Corporeal Dance/ Leaking body / Full body.
Esther Gauntlett. 2013.
“The word ‘body’, its danger, how easily it gives one the illusory impression of being outside of meaning already, free from the contamination of consciousness / unconsciousness. Insidious return of the natural, of nature. The body does not belong. It is mortal – immortal; it is unreal, imaginary, fragmentary. Patient. In its patience the body is thought already – still just thought.” Maurice Blanchot – The Writing of Disaster (1980. p.45).
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Contents Abstract 3. Methods 3. Literature Reviews 4. Research Journal 8. Introduction 9. On Language 10. Chapter One: Liquid Dress / Pouring Dress. Leaking Body / Absent Body
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Chapter Two: Running Water / Pouring Resin 15. Chapter Three: Abject Dress / Internal Body / Setting Resin Chapter Four: Solid Dress / Snapping Dress. Affect / Movement. Filled Dress / Full Body
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Conclusion 25. Bibliography 26. Image List 28.
Abstract Can we explore human emotion through an experience of synthetic material? This research examines the material world and the anxieties, identities and emotions embedded within it. Corporeal Dance appropriates the notion of an uncontrolled, ‘leaking’ female body that has dominated corporeal discussion in the past, as a means of deconstructing socially inscribed boundaries between the interior and exterior bodies, the subjective mind and the fleshy body, and by extension, the body and dress. This thesis explores female identity through metaphysical aspects of phase changes in synthetic materials, proposing that plastic represents an anxious boundary between the self and other, the natural and the synthetic, the wild and the controlled. The cycle of material movement is utilised to explore the delicate fluctuations between both physical and emotional states. While this project has been guided by the feminist theory of Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva and Margaret Shildrick, it has been greatly informed by a series of personal experiments and projects relating to how this material performs on the body, and how the body reacts to it. In particular, attention has been focused on the relationship between liquid and solidity as they relate to a female, fashioned body. This research calls for a heightened awareness of our affected body, our responses and experiences of our increasingly synthetic world. Key words: Plastic, liquid, subjectivity, female, body, abject, affect, leaking.
Methods The research for this thesis will be primarily literary, looking at works of critical theory along with standard history books on the subject of plastic. My investigation has primarily been driven by Feminist theory, and I will look at the fundamental texts featured in the literature review below, along with journal articles discussing these crucial texts. In addition, as this thesis is so closely linked to my studio project this semester, I plan to reference some experiments conducted and my personal response to them.
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Literature Reviews I have examined the following texts in an investigation of the elements, the female and the synthetic:
Mythologies – Roland Barthes. 1957. This book deals with the benign commodities that exist in Barthes’ 1957 France, and how they act as myths in a secular society. As he wrote, plastic was still moving from its previous position as an adjective describing flexibility, to its current position of a noun described by its own everydayness. The specific location of plastic in this chapter is in an exhibition, slightly removed from its current household existence. Barthes appears to be enthralled by a material; he calls it “stuff of alchemy”; “miraculous” and praises its “quick change artistry” (pp.97), but the chapter does begin to touch on some of the anxiety around imitation and use of such a transformative product. The idea of imitation is presented as a Bourgeois desire (“the first vestimentary postiches date back to the rise of capitalism”) (pp.98), but plastic is presented as somewhat of a game changer. It does not seek to imitate diamonds, silver and feathers (although I’m sure it does quite well), instead acting as a useful “household” substance. Barthes states that it is “the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic”(pp.98). This democratising material spreads beyond the natural forms it seeks to imitate, creating new shapes, structures and objects born out of function rather than aesthetics. The chapter ends in a speculation on the future use of plastic, “the hierarchy of substances will be abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticised, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.” (pp.99). This last sentence reflects an anxiety over the possibility of plastic, the reader left dangling on this idea of the plastic body. The spread of plastics over 50 years later is extraordinary, with them existing in our homes, cars, around our food, as small discs on our eyes and indeed inside of our bodies. The plastic body, only touched on in the last few words, is of great interest to this thesis.
Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter – Gaston Bachelard. 1942 This was the second in five books dealing with the imagining of the elements, published in 1942 and translated in 1982. Bachelard explores the representation of water in reveries, dreams and poetry. He has identified “two sorts of imagination: one that gives life to the formal cause and one that gives life to the material cause- or more succinctly, a formal imagination and a material imagination”(pp.1), and it is the poetic interpretation of a material that is of great interest to this thesis. In reading this book, I have chosen to focus on the sexual and maternal connotations of liquid. In the chapter ‘Clear Water’, Bachelard identifies the swan as an overarching metaphor in dealing with water. Clear water retains a sexual connotation, due to the transparency and reflective nature of it: only in clear water can you see the body of the bather. The swan is then employed as overused but apt metaphor of desire, particularly in its last moments; “The swan song is, then, sexual desire at its culminating point”(pp.37). In Bachelard’s theories on 4.
imagination, there exists a duality necessary for engagement. This death and sex metaphor hints at the tension in the exposure of clear water, but the anxiety over sex and liquid appears to be explored no further than this. In ‘Maternal Water and Feminine Water’, Bachelard presents a Freudian reading of natural water, “Nature is for grown men, Madame Bonaparte states, “an immensely enlarged, eternal mother, projected into infinity”” (pp.115). Water is inextricably linked to milk: it is the first liquid we drink, and this maternal material is constantly replicated in dreams and reveries; “compelling natural waters, river and lake waters even sea waters, to take on a milky appearance and metaphors of milk”. Opacity is not necessary, but ‘milkiness’ is projected through “warm, milky moonlight” on water. Milk is sedative, milky water is calming. The swelling movement of the ocean is maternal in itself, highlighted by the inclusion of a stanza from Mistral, “a time when the sea calms its immeasurable bosom and breathes slowly through all of its breasts” (pp.123). The undeniable maternal nature of the ocean, the calming, nursing, rocking, feeding ocean can be interpreted in a Freudian framework as deeply sexual in itself, although this is not make explicit in Bachelard’s writing.
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection – Julia Kristeva. 1982. Kristeva’s text on Abjection (published in 1982) follows a 1934 essay on the subject, “L’Abjection et les Formes Misérables”, by Georges Bataille in 1934. Kristeva’s text assumes a fundamental distinction between the subject and the object; with the subject representing the self and things we choose to associate ourselves with (identity, beliefs, values etc), and the object, which represents everything else. I have chosen to focus on the initial chapter of this thesis, “Approaching Abjection.” This essay examines the state in which the boundary between these two worlds is confused. In Kristeva’s words, “the abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I.” (pp.1). She proposes that facing this opposition, often a violent one, is an inherently traumatic and disturbing human experience, “it is not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, and rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”(pp.13). Kristeva draws on a similar metaphor employed in Bachelard’s chapter on Maternal and Feminine waters, that of milk, but reads it in a very different way: “Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.” (pp.12). Kristeva’s writing evokes the brute physicality of the sensation of abjection, capturing the involuntary (unconscious) expulsion of that which revolts us. It is the theory of Abject that I propose to use as a theoretical guideline for examining the liquid, plastic and corporeal in this thesis. 5.
Elemental Passions – Luce Irigaray. 1982. This book, first published in 1982 was described by the author in the preface as “fragments from a woman’s voyage as she goes in search of her identity in love.” I am investigating the body that Irigaray constructs in this tale of feminine difference in a relationship. In the foreword, Irigaray proposes that while man is viewed as the “son of God”, and God himself, while woman is seen only as the mother of God’s son, lacking any divinity in herself. Instead, she is defined by her body, for giving birth is the only miracle she performs. Her biology forms her identity, and “lovers fall back into the mother-son relationship”. The book begins with violent imagery and tone, “the ancient womb which bleeds only from the imperceptible pain of nothing, an incrustation of your nothingness in the most innocent part of my flesh, is that not the place of what you take?” (pp.11). Her lover’s tongue is initially viewed as a “blade” between her lips. “Your skin and mine, yes. But mine goes on touching itself indefinitely, from the inside. Secreting a flow which brings the sides together. From which side does that liquid come? One or the other? Both? So which is one and which is other in that production? Neither? Yet it exists. Where does it come from? From both. It flows between. Not held back by a source. The source already rises from the two caressing… Why should the solidity of an erection be more valuable than the fluidity of a flow between two?” (pp.16) The biological body is a sexualised one, and Irigaray attempts to ‘write’ this body throughout the text. The male body is seen as intrusive and aggressive in comparison, although this tone softens throughout the book. Irigaray’s female sexuality is born of the elements, natural, and I believe liquid. This ‘flow’, the secretions, the movement of space and boundary is viscous in the face of the solid erection of a man. In regarding the importance of the elements in the text, Celia Sjoholm (2000) applies a Classical reading, “Elements represent tension, ““fire and water and earth and the boundless height of air,” are created by “destructive strife”: a dispersive force living in all the matter. The elements as “more than one” strive to come together and return to the One of their origin ((Empedocles 1992, 61, frag. 35).” (pp.99). In referring to this strife, a reference to constant change and formation is made. There exists a continuous trouble in defining sexual identity, and any definition will always be fluid in itself – constantly changing. I believe this book to be an affirmation of love, and the metaphors soften as the two lovers continue to interact. Their sexualities are inherently different, this is made constantly clear, but they appear to operate in a complimentary and encouraging way. However, it is Irigaray’s use of the liquid element throughout the book, representing both the feminine and change, that is pertinent to this thesis.
Artificial Materials – Bussi Buhs. 1998. This text details the plastic workshop of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, constructed after a student’s revolt in 1968. The workshop had since been repeatedly and significantly scaled back since, and at the time of this book’s publication in 1998, was facing closure. In this context, I have interpreted the text, which consists of images of student’s artworks and a few essays by professors, as a love letter to the material in a bid to save their workshop. The editors introduction identifies a “conservative professor”, “one who refuses to acknowledge that plastic 6.
is a material equipped with an enormous innovative potential and the outstanding material of the century.” The text praises the infinite versatility of plastic in the face of criticism, and like Barthes, does not touch on the environmental concerns of the material, despite it being published some 40 years later. I have selected this text for its rare exaltation of the material, for there are plenty who dwell on the negative environmental, social and biological repercussions. Plastic is placed in an art context, and only discussed in relation to artistic creation; “In addition, the material quality of the work depends on the course of a chemical reaction, on the course of production (e.g. on polyaddion of durable plastics). It is requested that the artist becomes chemist himself when handling his material: he has to step one floor deeper down into the matter as ever before.” (pp.43) This idea of chemistry echoes of Barthes’ opening statement, and highlights the process of plastic, which is of vital importance to this thesis. The book features an essay by Wolfgang Ullrich entitled “A Sketch of a Resentment”, which opens with a quote from Jean Baudrillard, “Any opposition of natural and synthetic material is mere moralising.” This essay unpicks the attitudes of Schiller, Nietzsche, Hans Sedlmayr as well as Joseph Beuys; “As far as synthetic materials were concerned, this suspicion was mainly supported by their ambience of cleanness.” (pp.51). Plastics threatened material hierarchy and ideas of death and transitoriness.
Plastic: The Making of A Synthetic Century – Stephen Fenichell. 1998. This is perhaps the most ambivalent of all texts I have selected in regard to the topic of material. Fenichell’s book, published in 1998 (so still before the acute awareness of the environmental situation of today) reflects both deep respect and anxiety over the historical, current and speculated presence of plastics in the world. The book opens with a description of a polyethylene fibre used to construct a ‘space tether’, a string reaching from earth into space. This same material is used to construct “grocery and dry cleaning bags”, and allowed the Allies to attach radars to their aircrafts, giving them a great advantage in WWII (pp.2). This opening paragraph perfectly captures the uncertainty of definite opinion on the material. It is magical and benign, useful and destructive, part of us and completely foreign. Fenichell highlights the permanence of the material, which is perhaps its most dangerous quality, “The Rasputin of modern materials, you can break it, chop it, dice it, shred it, burn it and bury it but it stubbornly refuses to die.” (pp.3). The absoluteness of the material is deeply confronting; mythical and immortal or problematic? Fenichell’s text answers: both, something that is difficult to dispute. The issue of imitation is again raised, with the word becoming a “term of derision, signifying anything in contemporary life that is postmodern and grotesque.” (pp.23). Plastic is nostalgic, in the form of Bakelite, vinyl records and celluloid film, futuristic and hopeful in the form of the space tether, upsetting in the form of a McDonald’s polystyrene take away container and life saving in the form of valves, joints and limbs. It is rebellious and submissive. Fenichell’s Plastic is a conflicted history and an education on what we ignore or instinctively judge: “the shiny, stretchy, waterproof, unbreakable, resilient, and undecaying foundation of modern life” (pp.331). All quotes from selected texts unless otherwise specified. 7.
Research Journal can be accessed at: http://garmentobjecting.tumblr.com/ and additional information at: http://partialcastings.tumblr.com/
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Introduction A dance, both a solitary one and a partnership, is a performance. It is an expression of an idea through movement. In a partnered dance, there exists a leader and a follower. Give and take, control, movement, togetherness, and distance manifest themselves in a space. This research considers a material as a dance: the performance of the synthetic. I argue for a means of understanding body through dress, utilising a complete material analysis to communicate identity. This research aims to explore body relations, performance and affect through material. The physical component of this project aims to materialise the concept of leakiness, which is celebrated as a method of establishing agency and subjectivity through the body. I have explored boundaries that have been constructed by patriarchal society to restrict women identifying as whole being, but rather as a series of separate components cast in a language of absence. The feminist theories of Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Margrit Shildrick and Julia Kristeva assert that these boundaries be deconstructed in order to investigate subjective experience. The membrane that separates the fleshy body from the mind, the internal body from its external representation, and the experience of the body in the society it exists in becomes a leaking one, emphasising a refusal to consider one from the other. This thesis draws on the physical construction of a series of “leaking garments” made with polyester resin. These garments materialise the abstract and palpable elements of liquids and their transformation into solid surfaces. The experience of wearing these clothes is considered with reference to the synthetic, to our bodies, to liquid, to solid, and to an unnerving, tense ‘in-between’ state. In this research, I have drawn on Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson’s description of fashion as “a fleshy practice involving the body” (2001, pp. 1-5), and view the act of wearing something as an affective, subjective experience. I propose that bodily liquids can be referenced through plastic and its interplay, though this metaphor is an uneasy one: I am using the synthetic to describe the biological. Synthesis refers to the amalgamation of substances / ideas / energies to create the new. The synthetic material is not entirely different to the synthetic body – a combination of flesh and mind to create a unified state of being.
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On Language Throughout this research, I have used a language to describe texture that I find evocative and emotive. Gaston Bachelard’s writing on the ‘elements’ influences the use of the word element, and I take this to refer to the traditional four elements described in mythology and reverie – water, earth, air and fire. I have extrapolated this into a discussion of states – liquid, solid, gaseous - all owing something of their meanings and interpretations from their corresponding mythological element. “For materialising reverie all liquids are water, all that flows is water – water is the only liquid element” (Bachelard, 1983 p.93). Water is a perfect element, and so from the beginning I am referring to the disturbance of something seemingly pure. The discussion of imagination as opposed to meaning features in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s material meaning owes less to the image than Bachelard’s imagination, though both address the interpretation and affect of things (Sartre 1943, p.620). The meaning of my materials that I derive from my research exists outside of the image, and more in the emotional response. In order to convey this emotional response, I use a language that draws on our image-based imagination of the inside of our bodies, and of our experience of food. I hope to engage my reader with textures and constituencies that they are familiar with, as uncomfortable as they might be. A bowl of thick, gelatinous and chunky soup evokes an image in the same way that a discussion of infected snot might. The language of both is evident in the writing of Bachelard, who refers to the sea as mucus (1983, p.105), and the combination of water and other elements as a pate. Salvador Dali’s 1936 Autumn Cannibalism, discussed in Water and Dreams, depicts body parts melting into soft milk or cheese and consuming themselves with a spoon. Throughout this project, I have substituted polyester resin, which will burn the flesh and attack the lungs, with non-toxic, often edible materials in order to explore the texture of the material on the skin. I find an interchangeable discussion of texture, particularly a highly toxic and synthetic one, as being both bodily and consumable as deeply unsettling, but intrinsically linked. After all, the first food we consume is milk expelled from a mother’s body. The word material is used to describe the polyester resin I work with in the construction and manipulation of garments, and the subsequent resin-soaked fabric that forms the garments made for this project. This research draws on a narrative of construction as well as formal writing. My personal practice has been lead by a form of play with the material and my actions were often determined by unexpected behaviours of the polyester resin. This research presents an examination of a plastic journey through both the analysis of material and bodily imagination, and through personal emotional responses. Finally, in regard to writing on ‘female identity’, I make no claim that there exists a shared female experience. The writing that I have analysed in this research addresses women’s bodies, and is concerned with how to assert a personal identity through biology. Women do of course share a biology, and I have adopted Luce Irigaray’s theory of bodily difference in this research, as she 10.
(2008, p. 77) states “sexuate difference is the most basic and most universal difference. It is also the difference which operates, or ought to operate, each time in the connection between nature and culture.” This project acknowledges the distinction between ‘gender’ (culturally ascribed characteristics) and ‘sex’ (biological functions/ signifiers), recognizing gendered identity as a result of the cultural vernacular. I am concerned with the female body, and public and private conceptions of it. This research considers the body as a tool through which to communicate ideas, and a material as an extension of it.
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“My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven ... and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my comprehension.� 24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception, 1945
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Liquid Dress / Pouring Dress Leaking Body / Absent Body We start with a female body. A female body that has in the past been theorised in relation to the male body, a female body that has been theorised as an other. Luce Irigaray attributes to Freud “Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth” (1985. p.48). She argues that, historically, women have been defined by absence, what they don’t possess, rather than what they do, “the ancient womb which bleeds only from the imperceptible pain of nothing, an incrustation of your nothingness in the most innocent part of my flesh, is that not the place of what you take?” (1985 p.11). Margrit Shildrick refers to a male centric reading of the female bodies as centred on this: “the visual, and by now material, absence of the penis has been taken as the defining factor of femininity. Women are castrated men, their bodies marked by lack, what is hidden is just a hole” (1997, p.43). This is evidenced in Schildrick’s description of a 19th century anatomical plate of a pregnant woman: “to all intents her body is simply a container, contingently filled but essentially empty, and the woman as a person is marked by absence” (1997, p.38). She states, “it is not just that the body is constructed as absence, but that women themselves are ontologically out of order. The leaks and flows of the corpus are… the markers of a far more troubling lack of form: a resistance to closure which threatens disruption ultimately to the whole structuralisation of the Western logos.” (1997, p.43). This structuralisation demands neatness and containment and a separation of a clean, modest female mind from a dirty, leaking body. Corporeal feminism refuses to consider the mind as separate from the flesh, and attempts to build a sexed body, a female body explored through unique workings rather than a language of absence. The word leaking implies some sort of transgression, a form of boundary crossing. It also speaks of flow, and movement. The boundary between mind and body, of flesh and subjectivity is a “leaky” one (Shildrick 1997, p.13), and this is something to be celebrated. The things that affect the body and affect the mind can be a tool to express subjective emotion and experience. In Elemental Passions, Irigaray speaks of flow, embedded in the idea of leaking: “Your skin and mine, yes. But mine goes on touching itself indefinitely, from the inside. Secreting a flow which brings the sides together. From which side does that liquid come? One or the other? Both? So which is one and which is other in that production? Neither? Yet it exists. Where does it come from? From both. It flows between. Not held back by a source. The source already rises from the two caressing… Why should the solidity of an erection be more valuable than the fluidity of a flow between two?” (1992, p.16). Irigaray writes of the body’s workings as liquid, as well as the liquid that they produce. Her flow is a unifying one, linking the internal and external. There exists a metaphorical casting of the sexes as elemental, and her liquid body is celebrated. Female bodies menstruate, lactate and lubricate. These liquids come from the vagina and breasts. These body parts are unique, their actions, functions and overarching processes are unique. They speak of a unique body, one that I refer to as a liquid body that is identified by biological function as opposed to prescribed characteristics. 13.
Gaston Bachelard refers to the liquids of the female body in Water and Dreams. His chapter ‘Maternal Water and Feminine Water’ presents a reading of liquid that draws on gendered projections of the female (nurturing, calming) as much as it examines biological function (lactation). Bachelard uses a Freudian framework to explore female liquid, suggesting all liquid evokes a memory of milk: “Nature is for grown men, Madame Bonaparte states, “an immensely enlarged, eternal mother, projected into infinity”” (1983, p.115), “Water is milk as soon as it is extolled fervently, as soon as the feeling of adoration for the maternity waters is passionate and sincere” (Bachelard 1983, p.118). While acknowledging the male-centric perspective that haunts this material imagination, I propose that a bodily projection on non-bodily liquids (in Bachelard’s example: water) is another form of leaking, another blurred boundary that explores subjectivity through the body. In this research, all liquids are considered in relation to the body, and the boundary between mind / body is extended to mind / body / garment.
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Running Water / Pouring Resin In its unreacted state, polyester resin flows like milk. It runs and seeps, and drips. Catalyst is added, and the material flows for a short time before thickening and solidifying. Polyester resin was selected for its ability to be poured, for its ultimate slippery evasion. The method of application departed from the idea of containment, and instead embraces leaking. White chiffon dunked in baths of liquid resin. Wool injected with setting resin. Leather and viscose filled with poured polyester. The resin would spill, flow and drip, its trajectory undetermined and unpredictable, with polyester flowing, pooling and clinging to itself and the fabric it was housed in / on. It burrows, smudges and spreads. The boundary between cloth / plastic becomes another leaky one. These garments absorb the flowing liquid, and the liquid encases the cloth.
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The liquid body was explored in the studio through the melting of ice cream directly on skin. Flowing, uncontained liquid wrapped itself around my flesh. It followed the lines of a sleeve, of an undergarment. It took the appearance of milk running over breasts, and blood running down thighs. It became both body and cloth. It became both my insides spilling out and a fabric used to cover the ‘hidden’ workings of my body. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, I propose that this dichotomy of action deconstructs the binary opposition of exterior and interior, of flesh and mind, of body and garment.
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Abject Dress / Internal Body / Setting Resin How do we react to a change in the elemental? What happens when the flowing liquid is disturbed? The texture of bodily liquid is rarely homogenous, and its clots, lumps, fats and pus speak as much about visceral flow as running milk. These textures manifest themselves in setting resin. Bachelard states, “Material imagination needs the idea of combination” (1983, p.93). He refers to the mixture of elements as a “marriage” (1983, p.95), with elements taking on gender properties in their combination. “If two matters with feminine tendencies, like water and earth, mingle, well then! One of them becomes slightly masculine in order to dominate its partner” (1983, p.95). Again, Bachelard presents a gendered interpretation of material meaning, writing through male and female sexual experiences, “This reverie, which is born out of working with soft substances (pates), is also necessarily correlated with a special will for power, with the masculine joy of penetrating a substance, feeling the inside of substances, knowing the inside of seeds, conquering the earth intimately, as water conquers earth, rediscovering an elemental force, taking part in the struggle of the elements, participating in a force that dissolves without recourse.” (1983, p.107). The earth is bestowed with a fertile, female persona, open for male exploration and conquering. The sexual act becomes a territorial act, one of a man ‘knowing the inside’ of his prize. Female agency and sexual power is completely disregarded, and again her body is written in terms of absence. The discussion of expelled bodily liquids exists only in terms of excrement, where it is cast as relevant only to children and the mentally ill: “Should children’s enthusiasm for playing with soft substances (pates) astonish us now? Madame Bonaparte recalled the psychoanalytic meaning of such an experience. Following the psychoanalysts who have isolated anal fixations, she reminds us of the interest in their own excrement shown by children and some of the mentally ill.” (Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe (Paris, 1933). p.457) (Bachelard 1983, p.109). It is interesting that in reflecting on early material projects, I employed the term ‘child like’ to describe my personal response or the responses from those who engaged with it. To me, a childlike enjoyment signified a naughty, satisfying pleasure, and in this passage, is one that we are expected to ‘grow out of’, and if we don’t, something is wrong. It is this very distance from body awareness that should be discouraged. The most gendered, male-centric analysis of material meaning that I have encountered in my research comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing on slime in Being and Nothingness. “Take for example that particular quality which we call ‘slimy’. Certainly, for the European adult it signifies a host of human and moral characteristics which can easily be reduced to relations of being. A handshake, a smile, a thought, a feeling can be slimy.” (Sartre 1943, p.625). It is an in-between state: “Nothing testifies more clearly to its ambiguous character as a ‘substance between two states’ than the slowness with which the slimy melts into itself - like the flattening out of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back”. (Sartre 1943, p. 628). Charged with affective meaning, Sartre goes on to further feminise the substance he calls “the death of water” (1943, p.628). “I open my hands. I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at 18.
me. Its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid nor a dynamism like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me. It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking, it lives obscurely under my fingers, and I sense it like a dizziness; it draws me to it as the bottom of a precipice might draw me”. “In a sense it is like the supreme docility of the possessed, the fidelity of a dog who gives himself even when one does not want him any longer”(Sartre 1943, p.629). His slime, unlike a solid (again a female quality described in a language of absence), which is described as predictable and ‘reassuring’, represents an uncontrolled, threatening and disturbing medium. This language becomes more explicit further in the chapter, “The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which “gapes open”. It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution. Conversely woman feels her condition as an appeal precisely because she is “in the form of a hole”… Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis – a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the castration of a man; but this is above all because sex is a hole.” (Sartre 1943, p. 634). It becomes increasingly clear that Sartre is threatened by this behaviour, “Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet feminine revenge which will be symbolised on another level by the quality “sugary”. If I sink in the slimy, I feel that I am going to be lost in it, that is, that I may dissolve in the slime precisely because the slimy is in the process of solidification.” (1943, p.630). This assimilation, this dissolution of boundary between human and material, and in turn of male and female appears to be the most hostile aspect of Sartre’s description. The boundaries constructed by Western, male-dominated thought collapse in the slimy, the slimy becomes the materialisation of the leaky, easily transgressing and dissolving mind / body, body / space boundaries. The most useful analogy of the half liquid / half solid state of disturbed liquid is that of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. In another set of slowly melting boundaries, the fine line between the self, being what we see as ourselves and what we associate ourselves with, and the other, being everything else. The abject sits in the uneasy intersection of these two, a confused boundary of two seemingly separate worlds. She proposes that facing this opposition, often a violent one, is an inherently traumatic and disturbing human experience, “it is not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, and rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”(1982, p.13). This agitation of self/other, subject/object manifests itself in what the body expels, what we seek to distance ourselves from. The border of the internal and external body is a leaky one, and an acknowledgement of the things that we attempt to expel, or distance ourselves from is essential to dissolving a mind/body divide. Kristeva (1982, p.3) states “my body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit.” The vulnerability of this border manifests itself in an overall body vulnerability, which must be acknowledged in order to overcome. Despite its link to horror, the act of expulsion can symbolize some form of re-birth (Wilkinson 2012, p. 124), one that is useful in theorizing a new body identity. The horror possesses a power of destabilization. 19.
My material experimentation revealed an overwhelming interest in the ‘in-between’, abject setting state of polyester resin and its emotional and psychological implications. In this state, it forms thick, snotty goo. Parts of the mixture cling to each other and form beads of solidity floating in a gluggy soup. It looks like snot, like the skin of milk, like the fat sucked out of a body in liposuction. It looks like what you imagine ‘brains’ to be like when you’re a child. There is something so unsettling about this bodily fluid manifesting itself out of plastic, out of a toxic, synthetic mess. Putting my hands inside of this goo was overwhelmingly disturbing. I feel like a surgeon in my gloves, plunging my hands into somebody’s, or perhaps my own, stomach. The resin clung to me; it began to stick the fingers of my gloves together. It gathered momentum as soft strings slipped out of my hands. This experiment was repeated again, with a mixture of cornflour and water created to mimic the texture of setting resin, but removing the need for gloves, allowing full flesh contact. The slime hardened under pressure and yielded softly when it was removed. It felt sickly, pleasurable, and also completely revolting. It was allowed to wrap itself, trap down fine hairs and embedded itself in small crevices and wrinkles. As opposed to the ice cream, these mixtures clung to me. They did not flow or run off me, instead building upon my flesh, extending my body. I materialised the internal in the resin, and embraced dissolution of boundary between the synthetic and the biological, the interior and the exterior, the mind and body, the body and material.
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Solid Dress / Snapping Dress Affect / Movement Filled Dress / Full Body In considering the rise and fall, the subtle and intense movements and manifestations of synthetic liquid, it is important that I address its ‘end’ point. In a day, my polyester resin sets hard. It gathers weight and yields no longer. It is brittle, inflexible and permanent. This liquid has wrapped itself around fabric and frozen it. It has removed drape, fall and flow. It fills a space without a container. It protrudes. The spillage stands on its own. I believe this material investigation to have no concrete form, but rather to engage in a looping narrative of continual flow. Chemistry tells us that a solid is still in a continual state of movement, but it has the ability to set shape without a container. In regard to the body implications of solidity, it is this departure from container that is relevant. In this chapter, I look at the idea of solidity as representing both a harsh boundary and symbol of the patriarchal society that imposes them, and as the idea of a departure from a container, representing a full body. Shildrick discusses gendered body comparisons in her chapter on ‘Fabrica(tions)’ in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997, p. 38), “Where male bodies are all structure and solidity, women’s bodies are dematerialised, and more often represented in terms of surfaces and internal spaces”. She argues body studies depict the “dense unified structure of male musculature and skeletal form, but on the other the smooth surface skin and relative interior emptiness of the female body in which the organs of reproduction appear unsupported. While one suggests the very presence of masculine being in the world, the other is insubstantial. The female body reveals its inner secrets to the anatomical gaze as something quite apart from surface impressions. It is as though the inner and outer body are somehow divided against each other, and there is no ‘whole’ woman to know” (Shildrick 1997, p.38). A full body, while still maintaining its flow and leakiness, departs from the idea of an empty vessel that has dominated gendered body conversations. It sets its own shape, it is not malleable, or pourable. It in itself is a force. This body is not empty, not written in a language of absence, but rather full. It’s is not contained by skin, held in an untenable tense state of escape, of interior and exterior but rather a constant, robust version of flow between the two. The female has been written in a language of seepage that implies a lack of control of the body, and by extension, the self. However, in this project, the body is an active participant in the experience of wearing the leaking garments. The clothes dissolve the boundary of the skin, instead imagining the internal contents of the full body spilling forth through the fabric, and the material dissolving itself back into the flesh. Because the hard resin is only relevant on the body in this research, it is still considered in relation to movement. What is the affect of considering dress in regard to the body? The 22.
subjective corporeal experience is materialised in the performance of wearing the clothes. The ‘container’ dress bounces slowly with the rhythm of movement, its significant weight nestled in between the breasts, while the three ‘dunked’ dresses drag stubbornly along the ground, their nails clinging to a chalkboard as feet kick the hem out in front of them. The sharp edges of past pools of liquid snap at the flesh of the legs and the soft folds of fabric possess pointed corners. The garment is no longer easy, and demands a heightened interaction. You cannot float down a runway in a resin dress, you must engage with it. Fabric no longer streams around the body, but forms some form of solid cage that begs to be ripped open. This solidity, likened with Irigaray’s “solidity of an erection” (1992, p.16), represents a boundary: a harsh edge between woman and dress / body and space / body and society. These binaries are confronted through a final performance of the garments. Three participants were filmed in a large concrete room, and walked, crouched, scratched at, collapsed in, dragged and danced in the three dunked dresses. My material slipped over them, rubbed at their flesh and the performers slipped and wrapped back. Brittle fabric was torn open, flinging small shards of resin around a room. These garment structures, like the structures of the patriarchal world that contains them, were attacked. The fabric was split under stress and ripped, with a powerful body emerging from within. These actions symbolised the rebirth connotations of the abject discussed in the previous chapter. In this piece, the performer engages with her surroundings, and breaks down the boundaries between her body and the garment and the garment and the environment it exists in. Her movements depict a palpitating, angry body, suggesting that this engagement with dress is not an easy one. Through this movement, the cracked resin becomes fluid again. The saturated fabric quickly looses structure and power over the body, opening the gates of leakiness and fluidity. The final action of the dress returns us to the liquidness of the initial poured resin. The narrative of constructing and wearing the garments signifies a loop, a flow of the elements travelling between liquid, setting, solid, and liquid again. These stages, and the movement between them, represent the movement between the internal and external body, corporeal experience and the subjective mind. As liquid dissolves solid, merges with solid, sets hard, cracks and returns to fluidity, so too dissolve the boundaries that have long dominated the discussion of women’s bodies. The female body is both liquid and solid, and charts every territory in between. It is full.
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Conclusion This thesis and accompanying garments refuses to consider dress away from the body. It denies the separation of the fleshy body and the subjective mind, advocating for dissolution of boundaries that have long cast the female body as an incomplete man. Polyester resin was used to construct and manipulate a collection of ‘leaking’ garments, serving as a medium through which to examine elemental change. The flowing liquid, abject setting and solid states of the synthetic replicated a journey through bodily experience and previous, gendered body discourse. My personal material experiments, lead by instinct and play, were explored through and reflected upon within the framework of corporeal feminism and material imagination and meaning. The clothes were explored through the moving, living, agent body, conscious of subjective thought manifesting itself through movement and response. This research appropriates the notion of an uncontrolled, ‘leaking’ female body that has dominated corporeal discussion in the past, as a means of deconstructing socially inscribed boundaries between the interior and exterior bodies, the subjective mind and the fleshy body, and by extension, the body and dress. The idea of fluidity became evident in my investigation of each elemental stage of the project: through pourable liquid, through oozing, setting slime and through the cracking of the hard. The transition from each state, the crossing of each ‘border’ by means of material, action or thought is a fluid motion, and one that is vital for valorising the subjective experience of women. By re-configuring our ‘leakiness’, I write of woman as full and unique, as a whole.
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Irigaray, L. 1992. Elemental Passions. New York: Routledge. Irigaray, L. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. New York: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. 2008. Conversations. London and New York: Continuum. Kestenberg, J. 2008. “Bounded By Our Bodies”. Concordia Journal of Art History Vol. 5. (online). Available: http://cujah.org/past-volumes/volume-v/essay10-volume5/ (accessed 14 May 2013). Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia Press. Kristeva, J. 2003. Intimate Revolt. New York: Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Mirzoeff, N. 1995. Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and The Ideal Figure. New York: Routledge. Sartre, J-P. 1943. Being and Nothingness: an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge. Shildrick, M. 1997. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio) ethics. London: Routledge. Shildrick, M. 1992. ‘Women, bodies and consent’, in Maja Pellikaan – Engel (ed). Against Patriarchal Thinking. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Sjoholm, C. 2009. Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions. Hypatia. Vol. 13 Issue 5. White, R. 1999. “Elemental Passions and the Nature of Love”, Philosophy Today. Vol. 43.1 Wilkison, T. 2012. Uncertain Surrenders. Ph.D Thesis. Perth: Edith Cowan University
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List of Images 1.
Gauntlett, E. 2013. Injecting Coat. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Mixing. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Dripping Shirt. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Leaking Pant. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Ice Cream Body 1. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Ice Cream Body 2. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Setting Resin. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, E. 2013. Corn Flour Slime. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, S. 2013. Ripping Veil. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, S. 2013. Pushing Veil. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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Gauntlett, S. 2013. Finale. [photograph]. Personal Collection.
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