Lindsey Stamps by AA School

La Petite Mort

Hermès Hanging garments suspended from meat hooks caked in crimson residue. A row of scarlet leather work gloves dipped in resin and hung to cure, giving the distinct impression of a bloody glove captured in a still photo the moment just after death. Extruded furnishings cut from layers of vibrant red foam a dripped with ruby resin. This December Hermès’ flagship store on London’s New Bond Street housed the petit h pop-up shop designed by the local Studio Toogood. Petit h is a one-off couturier inspired by the remnants of patterns cut from leather strewn around the floor of the Hermès Parisian workshop. The temporary interior, sleek and bloodstained, left the cold but clear impression of a Parisian abattoir. The scarlet resin oozing from between the slices of foam stacked to create display cabinets, the meat hooks that red leather work gloves hung from apparently soaked, and the scraps of silk and leather lashed together, not quite matching, like bits from a butchers floor were somehow exquisitely beautiful rather than terrifying in this setting of high fashion. “The desire to see wins out over disgust or fear.”1 Violent, comical and in unusually poor taste given the origins of this particular fashion house, the luxury couturier got its start in France as an equestrian and leather goods manufacturer. Known for good craftsmanship, it seems a fitting correlation to dress the pop-up shop as a factory and give the store staff red leather aprons over stark white work smocks. There is a darkly humorous notion here that must not go unmentioned: Studio 1. Holier, D. Against Architecture. pp. 32

Toogood turned HermĂ¨s into an equestrian butcher shop lending a quality that seems it should fall somewhere outside the realm of beauty, in the realm of the cadaverous. Interestingly, the young staff was evidently trained to deny any such allegations and excuse the coincidence that the sopping red goo, meat hooks, and amputated leftovers lying about had anything to do with an abattoir aesthetic. The original color of HermĂ¨s packaging was this pulsating red, only changed to the current burnt orange when scarlet dye become scarce during the Great War. The shop was stunning. The polished silver hardware repurposed for various items, reflected the icy blue fluorescent lighting, the layering of scraps of red leather, and the crude looking tools set as displays and fixtures about the ground level all seduced the eye into sleek submission. The juxtaposition of stable and slaughterhouse made the analysis of the interior even more acute. When the origin of these products is reintroduced to the disassociated end product there is an almost absurd relationship established based on the offensive unity of the animal to the absurd ways in which their bodies have been abused. We are confronted with a luxury line with origins in horse-riding goods: saddles, bridles, stirrups, and at petit h they are styled like a high end boucherie. This abattoir, like that of Georges Bataille, is flat. Sumptuous to the eye perhaps, the implications of the imagery are so far removed from their meanings that the melodrama is lost. It is a tragic performance not a relationship between animal and carcass. Stark, low, and neon, the occupant is made very conscious of their presence within this space, but the mindfulness also reveals the normality of the shop despite

its cold and distinctive aesthetic. The installation is experienced on our horizontal axis through the cone of vision (horizontality being one of the markings of formlessness)2. There is a mouth-eye connection, to use Batailleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s description of the mouth as relation to consumption; we feast of the visual display of blood drenched pelt scraps around us. The vertical axis experience is also implied, but only as a byproduct of the connection we make to the processes which inspired this installation. The waste, the machine shit, is left to be scraped off the floor, and in petit h is turned into something expensive for our own ingestion and excretion. This suggestion of a chic luxury designer, upcycling left-overs and peddling them in a workshop reminiscent of a slaughterhouse would not always have been acceptable much less aesthetically pleasing. Yet this stylistic morbidity is a mainstay in contemporary photography, painting, performance art, and sculpture and anything considered grotesque beyond the possibility of aesthetic assimilation no longer exists. It is all consumable. Furthermore, it can be asserted that this prevalence goes beyond what Immanuel Kant introduced with the induction of the sublime into the realm of aesthetic discussion. It is no longer only that the macabre can be comprehended as a subliminal experience, but the horrifying in now being enveloped into the realm of beauty. With this induction of death into the territory of attractiveness, what is the difference between the ugly and the beautiful? Has mechanization of the slaughterhouse informed beautyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s appropriation of the grotesque?

2. Bois, Krauss. Formless.

Slaughterhouse “The slaughterhouse emerges from religion insofar as the temples of times past (not to mention the Hindu temples of today) had a dual purpose, being used for both supplication and slaughter.”3 The victims of the “curse” are neither the butchers nor the animals in this Grande Dictionary definition of the slaughterhouse; the victims are in the community, those that take part in or live in proximity of the disgraceful place. In this short entry Bataille does not define a slaughterhouse at all, in fact he suggests a relationship like that of religious guilt and notes the effect of living, being exiled, in the vicinity to death. With the work of Kant, the macabre was brought into the realm of aesthetics under the discussion of the sublime. The relationship between the horror of being on the brink of enveloping the awful object is so thrilling that it draws us in (like the urge to look for bodies as we pass the scene of a car accident); and the nearer we get to the object the more immense we become. After this philosophical revolution and alongside the emergence of technology in modern culture, our relationship to the fearful object has dramatically shifted. We are no longer sure what the distinction is between beautiful and ugly. What were once considered opposite ends of an aesthetic spectrum have collided. The “lugubrious grandeur that characterizes the places where blood flows”, this dismal ambiance, is what we are enamored with. This aesthetic as a style is spreading; but the feeling of fear is displaced and a kind of blasphemous reverence is left in its stead. The proximity 3. Bataille, G. Slaughterhouse, Re Thinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Routledge, London. pp. 22

of death simultaneously brings us closer to and farther away from experiencing it. Having death in our midst, walking around among us, between us, makes his presence less terrible, and yet the closer he comes the farther he gets. You cannot be afraid of what you are familiar with. The grotesque is infiltrating, penetrating farther into the human conscious than it has before, and guised in the name of beauty. Art has always challenged the human understanding of death through its representation. Yet as fundamental as this relationship is, the balance of power is still shifting. The macabre, the gruesome, and the profane have not only penetrated the realm of aesthetics, but the fleshy boundary between the beautiful and everything else has been ruptured. Death has deflowered beauty and morbidity now walks in the realm of the pristine. It is as though the aesthetic spectrum has been bent in half with beauty and ugliness now lying side by side, and the middle point is a lack of aesthetic experience or apathy towards it. Beauty is ravenous, greedy. The ugly has been appropriated to the side of loveliness, to make beauty more appealing. The beautiful objectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to make itself more spectacular in relation to the ugly is a great display of aesthetic value. It has been suggested that beauty and ugliness are truly two different discussions rather than opposing views on the same subject. There is also a differing view-point: beauty and ugliness are merging and becoming ever more in conversation with each other.

Organic Whole | Mechanized Fragment “Mechanization is achieved by a fragmentation of any process and by ordering those fragments in a series.”4 The assembly-line slaughterhouse is both something that can be comprehended, experienced, designed, and built, but it is also something that distances from the act of killing; it protects both butcher and consumer from experiencing the moment of death by fragmenting the process of consumption. “Thanks to this method, the butcher was no longer compelled to drive the hog into a corner to deal it a frontal blow.”5 Fragments, by the definitions of antiquity, are not beautiful. An object must be whole to be beautiful, complete. However antiquarian philosophers also held mathematics in the highest aesthetic esteem, yet assemblylines use mathematical movements to fragment processes. Machinery cuts, fragments, and severs to an unbreakable rhythm.6 The introduction of machines of death can be pinpointed as the catalyst of the great merger of beauty and horror. The Central Slaughterhouse of La Villette opened in Paris in 1867 as the first abattoir to serve a population of millions.7 This marks the beginning of the abrupt development of assembly-line slaughterhouses which quickly moved to the United States where it surpassed any previously conceived notions of production and consumption of meat. Subsequently in the first half of the twentieth century two world wars were fought, revolutionizing and normalizing mechanical killing which had a tremendous impact on the proximity of death to our culture. It is constantly growing 4. McLuhan, M. The Extensions of Man. pp. 12 5. Giedion, S. Mechanization Takes Command. pp. 233 6. Furthermore in this industry livestock is referred to by its severed body part, ‘head’ of cattle, or livestock being moved ‘on the hoof’ rather than as salted cuts in barrels. 7. Giedion, S. Mechanization Takes Command. pp. 209

closer to us and farther from our perception. The impact on human thought was profound as acts that were previously unthinkable became present in the collective consciousness. This familiarity but at a distance allows murder to be commoditized and absorbed by the realm of aesthetics. It is this shift in thinking from which the portrayal of the grotesque as beautiful stems. Carnage is more present in the mind, and the images of formless soldierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bodies become familiar. Killing begins to be discussed as having potential benefits for nations as a catalyst for production. During the Second World War, the United States began recovering from the Great Depression by focusing industrial effort into weapons manufacture, which gave the public a way to become positive about death as a result of war. The macabre images of war with the desire for consumption as a way to overcome obstacles, made room for previously opposed ideas, beauty and ugliness as opposites, to become in dialogue. We are nearer the boundary where we grow so vastly in scale that we experience the death of millions of beasts for consumption and for waste. In Mechanization Takes Command Gideon catalogues for us the evolution of meat manufacture from its Parisian origins to its explosion into inconceivable quantities in the American market. The need to produce a business for profit far exceeded the demand for meat and more disintegrating devices were invented to ship animals to other regions increasing demand and accommodating the swollen production capacity. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The operations of the butcher, slaughtering by handicraft methods, are often so merged into one another as to be difficult to separate. As soon as mass production was

used to turn the live animal is a salable meat, sharp and thorough division into single operations became necessary, as in all mechanization.”8 Is one entity consuming the other or is there a mutual blending? Traditionally, the sublime object is the ravenous carnivore devouring the space around itself and growing ever larger, encroaching on the space of the subject. It may be argued that the limits are very blurred with one object constantly pulling against the bounds of itself, repositioning its own beauty or deformity. In an experience of the sublime, the fearful object is survived by the subject. Here, ugliness is content with itself, but in the populous hunger for absorption, it is the beautiful which is never satiated, ever more vain and consumptive, which begs the question of how lovely it truly is and where the boundary lies, when beauty becomes a wolf in sheep’s skin. It is crucial to address the relationship between the organic and the machined in this series of juxtapositions. Imperfections of nature can be viewed as assets of beauty. A contribution to the gross nature of the machined slaughter, in addition to the quantity of animals turned out, is the “unpredictable contingencies that nature produces to be overcome by mechanical devices”.9 Rather than respecting the beauty of nature and its intricacies they are neutralized in this great equalizer. There is a clash of organic matter and machinery; it is a battle that the animal always loses, being digested for our consumption as though the machine is a mother bird, regurgitating the earthworm as shapeless, vomited food. Nature always has an established relationship with beauty, and the assembly-line digestion of animals is the farthest one can push the rape of the organic. 8. Giedion, S. Mechanization Takes Command. pp.228 9. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command. pp. 232

Formed | Formless “Nothing in and of itself, the formless has only an operational existence: it is a performative, like obscene words, the violence of which derives less from semantics than from the very act of their delivery. The formless is an operation.”10 Meat is formless, or it implies or appears to be. However meat follows all the rules of meat; it is the most magnificent and maniacal definition of formlessness. Bataille’s definition is not a definition at all. His explanation does not give meaning to the term11, but rather stabilizes it: A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.12 Bataille’s informe or formlessness can be interpreted as relating to a lack of formal structure, phenomenologically more than literally, in a subject. There is a lack of identifiability. Meat has been separated from its donor; ground beef for example, 10. Bois, Krauss Formless. pp. 18 11. The formless is essentially indefinable in definition and in characteristic. Here we wish to describe formlessness which acknowledging that any specific definition must be wrong given the nature of the subject. 12. Bataille, G. Formless

has no resemblance to a slow four legged animal, and even has little resemblance to the form it will finally adopt as a meal. Ground beef, is an in-between state that does not identify with anything similar to it, nor where it came from or where it’s going. Meat is the byproduct of an assembly-line slaughterhouse, the mechanical excrement for further digestion. In addition to this declassification, as with spit, the structure of meat is pliable and lacking boundary to differentiate the formless article from the subject interacting with it. In his explanation of the development of slaughterhouse practices Giedion describes the cleansing of both internal and external surfaces of the “defenseless object”13 hung facedown by his hind leg. It becomes impossible to tell where the form begins and ends and where you are in relation to it. Does this formlessness of meat make the product more or less palatable? Bataille’s discussion of formlessness certainly implies a gross quality, something undesirable; there is no craving for formlessness, no hunger for it. However it could be argued that with relation to meat, formlessness makes this substance more palatable. One would never consider walking up to a cow and sinking your teeth into its tough hind-quarters, but a Sunday rump-roast with family is very comforting. This reclassification of meat as food rather than as animal allows for ingestion. Take for example the egg. Billions of eggs are consumed annually, but there is a distinct differentiation between an egg and a chicken. The egg as breakfast food, as hours d’oeuvres, as complete protein, is separated from its origin. The raw egg extracted from its shell has not been completely deformed, as like meat, it still obeys 13. Giedion, S. Mechanization Takes Command. pp. 228-229

all the laws of nature regarding what an egg should be, but we need to separate it far from its origin to make the embryo appetizing, useable. It would be completely condemnable if one where to compliment a dinner-party host on the delicious fetus hours dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;oeuvres. We can only ingest eggs when we disassociate them as food, from what they are as substance. For the egg to be palatable we must ensure that its form is clear, that there is a distinction between its inside and its outside, and there must be a clear boundary between us and it. The formless is offensive because we cannot distinguish it from ourselves; it loses its boundaries and threatens to bleed into us. Machines are created to separate form from animal. They breakdown the construction, remove the classification, and allow for sameness, lack of differentiation. A cow is classified as a four-legged beast, a pig is a hooved animal with a snout, a chicken is a bird with feathers and a beak. Beef is cow, pork is pig, and meat is meat, its categories stripped down untying the demarcations of the animal from the expelled harvest of an assembly-line. The understanding that the formless at one time had form as a living creature, or had its origins with something stable furthers this need for a limit between it and us. More so than we understand meat as a substance, we recognize it as the byproduct of the operation of formlessness, the act carried out on a creature which was at one time definable.

Beauty | Grotesque During the last hundred years two world wars have been fought and the production and consumption of meat products have expanded exponentially, vastly devaluing the loss of life and neutralizing death. We are too easily able to distance ourselves from horror and the fear of our mortality largely due to the mechanization of death and the distance we are granted from the machined formlessness. Being in close proximity to the sublime and losing the sense of outline or demarcation brings about the fear of being overcome. However with the distance we have placed between ourselves and the horrible act or object by way of mechanization, this experience is becoming lost and devalued. What was macabre is absorbed by the beautiful, decadence and lusciousness appropriate the grotesque into a reformed visual feast for the ravenous gaze, and the formless is somehow defined. The fear and fascination with slaughterhouses goes beyond a morbid curiosity or strange attraction to the killing machine. Like the assembly-line, the digestion process is begun for us. There is an attempt to re-assemble, drawing our attention to the process or act of formlessness rather than the end product of meat. However there is no difference between re-construction and de-construction. The re-assembly and presentation of a grotesque mainstay of our culture, the beautification makes the presentation eatable, the fragmented, waxed, and cleansed animal, the formless is reformed into a useable image or product.

Bois, Y., Krauss, R. (1997). Formless: A Userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide. Zone Books, New York. Giedion, S. (1948). Mechanization Takes Command. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York. Hollier, D. (1992). Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. MIT Press, Cambridge. Leach, N. (1997). Re Thinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Slaughterhouse. Routledge Classics, London. Leslie, D., Lovitt, C., Stoekl, A. Georges Bataille. Vision of Excess. Formless. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. McLuhan, M. (2001). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge Classics, London. Studiotoogood.com. 2013. Studio Toogood : HERMĂ&#x2C6;S. [online] Available at: http://www.studiotoogood.com/work/interiors/herm-s- [Accessed: 07 Dec 2013].

La Petite Mort Lindsey Stamps 13 January 2014 Architectural Association