The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust

The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust Tarryn Handcock Abstract Dust engenders a fear of the unseen, an anxiety and horror at the dissolution of matter to a minute scale; it is amorphous, all pervading, and knows no boundaries. Through the inevitable progress of time the body is transformed and reduced to dust as the outer layers are shed as dander. In its smallest form the body is grotesque and undelineated. Our dead return to dust but so too do the living. The skins and cells of our moving, breathing bodies disperse into the world, mingling with foreign matter and waste as we pass through space. Dust forms stagnant veils coating objects of disuse, gathering in corners and floating above our beds. It is an unsettling and permanent presence, marginal and transitional, without site or bounds. This paper explores bodies that are decentralised and in a state of dusty disintegration. It addresses the horror of the body in a state of dissipation by asking: where and when does the body begin? Where may it end? And how might the body's transgressed boundaries offer up possibilities for designing wearable artefacts? Key Words Dust, skin, body, body horror, abject, wearable, artefact, design, creative research practice. ***** 1. Blurring Bodily Boundaries Released in 1543, Vesalius’ illustrated anatomical work De humani corporis fabrica (Fabric of The Human Body) marked a turning point in the way that bodies in European culture were perceived. It was a departure from the understanding of the body that had prevailed from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, when bodies were predominantly considered to grotesquely intermingle with the world. Discharges of bodily fluids like blood, pus, urine, phlegm and sperm, as well as marks on the skin were the only clues to its mysterious working processes.1 The skin came to be understood as the primary bodily boundary, an opaque, cutaneous envelope enclosing and protecting the individual’s essence and organs. By peeling back the skin early anatomists revealed the hidden interior, and the Vesalian system of medicine proceeded to popularize dissection in medical practice and education. In the twenty-first century the question of where, and when, our bodies begin and end has become increasingly complex. Today’s body is one in a line of historical bodies, a product of now well-established medical paradigms and the continuing exploration and representation of bodies across fields. X-rays and 3D The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust 2 __________________________________________________________________ scans bypass the skin of living subjects to reveal our pulsing organs, a concept that would have appeared outlandish to the sixteenth century team of surgeon and anatomical artist. Human body data sets such as The Visible Human Project, launched in 1994 through the U.S. National Library of Medicine, have made the anatomical interior publicly accessible. Users are able to fly through, section, isolate and dissect the body an infinite number of times, rendering it inhabitable and immortal.2 In the rising field of bio-technological art, fore fronted by institutes such as the SymbioticA lab at University of Western Australia, the Tissue Culture & Art Project has brought into question the issue of the body’s duration and location. SymbioticA’s Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have sought to address this and the ethical debate surrounding what may constitute life in their project The Extended Body. This body is a fragmented ‘population’ of cells and tissues that have abandoned a bounded, unified form and identity.3 Disassociated from the bodies that originally hosted them they become an extended body that is technologically sustained as a semi-living biomass. The project offers insight into what may happen as our interior structures venture forth and continue to thrive, sometimes long after the original body is gone. It seems, then, that in a contemporary context the body has once again become entwined with the world. Nano-technology and miniscule particles can pass through our pores, and our shed skins scatter into the world as dust and dander. No longer a containing, Vesalian envelope assured of bodily boundaries, our skins instead offer the potential for bodies to become porous or dissipated, granting access to hidden interiors and extensive futures. 2. The Eternal Grind People made dust whatever they did. Human bodies themselves were dust mills. People made dust when they rubbed their hands together or ground food with their teeth... Out of human bodies came materials that over time would turn to dust: wax from the ears; mucus from the nose; phlegm, saliva, and vomit from the mouth; dandruff from the hair… There was nothing on earth so big that it might not be made small.4 The phrase ‘from dust to dust’ is often used in reference to the lifecycle of bodies. Genesis 3:19 makes clear that in biblical terms this is a ‘return unto the ground,’ a journey undertaken by the dead as they are reabsorbed by the soil - but it’s not only the dead who deteriorate into dust.5 It’s estimated that we each shed seven billion scales of skin every three days, with dead skin constituting up to 90 percent of household dust and over a thousand motes of dust in every cubic inch of air.6 The eternal grind occurs as our living bodies produce, and are reduced, to dust while undergoing processes of being, becoming, and breaking down. Our past 3 Tarryn Handcock __________________________________________________________________ skins, dandruff and hair break free through the mere act of movement, dissipating into the world in a form that Julia Kristeva refers to as ‘the abject’. Elizabeth Grosz notes in Volatile Bodies that these detachable parts of the body: Retain something of the cathexis and value of a body part even when they are separated from the body. There is still something of the subject bound up with them – which is why they are objects of disgust, loathing, and repulsion as well as envy and desire. They remain (peripheral, removable) parts of the body 7 image, magically linked to the body. As the living body breaks down it becomes lodged in skin pores and clothing fibres. It is inhaled and blown afar, collects in corners, and gathers on surfaces of disuse. It comes to incorporate environmental and industrial particles, other bodies, animal bodies and body waste, its components made increasingly microscopic and indistinct with time. Transforming into a substance that is fluid and divisible, the body transgresses boundaries. It comes to be without form and location, capable of inhabiting spaces without detection until a ray of sunlight reveals drifting motes occupying a room, or the passage of time allows thick dusty pelts to form. In 1912 John Ogden exhaustively listed what may be found in the composition of street dust, including fragments of iron and steel from wagon wheels, horseshoes and the nails of shoes; leather from harnesses, chips of wood and stone, shards of gold, silver, and tin; fabrics and strands of various fibre, hair, animal waste, ore, paper, clay, sand, mould, and bacteria.8 This, of course, has changed with time as industry, materials and lifestyles have changed, effectively rendering dusts of different eras and locations with a ‘vintage’ that varies depending on their composite. Dust engenders a fear of the unseen, an anxiety and horror at the dissolution of matter to a minute scale and what unseen horrors it may contain. The qualities of deterioration, transgression, invisible presence, and indistinctness mark dust as a manifest form of body horror. It is amorphous, all pervading, and knows no boundaries. As the inevitable progress of time transforms and reduces the living human body to a dust it is also the fear of mortality that rears its head. In this smallest of forms the human body takes on an abject, marginal, and transitional role. Reduced to dust it is out of place, chaotic, and even potentially threatening.9 Anthropologist Mary Douglas explains that dust, dirt, and other forms of pollution are symbolically loaded with social values and fears. She identifies dust and dirt as signifying a disruption to the order we impose upon our surroundings, as much a product of our preoccupation with lurking microscopic bacteria as it is a fear of moral pollution – thus cleaning becomes an activity that becomes aligned with rituals of purification.10 Joseph Amato’s example of the Industrial Revolution when Reformers were issued with the task of purifying society of the tradition, corruption and filth of the Middle Ages, is apt. The attack The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust 4 __________________________________________________________________ on dirt ‘meant nothing less than whisking aside all impediments that stood in the way of humanity’s potential… a symbiosis of moral and material good, directing humanity toward an entirely new order.’11 Douglas states that the rejection of dirt and waste goes through two stages, the first being an acknowledgment that bits are identifiable as ‘out of place,’ unwanted, and a threat to good order. As with Grosz’s detachable body parts this ephemera is recognized as ‘dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence.’12 The bits and pieces go through processes of disintegration and their identity disappears and origin is obscured. Ambiguous, uncanny and threatening, this is the stage that concerns Julia Kristeva.13 In Powers of Horror, Kristeva discusses her theory of abjection. The abject body is ambiguous and uncontrolled, violating its own and social boundaries. Kristeva explains that body wastes, defilement, refuse and corpses show what one must withstand in order to live: 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—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. 14 As with other forms of body waste, dust is indicative of the abjection of the body and becomes an abject substance in its own right. It resides in a perpetual state of incompleteness, releasing its hold upon the body through a process of slow pulverising. Approaching vanishing point and anonymity it gains the power to swallow up other forms, to deny an origin and an end. The sheen of dust holds an eerie horror that evokes the dry musk of bodies degrading and materials breaking down. It encroaches beyond bounds, erodes and encases, implies lost histories and people fallen, speaks of aging and disuse, and hangs as veils of particles that are collectively united while remaining separately adrift. 3. The Poetics of Dust Vast is the kingdom of dust! Unlike terrestrial kingdoms, it knows no limits. No ocean marks its boundaries. No mountains hem it in. No parallels of latitude and longitude define its boundless areas, nor can the farthermost stars in the infinitudes of space serve other than as a twinkling outpost of a realm as vast as the universe itself. 15 5 Tarryn Handcock __________________________________________________________________ John Ogden’s introduction to The Kingdom of Dust vividly expresses his captivation with dust’s presence. To Ogden and others after him dust has been a source of wonder rather than horror. As much as it is associated with neglect and the body’s breakdown, disease and abjection, dust can also suggest magic and the potential for expansion and transformative change. Steven Connor has also spoken about the precious and magical qualities of dust – the value of gold dust and fine powder of cosmetics, the sprinkling of dust in fairytales that enables magical spectacles to occur, and pollen dust acting as a fertilising medium of regeneration.16 The juxtapositions that occur between its ability to simultaneously evoke magical potential and body horror serve as a timely (and temporal) reminder of fleeting life. It also causes us to consider, as Odgen did, the vastness of the universe and microscopic minutiae. For much of history, dust was the limit of unseen, tiny things for human sight and beyond it laid a realm of imaginative wonder. The Victorians placed great importance in dust because of its capacity to suggest the vastness of imaginative conjecture beyond the mundane, ‘the invisible behind the visible.'17 It is because of this that dust holds potential as an agent of design – it can come to represent a mode of approaching design practice as well as a substance to be engaged with through designed outcomes. In architectural practice there is an established precedent of practice engaging with dust. As far back as the 1860's, John Ruskin took a great interest in dust as a medium expressive of material lifecycles, and as an historical ‘time-stain’ that served as a record of the lifetime of architecture. He believed that it was a denial of history to remove dust from building facades, a critical comment on emerging forms of restoration that were championed by prominent Venetian conservator Camillo Boito at the time. Boito declared time-stains to be ‘extrinsic filth,’ and encouraged a series of cleaning campaigns to remove marks from buildings. Ruskin’s ideas have, however, endured and become critical to the development of contemporary experimental conservation practices.18 Conservator Jorge OteroPailos has used Ruskin’s The Ethics of Dust as the inspiration behind his series of projects of the same name. By removing the pollution and dust deposited on buildings he explores the preoccupation of cleaning architecture.19 Sheets of latex are laid over surfaces of the building to capture the form of the architecture and preserve the patterns of dust and grime as they come away from the facade; these are then exhibited. Otero-Pailos’ work is an excellent example of contemporary creative practice that embraces the qualities of dust to engage with issues of temporality, preservation, preciousness and decay. These themes are germane to conservation as a field but the work itself crosses into fine art and the public realm, catalysing discussions in a wider forum. This cross-disciplinary creative approach holds a great potential to be translated from the spatial and monumental to the scale of the wearable and the artefact. In the realm of wearable dust holds the ability to act as an agent of design thinking and practice. The wearable is a cross-disciplinary The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust 6 __________________________________________________________________ artefact, differing from objects like ‘jewellery’ and ‘garments’ that are produced with embedded field-centric paradigms. Wearables are artefacts that require a body context to situate and contextualise them. They can be borne, worn, embedded, carried, or even contain the body; they may take the form of an object, be the result of a process, or even be a substance; they can be temporal or enduring, in brief contact with the body or in a prolonged, trusting relationship with it. As a result, the wearable offers a way of approaching design that immediately suggests the body as a departure point for designing, rather than the body as a secondary consideration. This is in response to jeweller and academic Susan Cohn’s concept of the ‘canvas fallacy’: The ‘still-life abstraction of the body, including the isolation of body zones, serves as a background to jewellery ideas. Together, these parameters for practice (which I henceforth refer to as the ‘canvas fallacy’) discourage attention to the living body. This inhibits contemporary jewellers from exploiting the potentials for a body to be encircled and otherwise adorned, and deflects thinking about what this might mean in terms that go beyond the jeweller’s interest.20 While Cohn goes on to discuss the concept in terms of jewellery, this is an issue prevalent in many body-based design practices. Rather than continuing to design static pieces for the still-life 'canvas' that Cohn identifies, the body should instead be approached as a living, temporal and changeable site for design with any number of 'potentials'. The wearable may activate theses by encompassing or encircling, or being implanted, applied or extensive of the body. The wearable offers a mode of practice that embraces flexibility, hybridity and collaborative operation across fields. In this context dust offers a conceptual platform to approach the body as a site, not of horror, but of continually evolving new forms and surfaces. Our deepest fears and desires take expression through the body and the systems of control exercised upon and through it. Through social systems, rituals and worn adornment, bodies are subject to practices that mirror public, personal, and private concerns. Temporal and changeable, the body exists in states of being, becoming and breaking down. The transformative nature of skin in particular betrays embedded histories, social issues, and fleeting states of being. Incorporated into domestic dust, skin cells are no longer recognisable or responsive. Mary Douglas observes that while dirt is created by the ‘differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order.’ She poses that the formlessness of dust can become a symbol of beginning and of growth as much as it is a symbol of decay in this cycle of disintegration.21 Dust can thus be seen as a product of the body in a state of transformation, breaking free of its boundaries. Qualities such as 7 Tarryn Handcock __________________________________________________________________ ambiguity, dissipation, and the transgression of boundaries can be considered in terms of the body’s ability to respond to perceptive and imaginative possibilities, to extend beyond its bounds, and to assimilate artefacts into the sense of self or body schema. In exploring how dust can be a form of body horror we are able to gain insight into the ways that bodily boundaries may blur, bringing into question where and when they can begin and end, and how they can become decentralised or extended. While the body in a state of dissipation can be horrifying and disruptive of order it can also be magical - pre-empting growth and the emergence of new forms, functions, and interactions. Dust can come to represent a conceptual framework for design, one that embraces process and transformation while defying boundaries. This is an approach which anticipates change and the potential for exchange across fields. For wearable design it brings into focus the need for the body to become the primary focal site, placing an emphasis on designing for bodies that are not static. By considering terms, methods and processes that go beyond the designer's 'interest' there can be a move toward actively considering how the wearable can interact with the body, and how it might adapt to needs, desires, and shifts. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 39-41. Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic bodies and Posthuman Medicine (London: Routledge, 2000), 73-74. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “Towards a New Class of Being: The Extended Body,” intelligent agent 06.02, 2006, 1-7, http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/publication/ia6_2_transvergence_catts_zurr_extende dbody.pdf. Joseph A. Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 17. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ Gn 3:19 KJV. Margaret Horsfeld, Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework (New York: Picador, 1998), 186. Amato, Dust, 4. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 81. J. Gordon Ogden, The Kingdom of Dust (Chicago: Popular Mechanics, 1912), 13-14. Gary Alan Fine and Tim Hallett, “Dust: A Study in Sociological Miniaturism,” The Sociological Quarterly 44: 1 (2003): 3-4. The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust 8 __________________________________________________________________ Virginia Smith, “Evacuation, Repair & Beautification: Dirt and the Body,” in Dirt:The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, ed. Nadine Monem (London: Profile Books, 2011), 8-9. 10 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 2, 35. 11 Amato, Dust, 75. 12 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 160. 13 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 4. 14 ibid., 3. 15 Ogden, Kingdom of Dust, 1. 16 Steven Connor, “Pulverulence” (paper presented at An Evening of Dust, organised by Cabinet magazine for the Hayward Gallery, London, 17 October 2008 ), 2-10, http://www.stevenconnor.com/pulverulence/pulverulence.pdf. 17 Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63. 18 Francesca von Habsburg, “The Ethics of Dust Series,” in Jorge Otero-Pailos: The Ethics of Dust, ed. Daniela Zyman, Eva Ebersberger, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Kölin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), 21. 19 David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 96, 99. 20 Susan Cohn, “Recoding Jewellery: identity, body, survival” (PhD diss., COFA, University of New South Wales, 2009), 8. 22 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 160-161 Bibliography Amato, Joseph A. Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Covino, Deborah Caslav. “Abjection.” In Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture, 17-34. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. Accessed March 21, 2012. http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/61009.pdf. Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr. “Towards a New Class of Being: The Extended Body.” intelligent agent 06.02 (2006): 1-7. Accessed March 24, 2012. http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/publication/ia6_2_transvergence_catts_zurr_extendedb ody.pdf. 9 Tarryn Handcock __________________________________________________________________ Cohn, Susan. “Recoding Jewellery: identity, body, survival.” PhD diss., COFA, University of New South Wales, 2009. Connor, Steven. “Pulverulence.” Paper presented at An Evening of Dust, organised by Cabinet magazine for the Hayward Gallery, London, October 17, 2008. Accessed March 21, 2012. http://www.stevenconnor.com/pulverulence/pulverulence.pdf. Smith, Virginia. “Evacuation, Repair & Beautification: Dirt and the Body.” In Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, edited by Nadine Monem in association with the Wellcome Collection, 7-36. London: Profile Books, 2011. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Fine, Gary Alan, and Tim Hallett. “Dust: A Study in Sociological Miniaturism.” The Sociological Quarterly, 44:1 (2003): 1-15. Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. “Genesis 3:19 (King James Version).” In Bible Gateway. Accessed November 15, 2012. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3%3A19&version=KJV. Gissen, David. Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Accessed September 28, 2012. http://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art206/readings/kristeva%20%20powers%20of%20horror%5B1%5D.pdf. Ogden, J. Gordon. The Kingdom of Dust. Chicago: Popular Mechanics, 1912. von Habsburg, Francesca. “The Ethics of Dust Series.” In Jorge Otero-Pailos: The Ethics of Dust, edited by Daniela Zyman, Eva Ebersberger, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, 21-33. Kölin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009. Stoppani, Teresa. “Dust projects: on Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk and somecontemporary dusty makings in architecture.” The Journal of Architecture 12:5 (2007): 543-557. The Eternal Grind: Living bodies reduced to dust 10 __________________________________________________________________ Stoppani, Teresa. “Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille).” The Journal of Architecture 12:4 (2007): 437-447. Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project: Informatic bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge, 2000. Tarryn Handcock is a PhD candidate in Architecture and Design at RMIT University. Her research addresses how wearable artefacts critically function through the body and skin as sites of design. She is particularly interested in the ways that transitional states may influence creative research practice approaches.