a meaninglessness according to Camus. This is the absurd, or that with which one has difficulty coming to terms. Grosz, referencing Kristeva, calls this the abject: the ‘what of the body falls away from it while remaining irreducible to the subject/object and inside/outside oppositions,’ being both but resisting identification with either.[xii] Merleau-Ponty asserts sexuality is not a phenomenon to be subsumed into existence,[xiii] in the same way the body cannot be nothing. The body, a model for understanding corporeality,[xiv] is not incontestable, and expresses modalities of being that cannot be qualified ‘in the same manner as the stripes signify an officer’s rank or as a number designates a house. The sign here does not only indicate its signification, but is also inhabited by it; there the sign is what is signifies.’[xv] The words of Five Lists are not meaningless, nor nothing: they are the sign that designates sexual life within a particular ‘current’ of existence that is bounded by the ‘sexual organ.’

References and Additional Reading

[i] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea 1938:180

Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) Nausea (London: Penguin Books, 2000)

[ii] Sartre, 1938, p. 188. De trop is a Sartrean term.

[iii] The lists are not pornographic or gratuitous – conditions Lucas defines as ‘Ordinary Pervery.’ Ordinary Pervery is not Classic Pervery, which is a ‘rare’ condition that the individual must conceal until coming of age. Who are ordinary ‘pervs’? According to Lucas, most people. Classic pervs take pleasure in the undesirably unusual (Lucas, I Scream Daddio, 2015, pp. 132-133).

[iv] Merleau-Ponty, (1945: 144). Being, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, refers to the lived experience of the body through the senses.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945),  Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York,  2012)

[v] From the Latin incarnare, made flesh. The flesh made manifest.

[vi] Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 145

[vii] Camus 1942:20

Albert Camus (1942), ‘Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus,’ in God, ed. T.A. Robinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 317-327. A non-fiction essay on the ethics of suicide – here the absurd is the expression of a fundamental disharmony in our existence.

[viii]  Camus (1942)

[ix] Sartre, (1943:97-119) implies that the gap between a being/person (for-itself) and the world and its objects (in-itself) is another way of experiencing the absurd. The for-itself lacks the ability to come to terms with its own existential ‘nothingness,’ which is why it seeks an affinity with objects: or rather it has the potential for nihilism, or for ‘othering’ the in-itself, and this implies possibility to the facticity of the in-itself. This affinity signals an emotional apprehension of things which Sartre describes as overflowing with a knowledge of the world the for-itself does not possess, for being just ‘is.’

Jean Paul Sartre (1943) Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)

[x] Lucas (2011) speaking to Pauline Daly on how she names her characters – from phrases ‘Out of my past. Overheard in the present.’ (After 2005 Before 2012, p. 50)

[xi] Victor Hugo (1862) Les Misérables (London: Penguin Classics, 1982), p. 1210

[xii] Grosz,( 1994, p. 192). moves away from the sphere of subjective representation, to insist, much like Young (1990), on the female experience of the lived body.

Elizabeth Grosz Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (London: Routledge, 1994)

[xiii] Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 161-164

[xiv] Corporeality as defined in Grosz, 1994.

[xv] Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 161-164

[xvi] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,1982)

Lucas, Sarah Five Lists (1991)

Image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art , New York (MoMA),  licensed through Scala Archives