The

Artist
Will Be
Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL
OBJECTS & SUBJECTS

Christopher Braddock
PhD 2008

for E & E

The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Christopher Braddock
2008
A thesis submitted to
Auckland University of Technology
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

School of Art & Design

PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Mark Jackson

t abl e o f
Attestation of Authorship

Acknowledgements

Index of Images

Abstract

Introduction

Contents

10

Preface
0.1

Exhibition Description
The Artist Will Be Present

21

Chapter 1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4

Performativity
Approaches
Introducing Metaphor & Metonymy
Utterances

40
40
54
59

Chapter 2
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8

The Flesh of the Chiasm

Contingency
Liminality
Alex Martinis Roes Ontological Leap
Bruce Naumans Space Under My Hand
When I Write My Name.
Marcel Duchamps Erotic Objects
Embodiment
Efficacy

63
66
71
74

Mimetic Incongruence

91

Chapter 4
4.1
4.2
4.3

Performative Sculpture/
the Object of Performance
Alicia Frankovichs Flying Fox
Carolyn Eskdales Furniture Objects

5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7

105
108
114

Sympathetic Magical Action

Background: Similarity & Contagion
Inside, Outside
The Problems of Intellectual Rationalism
Critiquing Frazer
Metonymy Stands as Substitute
A Recent Trend

128
131
133
138
139
141
143

Chapter 6
6.1

79
82
84
85

Chapter 3
3.1

Chapter 5

6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
6.9
6.9.1
6.9.2

Morphological Ambivalence in the

Partial Object/Subject
Melanie Klein and the Psychoanalytic
Model of the Part Object
The Force of the Pendulum
The Force of the Wedge
Anatomical Votives
Ann Hamiltons Malediction
The Force of the Donor
The Force of the Utterance
The Force of the Moment
The Force of the Signature
The Force of the Mould

Conclusion
References

152
160
171
177
182
189
192
201
205
214
219

225
230

ATTESTATION OF AUTHORSHIP
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my
knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another
person (except whereby explicitly defined in the acknowledgements), nor material which
to a substantial extent has been submitted for the award of any other degree or diploma
of a university or other institution of higher learning.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I break with academic protocol and thank, firstly, my family Esther Leigh and Eva
Braddock. Esthers steadfast support has been tremendous throughout this project and I
thank her for her insight, patience and for loving and caring for me. While Eva is still too
young to understand the reason for her fathers absences from home (more than she might
have liked), I thank her for always being there for me when I was home. My supervisors Mark
Jackson and David Cross deserve noisy praise. Mark has been generous with his time and I
am indebted to him for many of the critical re-workings of the manuscript as it took form.
He is like a cabinet of curiosities from the 1980s and 1990s theoretical splurge. His
knowledge and flexibility of application is invaluable. In his supervision Mark demonstrates
an ability to throw apart and undo ideas in order to re-form them. In this sense Mark has
been provocative yet supportive. Moreover, the relationship has felt more like a collegial
one than one of supervision. For all of this I thank him. As secondary supervisor David
Cross insistence on nailing the practice, and the manner in which it prompts the text, has
been invaluable. He has nudged my studio practice toward performative-installation in
ways that have been extremely helpful. Thank you David for your generosity and support. I
also thank my initial secondary supervisor, Robert Wicks, whose wide philosophical
knowledge and generosity helped in the early stages of this project. I am privileged to have a
Head of School, Desna Jury, who has consistently supported my teaching, research and
interests in a proactive way and I thank her for that commitment that has so facilitated the
completion of this project. The visual arts staff at AUT University is an engaged group of
colleagues in teaching and research and I thank them all for their support in different ways.
The staff of St Paul St Gallery at AUT is extremely supportive. I thank in particular
Leonhard Emmerling and Catherine Garret as well as the installation staff, Jonathan Brown
and Simon Glaister. I thank all the students who have taken keen interest in my developing
project both at AUT, Auckland and RMIT University, Melbourne, in particular Mairi
Gunn for video assistance and Samantha Horstman and Felix Davis for performance
assistance. A number of individuals have discussed my studio practice with me, being
generous with their time and helpful in their engagement. I want to thank in particular:
James Charlton, Paul Cullen, Anna Jackson, Natasha Conland, Monique Redmond, Alicia
Frankovich, Amelia Jones, Zara Stanhope, Adrien Allen, David Thomas, Jan Bryant,
Melanie Roger, Brian Butler, Charlotte Day, Bella Star, Emily Cormack, Kyla McFarlane,
Sue Gallagher, Andrew Douglas and Albert Refiti. Thanks also to Ilse Marie Erle for
translation work and Mel Hight for designing the thesis document. Finally, I wish to
thank the staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, for assisting me so generously in
researching their anatomical votive collections and related literature.

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INDEX TO IMAGES
Works by Christopher Braddock from The Artist Will Be Present
Cut 1 The Artist Will Be Present, 2007, RMIT University SOAG Gallery, Melbourne
Above, 2007, 45
Participate, 2007, contents page, 29, 168
Take series, 2007, cover, 61, 65, 88, 89
The Artist Will Be Present, (installation view), 2007, 27, 211

Cut 2 The Artist Will Be Present, 2008, St Paul St, AUT University, Auckland
Above, 2008, chapter headers, 15, 23, 45, 218, 226
Back, 2008, 21, 24, 71, 97, 226
Caress, 2008, 26, 47, 72, 89, 98, 212, 226

Background Works by Christopher Braddock

Back, 2007, 45
c from the Fleshly Worn series, 2004, 156
Push Me Pull You, 2005, 35, 36
Push, 2003, 33, 34
Sculpsit, 2006, 31,
6.5 Kilos of Phantasmagoria, from the Fleshly Worn series, 2005, 38

Other Images
Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930-31, 171
Alex Martinis Roe, Ontological Leap, 2007, 74, 75, 77
Alicia Frankovich, Flying Fox, 2008, 109, 187
Alicia Frankovich, To Veer, A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour,
2007, 113
Ann Hamilton, Body Object Series #11, Boot, 1984/1993, 109
Ann Hamilton, Malediction, 1991-1992, 189, 190
Ann Hamilton, Offerings, 1991, 201
Auguste Rodin, Iris Messenger of the Gods, 1890-91, 109
Brassai, Nu 115, 1932-33, 172
Bruce Nauman, Corridor, 1970, 67
Bruce Nauman, Device for a Left Armpit, 1967, 209
Bruce Nauman, Finger Touch with Mirrors, 1966-67, 137
Bruce Nauman, Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name, 1966, 79
Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio, 1968, 100
Bruce Nauman, Thighing, 1967, 102
Bruce Nauman, Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists, 1966, 185
Carolyn Eskdale, Body Pocket, 2003, 114
Carolyn Eskdale, Ear Boxes, 2000, 118
Carolyn Eskdale, Furniture Objects, 2003, 114
Carolyn Eskdale, Reserve Object, 2001, 116
Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971, 54

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Dane Mitchell, Portal to the Spirit World, 2007, 146

Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1968, 153
Franz West, model with Pastck No.8, 1982-83, 123
Franz West, Pastck, 1978-79, 123
Felix Gonzales Torres, from the series Untitled (PlaceboLandscape for Roni), 1,200 lbs of
candies individually wrapped in gold cellophane, 2005, 145
Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart, 1991, 116
Gabriel Orozco, Working Tables, 2000, 154
Laresa Kosloff, Deep & Shallow, 2004, 110
Laresa Kosloff, Deep & Shallow, in Make it Modern, 2005, 112
Louise Bourgeois, Trani Episode, 1971, 152
Lygia Clark, Dialogue, 1966, 68
Marcel Duchamp, Female Fig Leaf, 1950, 82, 130, 221

photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission

from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Marcel Duchamp, Female Fig Leaf, 1950, on the cover of Le Surrealisme, meme, 1956, 137
Marcel Duchamp, Objet-Dard, 1951, 82, 179

photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Marcel Duchamp, Wedge of Chastity, 1954, 164, 181

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884 et al., 128 photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the Pitt Rivers
Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884.58.111, 128

photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the Pitt Rivers

Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1896.77.22-25 Balfour, 135 photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the
Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1896.77.28 Balfour, 134 photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the Pitt
Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1912.92.209-299, Peru, Bolivia, 193 photographed by Christopher Braddock with
permission from the Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1917.53.666-669 Tylor, 134 photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the
Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1985.49.113, Mexico, 187 photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the Pitt
Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1985.50.141, Perugia, Italy, Breast, 193 photographed by Christopher Braddock with
permission from the Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum, 1917.48.40-46 Balfour, 135 photographed by Christopher Braddock with permission from the
Pitt Rivers Museum

Robert Morris, Untitled (Box for Standing), 1961, 105

Rope Anatomical Votive, Limassol, Cyprus, 159
Sergei Eisenstein, October, 1905, 101
The Papadopoulou Wax Votive Workshop, Nicosia, Cyprus, 186
Ugo Rondinone, Roundelay, 2002-2006, 204
Ugo Rondinone, The evening passes, 1998, 73
Wax Anatomical Votive, Famagusta, Cyprus, 183
Wax Anatomical Votives, Nicosia and Famagusta, Cyprus, 182

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ABSTRACT
The Artist Will Be Present explores objects as traces that stem from performed actions, and
my body in performance. Part-sculptural objects, video and sound act as performance
documents that expand on notions of the live encounter. Interest lies in how we get to
objects: process in variance to product or closure. And the question of how the body/s of
the audience become participatory is at the forefront of these operations.
From this viewpoint the exegesis aims to broaden existing scholarship on performativity,
liveness and the part-sculptural object, exploring the manners in which various cultural
practices act to animate objects. I reconsider the Euro-American genealogies of
performance/body art (Bruce Nauman, Lygia Clark, Ann Hamilton et al.) in
relationship to contemporary art practices in Australia and New Zealand (Alicia
Frankvich, Carolyn Eskdale et al.) through the lens of late 19th-and early 20th-century
writing on sympathetic magical action. A legacy of cultural anthropology dealing with
magic (that was privileged in establishing grounding aspects of structural linguistics)
circulates around the British anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah whose thinking on
persuasive analogy in ritual performance draws a crucial link between J. L. Austins
performative utterance and James George Frazers notion of sympathetic magic. From
such a perspective the operations of sympathetic mimesisinvolving ambivalent
similitude and contagionare discussed in terms of performative and persuasive
illocutionary force. This offers another model for articulating an authentic performative
document as an encounter with the live.
A phenomenological method of enquiry, including Maurice Merleau-Pontys concept of
the chiasm,along with notions of mimetic incongruencecrucially tease out
relationships between the live and the performance document and aim at resisting
subject/object dichotomies whereby concepts of embodiment and indeterminate play
between artist, objects and audiences are activated.
Applied to contemporary debates on performance and objects out of action, part
objects and images are transformed as partial subjects: metonymically part of larger
wholes as trace (substitution) and contagious contact (liveness). What is lacking in the
operations of sympathetic mimesis is precisely what draws out the body/s of the

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audience as they desire closure in object and duration. As these questions turn on the
body of the artist/self and the audience/participant in performative installation practice,
I offer an analysis of bodies in ritual exchange (donor/donee); subjects and objects as
transformers: relations of force over formliminal, reversible and redolent of lackthat
emphasise encounter in difference to recognition. This is to speak of, in the words of
Lygia Clark: Tactile shocks to liberate the body.

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INTRODUCTION
The Artist Will Be Present makes a significant contribution to debates and practices of
performance and its documentation. Firstly, the exegesis articulates a unique perspective
to understandings of performative documents and to the active force of the part object
via explorations of the histories and practices of sympathetic magical action. My aim is
to broaden existing scholarship on performativity, liveness and the part-sculptural object
via the framework of sympathetic magical action within an analysis of mimesis,
similitude and contagion.
This approach elucidates relationships between various pre-modern cultural practices
and performance as figured within modernity. To be more precise, firstly, my approach
reveals the manners in which various cultural practices act to animate objects. Secondly,
the exegesis probes the contributions made by art practice to such debates by exploring
the Euro-American genealogies of performance/body art (Bruce Nauman, Lygia Clark,
Ann Hamilton et al.) in relationship to contemporary art practices in Australia and New
Zealand (Alicia Frankvich, Carolyn Eskdale et al.). Thirdly, the installation component
signals a shift from the ambit of performance art documentation. In this regardand
cognisant of notions of animism, anthropomorphism and contagionI explore objects
as traces that stem from performed actions, and my body in performative utterance,
where video documentation becomes a deferral of the subject/object encounter, or
questions conditions of liveness. Important to the overall project is that I arrive at these
partial bodily traces in video and sound via a distinctly atypical research pathway that
positions the body of the artist as donor within highly ritualised contexts of production
outlined in anthropological material on sympathetic magic. This approach is, in the
end, far more significant to the project than the ubiquitous art historical approach to the
part object that privileges models of psychoanalytic enquiry.
My strategy brings to light the British anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiahs significant
essay Form and Meaning of Magical Acts (1973), in order to locate a gap in the
scholarship between two fields of study. On the one hand, literature on the part object
has activated a legacy of structural linguistics that employs the operations of metaphor
and metonymy. In particular Rosalind Krauss and Yves Alain Bois employ Roland
Barthes critique of George Batailles The History of the Eye in order to articulate a

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formlessness characteristic of the part object; erosion as a metonymic part of a larger

whole. On the other hand the operations of metaphor and metonymy are employed by
a number of writers (Peggy Phelan, Jane Blocker and Kristine Stiles et al.) engaging with
notions of performativity and the problem of how the live moment is recorded,
documented or archived.
Phelan, for example, points to metaphors role as securing reproductive value
(substitutions). From this perspective, if metaphor documents the live, metonymy is
viewed as associative; working to displace the document in the moment of the live.
Phelan and Blocker see metonymy as a kind of somatic language where notions of
performativity integrate mind and body in an understanding of being embodied in our
bodies (Blocker 2004: 34).
It is with reference to the linguistic operations of metaphor and metonymy that
Tambiah links J. L. Austin with James George Frazer. It is in highlighting this link, and
applying it to contemporary debates on the rituals of performance and their
documentation, that the exegesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in the
field. To be more specific, in referencing Austins performative utterance in the context
of persuasive sympathetic analogy, Tambiah sets in motion a connection to Roman
Jakobson who, in turn, acknowledges Frazers operations of similarity and contagion
(inherent in sympathetic magical action) as those of metaphor and metonymy. This
exegesis employs Tambiahs analysis as a way of contextualising part objects, and their
ritual contexts, as metonymically lacking. In this regard the action-at-a-distance of
sympathetic mimesis operates as a force-field of redundancy that performatively draws
out audiences as they desire closure both in object and duration. This is the force of the part
object/subject that questions the ethical and aesthetic consequences of the operations of
fixed (scopic) representation, longevity and permanent collection.
For example, Tambiah employs a Zande case study (discussed at length in 6.3 The Force
of the Pendulum) in which a creeper is employed for curing leprosy (1973: 214). His
example relies on the creepers falling leaves leaving behind residues that resemble a
lepers wounds and made into a paste applied to the wounded body. Insofar as the plant
is employed therapeutically, a persuasive and forceful transfer is announced where the
undesirable (the loss of the limbs resulting in death) is replaced by a desired growth in
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the human subject.

The significance of this example is that Tambiah suggests a vacillation between literally
knowing that a creeper is a creeper and a bodily aphasia that forms a transgression in
language; a crossing of the metaphorical axes (a plants growth formations and a lepers
sores) that forms a metonymic violation of meaning. Tambiahs understanding of these
operations position metonymy in the persuasive force of a performative illocutionary act
of doing that dominates formal aesthetics, and the actual condition of the body which
resides in a context of ritual action. I relate these operations of sympathetic analogy to
the body/s of the artist and audience as implicated in what film theorist and
phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack calls a chiasmatic structure of reversibility with
implications for a carnally embodied understanding of perception (2004: 73-74).
To my mind what makes the creepers residue in Tambiahs example so interesting is its
partial and ambiguous morphology with respect to the body represented, combined
with notions of contact or contagion with the body. These characteristicsFrazers
operations of similitude and contagionare shared by many anatomical votive objects
as they are by many objects out of action discussed in the genealogies of performance
and body art: not least, Marcel Duchamps small erotic objects such as Feuille de vigne
femelle (Female Fig Leaf) (1950); Bruce Naumans body-part objects such as Device for a Left
Armpit (1967); or the tiny bread dough casts produced by Ann Hamilton of her mouths
cavity in Malediction (1991-1992). More recently, these genealogies extend to New
Zealand artist Alicia Frankovichs Flying Fox (2008), for which her leg is seen jutting out
from an upstairs window in Aucklands Ponsonby district, or Carolyn Eskdales Furniture
Objects (2000-2003) somatically hand-moulded and ambivalently indicative of our
subjectively experienced bodies.
Put another way, I argue that these objects act as partial subjects that are unlocatable
as trace (substitution) and contagious contact (liveness). What is (metonymically) lacking
in the operations of sympathetic mimesis is precisely what draws out the body/s of the
audience. It is this drawing out that makes all subjects and objects partial.
Representational unity and saturated ritual contexts (including predetermined putative
intentions) would undo such a force. Along these lines I offer an analysis of the body of
the artist in a ritual performative (and unlocatable) exchange (donor/donee) in variance
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to some modernist tropes which have tended to view the artist in the more authoritative
(and domineering) guise of high priest, shaman or magician.
In prcis, I activate Tambiahs understanding of sympathetic magic as a way of
discussing how the agents of artists, objects and audiences are complexly present in the
ritual mix. In this way I extend Tambiahs argument (which does not, in itself,
deconstruct Austin) so that saturated ritual contexts are called into question and I
articulate performance documents as deeply reciprocal and somatic; illocutionary
gesture activated as sympathetic trace and contagion. In an application of
anthropological findings to the arena of art history, the characteristics of similitude and
contagion are compared to Krauss emphasis on erosion (or reduction) in morphological
ambivalence. Krauss argument is lent ritual (performative) context in that Tambiah
contextualises the operations of sympathetic magical action as primarily about forces of
persuasion and conceptualisation in difference to issues of cause and effect.
As said, a principal motivation in my artistic practice is an engagement with bodily trace
and contagion relative to various processes of recording and repeating that seem
appropriate to specific performative installations. To this end, my body, and the
architecture of the installation, move through various operations that render them
morphologically ambivalent (spatial ambiguities of the cast and mould, close-up views,
dislocated sound tracks, endless duration, spatial and perspectival disorientation). At the
same time my body shows the signs of strenuously prolonged action (or utterance)
which, combined with its mimetic closeness, provokes a sense of contagious encounter
and reciprocity in and with the body/s of the audience. In this regard, an interrogation
of representational pathos and presentness, while (simultaneously) presenting my body,
offers a unique tension (an irresolvable one) that questions how modes of process (getting
to objects) and performative documentation operate.
Finally, I intend a tension between the exegesis and practice-based components of this
thesis. While I persistently embed reference to my own studio practice in the exegesis as
it unfolds, I am less interested in a notion of exegesis that illustrates or describes studio
practice. To this end I have resisted a point-by-point commentary on the progress of my
studio practice. I am interested in a writing that is expansive, touching on a wide range
of philosophical contexts. In this regard I raise as many questions and possible
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interpretations as I proffer solutions. Insofar as an exegesis might contextualise an art

practice, I aim to elucidate a few angles and approaches cognisant that they are few in a
broad field of possible interpretations.
It should be of no surprise that I endeavour to resist saturated contexts (a theme that
runs throughout the writing on the inherent partiality and ambivalence of the
performing body). Moreover, I anticipate that viewers will experience the exhibition
component of The Artist Will Be Present and not make reference, in their own minds, to
the operations of sympathetic magical action. I say below that magic is most alive where
one does not detect its action and that my proximity to magical discourse draws
attention to the sharpness of a difference. This statement frames my method of analysis
as a potential and deconstructive interpretation of an art practice.
By way of a summary of chapters, the Preface offers an overview of the installation
component of The Artist Will Be Present. It prioritises practice at the vanguard in order to
instigate some key concerns that the thesis will unfold. It introduces the operations that
I employ in an attempt to expand notions of the live encounter. They are the
vacillating characteristics of partial objects caught between the operations of mould and
cast and my performing body, both viewed as performative documentation that drives
the moment of the live.1 The Preface elaborates on various modes of participation
where I endeavour to engage the body/s of the audience in performative ways that
signal these objects and subjects as never complete, always in a process of becoming.
In this light, Chapter 1 gives an overview of the notion of performativity. It emphasises a
relationship between interdisciplinarity and performativity. It sets forth a challenge to
static sculptural paradigms through performative notions inherent in objects themselves
and the spaces in which they are encountered. This chapter qualifies the term
performative documentation as stressing processes that resist privileged modes of
making, viewing and interpreting art work where authorial credence is not questioned. I
introduce the terms by which metaphor and metonymy are used throughout the thesis.
This critical terrain, serving as the underbelly of this project, becomes further refined by
the terms of performative utterance. Performative utterance is employed as another
The term performative documentation is used by Philip Auslander and is discussed in the
thesis that follows (Auslander 2006).
1

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means of stressing a process of enactment as an encounter between artist, objects and

audiences.2 Together with this, the atypical occurrences in many art contexts denote
special, non-trivial and transformative contexts that are furthermore characteristic of
magical action. Here the question of the force of performative iteration in resolving
undesirable outcomes is critical to my unfolding argument.

ABOVE, 2008

Moreover, Chapter 2 raises key concerns within a notion of performativitynamely

embodiment, liminality, contingency and efficacyand concurrently introduces some of
the principal works discussed in the thesis as a means to elucidating The Artist Will Be
Present. Among other works these are Melbourne-based artist Alex Martinis Roes
Ontological Leap (2007), Naumans Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name (1966) and
Corridor (1970) and Duchamps erotic objects from 1950-1954. This chapter introduces a
phenomenological method of inquiry which focuses on the phenomena of experience as
spatially and temporally embodied in the performative encounter between artist, objects
I am indebted to Amelia Jones book Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998), discussed at length in
this thesis, for this emphasis in which the meanings or readings of body art are contingent on the
process of enactment.
2

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and audiences. By way of Maurice Merleau-Pontys notion of the chiasm, various forms
of visual reciprocity are discussed, such as live close circuit cameras and casts and
moulds where the body/s of the audience and/or artist are the participating or casting
agents. In this sense, the body is defined as both a subject (subjective reality) and object
(objectifiable for others), and also simultaneously internally divergent with itself
(Vasseleu 1998: 26).
Chapter 3 explores the notion of mimetic dislocation with a focus on the moving image. It
rehearses an idea that will be reiterated at length by means of Marcel Mauss poorly
executed ideogram, (1975: 68) that representational faithfulness undoes mimetic force. I
outline how moving images might be encountered in the comparably haptic and
intimate sense that I advocate for the part objects in the project. In this light the
conditions of ambivalence inherent in partial objects is assayed alongside notions of
physiognomic closeness or intimacy in viewing the moving image components of The
Artist Will Be Present. For example, the montage techniques of Nauman and the Soviet
filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein are analysed as a way of articulating a notion of mimesis
and the optical unconscious as a visual counterpart of metonymy in language. In this
way the essential incongruence of mimetic images is discussed in terms of an evocation
of processes inherent in works of art and their capacity for intimate contagiousness
between bodies. This will be discussed in relation to sympathetic magical action as a
process of substitution, an idea fleshed out at length in Chapter 5.
Chapter 4 consolidates an emphasis throughout the thesis on the objectness of
performative actions under the term performative sculpture. I utilise a link between
body art and Minimalism in order to articulate the notion of a surrogate performer
also inherent in sympathetic magical exchanges. A gradual history of the fragmented
body has implications for the viewer who is obliged to view differently in order to
encounter a reciprocity between herself and an object. It is here that I introduce
Frankovichs Flying Fox (2008) and To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of
Behaviour (2007), as well as Australian artists Laresa Kosloffs Deep & Shallow (2004) and
Eskdales Furniture Objects (2000-2003). These works are discussed alongside the work of
Lygia Clark and her insistance on objects and subjects encountered in the body of the
viewer. When these questions turn on the body of the artist/self and the
audience/participant, they create objects and subjects as transformers: relations of force
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over formliminal, reversible and redolent of lackthat emphasise encounter in

difference to recognition.
Chapter 5 reaches back into the histories of sympathetic magical action and defines the
terms by which similarity and contagion are understood. This is researched by way of a
group of late 19th-and early 20th-century anthropologists who contributed to the
anatomical votive collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, in a period
contemporaneous with Frazers The Golden Bough outlining the terms by which
sympathetic analogy might be understood. As such I introduce some primary research
from lecture notes and journal entries in relation to specific artefacts from the Pitt Rivers
in this and Chapter 6. Partly in response to Frazer, Mauss proffers the notion of the
poorly executed ideogram, which I critique and translate as the conditions of forceful
persuasiveness and ambivalence. For example, I propose the poorly executed ideogram as a
concept akin to the lifting of naturalism or modes of representation in Eisensteins filmic
use of the partial subject. The importance of critiquing Frazer is to expand upon his
theories, typical of the Victorian era, with an understanding of performative contexts
and beyond the scientific terms of cause and effect. Magical actions are therefore
understood in the context of ritual action that engages with objectives of persuasion,
conceptualisation and expansion of meaning. Chapter 5 sets this important dynamic in
place as a model for discussing The Artist Will Be Present and other works mentioned
above. In this sense magical language can be viewed as exploiting ordinary linguistic
properties but in special performative contexts including those of visual arts.3 In this
vein Tambiah, in both his The Magical Power of Words (1968) and Form and
Meaning of Magical Acts: A Point of View (1973), argues for performative aspects of
magical acts where properties are transferred to recipients (objects or persons) as the
semantic basis of magical acts. This will elaborate on the idea of surrogate performers
and the possibility of action at a distance discussed in Chapter 4. In referencing the
operations of metaphor and metonymy in language, Tambiah sees rich implications for
the metaphor as a device of selection and substitution in the ritual action of magic
while metonymy stands as a substitute; for the name of part of a thing. This process of
substitution is the principle of contiguity in magical acts which allows partial
objects/subjects to transform through redundancy, through that which is in excess. This
While he does not discuss visual arts, this view is based on Jesper Sorensens A Cognitive Theory of
Magic and will be elaborated on in the thesis.
3

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pivotal relationship to magical action is more one of structure than content. In this
respect the structure of magic is the structure of the artwork. These are the operations of
formlessness and contagion inherent in magical action. As Simon OSullivan writes:
Art might be understood as the name for a function, a magical and aesthetic function
of transformation (2006: 52).4 Magic is most alive where one does not detect its action.
In this sense, my proximity to magical discourse draws attention to the sharpness of a
difference. While this historical background might seem overdue, I fancy this chapter as
a hinge in the discussion that will bring the previous analysis to bear on the notion of
morphological ambivalence in the context of the partial object/subject which is the
focus of Chapter 6. If the reader seeks more clarity on the operations of sympathetic
magic up to this point, she or he could always read Chapter 5 first.
Chapter 6 assays the driving force of the thesis where the previous writing laid the
groundwork. Mauss notion of the poorly executed ideogram in sympathetic analogy is
compared to Krauss emphasis on reduction in morphological ambivalence (Krauss
1999: 71). The function of the poorly executed ideogram, which is to produce the person,
is analysed against the aforementioned notion of surrogate performers. A crucial point
here is that images are dispensable and, as such, underscore a power of force over form.
It is in this sense that representational completion would undo such a force. Krauss emphasis on
ambivalence, in variance to abstraction, is contextualised in her and Bois Formless: a
Users Guide project. I review their use of Barthes The Metaphor of the Eye (1963)in turn
a critique of Batailles novel Lhistoire de loeil (The Story of the Eye) (1926)as a means of
discussing visual metonymy as a device to destabilise representational unity. I advance
this as a tool with which to elucidate performative action, or doing. As Stiles argues, this
is to augment the metaphorical capacities of conventional static forms of art with the
communicative function of metonymy (1998: 329). A ubiquitous tendency in art
history/theory to critique the part object passing through the psychoanalytic theories of
Melanie Klein is noted. Where such theories also establish relationships between parts
and greater wholes common to metonymy, they do not always register the significance
of performative contexts. It is here that Tambiahs reassessment of sympathetic magical
See Simon OSullivan in relation to aesthetics and affects as what Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari term the harnessing of forces: Another way of saying this is that art is a
deterritorialisation, a creative deterritorialisation into the realm of affects. Art might be
understood as the name for a function, a magical and aesthetic function of transformation
(2006: 52). OSullivan does not discuss magical action beyond this comment.
4

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action reiterates pragmatic contexts of production and notions of performative

utterance, via the work of Austin. Jacques Derridas critique of Austin and his writing on
the supplements relationship to the live moment assists in clarifying the notion of
performative utterance. In this context anatomical votives that operate within the
traditions of sympathetic analogy are compared to Hamiltons Malediction at the Louver
Gallery in New York from December 7, 1991, to January 4, 1992, and with Duchamps
Wedge of Chastity (among other works), as an application of the theory espoused above.
These artworks share the characteristics of Mauss poorly executed ideogram in their
combination of formless ambivalence and intimate attention with respect to the bodies
that participated in them. These conditions of sympathetic analogy are what make the
Wedge of Chastity so ironically faithful to, and so embodied an encounter between, Marcel
and Alexina Duchamp. This approach offers a way of examining partial
objects/subjects that incorporates performative contexts and asks how such
objects/subjects operate in a contingent, embodied and haptic sense rather than in
terms of scopic representation.

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Preface
0.1

EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION
THE ARTIST WILL BE PRESENT

0.1 EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION

THE ARTIST WILL BE PRESENT

BACK, 2008

The thesis engages with the projects development over the 12 months of July 2007 July
2008, as well as discussing significant background works.5 While the St Paul St exhibition
stands as the PhD final project, I choose to engage foremost in the development of the
works for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a notion of the project as continually shifting and
open to change is embedded in an overarching performative approach. In this sense there
can be no final exhibition but only one that marks a particular moment. Hence, there is
always an inexhaustible (always of) potentiality in making work or writing. But more than
this, a performative approach signals a here and now concrete finitude to what something
is, but always partial and in process but meaningful or affective. This apparent
contradictiona play between the performative moment of the live and its paradoxical
reliance on the repeatability (iterability) of that momentis key to The Artist Will Be Present
as it unfolds (the title itself proposing an interrogation of the artists presentness). Secondly,
Two exhibitions mark this period both entitled The Artist Will Be Present as an ongoing project:
July 2007 at the RMIT University SOAG Gallery, Melbourne (as part of its School of Art
International Artist in Residence Program) and July 2008 at St Paul St Gallery, AUT,
Auckland. These two projects will be referred to as Cut 1 and Cut 2 in the thesis.
5

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the project persistently asks the question as to how to engage the body/s of the audience in
participation as a means of articulating the operations at work between artist, object and
audience within a concept of performativity. Activating such modes of participation has
been difficult and challenging. The Melbourne stretch of The Artist Will Be Present
emphasised a physical encounter with the Take series of part objects while the Auckland
stretch accentuates a visually haptic encounter of these object/s mediated by projected
moving image. In the first instance (Cut 1), it was very difficult to engage audiences to
actually pick the objects up (also in the knowledge that they were being videoed, this fact
advertised for ethical reasons). I had always to revert to training groups of students
beforehand, asking them to front at the exhibition openings (posing as unsuspecting
audiences) in order to try and prompt members of the viewing public. Furthermore, I
noticed that the part objects (the Take series) were becoming redundant. By this I mean that
they risked reinforcing the very notions of scopic recognition that the project is at pains to
resist. Certainly the trestle tables (Cut 1) were designed as sites of shifting research and
expansion in difference to pedestals as sites of scopic recognition and closure; however any
object on any surface risks soliciting aspects of the scopic. And the objects themselves,
designed to reference but resist Modernist formalism, seem to me to risk reiterating exactly
that which they attempt to critique in their closeness to Modernist abstractions (for
example, little Henry Moore or Jean Arp sculptures).6 Maybe they were too closetoo
much of a knife-edgeto clearly stake out a position of encounter? These questions I leave
open as a means of interrogating the nature of participation in performative contexts.

To participate with the objects in the Take series is crucial in activating a sense of quotation
and critique regarding Modernist morphological abstraction. They are not meant to be little
modernist sculptures, they are intended to play with this history but to walk a fine line in that
playfulness. To have placed these objects on white pedestals or in vitrines would signify a
physical detachment from them, activating an optical engagement rather than a somatic one. As
I will argue in depth, in the tradition of the part object, they denounce formal Modernist
abstraction in favour of the reductive quality of the part object.
6

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CUT 2

ABOVE, 2008

- 23 -

Two large-scale and one small dvd wall projection occupy Gallery 2 of St Paul St entitled
Above, Back and Caress.7 For Above and Back I film myself in a black-out studio doing an
activity that is never fully disclosed to the viewer. The objects that I manipulate are never
seen. Just as the activity is not fully understood, the views of my body are also partial. The
camera is hung from the ceiling for Above while the camera angle for Back is a close-up rear
view. Both points-of-view are designed to disorientate the vertical axis of the viewers
looking. I contort, bending over, grappling with some form or other between my knees.
These two works employ sound tracks using two directional microphones that initiates a
fourth sound work entitled Over & Over that plays in the foyer entrance to the gallery.8 The
sound consists of breathing, and occasional slapping against the sides of my knees, which
accentuates the energy and doing of the process as well as a sense of ambivalence about what
kind of activity might be taking place. Such spatial dislocation shared by all the moving
image works in The Artist Will Be Present increases a sense of fragmentationof partial
experienceendemic to the project.

BACK, 2008

Above (2008) (looped dvd, 41.24 minutes); Back (2008) (looped dvd, 59.54 minutes); Caress (2008)
(looped Blu-ray, 22.46 minutes).
8 Over & Over (2008) (looped sound recording, 59.54 minutes).
7

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Moreover, various videoing and editing techniques add to a sense of spatial disorientation
and endless duration in the body/s of the audience. As already noted, Above is filmed with
the camera suspended above my body with the vertical axis of its 16/9 format following the
longitudinal axis of my body. For exhibition, the data projector is mounted vertically (righthand-side facing upwards) so that the image both floats and partially coexists with the
viewers bodily orientation. Here the viewer can experience a sense of falling back as he
tries to comprehend my bodys orientation. Back is also filmed vertically (locating my bodys
vertical axis as it moves up and down), but projected horizontally so that the image of my
body scrolls in and out of the viewers space not literally linked to his vertical axis. Back is a
continuous loop achieved by cutting the end and beginning of each sequence against the
black-out studio at a point were my body totally disappears from the frame. Above has a
two-second black phase-in-and-phase-out between each looped sequence. The works are
projected larger than life-size to increase an experience that is embodied as the projected
images overwhelm the space in which the viewer stands.
The third dvd work, Caress, pans up-close (in macro function) the surface of five part objects
from the Take series.9 Panning horizontally by hand, the slow quivering of my bodys
movement (as slow as I can pan without stopping) suggests a handling of the objects
transposed (as will be argued at length below), by a closeness of the moving image, into a
fleshy and haptic filmic encounter as a form of intensely experienced and embodied
participation. This image, much smaller than Above and Back, locates a closeness with the
viewer in its intimate scale. The brightness and definition (Blu-ray) of the image suggests an
almost forensic fleshy encounter. Whether it is an encounter with the inside or outside of a
body is unclear. Together with this the intensity of the high-definition projection offers a
spatial uncertainty. The viewer is unsure, in the first moments of viewing, whether the
image rests on or in the wall. Both Caress and Back are projected on each side of the same
dividing projection wall. Each bleeds to the edges of that wall where the viewer must decide
on left or right points of entry before reorientating herself to viewing distances. As will be
argued in 6.9 The Force of the Moment, this spatial (either/or, inside/outside) ambivalence will
be related to the implosion of the mould in its chiasmic reversibility. In this respect the
mimetic closeness and incongruence of Caress summonds an in-between two space in the
body/s of the audience.

Take 1-18 (2007) epoxy clay, hand-held dimensions.

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CARESS, 2008

As said, these three dvd works are filmed in a black-out studio and projected in a blackedout gallery, soliciting body/s unframed by the conventions of the white cube. As my body,
and the part objects (the Take series), slip in and out of frame, it is only those
objects/subjects that define the frame. This is to say that in my absence the body/s of the
audience are the active agents in this reduction of place. In this way the body/s of the
audience are further spatially disorientated (and embodied) in a form of reciprocity with
and in the images.
Together with this there are a number of architectural interventions in the space. On
entering the gallery the viewer will experience the space as never before: a new wall
configuration that will surprise regular visitors. She will enter through a corridor that is
empty, while the sound of Over & Over will still be audible from the entrance foyer space
from which she has just come. On turning a corner in the corridor she will view, at its end,
Above, projected vertically and to the edges of the corridor space. Before reaching the end
wall on which Above is projected, he will turn into other projection spaces in which Back and
Caress are projected. These spaces comprise unexpected wall angles and more empty space
where projections might have been anticipated. Over & Over is still audible but more distant
and dislocated from the moving images of which it is the sound track.

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CUT 1

THE ARTIST WILL BE PRESENT, 2007

THE ARTIST WILL BE PRESENT, 2007

Two large wooden ply tables with wooden trestle-legs occupy the floor of the RMIT SOAG
Gallery. The 18 part objects that make up the Take series rest in no particular arrangement

- 27 -

on their surfaces with viewers randomly picking them up, handling them and returning
them in altered formations. These tables were designed to encourage interaction with the
works as opposed to scopic recognition of objects on pedestals. These works are the result of
pressing handfuls of epoxy clay against my body. Not the spaces between me and other
things but the spaces in-between my body. As a result they bear the blemishes, folds and
impressions of hair that the process affords. A recurring response on the part of visitors on
handling the Take series was an expression of surprise at being party to such a private
encounter with my body sometimes described as closeness. A viewer declared how she had
enjoyed touching my body. She noted that only with a lover would she have experienced
touching another with such intimacy or experienced a matching of her body with anothers.
As Anna Jackson writes in the catalogue for the exhibition:
Youd be forgiven if you suddenly become less than comfortable with holding the
works. Realizing that the object you hold is the impression of the space under the
artists armpit may warrant you putting it back on the table in a hurry. For, at that
moment, it becomes clear that each work embodies an intimate physical experience
with the artist. And your participation lends this proposition meaning and makes
these works relational objects. (2007: 3)
A dvd work entitled Participate10 recorded audiences handling and searching out the Take
series adjacent in the space. This work played on a small six-inch monitor by the exit, where
an artists statement might be located. I enjoy the idea that this size and location denotes
this work as therefore not a work, like the other big wall projection, however I reckon it is
as crucial as it signifies the body/s of the audience engaging with the part objects which is
always never ending. I like the possibility that some viewers might even miss this work, or
give it less attention, as documentation when it is actually (as I will return to in detail) one
of the performative documents that drive the whole show; that never leaves the moment of
the live as momentary.

Participate, 2007, (looped dvd, 13 minutes). This work has, in yet another earlier version of The
Artist Will Be Present (May-June 2007 at Roger Williams Contemporary Gallery, Auckland)
recorded the opening event of the exhibition and was then added to the project on the first day
of the exhibition. In Melbourne (Cut 1) I recorded Participate as a workshop in the Artist in
Residence studio with RMIT students (11 July 2007) using the tables that would subsequently be
used in the exhibition. This fitted with the expectations around the residency programme (to
engage with students and work collaboratively with them). I thank them for their generosity and
creative input to the project.
10

- 28 -

PARTICIPATE, 2007

Also in the exhibition, a large-scale wall projection played an earlier version of Above
(2007).11 This work is clearly located in the artists studio due to the nature of the floor,
while the activity and point of view of my body has remained the same for Above (2008) (Cut
2). That the audiences activity captured in Participate may be akin to what takes place in
Above is left unstated. In this lose association there is a slow (and often unresolved)
realisation, in the audiences videoed, of what the part objects that make up the Take series
might be likened to. And if they are derivative of a body, how was this accomplished and in
what circumstances?
These partial objects/subjects are mimetic but not figurative and the question arises as to
how one might name these things. What do they look like? Their character straddles the
conditions of formlessness and intimacy due to their ambivalent formal nature and the
undisclosed knowledge of their production. And there is also a question as to how they
function as objects and moving images of participation. Viewers describe searching for a
correspondence with their own bodies and in so doing engage in a reciprocity as they adopt
their role as one of many casting agents.

11

Above, 2007, (looped dvd, 28 minutes).

- 29 -

This activity of searching pivots on a lack of disclosure in the objects that prompt the
experience. Furthermore, there is a sense of infection or contagiousness where the touching
of the objects bears a forceful relationship to touching another. The difference between
regarding the objects and handling them (Cut 1) is marked by a shift from the optical, and its
concomitant associations with the remove and reverence of the artwork, to the tactile,
triggering a sense of embodiment. The move to filming the Take series in startling and upclose proximity (Cut 2) marks a reappraisal of the optical as the optical unconscious
(discussed in Chapter 3), in turn manifest as a filmic embodiment of the body/s of the
audience. These partial objects/subjects are viewed less as art objects than as propositions
that gain value as they are participated withas translational objects that might be viewed
as surrogate performers, liminal and reversible, establishing relations between the
individual and others and highlighting the differences between the artists and viewers
bodies. As will be argued at length, this is to discuss the works social force and efficacy in its
mimetic function as partial to the whole.12
At the risk of being overly descriptive I want to explain the genealogy of the dvd works
as a component of the overall project entitled The Artist Will Be Present. I do this because
their introduction has provoked a complex shuttling between the part objects in the Take
series, their relationship to the partial view of my body in Above and Back, the video
footage of people handling the works in Participate, and the up-close footage of these
objects in Caress.

As I will argue, aspects of nondisclosure in the partial object and partial subject, and a lack of
completion or resolve, are crucial to an understanding of the overall project. These images are
reductive as a part is to a whole. They will always disappoint an expectation for a resolved
aesthetic resolution or narrative. Their simultaneous ambivalence of form, mixed with a marked
sense of intimacy, strikes at the heart of their force.
12

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SCULPSIT, 2006

SCULPSIT, 2006

- 31 -

From the outset, and prior to the moving image components, the project stemmed from
a range of part objects that resulted from actions that were never recorded. These part
objects resulted from impressions of my body into malleable surfaces such as clay, with
the cavities created filled to overflowing with silicon (6.5 Kilos of Phantasmagoria, 2005),13
or poured with plaster and covered with fabric (Push Me Pull You, 2005 and Sculpsit,
2006).14 An earlier work, Push (2003), experimented with a series of 26 plaster blocks
with impressions of my right hand and wrist.15 Caspar Millar noted at the time, with a
dual interest in the artist as ethnographer (collecting gestures or sets of body citations)
and the bodys imprint and/or photograph in relationship to the death of its subjects:
The bodys impression in plaster is originally tied to death: the last imprint, but
reproduced in positive again as dead-head. Braddocks impressions remain
concave and hard to read, a shadow of the body-part now absent. They might
then be reminiscent of apparatuses of display: the recesses in which the body
might lie. Your guess what bit of the body. Its often argued that photography
assists in the death of its subjects. So are there a couple of layers here? In this shift
from medium to medium the real becomes an allegory of death and a fetishism of
the lost object, in this case, lost gesture. While these shifts are associated with loss
of aura, photographys monumentalising and reproducing capacity displaces that
cult-value. Furthermore, two means of reproducibility mergecast and
photographas agents of loss. (2003: 2)16

6 kilos of Phantasmagoria (2005) is made from the largest amount of silicon I can mix by hand in
one go (while other works entitled a-c from the Fleshly Worn series (2004-5) are poured to the length
of my body). The top surface of the pour marks the outer limits of the cavity created by my
bodys imprint and the surface of the overflow. My bodys impressionsleft and right knees
are then re-aligned when hung over hooks.
14 I installed Sculpsit (2006) fabric on plaster, in the background for the RMIT, Melbourne
exhibition (Cut 1). While it is not part of The Artist Will Be Present as such, I did this to offer
Australian audiences some background context to my work. For Sculpsit I made impressions of
all the hinged pairs of my body that I can bash into clay: the deepest impressions I can
physically makemy left and right heels, knees, arse, elbows, wrists (inside and outside). These
impressions are cast in plaster and covered with fabric. The forms appear as close
approximations of my body but are not clearly identifiable. In that they are created by direct
contact with the body they share a certain similarity with how the body is commonly viewed
through clothes but also an ambivalence by virtue of their part body associations. In this sense
Sculpsit operates between the conditions of similarity and contact with the body: not exactly a
representation but an embodiment of the body.
15 Push (2003) plaster and provenance labels. This was a project for pp37-45 (an artist-run project
based in Auckland). It involved 26 impressions of my right hand and wrist in plaster blocks with
accompanying provenance labels for each block. The provenance formats are adapted from the
The J. Paul Getty Trust & College Art Associates site for describing a work of art.
16 At the time of publication of Millars text for the pp catalogue (before the installation was
complete), I was to exhibit photographs of the plaster blocksshowing impressions of my
handsmounted on large-scale light boxes. At the last minute I changed my mind and
13

- 32 -

It occurs to me, a few years later, that my idea to photograph the plaster blocks (that never
eventuated) comes close to the operations I now envisage in Caress where the
monumentalising of the digital moving image (that has no original) operates as an agent
of loss always to be filled by various participatory gestures in the body/s of the audience.

PUSH, 2003

exhibited the plaster props themselves in a long dotted line across the floor of the studio/gallery
with accompanying provenance labels.

- 33 -

PUSH, 2003

Several people encouraged me to document my studio processes as background context

to the sculptures. After experimenting with video documentation I was dissatisfied with
the literal and descriptive quality of the footage. It was long, didactic in nature and
extinguished any illusive and undisclosed qualities inherent in the part objects it
documented. The footage also reinforced Modernist photo-portrait projects in the 1950s
such as David Smith Makes a Sculpture, published in Art News in 1951, and akin to
Pollocks performances photographed by Hans Namuth in 1950 and published in

- 34 -

Allan Kaprows famous essay The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.17 At this point the
video experiments shifted sideways, entertaining a group of moving image works that
might be read alongside the objects, not documenting their making, but a parallel
practice suggestive of studio process as performance. Where Pollock resisted (but
acquiesced) documentation of his studio process, The Artist Will Be Present displays a selfreflexivity to a critical self-examination, and with a conceit for an audience who will not
fully comprehend; where the ground rules are unclear in the viewing.

PUSH ME PULL YOU, 2005

17

See Allan Kaprows The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958).

- 35 -

PUSH ME PULL YOU, 2005

- 36 -

In this context, The Artist Will Be Present promotes an ambivalent character of partial
object/subject, manifest as sculptural part objects made by contact with bodies (in a
performative sense by my body and the body/s of the audience), and as moving images in
which a partial view of bodies and objects is created. Within an uncertain sense of spatiality,
all the images embody an experience of the body rather than casting a representation: the
processes capture an imprint of performative action in-between bodies where the auratic is
relocatedtransferred to the technology of process. In this regard I attribute value to the
stuff that gets us to objects. As is characteristic of the Take series, the moving images are
never fully disclosed. Where the objects relationship to processes of seriality is marked in
their number and the traits of the mould, the digital moving images locate the serial as
endless repetition. That there is always remainder (redundancy) in the works is what marks
their incompletion. This denotes both endless duration and a lack of duration. What is
more, as the objects participatory decoding calls into question their completion, so too does
a lack of disclosure and finality in the moving images call into question the replete authorial
gesture. If the objects are termed traces of gesture by which authorship is problematised,
then so too are these moving images traces of gesture.
In this way, the notion that the artist will be present is questioned against the terrain of a
modernist fixation that the artists intentions are necessary to the critical interpretation of works
of art. The thesis will discuss a performative shuttling that violates a dichotomy between subject
and object. I want that you never get to the object that is sculpture. In this way, and as a kind
of provocation, my body will be viewed as part object (in that I vacillate between the subject of
the images and the object in the work), while the part objects of the Take series might be viewed
as part subjects, catalysing the agency of participation that is the body/s of the audience. And in
this respect the body/s of the audience might be viewed as part object/s (or part body/s) where
their participatory action is not so much driven by intentional and directed viewing inasmuch
as drawn out by the part subjects of the Take series. In this way meaning is extricated from
privileged form and situated instead as indefinite performative force. These are the operations of
force over form that the project is at pains to call attention to by way of an interconnectedness of
my body with the body/s of the audience.
While I admire arguments put forward by the likes of Phelan that reproduction betrays the
very ontological nature of the live, I want to interrogate this apparently reductive position
by performative exchanges through sculptural objects and moving images rather than live
- 37 -

bodily presence.18 I want to keep thinking through relationships between live actions (even
if they are private ones recorded by the video camera), my body, objects and the body of
the audience. I want to insist on a live art that gains currency through performative objects,
that in their constant deferral and disappointment (also a condition of disappearance) with
respect to the body/s that were once in contact with themand the continual potential of
participationexpands this notion of the live.

6.5 KILOS OF PHANTASMAGORIA, FROM THE FLESHLY WORN SERIES, 2005

18

See Peggy Phelans Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993).

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Chapter 1
1.1

PERFORMATIVITY

1.1 PERFORMATIVITY
The Artist Will Be Present is an interdisciplinary project both in practice and theory. In
practice, the project employs a range of cross-media such as epoxy clay, pre-fabricated
trestle tables, video and sound in an interdisciplinary emphasis commonplace in the
visual arts. More specifically: the project employs object-based sculpture that can be
read against the traditions of the part object (discussed at length in this thesis) and the
device of the mould in articulating the body; it engages with the history of the artists
body, and viewers bodies, as recorded by video camera; the project engages in activities
of spectator participation, and in so doing, solicits complex discussions concerning
relationships between artist, artworks and mechanisms of viewing. In discussing new
media installations, the notion of a tension between hybrid materials and
heterogeneous spaces, on the one hand, and procedures of perception of thought, on the
other (Parfait 2006b: 33) has become important in analysing viewers encounters
with the durational, and often repetitiously looped, aspect of video alongside objects and
documentation emanating from performative actions.19 As such The Artist Will Be Present
requires that the contexts of performativity, in which the objects and video projections
operate, are defined and articulated.

1.2 APPROACHES
The theoretical approach activates the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and
performance studies. But these discipline categorisations, in themselves, present a
myriad of possibilities. In what Jon McKenzie describes in Perform or Else as the
theory explosion from the mid 1970s, there have emerged a layered and
interdependent number of theoretical approaches in articulating the notion of
performativity: Cultural Studies, Semiotics and Deconstruction, After Marx,
Feminism(s), Theatre History and Historioraphy, Hermeneutics and
Phenomenology, and Psychoanalysis (2001: 39).20 With few exceptions such
categories underwrite the discipline of art history/theory within similar timeframes.

See Christine Van Assche where she also employs the term hybrid works with respect to new
media installations integrating video into hybrid installations composed of objects as diverse
as painted canvses, sculptures, artifacts, drawings, sound, etc (2006: 27).
20 McKenzies list is derived from the categories employed by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph
Roachs 1992 anthology Critical Theory and Performance.
19

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The point to be made is that the theory explosion opens up ways of negotiating the
notion of disciplinarity that is itself performative.
In a visionary move, McKenzie describes a shift from disciplinarity to performativity.
He stresses that a notion of performativity rests on the methods of analysis together with
its object of concern.21 He writes: In theorizing performative efficacy, Performance
Studies has mimed its object of study; our scholars have launched their own challenges
to the institutional norms of research and teaching (2001: 33). This is an important
point with reference to the notions of disciplinarity in The Artist Will Be Present. My
project performs across so-called disciplinary fault-lines in a number of ways. Firstly, as
has already been mentioned, it engages in cross-media visual arts practice. Secondly, it
roves across theoretical and philosophical terrain that serves its needs rather than
adhering to specific discipline categories. This reflects a position that, as an artist, my
influences are discursive but held together by common threads of enquiry. Thirdly, a
PhD that engages reflexively in artistic practice creates an in-between liminal space that
challenges the academys traditional split of practice and theory. In this sense the
methods and style of the overarching project are themselves performative. To engage
my own studio practice in the context of a text within the academy is to subvert those
academic tropes, or make them at least a little reflexive, in difference from reflective. It
also activates a phenomenological methodology where elements of autobiography
necessitate self-reflexivity. This underlines an important dynamic within The Artist Will
Be Present, that being a body is relative and where phenomenologys emphasis on
embodiment and the nature of experience contests the possibility of its representation.22
In this sense Steven Scrivener advocates a form of reflection-in-action and practice
where description of the creative-production process should be the principle means

See Hubert Klocker where, in quoting Vilm Flusser, he refers to a theory of gestures as
the discipline of an emerging post-historical future. It is, in both theoretical as well as practical
terms, a possible discipline of the so-called new human being (1998: 160). While Flusser
employs the term discipline, I take his inference to be similar to that of McKenzie where posthistorical describes a threshold moment in the face of an enlarged sense of performativity. See
Flusser, Vilm (1993), GestenVersuch einer Phnomenologie (Bensheim: Bollmann Bibliothek), 236,
which I have not referenced.
22 See Vivian Sobchack where she discusses her own use of autobiography and anecdote
(following the amputation of her left leg) from the point of view of a phenomenological
methodology (2004: 6-7).
21

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by which students demonstrate that they are self-conscious, systematic and reflective
creators (2000: unpaginated www).23
I see the overall project as situated in what Amelia Jones terms body art. In her focus
on work of the 1960s and 1970s she is,
interested in work that may or may not initially have taken place in front of an
audience: in works that take place through an enactment of the artists body,
whether it be in a performance setting or in the relative privacy of the studio,
that is then documented such that it can be experienced subsequently through
photography, film, video and/or text. (1998: 13)24
This notion of body art incorporates objects that are the result of performative actions
that may, or may not, have been carried out in public view. As such it entertains the live
bodys documentation as performative. From a different perspective Phelan makes the
case that: Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise
participate in the circulation of representations of representations She says this from
the point of view that: Performances being becomes itself through disappearance
(1993: 146). She argues that the time or moment of live art cannot be repeated and that
any attempt at reproduction makes the genre something other than performance. In
difference to this position, I want to insist on a live art that gains currency through
performative sculptures and moving images. While I understand the drive in Phelans
text to underscore the problematic nature of performance to its modes of reproduction
(often in order to survive and live beyond the ephemeral moment of its live production),

I take from this an emphasis on reflexivity as a form of research method which Scrivener goes
on to advocate. I differ from Scrivener in that I have not pursued the likes of a creativeproduction project report outlining all the points in the project in studio practice that point to
moments of change etc. While reflecting on some details of previous work I have concentrated
on one major project over 12 months and embedded those reflections into a text which, I hope,
has implications for visual art theory/history writing on the issues with which I engage. I find
this approach (while I also employ first-person narratives at points), richer and less prescriptive
than Scriveners.
24 Jones introduces this argument in a previous essay where she says that her use of the term
body art in preference to performance art is informed by an embodied, phenomenological
model of intersubjectivity She also underlines the intersubjectivity of documentation, in a
related way to Auslander (discussed above), where the specificity of a live situation should
not be privileged over the specificity of knowledges that develop in relation to the documentary
traces of such an event. While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of
flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader <--> document) is equally
intersubjective (1997: 11-18).
23

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I also believe it to be overly reductive as a way of thinking through relationships

between live art, performative objects and the body/s of the audience.
The Artist Will Be Presentalong with the artists discussed in this thesisplaces particular
emphasis on the objectness of performative acts, either as my body or part objects
virtually represented in dvd projections; relics of private actions, but always continuing
toward another action through participation. This encourages, as Paul Schimmel writes
in Leap into the Void: performance and the object, a reversal of the traditional
precedence of the object over the act (1998: 17). In this way the performative
methodology that underwrites The Artist Will Be Present has challenged my sculptural
object-based practice to always place objects in relationship to performance.25 This is
because the objects on their own fail me unless they are viewed as part of a process, both
in their making and in their reception. Again, as Schimmel writes, this is to describe
actions whose primary goal was the process of creation rather than the production of
objects (17).26 To this end The Artist Will Be Present employs the use of darkroom/projection where the various scales of moving image and the accompanying (but
spatially dislocated) sound tracks involve the viewer in personal modes of intimate
contact. Anne Cauquelin remarks that where the walls of the gallery are included as
part of the medium,
to be shed light on, it is the space of the exhibition venue which is by the same
token freed in order to enter into the object [and in this sense] space becomes
place it is part of the body enveloping it, as it defines it (the limit) and in return
would be nothing without the enveloped body. (Cauquelin quoted by Parfait
2006b: 50)27
While I understand Cauquelins emphasis on the fabric of the space, itself implicated in
the work, there is a further discussion to be had in relation to the complex encounter
with spatiality that performance negotiates where the gallery is one of the problematics
To be clear, up until the beginning of 2007 I have always engaged in object-based sculpture.
These are the first moving image and sound works I have made.
26 On this point Jones, in referencing Walter Benjamins Work of Art essay (and in the context of
discussing fragmentary and prosthetic forms emanating from the body), writes: Thus there is a
new potential for the production of subjects (bodies/selves) not as only static simulacra but also
as in process, open to otherness in a way that promotes rather than suppresses ethical behaviour
in relation to others and social spaces (Warr and Jones 2000: 41-42).
27 Van Assches Historical and Museological Aspects of New Media Works discusses various
modes of projection, closed circuit, monitors as objects, sound components and flat screens as
influencing viewers engagement with the works.
25

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with regard to where performance happens. In this regard the gallery and a question of
place has been an ongoing issue, especially in videoing Above. The work has gone
through three manifestations exploring the site in which my performing figure plays
itself out: from my studio floor in the 2007 version (Cut 1), to experiments in a fully
white-out studio, to shooting the work in a black-out studio for the 2008 version (Cut
2).28 This last version solicits a body unframed by the conventions of the white cube
(where previous versions in this series, such as Back (2007), had projected the white cube
upon itself) where my body acts as a more free-floating agent and the body/s of the
audience are spatially disorientated.

The decision to film my body in black-out conditions was motivated by wanting to produce a
body of work for the final exhibition that read well in relation to one another. To this end the
studio floor in Above (Cut 1) seemed incongruous with the white wall in an earlier version of Back
(which was filmed against a white wall in my studio) and so I took the decision to suspend my
body in a kind of placelessness that the black backdrop affords. It then seemed logical to locate
the part objects of the Take series against the same black backdrop (Caress) as a way of locating
them in lateral association with the partial views of my body.
As well as this, in eliminating the artists studio as the site of my performing body from the
first version of Above (Cut 1), I am removing the site of the studio as that associated with the
struggle of the Modernist solo male genius. This is Jones concern in her analysis of Jackson
Pollock, where she coins the term Pollockian performative. She wants to interrogate the
normative values inscribed in the trope of the artist genius epitomized by the modernist Jackson
Pollock (1998: 103). In this context I am aware that deeply performative operations with
respect to gender would open this thesis to, for example, critical approaches to gender identity in
the work of Judith Butler. While this research direction is valued and acknowledged, it would
require another thesis exposition to do justice to its complexity.
In a move from Cut 1 to Cut 2 the image of my body in Above (Cut 2) seems more diminutive
and neutralised of heroism than it does in Above (Cut 1). I am signaling a fascination with my
body as an ambivalent marker of an audiences unlimited reciprocity between bodies and an
interest in the animism of things as it relates to the animism of the body. When Above and Back
(Cut 2) are read alongside each other they become located in a more indeterminate sense of the
optical unconscious that references a primordial sensuousness that instantaneously flashes
before the viewer (a notion discussed in Chapter 3 in the context of Walter Benjamin).
28

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ABOVE, 2007

ABOVE, 2008

BACK, 2007

- 45 -

In relation to projected images in black-out conditions, Franoise Parfait proffers the notion
that video and installation updates time. Here she means that video is an experience in the
present, always to some degree embodying the viewer in the duration of its unfolding. The
viewer is caught in a configuration of a space-time to which he is not accustomed
(2006b: 43). This is an important observation for The Artist Will Be Present in which both the
suspended darkness of the blacked-out space and the looped technical performance posit the
audience in an already reciprocal relationship with the work: her spectator posture becomes
orientated in a haptic and embodied way to the scale of the projected images and the
undisclosed possibilities playing out within them.29
It is in this sense that the wall configurations (Cut 2) orient and play with spectator posture.
As the viewer passes through the first empty corridor her expectation of work to be
viewed is momentarily thwarted. But this pause, in comparative darkness, is both a moving
away from the sound of Over & Over and a rehearsal for the black-out moments in the
moving images themselves, Back and Caress. Following the turn of the corridor she views
Above at its end. This is a view constrained by the corridors dimensions and therefore
intimate in scale. On turning into another projection space midway down this corridor he
comes to a space within a space in which Back is projected. On entering, the wall
configurations are angled with his body moving past and close to the wall on which Back is
projected. He must therefore move away from the image in order to find a viewing position.
She then moves into a third space in which Caress is projected, not on the anticipated wall in
front of her body, but against the wall adjacent to her entry point, forcing her again to find a
spectator posture. Over & Over is still audible but more distant and dislocated from the
moving images of which it is the sound track/s. Her body has moved into spaces inside
other spaces only to return the way it came. Here I aim at a chiasmic folding in of body/s
(discussed a length in Chapter 2). The exhibition design also challenges conventional ways
in which data projectors are positioned (normally reiterating an ideal and often single
viewpoint for the spectator squarely in front of an image), questioning normative viewing
positions and insisting that body/s move close to images in their initial encounters and
relocate in relation to images.

See Franoise Parfaits Installations in Collection (2006) for an extended discussion on

spectator posture.
29

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CARESS, 2008

Concurrent with this, and following Parfaits argument, The Artist Will Be Present disappoints
spectators in relation to expectations of image and narrative. The moving images of my
partial body, and the slow close-ups of the (already) part objects, are all part of a larger whole
creating a sense of loss and absence in which the viewer is invited to partake, in which
memory, language and body fill the voids and complement the difficulties of perception and
signification (Parfait 2006b: 43). In this sense the repetitious nature of the mediums
employed across The Artist Will Be Presentlooped video, incessant sound and moulds
collude to evade desires for completion. They are at odds with a modernist ontology that, as
Bois writes, requires an artwork to have a beginning and an end, and holds that all
apparent disorder is necessarily reabsorbed in the very fact of being bounded (Bois and
Krauss 1997: 26). A degree of disorientation is intended here. The partiality of the moving
images and the part objects, their close-up-ness by physical (Cut 1) and virtual (Cut 2) contact,
as well as their lack of clarity with respect to the body/s they embody, provoke both
perceptual and physical disorientation. Spectators ask: what exactly is this image/object and
what is my role in this installation as subject and as object?
To speak of objects in relationship to performance conjures up all the possible
accoutrements associated with the recording of live performance. In this regard,
distinctions between documentation of live performance and objects that emanate from
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performative actions are porous. Put in simple terms (and to follow Phelans argument),
live performance is experienced as an ephemeral moment, and other than that
immediate moment of reception/participation, it relies on documentation. However the
objects of performance discussed in this project index a range of encounters with the
temporal: video footage of previous public and private actions and of sculptural objects
as relics of private actions. The virtual images and real objects are all encountered
and participated with on various levels of engagement. A notion of performativity does
not therefore signal a diminishing of the art object but rather a re-evaluation of it.30 This
prompts Hubert Klocker, via the writing of Vilm Flusser, to articulate the object as
gesture: It then becomes a gesture that in the conceptual and performative work
cannot only stand by itself, but can also lead one to a re-evaluation of the art objects
(1998: 159). Furthermore, Philip Auslander argues for a distinction in performance
documentation between the documentary and the theatrical where the latter suggests, as
is the case with The Artist Will Be Present, performances staged solely to be filmed with no
meaningful prior existence presented to audiences (2006: 1). In introducing the idea of
performative documentation he proffers the notion of authenticity, rather than the
idea of the photograph, and its indexical trace to the real event, as what governs the
performance of documentation. And on this point he says that the relationship
between the document and its audiences is crucial in establishing authenticity. This is
significant for The Artist Will Be Present as I contextualise its operations as
phenomenological where the body/s of the audience perceive the images as

Such a re-evaluation of the objects that proceed from performative actions has received
significant focus via the work of Joseph Beuys. See Paul Schimmel where he contextualises the
objects that remain after Beuys performances as relics turned in to a kind of Shroud of
Turin, in that they embody meanings that are functions of their mystical history. And where he
states that the objects then began to be re-made as objects associated with those past
performances as a transformation of the relic into sculpture (1998: 83). And as Schimmel
points out, this placed Beuys in conflict with some of the post-object tendencies of the Fluxus
artists. He also remade I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), in which Beuys spent time with
a wild coyote named Little Joe, five years after its first performance in which objects from the
originating work took on the associated symbolic meanings of that past ritual (1998: 84).
See Robyn Brentano, via the writing of Constance Lewallen on Terry Foxs Levitation (1970),
where she refers to Beuys work as a ...residue of a ritual action [that] could retain the aura of
the event (1994: 60n44).
See Klocker where he employs the work of Beuys in the same vein stating that the BeuysBlock installation at the Darmstadt Museum (that cannot be altered in perpetuity) distills the
gestural nature of Beuys work in relation to the power of the object. Klocker develops this into
the argument that, for artists like Otto Muehl, Gnter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the
photograph became the basis for their Aktions and collages (1998: 188-192).
30

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performative. As Auslander writes: Perhaps the authenticity of the performance

document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly
originary event: perhaps its authority is phenomenological rather than ontological (9).
In this regard, Chapter 2 discusses Martinis Roes, Frankovichs and Kosloffs
performance-installations and videos that shuttle between live performance and artefacts
that bear the traces of their bodies. In a different but related view, Eskdale exhibits
small-scale part objects that ambivalently suggest body organs. Her objects overtly bear
the traces of her manual manipulation, changing how we view them. Eskdale does not
engage in live performance but rather exhibits objects evocative of private and drawnout actions which, in turn, opens up the terms by which performative actions might be
articulated and places emphasis on the objectness of performance. Like Eskdale,
Naumans Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name acts as a trace of an action that
never took place in public view. It fixes that performative action in an artefact that
functions as evidence. But, more than documentary, the artefact is itself the work and
document: process as product.
Continuing this emphasis on process, three key issues that Jones negotiates in her
engagement with body art are a performative conception of the artist/self as in
process, [that this conception is] commodifiable as art object, and [is] intersubjectively
related to the audience/interpreter (1998: 12).31 As such, her emphasis marks an
interdependence between artist, subject and audience located within a notion of
performativity in which the meanings or readings of body art are contingent on the
process of enactment rather than attributing motives to the authors as individuals or
origins of consciousness and intentionality (1998: 10).32 This describes not only a
contingency between subject and object, artist and spectator, but also a more complex
notion of a subject as intersubjective in a process of self-exposure.33 Such an emphasis
on processes of enactment is important to Gavin Butt as he outlines in The Paradoxes of
All citations in this thesis that include emphasis are the original emphasis employed by the
author cited unless otherwise stated as emphasis added.
32 See Jones where she emphasises the formalist notion of disinterestedness predicated on a
clearly possible interpretation of an art object and its meaning when she writes: The formalist
insists upon the disinterestedness of his interpretations, and such disinterestedness is predicated
upon a pure relation between the art object and its supposedly inherent meaning (embedded in
its form, to be excavated by the discerning interpreter) (1998: 35).
33 Jones places particular emphasis on the work of Carolee Schneemann and Yayoi Kusama
who, in photographing themselves, perform both author and object (1998: 10).
31

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Criticism the problematics of a notion of critical distance as a legacy of the

Enlightenments positioning of the critic or theorist as a judicious authority and
interpreter of art and culture. The book seeks out performative approaches to criticism
that resist the critic as positioned (authoritively) outside the text: That is to say that the
theorist, rather than being remote from that which he or she surveys, is enmeshed in
the very, perhaps even creative, production of the cultural fabric itself (2005: 3). This
is part of an ongoing and contemporary move to resist privileged modes of making,
viewing and interpreting in favour of the operations inherent in the liveness of
performativity as reciprocal and always in motion. In this light Jones main motivation is
to re-embody the subjects of making and viewing art (1998: 11).
Along similar lines, and in evoking a conception of art anticipated by the Russian
literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Robyn Brentano describes how
performance art replaces the modernist notion of a work of art as a formal,
bounded, material object, with its meaning already inscribed, with a more open-ended
view of art as a transaction between artist, object, and perceiver (33n38). She refers to
Douglas Crimps essay Pictures in its reference to Michael Frieds 1967 attack on
Minimalism as linked to theatricality. As a number of writers have noted, this can be
described as marking a shift from Modernism to Postmodernism.34 This is to describe a
space not only of interdisciplinarity but also one in which there is a contingency between
artist, spectators and objects. It is what provokes Parfait to deduce that video installation
more than ever before permits the spectator to stand in the image (2006b: 63).

There are numerous critiques of Michael Frieds notion of theatricality. See Jones where she
rereads Minimalism via the works of Robert Morris and Tony Smith from a feminist
phenomenological viewpoint prioritising interpretation as an ongoing process (1999). I will refer
to this text again in section 4.1 Performative Sculpture/the Object of Performance.
See Susan Cross who reads Bruce Naumans work in reference to Frieds Art and
Objecthood, 1967, where she says: With Lighted Center Piece (1967-68) Nauman seems to
exaggerate and make literal Frieds notion of a Minimalist works stage presencethe
theatricality that the critic predicted would be the negation of art. Nauman embraced what
Fried had rejecteda preoccupation with time... the duration of experience, and what Fried
found paradigmatically theatrical was the very concept that would in fact define the process
and performance work that dominated the arts of the 1970s (2003: 13).
See Klocker where he writes that Vito Acconci, Morris, Nauman et al. are a direct
consequence of the performative gesture in the works of Pollock and Newman. These were the
kinds of artists Fried named as literalists, in transfixing the moment of transformation from
painting to object as all encompassing the spatial, the performative and the concept
oriented (1998: 162-163).
34

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In emphasising this idea of standing in the image as an encounter, OSullivan writes:

An object of an encounter is fundamentally different from an object of
recognition. With the latter our knowledges [sic], beliefs and values are
reconfirmed. We, and the world we inhabit, are reconfirmed as that which we
already understood our world and ourselves to be. An object of recognition is then
precisely a representation of something always already in place With a genuine
encounter however the contrary is the case. Our typical ways of being in the world
are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought.
The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus
in our habitual subjectivities. (2006: 1)
This is the kind of concept that Schimmel pursues in relation to objects that result from
performative action when he states that the performative act offers the opportunity
to unravel the systems and structures that provide a false sense of solidity in a world that
is forever in flux (1998: 119).35
One of my underlying motivations for such an emphasis is that the charisma and value
that can be attributed to the performative still remains the bastard-child of
contemporary visual arts practice. While significant critique has emerged over the last
few decades encouraging a less scopic form of viewing, it remains a canonical position in
visual art history/theory.36
Jones main motivation in her analysis of body art is to unravel the systems and
structures that allow us to interpret the objects of performance. In her analysis of
Jackson Pollock, where she coins the term Pollockian performative, her specific
concern is to interrogate the normative values inscribed in the trope of the artist
genius epitomized by the modernist Jackson Pollock (1998: 103). She notes that the
artist is self-consciously performed through new, openly intersubjective contexts
(including video or ironicized modes of photographic display) which insist upon the
openness of this and all subjects to the other (1998: 67). She is interested in how
See Adrian Heathfield where, in the context of Damien Hirsts The Pursuit of Oblivion (2004),
summarises some of these underlying tendencies in visual arts practice as, from the lasting to
the temporary, from the optic to the haptic, from the distant to the close, from static relation to
fluid exchange. In this regard Oblivion is symptomatic of a profound impetus in contemporary
art and culture toward the immediate, the immersive and the interactive: a shift to the live (2004:
7).
36 Phelan calls performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art due to its
nonreproductive leanings (1993: 148).
35

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Pollock gets performed by an innumerable number of interpretive contexts such as

artist, photographer, critic, historian and, over any period of time, contemporary and
historical (1998: 268n241).37
Jones words echo those of Barthes celebrated 1968 essay The Death of the Author in
referring to the text as creating meaning. As Barthes writes: Once the Author is
removed, the claim to decipher the text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is
to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing
(2006: 44). And, in indicating a privileging of the notion of the reader over the author,
Barthes writes: The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a
writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a texts unity lies not in its origin
but in its destination (2006: 45).38

Like Jones, Schimmel emphasises that this notion of getting performed (Jones term) also applies
to the forms of mediated documentation that make certain performances visible and that
construct their reception such as Namuths photographs of Pollock as opposed to the actions of
Pollock per se. Schimmel states in relation to Pollock that each gesture animates the
subsequent moves, producing a non-narrative linearity that focuses the viewers attention on the
performative dimensions of the act of painting. And referring to the notion of contact
Schimmel continues: Although Pollock may have questioned this dimension in his work, his
desire to maintain contact (his word) with the canvas essentially transformed the artists role
from that of a bystander outside of the canvas to that of an actor whose very actions were its
subject (1998: 18). Schimmel is referencing the writing of Froman. See Froman, Wayne (1998),
Action Painting and the World-As-Picture, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (4), 472-73,
which I have not referenced.
In the same essay Schimmel points to Kaprows reference to the return to ritual, magic and
life in Kaprow, Allan (1958), The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, Art News, 57 (6), 56.
See Klocker as he references the same Allan Kaprow text and the importance of Pollock for
establishing the possibility of Happenings and Events. Klocker notes Pollocks limitations in
saying that: Pollock, however, did not possess the creative means to evolve the new possibilities
that would transcend the culmination of painting that he himself had formulated (1998: 162).
See also Brentano as she quotes Harold Rosenberg in qualifying that when Namuth
photographed and filmed Pollock: What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an
event The actpaintingis of the same metaphysical substance as the artists existence. The
new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life (1994: 35). See
Rosenberg, Harold (1952), The American Action Painter, Art News 51 (December), 22-23,
which I have not referenced.
38 To emphasise the reader, the texts destination, as a place in which a texts unity might be
found is to underline the importance of process over form. In an emphasis on performative
processes in relation to objects, see Schimmel where he cites John Lathams Skoob Tower (1964)
and references Lathams term event-structure theory in the context of his students from St
Martins School of Art in London chewing up a library copy of Clement Greenbergs 1961
collection of essays, Art and Culture for which Latham distilled the pulp, poured it into a flask,
and labeled it essence of Greenberg. As Schimmel points out, Latham used this
demonstration to focus on the primacy of process over object (1998: 57).
37

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Noteworthy in this discussion about authorial intention is McKenzies final paragraph

for the introduction of Perform or Else given almost entirely over to Derridas remarks on
Phillipe Sollers Numbers:
The text is remarkable in that the reader (here in exemplary fashion) can never
choose his own place in it, nor can the spectator. There is at any rate no tenable
place for him opposite the text, outside the text, no spot where he might get away
with not writing what, in the reading, would seem to him to be given; past; no spot,
in other words, where he would stand before an already written text. Because his
job is to put things on stage, he is on stage himself, he puts himself on stage. The
tale is thereby addressed to the readers body, which is put by things on stage,
itself. (2001: 26)39
Again, as McKenzie writes, this is to say that the performative subject is
constructed as fragmented rather than unified, decentered rather than centred
Similarly, performative objects are unstable rather than fixed They do not occupy
a single proper place in knowledge; there is no such thing as the thing-in-itself
(2001: 18 emphasis added).
To repeat: the notion of performativity therefore describes a performance in a
continual process of becoming. It resists models of fixed meaning either in relation to
an individual authors intentions or any other prescribed position. It resists silos of
contained disciplinarity and performs relationships between practice and theory as a
crucial factor in such a resistance. It also summons the possibility of failure or
disappointment that are at the heart of The Artist Will Be Present As stated above,
interest lies in how we get to objects (process in variance to product, given thatin the
words of McKenzie cited abovethere is no such thing as the thing-in-itself) where
the making and the receiving (in modes of participation) can never rest in
completion. This is to say that, if the part objects in the Take series are only ever
near completion in the audiences that engage with them, this is always never
ending. As Butt writes with respect to the practice of criticism (also employing the
work of Derrida), this talks of an agency within the very mode of critical address itself
(2005: 6). This is an agency in encountering objects, divergent from a search for
closed scopic recognition of a finite object, that entertains the very possibility of a

McKenzie is quoting Jacques Derridas (1981), Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press), 290, which I have not referenced.
39

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failure of communication in what Butt terms thinking about the event-ness of the
critical encounter (2005: 7).40

1.3 INTRODUCING METAPHOR & METONYMY

CHRIS BURDEN, SHOOT, 1971

The notion of getting performed, emphasised by Jones above, was underlined by Stiles as
she critically demolished one of the early surveys of performance art by Henry Sayre
entitled The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970. She alerts us, in her
review of Sayres text for Arts Magazine to Derridas notion of undecidability which (in
quoting Sayre) describes the conditions of contingency, multiplicity, and polyvocality
which dominates the postmodern scene (1990: 39). In criticising Sayres use of the term
individual genius in relation to Chris Burdens Shoot (1971) Stiles points to the crucial
role of collaboration in performance art stating that:
His [Burdens] participatory action required collaboration with the viewer-turnedcoperformer and functions not only metaphorically but metonymically to remind
the beholder of her/his mutual contingency and responsibility to life events. In
short, Burdens collaboration was an indictment of the viewer, historian, critic, in
her/his various roles as consumers and producers of the text. (1990: 41)

See Gavin Butt where he references Derridas Politics of Friendship (1997) and the necessity
of remaining open to the irreconcilable confusions of communication, to the errors and
misrecognitions that it opens up (2005: 6).
40

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Stiles inventory of the various roles as consumers and producers of the text is to
declare the innumerable and undecidable possibilities of contingency within a notion of
performativity. Once again, this is reminiscent of Barthes writing when he says:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning (the
message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (2006: 43-44)
The use of the word indictment in Stiles analysis of Burdens collaboration drives
home the idea of responsibility that she is keen to emphasis. The viewers watching
Burdens Shoot might have intervened and, in another non-art context, might have been
legally obliged to do so, or, were legally obliged to do so at the time but did not. The
fact that they did not underscores a profound undecidability in the context of
performance and in a complex notion of contingency between parties within multiple
sites of reception.41 This is not a moot point. As such, the conditions that define
performativity might be applied to any interaction in everyday life. My having a
conversation with someone could be analysed as a performative exchange. The point is
that the rarefication that occurs in the art context self-consciously removes Burdens
action from normal circulation. Klocker calls this the enigma when, in referencing
Flusser, he describes the performative multi-dimensional component as enigma, a
puzzle that can be solved through decryption (1998: 160).42 And he goes on to say
that this notion of the gesture is seen as a reaction to a tightening grid of
communication and information channels, into which it has been interwoven by the
On this idea of audience responsibility as an ethical encounter, see Tim Etchells, director and
writer for the performance group Forced Entertainment based in Sheffield, UK, since 1984. He
discusses Chris Burdens Shoot (1971) in the context of witnessing. He states that Burden
described his audience not as spectators, but as witnesses. As Etchells writes, to witness an
event is to be present at it in some fundamental; ethical way, to feel the weight of things and
ones own place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker (1999:
17). Etchells employs the notion of the witness to discuss audiences that are implicated in the
here and now of the moment and who may share some burden within a reciprocal sense of
responsibility. With respect to Burdens Shoot he writes: The art-work that turns us into
witnesses leaves us, above all, unable to stop thinking, talking and reporting what weve seen.
Were left, like the people in Brechts poem whove witnessed a road accident, still stood on the
street corner discussing what happened, borne on by our responsibility to events (1999: 18). In
this light, Forced Entertainment made a decision in their performance Speak Bitterness (1995) to
gently light the audience so that the performers could engage with those watching as a more
embodied form of reciprocity.
42 Klocker is quoting Flusser, Vilm (1993), GestenVersuch einer Phnomenologie (Bensheim:
Bollmann Bibliothek), 91, which I have not referenced.
41

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collective and thereby become objectified (1998: 160). Klocker sees such a grid as the
organising systems of libraries, archives and museums as well as less identifiable systems
of reception such as interpretation and paraphrasing. And it is arts enigmatic quality
that remains the immanent guarantor of the preservation of the artists potential to
liberate (1998: 160). This is the kind of situation that Jesper Sorensen argues in A
Cognitive Theory of Magic as special and non-trivial with manipulative and
transformative results (2007: 32). He does so in defining the characteristics of magical
action that I will return to in some depth. In prcis, this maps out a genealogy typical of
the structure of magical action where, removed from normal circulation, the enigma,
or puzzle, is solved through decryption that is manipulative and transformative.
In summary, in utilising the terms of metaphor and metonymy, Stiles refers to (but does
not focus on it in her review), a line of argument in relation to performativity where the
metonymic constitutes a crossing of the metaphoric axes of substitution. She will
develop this argument more fully in Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,
where she equates metaphorical capacities with conventional static forms of artthose
evoking scopic recognitionand the function of metonymy as a performative action
acting in the space between a human viewing subject and the conventional art
object (1998: 306) and therefore soliciting modes of haptic encounter in difference to
the scopic. As previously mentioned, the rarefaction that occurs in the art context selfconsciously removes action from normal circulation and permits, in the words of
Barthes, a counterdivision of objects, usages, meaning, spaces and properties
(1972: 246).43 Stiles also points to a disturbance between the terms by which artist,
artwork and viewer might be understood as the metonymic process that presents objects
as born in an event and where the artist becomes both a subject who produces an
object, and the object itself (1998: 306). This idea that the body in live performative
action can be understood as metonymic is shared by other writers such as Phelan and
Blocker and will be discussed at some length in section 6.9 The Force of the Moment.
Roland Barthes writing on metaphor and metonymy is outlined in detail in section 6.3 The
Force of the Pendulum. In prcis, metaphor plays a synchronic field of substitutions or repetitions
constitutive of a (vertical) paradigmatic axis. Metonymys temporality operates the additive and
dislocative syntagmatic chain. It is with metonymy, as Barthes suggests, that violations happen
as chains of metaphors cross in the poetics of forced syntagms. For example, and as I explain
below, the ritual of the Catholic Eucharist constitutes a number of metaphoric substitutions, two
of which are eating a shared meal together and the eating of anothers flesh. This crossing of the
metaphoric chains becomes what Barthes refers to as a metonymic forced syntagm.
43

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In prcis, Phelan points to metaphors role as securing value and reproduction. In this
sense, metaphor documents the live (substitutions and repetitions). Metonymy is
viewed as additive and associative; it works to displace the document in the moment of
the live. And in the plenitude of that moment the performer actually disappears
and represents something elsedance, movement, sound, character, art (Phelan 1993:
150). In this respect, performance highlights an impossibility of being in the present
moment other than by its reproduction or supplement. Blocker, on the other hand, sees
metonymy as functioning as a kind of somatic language where, akin to the experience
of pain, performativity integrates mind and body in an understanding of being
embodied in our bodies (2004: 34).
The notion of the metaphor as a figure of similarity, and metonymy as a figure of
contiguitywhere contiguity is understood as a disturbing vacillation of meaning due to
profound crossing or contamination of the metaphoric axesis important for this
project. Working, if you will, backwards from Stiles 1998 essay, I reference both
Barthes and Tambiahs analysis of Jakobsons opposition between metaphor and
metonymy, who, in turn, references Frazers principles of similarity and contact in the
context of sympathetic magical action.44 This is arguably the driving genealogy of the
project. Firstly, it supports my belief that performative objects, a term that I will analyse
in depth, have an ethical and pedagogical social force sufficient to cause debate and
change, not necessarily as Stiles would argue as identifiable political change, but a more
ambivalent reciprocity between subjects and objects that notions of performativity
foster.45 Secondly, it offers a means of contextualising my art practice that engages with

Kristine Stiles does not employ Barthes or Stanley J. Tambiah as points of reference. So while
I use her writing as a point of reference, my research pathway is somewhat different.
45 This draws an important distinction between my practice and some of the motivations
inherent in relational aesthetics. I am less interested in those artistic practices that, as Claire
Bishops describes, appropriate social forms as a way to bring art closer to everyday life
(Bishop 2006: 10) and where she goes on to list things like drinking beer and organising a garage
sale. My discussion rubs shoulders with Bishop when she outlines her three primary motivations
in pursuing an art of participation which are: an active subject empowered by the
experience of physical or symbolic participation, questioning authorial control and thirdly,
engaging in a perceived crisis in community and collective responsibility (Bishop 2006: 12).
Her third point reiterates Nicolas Bourriauds relational aesthetics where he advocates a
collective sensibility within which new forms of art have been inscribed (Bourriaud 2002:
13-14). He does so in the context of the challenge that is the Internet. And in keeping with this
emphasis on an expanded mass media, Bishop is also interested in works such as Phil Collins
44

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morphologically ambivalent part objects and subjects in performative contexts. I employ

the histories of sympathetic magical action, as it stems from notions of sympathetic
mimesis, because it places emphasis, not on representational fixity, but on the force of
performative utterance surrounding images within efficacious ritual contexts. Here,
operations have a primary significance that is other than aesthetic. The history of
sympathetic magical action, when understood outside the terms of cause and effect,
offers a model for understanding fragmented objects and subjects that come into
performative contact as disturbing intimacy and contagion. Thirdly, sympathetic magical
action offers a way of contextualising the role of the artists body in performanceinstallation. Particularly in the context of the ritualistic offering of anatomical votives, an
emphasis on the body of the donorits dimensions and characteristicsis crucial to the
operations that position objects as surrogate performers. This is another way of
discussing how the aura of the human body clings to the work (Krauss 1999: 55)
with a special emphasis on the use of the artists body. And it might be in a shift from
seeing the artist as donor (as I do for Hamiltons Malediction below in Chapter 6), rather
than high priest or shaman, that such a distinction is most clear. The notion of donor
implicates subjects and objects as embedded in ritual processes where the terms of
contagion are drawn out as persuasion and transference of therapeutic power. I am not
drawn to the notion that artists themselves exude magical force, and that their powers
are worth considering as purported by Peter Eleey for the exhibition Strange Powers
organised by Creative Time in New York City in 2006 (2006: 61). I want rather to position
the artist in ambivalent ritual circumstances: in the mix of getting performed. As will be
discussed, the idea of anatomical votives as an exchange within specific ritual contexts
(vows, witnesses, ceremonies) offers a model of reciprocity that is about participation in
transactions. This is close to what Stiles means when she states that metonymic processes
present objects as born in an event and where the artist becomes both a subject who
produces an object, and the object itself (1998: 306).

The Return of the Real (2005) involving a press conference for former stars of Turkish reality
television (Bishop 2006: 17n10).
While I appreciate that these divisions are not cut and dry but often one of emphasis, I side
with Jones, more than with Stiles or Bishop, in avoiding what Jones terms any putative
intention of enacting the body in a concrete social practice (1998: 246-247n237). Rather, I
am interested as Jones underlines, in exploring social participation that is radical in its
ambivalence, that is, not reduced to specific political or social studies projects. I will emphasise
this distinction more fully in section 6.1 Morphological Ambivalence in the Partial Object/Subject.

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1.4 UTTERANCES
The use of the term performative utterance draws upon Austins notion of performative
speech acts that Tambiah, in turn, references at length. This will be developed (in
section 6.8 The Force of the Utterance) in relation to The Artist Will Be Present as understood
in terms of a forceful and repetitious iteration, not in the more literal sense of speech
itself or word, but in terms of a forceful impressing of my body into (theoretically
countless) partial forms and continuous (unremitting) dvd footage of urgent and
exhaustive (but undisclosed) action: processes of making as the art object/object of art. Likewise
the bodily imprints and smears of Martinis Roe and Nauman will be viewed in the
context of objects that alert us to urgent performative utterances that need to be read
against complex and inexhaustive contexts of performativity. This is to emphasis the
doing in language in difference to describing, an emphasis of process over content. In
this light Kira Hall argues that the term performative is indebted to Austin who,
objecting to the logical positivists focus on the verifiability of statements, introduced
the performative as a new category of utterance that has no truth value since it does not
describe the world, but acts upon it (2000: 184).46
In reiterating Richard Schechners claim that performance is twice behaved behaviour,
Phelan asks ...what is the force of that repetition? (1998: 9). And in the context of
Krauss writing on the original as operative through the copy, she states that to ...frame
an act of behaviour is to engage in a highly technological semiotics of movement; it is,
in other words, to execute a rigorous mental behaviour we might call reading the
performative This mimicry and iteration is the place where performance and
performativity intersect (1998: 9-10). This is strongly reminiscent of Roger Caillois
emphasis in Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia when, in the context of sympathetic magic
he writes: Mimicry would thus be accurately defined as an incantation fixed at its
culminating point and having caught the sorcerer in his own trap (1984: 27). And in
language that is marked by its sculptural emphasis on casting that will be important to
this project, Phelan concludes her chapter: Such a recasting is a necessary part of what
I hope this field performs, the rehearsal after the performance: twice behaved behaviour
that erases the distinction between then and now, original and copy, past and present,
For a discussion on the way in which linguistic anthropology has been strongly influenced by
the notion of the performative utterance, see Kira Halls Performativity (2000).
46

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me and you (1998: 18). Phelans inquiry what is the force of that repetition? (emphasis
added) is a question that I ask in discussing (as she mentions a few lines later) visual
mimicry and its iteration.
In articulating the territory of performance, performativity and performance studies,
Phelan eloquently solicits W.H. Audens elegy to W.B. Yeats, that poetry makes
nothing happen:
Like Austin struggling and failing to find a speech act that is not performative,
Auden tries to posit the notion that poetry, despite its anti-making, its resistant
productivity, survives because it manages to fill its modest home in the valley of
its making, in the deep lozenge of the throats dark, almost formless cavity.
(1998: 10-11)
Phelan is articulating a notion that performativity happens as it speaks, that it is
continually transformative and becoming: This transformative becoming is the almost
always elegiac function of performance theory and writing, if not performance itself
(1998: 11).47 To articulate performance as elegiac summons some of the connotations
of mournful loss that will be discussed in section 6.9 The Force of the Moment; that the
moment of the live is only comprehensible through its absence.

In referencing Austin and in qualifying a difference between performance and a notion of

performativity, Richard Schechner points to ...the myriad contact points and overlaps, tensions
and loose spots, separating and connecting these two categories (1998: 362). He refers to the
way in which performance art, Happenings etc., (and I add body art) expanded on the more
conventional notion of performance as theatre, music and dance, encouraging a number of
theorists ...to examine performative behaviourhow people play gender, heightening their
constructed identity, performing slightly or radically different situations. This is the performative
Austin introduced... (1998: 361).
47

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TAKE SERIES, 2007

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Chapter 2
2.1

THE FLESH OF THE CHIASM

2.1 THE FLESH OF THE CHIASM

Some key terms emerge in the literature surrounding a notion of performativity that are
important to single out at this juncture and that will recur time and time again in the
course of this project. They are terms such as embodiment, liminality, contingency and efficacy.
These terms themselves tend to stem from a phenomenological method of analysis that
is the linchpin of film and performance theorist Vivian Sobchack and (while she does
not employ all these exact same terms) art historian of performativity Amelia Jones.48
Sobchack states in her introduction to Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture:
Thus phenomenological inquiry focuses on the phenomena of experience and
their meaning as spatially and temporally embodied, lived, and valued by an
objective subjectand, as such, always already quantified by the mutable
specificities and constraints of history and culture. In this sense embodiment is
never a priori to historical and cultural experience. (2004: 2)
In this complex passage Sobchack isolates some decisive issues that this chapter develops
in relation to the four key terms above. A phenomenological language of perception
adumbrates the bodythe incarnate subjectas experiencing phenomena in the
continuously changing contexts of space and time, as indicated by Sobchacks notion of
the spatially and temporally embodied. This is important for discussing the bodys role
in performative acts because it necessitates a focus on installational space and
performative duration. Then Sobchack states, and valued by an objective subject. This
seemingly tautological turn-of-phrase announces a compound shuttling in a language of
perception that resists a dichotomy between a perceiving subject and a perceived object.
And the rest of her sentence, qualified as it is by the always already of the perceiving
experience, suggests that this embodied notion of perception is always concomitant and
in flux, never an isolated event.49 This concurs with Jones emphasis in the previous
chapter where she asks who gets performed, a question that cannot be answered in the
always already instability of perception. As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Phenomenology of
Jones highlights a poststructuralist theory of embodied subjectivity and in so doing adopts a
predominantly French phenomenological and poststructuralist line of argument from Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, through Simone de Beauvoir, and finally to phenomenologically influenced
feminist poststructuralist models of performative subjectivity with particular reference to Luce
Irigaray (1998: 13-15).
49 Sobchack continually returns to this irreducible statement that we are objective subjects and
subjective objects (2004: 9).
48

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Perception, [phenomenology] is also a philosophy for which the world is always

already there before reflection beginsas an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are
concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and
endowing that contact with philosophical status (2007: 133).
Merleau-Pontys approach to phenomenology is constructive in this context as it
stresses that perception is corporeal experience, as Cathryn Vasseleu writes: Taking
issue with the ideal viewpoint of the mind full of concepts, judgments and relations,
Merleau-Ponty regards the specular as an essentially incarnate reality, bound to and
produced within a corporeal and social context (1998: 21). Merleau-Pontys notion of
the chiasm is a language of perception conceived of as entre-deux, or in-between two,
aimed at resisting relationships between the self and the world, the subject and the
object (Vasseleu 1998: 21-25). The posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible,
containing the paper The IntertwiningThe Chiasm, addresses problems that
might qualify how the terms of embodiment, liminality, contingency and efficacy
might be understood, as an attempt to delay (as indefinite) the operations at play
between artist, objects and audience as indefinite. This stresses the importance placed
on the encounter as a process always in becoming: the always already of Sobchacks
analysis. It is in this sense that dichotomous terms such as visible/invisible or
interior/exterior are incompatible with Merleau-Pontys view of embodiment as an
indeterminate interplay of each term (Vasseleu 1998: 24).

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TAKE SERIES, 2007

TAKE SERIES, 2007

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It is in this sense that The Artist Will Be Present evokes a doubled absence of the body. When I
say that the part objects in the Take series are made by pressing handfuls of epoxy clay
against my body, how are these objects really to be described? These are not the spaces
between my body, or between me and other things, but an in-between two space. When
caught in modes of participation (physical and virtual), this describes a kind of
indeterminate play that makes for a doubling of the partial locating the space of the
spectator in delay and disappointment: the pushing and pulling of process rather than
representation. This is not to infer failure, but rather to ask in the deepest
phenomenological sense, would you ever get to the other object or body/self?

2.2 CONTINGENCY
The notion of indeterminate play is the ground by which contingency might be
understood. Within a concept of performativity, subject and object are always
contingent upon each other within innumerable (undecidable) contexts. But more than
this a notion of self is itself contingent on an interrelation of its constituent parts. This,
for example, is a crucial point to Naumans Corridor installation at the Wilder Gallery in
1970. The work places me (the viewer) in an encounter with myself as vacillating
between the subject and object of the work.50 As I enter the narrow corridor space I see
my body (filmed in live close circuit by a camera positioned above the doorway through
which I entered) from the rear view on two monitors positioned at the far end of the
corridor. As I move towards the monitors my back view moves away from me. As I
reach the end of the corridor and turn to come back (there is no other exit than the
point at which I entered) the filmed front image of my body faces, and follows, my back,
becoming larger as I move away from the image but as I move towards the cameras
eye. I try to quickly turn my body in the narrow space of the corridor to catch a glimpse
of me looking at my image, to see myself face-to-face, but the necessary speed required
See Schimmel where he states that these corridor works were also a way of engaging the
viewer/participant as opposed to the artist in experiencing the work. Nauman had been the
performer in earlier works such as when videoing himself for Walk with Contrapposto (1968)
where he recorded himself walking up and down a corridor set for an hour (1998: 91).
In relating this work to the pieces in which Nauman recorded his own bodys movement in
his studio such as Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) see Gaby Hartel who describes the way
the monitors surveillance of the viewer replaces the artists own body, or that of the dancer. In
this way Naumans own physical tension is transmitted to the viewer in the form of a
muscular tension (2006a: 213).
50

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to gain such a glimpse can never be faster than my actual movement: I can never see
myself looking. This is one of the enduring and significant works of the early 1970s in its
encapsulation of a phenomenological understanding of a language of perception that is
in constant motion with respect to the self. Seeing myself moving away from myself, or
trying to catch a glimpse of me moving toward myself, only to be thwarted by my
immanent physicality and perceptual restrictions, is a fine example of what Jones
describes as intersubjectivity and its relationship to what Sobchack refers to as
interobjectivity.

BRUCE NAUMAN, CORRIDOR, 1970

With regard to such terminology, Merleau-Ponty employs the illustration of two hands
of a body touching each other and signifying a reversibility of subject and object within
the same embodied subject. The hand that touches and the hand touched are both
subject and object but simultaneously reversible, it becoming impossible to distinguish
the polarities of subject/object (Vasseleu 1998: 26-27). As Merleau-Ponty writes this
constitutes a touching of the touch,
when my right hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things,
where the touching subject passes over to the rank of the touched, descends in to
things, such that the touched is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in
the things. (1968: 133-134)
This is how the subjective and objective reciprocity becomes described in terms of the
inter. A danger in advancing the terms of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity is that
the nature of the inter risks reinforcing a Cartesian dichotomy that Merleau-Ponty

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endeavours to resist. As noted above, embedded in the notion of the chiasm is a language
of perception based on the entre-deux, or in-between two, that aims at resisting
relationships between subject and the object.51 Given the ease with which discourse
surrounding the inter becomes polarised, it is significant that Merleau-Pontys final
sentence for The Intertwining reads: And what we have to understand is that there is
no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to
reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the
ultimate truth (1968: 155).

LYGIA CLARK, DIALOGUE, 1966

Writing on the work of Lygia Clark, Bois and Krauss discuss her work Dialogue which
can be seen to be investigating this problem of how a dichotomous structure between
subject and object might be negotiated. They write: Dialogue explores what the bodily
use value might be of a Mobius strip the material of a sensory defamiliarization
(1997: 158-160). This work exaggerates the private/public nature of the encounter
where two participants place their hands through the two loops of a semi-flexible
mobius strip and so illustrate the complexities of Merleau-Pontys intertwining: If the
dialogue is continued long enough, a moment comes where the impression is born that
the hands are carrying out a kind of autonomous dance and that, in their false

Brian Massumi writes in difference to this notion of intersubjectivity concerned as he is with

the idea that: The individual is defined by its positioning within the intersubjective frame
(2002: 68). He sees it as a circular endgame that is destined to tautologically repeat itself,
ironically all about a subject without subjectivism: a subject constructed by external
mechanisms. The Subject (2002: 2). He argues instead for a notion of emerging and
becoming.
51

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symmetry, they are separated from the body (Bois and Krauss 1997: 160).52
In effect, Naumans corridor becomes a visual signifier of the notion of living flesh
outlined in Merleau-Pontys chiasm. As Vasseleu writes:
Flesh is Merleau-Pontys term for the prototypical structure of all subject-object
relations. In every instance of this relation, flesh defines a position which is both
subject (a subjective reality) and object (objectifiable for others), and also
simultaneously a subjectivity which is internally divergent with itself. In other
words, flesh expresses the inscription of difference within the same. (1998: 26)
And as she goes on to write: Flesh is not a grasping of being in its reversibility but the
inscription of difference in a chiasmic doubling/crossing. The chiasm is flesh in its
intertwining, reversibility and its divergence or non-coincidence with itself (1998: 29).
This is a difficult concept. Rather than being matter or mind or substance, MerleauPonty uses the term element in the sense of water, air, earth and fire to describe his
notion of flesh so that it rests midway between the spatio-temporal individual and
the idea and goes on to qualify that this is not about facts as such but is yet
adherent to location and to the now. And he qualifies this as: Much more: the
inauguration of the where and the when, the possibility and exigency for the fact; in a
word: facticity (1968: 139-140). In this way the viewers as subjects of Naumans
Corridor become intertwined as both the subject and object of the art work, and
simultaneously, non-coincident with themselves signified by the impossibility of the
perceptual turn necessary to view oneself viewing oneself.53 When Merleau-Ponty refers
to not being able to see ones own backan overwhelming characteristic of Naumans
Corridorhe notes that it is not about the fact of seeing but that it is visible by right
and therefore falls under a vision that is both ineluctable and deferred (1968: 137).
This is why phenomenology is so apt a method of enquiry into the conditions of the
live moment and its relationship to the document. The flesh of the world insists on a
Guy Brett quotes Clark with respect to this work that a notion of the collective body was
...the exchange between people of their intimate psychology. This exchange is not a pleasant
thing. The idea is that a person vomits life experience when taking part in the proposition. This
vomit is going to be swallowed by the others, who will immediately vomit their inner contents
too. It is therefore an exchange of psychic qualities and the word communication is too weak to
express what happens in the group (1998: 28-29 &n23).
53 As Cross writes of the corridor works from this period: Naumans installations trap the
viewer in a confused position between action and nonaction, agency and compliance, doing and
watching (2003: 16).
52

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spatio-temporal moment that is locatable in the now of the event, yet this fact of the
moment is always ineluctably deferred. And the cameralike the camera that views my
body in performative action in Above and Backprovokes the question of who gets
performed, making for a double nuance in the inter of the intersubjective/objective: the
self simultaneously non-coincident and viewed as object by the camera which signifies
the look of the other. And to complicate these operations further for Naumans Corridor
work, this signifier of the other recording subject is in closed (live) circuit54 and
therefore only perceivable by the one perceived, rendering her in perpetual dehiscence.
It is in this sense that chiasm stands for the motion of perpetual dehiscence, in which
perception is understood as being in momentum (Vasseleu 1998: 30).
In asking how it comes about that we perceive, Merleau-Ponty states: We shall understand
this only if the empirical self and the body are not immediately objects, in fact only if they
never quite become objects (2002: 241-242). It is in this sense that interobjectiveness
operates where the subject and object both simultaneously vascillate. This is a significant
point for the discussion in Chapter 4 regarding the objectness of performative actions
because it reinforces the possibility that objects are never quite objects, fixed within a
language of perception, and that such a realisation is heightened in the realm of
performative body art. A notion of contingency in this regard is inscribed with a constant
differencing in a chiasmic doubling/crossing (Vasseleu 1998: 29).
And it is in this regard that The Artist Will Be Present attempts an incarnation of the flesh of
the chiasm which will always necessarily fail. For it attempts an indeterminate interplay
between the part objects intimate impressions of one, in vacillation with the other, via
means of participation. The moving images scale, and the sound of the struggle of their
indeterminate making in Over & Over, embody the viewer with a physiognomic closeness
that attempts to dissolve viewer and screen. In this way the blackness of the images
backgrounds projected in the blacked-out gallery space lend a groundlessness to the
images. As my body and the Take series (Back and Caress) disappear from view, the
insistent and spatially dislocated sound track indicates that the activity continues out of
frame. At these points the body/s of the audience are alone and noncoincidental with
the process of making (the performative utterance) that continues in an adjacent
See Christine Van Assches Historical and Museological Aspects of New Media Works
where section two is dedicated to discussing the operation of the closed circuit video work.
54

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spatiality. As Sobchack writes, the chiasm names the ground of all presence against
which discrete figures of being emerge as such; it is thus the ground from which
oppositions both emerge and fall away, in which they become reversible but
noncoincidental (2004: 294n218). These operations of absence and failure underscore
a contingency, not between subject and object, artist and audience, but a resisting of those
terms in preference for a profound liminal intertwining.

2.3 LIMINALITY

BACK, 2008

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CARESS, 2008

Returning to the question of how I endeavour to theorise and contextualise The Artist
Will Be Present, I make use of the manner in which anthropologists and folklorists, in
their analysis of ritual processes in ethnographic case studies, have been a significant
factor in the formation of performance studies. This has been more broadly articulated
as a relationship between theatre and anthropology. In particular I utilise the notion of
liminality defined as relating to sensory thresholds and as an indeterminate state, phase,
or condition of in-between two (Vasseleu 1998: 22).55 As McKenzie writes:
Theatre provided anthropologists and ethnographers with a formal model for
seeing performance, for recognising its forms in society, for conceptualizing the
ways in which social meanings and values become embodied in behaviours and
events. In turn, liminal rites of passage gave theatre scholars a functional model for
theorizing the transformational potential of theatre and other performative
genres separated from society both temporally and spatially, liminal activities
allow participants to reflect, take part, and reassemble symbols and behaviours
and, possibly, to transform themselves and society. (2001: 36)

See also Phelan where she discusses, in the context of the origins of theatre as growing out of
ritual practices, transformations where the initiate is suspended in an in-between or liminal
state during the ritual practice itself and the significance of Arnold van Genneps argument to
this effect (2004: 17n13). She will argue this as a primary influence on Marina Abramovics live
performances such as Rhythm 0 (1974) and The House with the Ocean View (2002).
55

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The notion of liminal rites of passage becomes central to my project as I argue, from the
point of view of sympathetic magical action, that these partial objects operate as a
performative force due to their (formal) ambivalence as objects/images. And that,
together with their intimate associations of contact (contagion) with the body, such objects
(and their related donor subjects) are best understood in the context of performative
ritual. In this sense the concept of performativity can be defined as an embodied
enactment of cultural forces [and as] a liminal process, a reflexive transgression of social
structures [and that] liminal performances are capable of temporarily staging and
subverting their normative functions (J. McKenzie 2001: 8).56

UGO RONDINONE, THE EVENING PASSES, 1998

This kind of emphasis might be applied to works like Ugo Rondinones The evening passes like
any other57 (1998) in which the artist employs large stone-like white objects suspended from
the ceiling, suggestive of human touch. These objects are exhibited alongside video
monitors depicting endless scenes of an oncoming truck and a naked woman recurrently
jumping up and down, together with a looped sound track with the words, What could be
better, nothing is better. Gaby Hartel writes about this installation: By urging visitors to
touch, look at and listen to, this art gives priority to their instinctive perceptions. So the
viewer experiences his/her body as a source of knowledge, and becomes a participant in

See McKenzie in Genre Trouble: (The) Butler Did It for a reading of Judith Butlers Gender
Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) in the context of the performative studies field.
McKenzie examines Butlers citation of two 1980s anthropological texts, by Victor Turner (From
Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982) and Schechner (Between Theatre and
Anthropology, 1985), where the concept of liminality is employed across a range of activities,
rituals and theatre as constituting an in-betweeness in performative genres (1998: 218, 223).
57 The full title of this work by Ugo Rondinone is: The evening passes like any other. Men and woman
float alone through the air. They drift past my window like the weather. I close my eyes. My heart is a moth
fluttering against the walls of my chest. My brain is a tangle of spiders wriggling and roaming around. A
wriggling tangling of wriggling spiders (1998).
56

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this kind of performance poem (2006b: 244). This is to stress perception through the body
as an incarnate process of the chiasm.58

ALEX MARTINIS ROES ONTOLOGICAL LEAP

ALEX MARTINIS ROE, ONTOLOGICAL LEAP, 2007

This sense of liminality has been discussed in terms of the uncanny as a sensation of surprise
and acute momentary embodiment. I have preferred to emphasise a sense of disorientation
rather than the uncanny while acknowledging that the two terms share some commonality. For
an interesting contextualisation of the uncanny in film, see Lesley Stern where she discusses
Freuds 1919 essay The Uncanny. While Stern does not employ the term liminal, the terms by
which she discusses a moment of perceptual jolting in the consciousness of the viewer is close to
a sensory threshold and intermediate state of in-betweeness described above. In describing
Freuds surprise at seeing another passenger enter his train compartment only to realise that it
was, in fact, his own reflection in the washing-cabinet mirrored door, she writes: He presents us
with a scene conceptualized as a frame within a frame. His perception involves movement, he is
jolted, subjected to a shock. We might almost say that the movement involves transference, it is
a movement between the viewer and the image (1997: unpaginated www). Added to this is the
notion of space and time transfigured through the action of the moment in the cinematic
experience. This is liminality as it is suspended in space and time. Stern notes in the context of
the uncanny: We might also say that it is an instanciation of the cinematic body. That is to say,
it is a body that simultaneously moves (through human agency) and is moved (mechanically,
through cinematic means). It moves through space and time; space and time are reconfigured
by the movement. And later in the same essay in reinforcing the notion of the moment in the
film Blade Runner where Pris somersaults in front of Deckard landing on his shoulders: Pris
performance is not a demonstration of presence. It is an assertion that subjectivity, history,
memory (manufactured or not) are lived through the body; but simultaneously it is an
enactment of the momentariness of the body (1997: unpaginated www).
58

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ALEX MARTINIS ROE, ONTOLOGICAL LEAP, 2007

Martinis Roe earnestly performs before a Melbourne audience at Conical Inc. on July
28, 2007. Assimilating VALIE EXPORTs Ontological Leap (1974) and Touching. Body
Poem (1970/1991) into her own work she stands dutifully in a box of sand.59 Stepping
back out of the box she holds up pre-prepared card-mounted photographs of her feet
impressions, displaying them to her audience as if miming the presentation of applause
or laughter queue-cards before a soap-opera set. Cut to the size of the boxes she then
This performance-installation is entitled Ontological Leap and is a detail, within a separate
section entitled (EXERCISE), of a larger performance entitled Practical Illustrations of Body
Configurations in Architecture. As such Alex Martinis Roe refers to VALIE EXPORTs Ontological
Leap (1974) while she is also conscious of works such as EXPORTs Touching. Body Poem
(1970/1991). She says that these specific references to earlier artists works are to some degree
random in that she was trying to assimilate art historical methodology that uses examples to
illustrate a point. In the interests of focus I have chosen not to dwell on the complex manner in
which Martinis Roe quotes history and its relationship to the terms of appropriation. While this
is also an aspect of my own practice in the manner in which the part objects in The Artist Will Be
Present quote small proto-Modernist sculptures, this is not an idea developed in this thesis.
Martinis Roe makes, for example, a distinction between the remake and the derivative
artwork: The section where I photographed my feet on the box of sand was the remake but
the piece with the clay and my fingers was meant to be a derivative artwork of the Ontological
Leap work. The idea of the derivative artwork is meant to do away with the value judgements
that would immediately arise (2008). This aspect of her practice will have to wait for a future
project. Another subset of her practice which I do not highlight is her focus on feminist histories
where she states in relation to the EXPORT works: Also her role in the history of feminist
cathartic work was an important reason [for her inclusion in Practical Illustrations of Body
Configurations in Architecture] (2008).
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places the photographs over the imprints of her feet. The photographs oscillate as
negative and positive images, at once concave impressions as well as convex reversals
not unlike the feet coming out of EXPORTs TV screens. In the originating work,
EXPORTs four pairs of feet each standimprintingon the four glass screens of four
TV monitors, as if we are looking up at people through a glass sheet on which they
stand. But the images are reversed as we look down upon the screens that rest in a
grided cross formation, on the floor, screens facing upwards. Retrieving the photographs
and placing them to one side, Martinis Roe steps back into her footprints and, holding a
camera up to her face in a downward glance, takes photographs of her own feet in the
sand. Stepping out she repeats the exercise, finally leaving the card-mounted
photographs of her feet impressions covering the actual impressions. What interests me
is the attention she places on a relay between media (object, photograph and
performance) in her quest to articulate the underbelly of the foots touch and weight so
evident in EXPORTs work. As well as this, Martinis Roe makes photographs that are
almost exact replicas of the photographs by EXPORT called Ontological Leap. In this
sense she is turning what she imagined to be her artistic process into a performance as a
liminal relay between media and disciplines.60 As Martinis Roe states:
I wanted to use one of VALIE EXPORTs works in that section of the
performance (EXERCISE) because of her use of repetitive process across different
media I also wanted to use a photographic series and convert it into a
photographic performance. The main idea was to choose a work which took the
conceptual logic of the performance-installation as a whole and extrapolate it over
and over... the idea that you could keep going with the same idea because it was
deconstructing representation... a kind of infinite project. The relationship with
the Touching. Body Poem work I guess you could say that I like to collapse the
distinction between the real and the represented body because I think our
identities are completely confused and made up of repetitions of the self both real
and mediated. I was using the body interacting with the screen as an object, as a
way of articulating this collapse between reality and representation. (2008)

See McKenzies Perform or Else which, as stated above, proffers the idea of a shift from
disciplinarity to performativity where a notion of liminality between disciplines is developed.
60

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ALEX MARTINIS ROE, ONTOLOGICAL LEAP, 2007

ALEX MARTINIS ROE, ONTOLOGICAL LEAP, 2007

Martinis Roes actions are only understood in relation to the ritual played out in front of
her Melbourne audience. This is to underline an earlier emphasis raised by Jones that
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the artist is self-consciously performed through new, openly intersubjective contexts

(including video or ironicised modes of photographic display) which insist upon the
openness of this and all subjects to the other (1998: 67). In this regard, her five
performances over a two-week period at Conical Inc, presented the debris, or
aftereffects, of her performance pieces before her audiences as performative
documentation. To reiterate Auslanders emphasis already noted above, it was her
relationship with her audiences that authenticated the materials in her installation. And
in this way the objects also form the focus of each performance event at intervals during
the exhibition. One such artefact was a line of clay carefully manipulated, again in the
presence of the audience, as a derivative artwork based on EXPORTs Ontological Leap.
At a particularly concentrated moment in the performance-installation, as if typing with
head to one side, she smudges clay across the horizontal surface of a copy of a
demolished wall of the gallery she has made as a temporary podium as well as across a
TV monitor embedded in the structure. This relay, as I have called it, questions the
live moment of performance as it insists on a derivative play between the live, its
historical sources in previous body art works, and (as will be discussed below in detail) its
constant reiteration as repeated performances and as stage-set debris. I am intrigued at
how Martinis Roe uses her bodydressed in black like a theatre stage-handas the
catalyst, with and in front of audiences, to question how the live performance gets
remembered: how her documentation of previous performances are re-enacted as
events. Is what she does more real than the various kinds of documentation that she
references? How is her live body in its supposed authenticity more real than the photocards she displays of EXPORTs work or the photographs she takes of her own feet?
Her work, in this sense, is designed to expand and question the relationship between
performance events and their documentation.61
In this questioning Martinis Roe utilises some of the traditionally enduring tropes of
spatial liminalitymould and cast, positive and negative photography, the live body
and the screenas a means, in her words cited above, of deconstructing
These questions are similar to those raised in the draft document for Perform, Repeat, Record: A
Critical Anthology of Live Art in History proposed by Heathfield and Jones: How does live art get
remembered? How does this remembering manifest itself in documents and in re-enactments of
performance events? What is the nature of the performance event? Is it more real than the
various kinds of documentation (textual, photographic, videographic, filmic, re-stagings) through
which it is passed down through time? Is the live body more authentic than the body
represented in photographs, film, or video? (2007).
61

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representation a kind of infinite project made up of repetitions of the self both real
and mediated. This is where I will argue for the trope of mould and cast (positive and
negative) in this work and that of Nauman, Duchamp, Eskdale and the Take series as
evoking but never resolving its own loss or disappearance. At its most basic, an
imprintfootprintcharacterises both contact and absence: in order for the imprint to
appear, the foot must lift out and move on. The presence of the bodys imprint therefore
solicits notions of temporal delay: an indexing of past contact by touch as well as the
present discovery and speculation surrounding the original contact. In the catalogue
essay for the 1997 Centre Pompidou exhibition LEmpreinte (Imprint), George DidiHuberman describes the imprint as a dialectical image, a conflation of contact and loss:
contact with the loss of the loss of contact, forcing us to re-think models of temporality
(19).62 For Didi-Huberman the mould becomes a metaphor for absence that might be
inhabited or filled at any point. This is the always already of the perceiving experience.

2.5 BRUCE NAUMANS SPACE UNDER MY HAND

WHEN I WRITE MY NAME

BRUCE NAUMAN, SPACE UNDER MY HAND WHEN I WRITE MY NAME, 1966

This and subsequent quotations of George Didi-Hubermans LEmpreinte are my translations.

Bois and Krauss critique Didi-Hubermans use of the term dialectic in a related text (Bois and
Krauss 1997: 67-73).
62

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In 1966 Nauman made Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name, a work that has
significant resonance with Martinis Roes impressing and smudging actions in Ontological
Leap. In variance with Ontological Leap, Naumans work acts as a trace of an action that
never took place in public view, casting those actions in an artefact that functions as
evidence after the event. These works present bodies in absentia.63 Like Martinis Roes
manipulation of clay, Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name looks morphologically
ambivalent in its description of the space between the artist and a (writing) surface,
between himself and the world (Halbreich 1994: 91): it makes concrete a void between
the body and an object. The work relies on the notion of bodily contact with wax, but
not any body: Naumans signaturethat which lends authorial credencemoulded in a
material historically associated with sacredness, healing and seals of authority. And from
a sculptural paradigm the idea of temporality is lent to the work in that wax is a material
designed to melt and be reconstituted. That these artists use their bodies as casting agents
transforms a perception of moulds and casts, as dichotomous and divided along clear
points of intersection, into one of liminal in-between two, a fleshy subjective reality
objectifiable for others and internally divergent. The body that formed these works
cannot be said to be absent, but rather, to have fallen in an entre-deux state of liminality.
In this sense the sculptures are part of, or suggest a metonymic desire (and therefore
lack), of a larger whole (Storr 1994: 53-54). 64

Another work also produced in this series in 1966 that could be used in this discussion is
Naumans Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists. Here Naumans knee imprints are
ambiguous by virtue of a liminal reversal common to moulds and the deception in the title itself.
See Reihe Cantz who points out that the knee impressions are actually his wifes knees, Nauman
having stated in interview that they were his own (1998: 44-45). As with Martinis Roes feet
impressions, the viewer is left searching to recreate the positive anatomy that once filled the
void.
64 This wording is close to Robert Storrs but I disagree with Storr who draws a distinction
between Jasper Johns use of body parts as symbolic or formal fragments and Naumans as a
sculpturally and logically self-sufficient statement of the relationships between its components.
Storr writes that: Rather than being part of, or the metonymic representation of a larger whole,
From Hand to Mouth is a whole unto itself: a richly ambiguous but complete grammatical unit.
This high concentration of meaning within a seemingly obvious shape is typical of Naumans
work... (1994: 53-54). While it may be truer of From Hand to Mouth, it is not the case that works
like Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name or Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists,
form complete grammatical units. I have altered Storrs wording with regard to the metonymic
representation of a larger whole and said instead that the sculptures suggest a metonymic
desire (and therefore lack), of a larger whole, implying the opposite to that which Storr argues
for Nauman. The metonymic axis of contiguity does not represent as a complete grammatical
unit. Its force is all that is lacking and redundant to its partiality.
63

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Reihe Cantz comments in relation to this and other works between 1966 and 1970
such as Collection of Various Flexible Materials Separated by Layers of Grease with Holes the Size of
My Waist and Wrists (1966) and Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists (1966)
that: Physical presence is precisely what is missing from these works, an absence
achieved through various disillusive manoeuvres (1998: 44). Such an absence is also a
characteristic of some of Naumans films and videos of this same period. In works such
as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1968), Nauman can
vanish from view while his presence is indicated by the sound of footsteps or a bouncing
ball.65 This is the noncoincidence of image and audience previously described for my
disappearing body (Back) and part objects (Caress) as well as a dislocation of sound and
image that Cantz maintains as disillusive manoeuvres. I do this to avoid over
literalising the works (at each step trying to remove information in order to present parts
of larger wholes where redundancy, or lack, is all those parts that are missing and, in
turn, all those parts that we desire). Moreover, I do this to provoke an absence in the
experience of both image and sound. Only my body and the body/s of the audience
constitute the image due to its frame-less-ness and disorientated presence in the space.
In this way the body/s of the audience, in a deeply phenomenological manner, become
spatially and temporally embodied in the performative encounter: become intertwined
as both the subject and object of the art work as they stand, for that moment, on their
own, or, filling the absent moment. This, for me, is another operation for questioning
the instant of the live performance. As will be argued below, via the writings of Phelan
and Derrida, my body (as is the case with Naumans body in Walking in an Exaggerated
Manner around the Perimeter of a Square) becomes dislodged from the referent, from
communication and its context: as in the words of Derrida, the nonpresent remainder cut
off from its putative production or origin (1988: 10). This radical non-presence can be
located in experiencing my live body in dvd projection (absent in person, so to speak,
and also absent, at moments of total black-out, from the audiences space). It can also be
located in the performative part moulds of the Take series as I index past moments of
contact with body/s (mine and audiences), their modes of participatory encounter
manifest as close-up filmic projections importuning the body/s of the audience by way
of a filmic closeness (Cut 2) which will be discussed in Chapter 3 in the context of Laura
Marks writing on bodily haptic encounters in film.

65

See Cantz who makes this observation (1998: 46).

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2.6 MARCEL DUCHAMPS EROTIC OBJECTS

MARCEL DUCHAMP, FEMALE FIG LEAF, 1950 & OBJET-DARD, 1951

MARCEL DUCHAMP, FEMALE FIG LEAF, 1950

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Naumans works have been compared to Duchamps erotic objects between 1950 and 1954
that may derive from moulds in the casting process for his final work Etant donns.66 The
1950 Feuille de vigne femelle (Female Fig Leaf) may be the reverse mould of the female
pudendum of Etant donns while the Objet-Dard (1951) is said to be a plaster object formed
from the leftover material cut away from a mould of the Etant donns breasts (Jones 1994:
91-92). The bottom portion of Coin de chastete (Wedge of Chastity) (1954) is made of dental
plastic into which a wedge of galvanised plaster is forced. These three sculptures formed the
group known as the erotic or sexual objects (Jones 1994: 90; Molesworth 2005a: 179-182;
Pincus-Witten 1973: 41) to which can be added Not a Shoe (1950) bearing a striking
resemblance to the galvanised plaster component in Wedge of Chastity four years later.
Like the Martinis Roe and Nauman works, the erotic objects allude to human anatomy
but are ambiguous in their representation of it. All these objects share a mimetic
partiality. It is the ostensible knowledge of their productiona past and part action
and techniques of visual reciprocity, such as the body as casting agent, that lends them a
dual sense of formlessness and intimacy with the bodies that were once in contact with
them. It is this indeterminate interplay of formlessness and intimacy where flesh
expresses the inscription of difference within the same that underwrites the partial
objects and moving images of The Artist Will Be Present. In this casting process, where
flesh is mould, there is no original while each appearance is unique; the participatory
action of viewers (physical and virtual) further contributing to the flux of each
appearance. In a similar light, digital media possesses no original, as Parfait observes,
each one of its appearances is unique by virtue of specific architectural conditions, a
more or less variable relation between a space, a time, materials and an electronic
device (2006b: 36).
In this way The Artist Will Be Present expresses an always changing flux vis--vis the
object of performance. Above and Back allude to studio process as performance where
I am less interested in a discussion of influence between Marcel Duchamp and Nauman but
rather to observe similarities in their works that may have been synchronic. In comparing
Naumans From Hand to Mouth (1967) to Duchamps With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959) Neal
Benezra argues that Nauman is more influenced by Jasper Johns than Duchamp given that the
first major Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 was when Nauman
was still an undergraduate and the most major English translations on Duchamp appeared in
the 1970s onwards. In this light a comparison to Johns Target with Plaster Casts (1955) might be a
more apt comparison (Benezra 1994: 24).
66

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the making overshadows the object, while Participate and Caress (Cuts 1 & 2), in their
different modes of participation, exaggerate the encounter in variation to scopic
recognition of the objects. Like Duchamps erotic objects, this is a way of activating the
auratic nature of the body in objects as a form of embodiment.67

2.7 EMBODIMENT
In analysing the perception of a six-sided white cube, Merleau-Ponty writes that: if
the words enclose and between have a meaning for us, it is because they derive it
from our experience as embodied subjects (2002: 236). In this sense the term
embodiment is characteristic of a desire to describe a body beyond the terms of scopic
or purely visual representation, a notion of a body that is understood as reciprocally
experienced by artist and viewer due, as will be argued in some depth, to the contexts of
performativity in which the experiencing operates.
In Body Thoughts anthropologist Andrew Strathern, like many others, seeks to reject a
Cartesian view ( la Descartes) that separates mind and body in order to highlight a
concept of the body to the extent that embodiment has become an identifiable term in
cultural analysis. In a move reminiscent of the chiasm, the notion of dichotomy is
replaced with notions of ...crossover or interpenetration of putative mental and bodily
characteristics (1996: 2 emphasis added). In a way that echoes a drive away from an
individuals authorial intent noted in Chapter 1, this term may replace notions of the
individual or person that tend more to indicate rights, identities, tendencies of will or
self-definition, while embodiment seeks to investigate the senses and feelings of the here
and now.68
Stratherns most lucid definition of embodiment reads:
Embodiment has to do with the body, but it implies that it is something else, other
than or added to the physical body itself, that is embodied, and such a thing
I will return to Duchamps erotic objects in section 6.4 The Force of the Wedge.
See Andrew Strathern for a good overview of phenomenological methods and the notion of
embodiment in anthropology (1996: chapter 8). In referencing Merleau-Ponty he writes that:
Objects do not exist in any a priori sense but only a posteriori, as a result of perception and
perception is always embodied (1996: 178). In a similar emphasis to Sobchack, and with
reference to Thomas Csordas, he stresses a concept of the body as a mindful body.
67
68

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often turns out to be an abstract social value, such as horror or bravery.

Embodiment thus has to do with values that in some ways are also disembodied or
may be thought of separately from the body itself. Embodiment, in other words, is
a term that belies itself by combining the abstract and the concrete together.
(1996: 2 emphasis added)
While I agree with the idea of the term embodiment belying itselfparticularly in the
context of a constantly shifting notion of performativity described aboveas a term that
defies exact definition, I disagree that it might be thought of as separate from the body
itself as this would contradict Sobchacks important point that embodiment is a
fundamentally material condition of being that therefore brings about both the body
and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, as irreducible (2004: 4).69 And in
stressing that this does not mean a perfect synchronicity of body and consciousness, as
objective subjects and subjective objects, Sobchack quotes Gary Madisons Did
Merleau-Ponty Have a Theory of Perception?:
The perceiving subject is itself defined dialectically as being neither (pure)
consciousness nor (physical, in itself) body. Consciousness is not a pure selfpresence; the subject is present to and knows itself only through the mediation of
the body, which is to say that this presence is always mediated, i.e., is indirect and
incomplete. (2004: 4)
This reinforces Merlau-Pontys notion of the chiasm discussed above that seeks an
indeterminate interplay: the in-between two of the entre-deux.

2.8 EFFICACY
A potential for performative genres to transform themselves and society voiced by
McKenzie above, entails the possibilities of transformation as a result of personal and
social contingency inherent in cultural performance. And here distinctions between
disciplines of anthropology and art history/theory have generally perceived efficacy on
differing trajectories. Anthropology has tended to uphold notions of efficacy that
reinforce normative social structures while also consoling or healing participants, while
art history/theory has tended to focus on performance as transgressive and resisting
See Judith Farquhar and Margaret Locks introduction to Beyond the Body Proper where they
express the hope founded in a materialist anthropology of embodiment to move beyond the
impossible poles of a Cartesian social science. This is the domain of neither a cultural mind nor
a biological body, but of a lively carnality suffused with words, images, senses, desires, and
powers (2007: 15).
69

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normative social values (J. McKenzie 2001: 30). This has been significant, for example,
for feminist discourses that challenge normative male gender roles or those that engage
in institutional critique. In this regard, terms such as redemption are employed less
frequently in art history/theory. Against this grain writers such as Brentano and Stiles
suggest transformative possibilities.70 Brentano refers to a redemptive belief in the
capacity of art to transform human life (1994: 31) while Stiles states that:
Performance Art teaches that the body is an autonomous material object but
equally part of a collective history in which people have responsibility. This ethical
and pedagogical element is the powerful quality of performance that endows the
best artists actions with a social force sufficient to cause debate over the nature
of shared cultural, social, and moral values. (1990: 41 emphasis added)71
It is one of Sobchacks main objectives in her chapter entitled The Passion of the
Material: Towards a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity, to avoid a metaphysical
transcendence that separates spirit and flesh, mind and matter, for a relationship
between body and world [that is] transcendent in the fleshemergent from the
common ground of the worlds physical incarnation and temporalized materiality and in
the immanence of the lived bodys primordially material sense-ability and responsability (2004: 295).72 It is in evoking both aesthetic sensibility and ethical responsibility
that she seeks out a reciprocal relation between aesthetics and ethics, that material
objects in the world are not only sensible to our own flesh but how they also can make us
devoted and responsible to the flesh of the world and others (2004: 295).73
It is in this sense that I will argue that part objects such as Duchamps Wedge of Chastity,
when viewed from a performative perspective, pronounce with illocutionary force an
embodied and liminal statement of responsibility to the flesh of, in this case, Duchamp
See Jones Body Art/Performing the Subject which brought this to my attention.
Within this discussion McKenzie outlines a notion of resistant efficacy. He points to
Auslanders assertion in Presence and Resistance that postmodern performance does not attempt
to oppose social norms and institutions but instead infiltrates them through subtle critiques
and/or parodies of representational media (2001: 43).
72 Likewise, Stern argues from a similar position when she states that Pris somersaulting straight
towards the viewer in Blade Runner is a refutation of the metaphysical postulate, an
instanciation of the thoughtful body or the bodily ego (1997: unpaginated www).
73 Along similar lines, commenting on the processes of aesthetic creation and interpretation
Butt suggests that the ethics inherent in the essays collected in his edited volume do not
impose a model of criticism from without, but discover or produce one out of an engagement
with - and a response to - the contingencies encountered whilst undertaking the act of criticism
itself (2005: 17).
70
71

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and his second wife Alexina. As will be argued at length, this is to speak of a profound
efficacy in the mimetic function of the partial object/subject.
In the same vein, it is the immanent materiality of the Take series, as compared to the
touch of the cinematic experience, in The Artist Will Be Present that I want to argue as
efficacious (and so too the interaction of body/s with materials for Martinis Roe and
Nauman). Merleau-Ponty points to a sense of ethical responsibility in the other when he
describes flesh as the narcissistic operation of seer/self as a field open for other
Narcissus, for an intercorporeity. And in this context he extends the intertwining
hands to the hand of another when he writes: If my left hand can touch my right hand
while it palpates the tangibles, can touch it touching, can turn its palpation back upon it,
why, when touching the hand of another, would I not touch in it the same power to
espouse that things that I have touched in my own? And in this same sense he writes
that this circling of the seer which the seer does not form but which forms the seer can
animate other bodies as well as my own (1968: 140-141). But, importantly, as will
be discussed below, this ethical responsibility is not one tied down to intentions and
social cause but one that is performatively ineluctable in its relations between me and
others. The surface of the Take series bearing the contamination (contagion) of my body
(but not my body in its entre-deux spatiality) is strongly intimate. These part objects bear
the marks of my skin and hairs, of a sense of pressure of my body against the world.
These surfaces, aligned with the flesh of the body/s of the audience via various modes of
participation (physically and optically encountered), reveal quite unexpected relations
between bodies. Merleau-Ponty would say that the flesh of the chiasm is a thing among
things but coincidentally what sees them and touches them and that this double
belongingness to the order of the object and to the order of the subject reveals to us
quite unexpected relations between the two orders (1968: 137).74 And in a footnote, the
editor to the Northwestern University Press edition of The Intertwining, Claude
Lefort, incorporates a note by Merleau-Ponty inserted in the text which coincidentally
describes for me the process of my making these part objects. He comments that this
flesh is a question and response:
To accentuate this point Merleau-Ponty writes that the body is lost outside the world and
its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making
itself the outside of its inside and the inside of its outside. And henceforth movement, touch,
vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return towards their source and, in
the patient and silent labour of desire, begin the paradox of expression (1968: 144).
74

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The openness through flesh: the two leaves of my body and the leaves of the
visible world It is between these intercalated leaves that there is visibility My
body model of the things and the things model of my body: the body bound to the
world through all its parts, up against it all this means: the world, the flesh not
as fact or sum of facts, but as the locus of an inscription of truth: the false crossed
out, not nullified. (1968: 131n131)
I love this slightly hesitant note (with pauses and arrows) in that it incarnates the Take
series as vacillating between an object of my making and the subject of my body. But
more than this, my body model of the things and the things model of my body where
things are all the parts of the flesh of the world that are left out and therefore desired in
our exchanges. The redundancy of all the parts that these part objects solicit will be
analysed in depth in Chapter 6. Moreover, the intimate surface of these part objects
transposed in up-close projections (Cut 2) presumes on a vision that is embodied in
tactile space as the body/s of the audience are inextricably embedded in its visual field.
In this way, as Jones writes, the body, then, is not just a simulacral, two-dimensional
screen, but a flesh-like screen, one that presupposes the depth and materiality of the
body as subject (2006: 67).

TAKE SERIES, 2007

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TAKE SERIES, 2007

CARESS, 2008

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Chapter 3
3.1

MIMETIC INCONGRUENCE

3.1 MIMETIC INCONGRUENCE

Where the previous chapter sought to define how the notion of the chiasm is employed as
the underlying methodology for this project, this chapter explores mimetic dislocation
with a focus on the moving image. It outlines a notion central to Mauss poorly
executed ideogram, that representational faithfulness undoes mimetic force. Such an
emphasis underwrites an overarching concern in this thesis that partial objects and
subjects adopt, in the words of Eduardo Cadava, an essential incongruence (1997: 15).
Walter Benjamins notion of the mimetic faculty is closely aligned with the idea that
human language follows on from the sounds of living nature in the sense that
onomatopoeia is a commonplace and sensuous form of mimesis (1986: 334). It is also
closely aligned, more evident in Doctrine of the Similar than in On The Mimetic Faculty, with
archaic magical correspondences and similarities.75
This emphasis on the mimetic facultys impact on the formulation of language allows for
the possibility that, in the words of Anson Rabinbach, aural and visual elements of
language are seen as the residue of the powerful natural and supernatural
correspondences that predominate in the mental world of the primitives. And
Rabinbach goes on: This idea is also emphatically linked to Benjamins conception of
Messianic time as comprised of the fleeting instantaneous flash as opposed to duration
(1979: 62).76 This posits a notion of mimesis as fundamentally tactile and physical with less
focus on narrative duration and representational fixity. In this sense Strathern writes:
Mimesis is the physical counterpart of metonymy in language The most characteristic
See Anson Rabinbach for a comparision of Benjamins two texts, Doctrine of the Similar and On
The Mimetic Faculty, both written in 1933. Rabinbach recognises in the former an exaggerated
historical anthropological dimension, such as an emphasis on archaic magical correspondences
and similarities, which is not as present in the latter (1979: 61).
See Strathern where he contextualises mimetic embodiment in refering to Michael Taussigs
Mimesis and Alterity. Strathern summarises Taussig as pursuing themes, via the Cuna people of
South America, where mimesis is described as the imitation of the other, both as a reaction
and as an attempt at appropriation It has emotional, artistic and magical roots (1996:
193). In this regard he goes on to quote Taussig as identifying the mimetic faculty as a
human characteristic that grants to the copy the character of the original the representation the
power of the represented (1996: 193). See (Taussig 1993: xviii).
76 It is in this sense that Taussig recalls Theodor Adorno in Uber Walter Benjamin that: He
is driven not merely to awaken congealed life in petrified objectsas in allegorybut also to
scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, Ur-historical and
abruptly release their significance (1993: 1).
75

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operations of its logic... take the form of movements of the body, turning to the right or
left, putting things upside-down, going in, coming out, cutting, tying (1996: 27).
Sobchack underscores this emphasis on the physicality of mimesis when she sees
mimesis as a corporeal activity that does not require the translation of conscious
thought to be enacted or understood (2004: 76n67).77 Sobchacks locating of mimetic
activity as other than conscious may relate to Benjamins notion of the optical
unconscious in which ways of seeing that escape the scopic activate an expansion of the
optical.
Benjamins notion of the optical unconscious is one that declares some allegiance to
psychoanalytic models as it rubs shoulders with a study of magic, the most celebrated
instance being Sigmund Freuds Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts where
Freud argues that a system of contagious magic and associations of contiguity constitutes
an over-valuation of mental processes when he writes that, it may be said that the
principle governing magic, the technique of the animistic mode of thinking, is the
principle of the omnipotence of thoughts (1999: 85).78 This, he argues, is an overevaluation also found in neurotic patients. In relation to this Freud makes a caveat
which I quote at length as it sets in motion seemingly anachronistic associations of the
magic in art:
In only a single field of our civilisation has the omnipotence of thoughts been
retained, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that a man
who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment
of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effectsthanks
to artistic illusionjust as though it were something real. People speak with justice
of the magic of art and compare artist to magicians. But the comparison is
perhaps more significant than it claims to be. There can be no doubt that art did
not begin as art for arts sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses which
are for the most part extinct to-day. And among them we may suspect the
presence of many magical purposes. (1999: 90)

Sobchack states this in reference to Taussigs Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.
See Rosalind Krauss as she outlines Benjamins main concerns in the term optical
unconscious in his 1931 Small History of Photography and his 1936 Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction essays. She raises the question as to whether the optical
fieldthe world of visual phenomena: clouds, sea, sky, foresthave an unconscious? (1993:
179). She asks this question precisely to test Benjamins notion of the optical unconscious in
relation to Freuds notion of the unconscious.
77
78

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And Freud footnotes a reference to Reinachs Lart et la Magie from 1905-12. He points
to the possibility that primitive artists did not desire to please but to evoke or
conjure up (1999: 90n93). He goes on to quote Reinach:
In modern times people often speak metaphorically of the magic of a great artists
brush or chisel, or more generally of the magic of art. This expression is no longer
permissible in its proper sense of a mystical force brought to bear by the human will upon
other wills or upon objects; but, as we have seen, there was a time when it was literally
trueat least in the artists opinion. (1999: 91n93)
Reinachs view of magical practice is typical of a Victorian rationalist explanation
redolent with evolutionist theories of his time as will be argued in Chapter 5. I want to
argue the opposite, that magical action can be understood as a performative forceto
use Reinachs term, and a term I will employ with regard to Austins performative
utterancebrought to bear by the human will upon other wills in the context of
conventional normative understandings. I reference Freud and Reinach in order to flag
my interest in reassessing attitudes in the late 19th-and early 20th-centuries to do with an
over-evaluation of desires seen by them in the contexts of neurosis and primitivism
respectively. In focusing on the latter, and through a re-evaluation of the operations of
sympathetic magic, my project activates ethnographic and anthroplogical sources and
their negotiations of so-called primitive or savage understandings of mimetic animism.
Reinachs terms, evoke and conjure up suggest processes between agents thatwhen
viewed outside the terms of cause and effect typical of the Victorian eramight be
interpreted performatively with a strong emphasis on reciprocity between agents and a
divergence within the self/body so important to the last chapter of this thesis. It is with
reference to these modes of mimetic animism that Jennifer Bean talks of a
phenomenologically performative reflexivity that is so important to this project:
Mimesis stresses the reflexive, rather than reflection; it brings the subject into
intimate contact with the object, or other, in a tactile, performative, and sensuous
form of perception, the result of which is an experience that transcends the
traditional subject-object dichotomy. Through mimesis the subject is not stabilized
or rigidified by means of its identifications. Indeed, mimesis redefines identification
as process, a contagious movement that renders indeterminate, fluid, or porous the
boundaries between inside and outside. (2001: 46 emphasis added)79

79

See Sobchack who discusses this text by Jennifer Bean (2004: 89).

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Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses describes a
sensuousness in the photographic process where the capacity of mimetic machines to
pump out contact-sensuosity encased within the spectrality of a commoditized world is
nothing less than the discovery of an optical unconscious, opening up new possibilities
for exploring reality (1993: 23). Rebecca Schneider, who references the same
moment in Taussigs text, notes that this use of the optical unconscious deploys a
sensuality of mimesis, implicating the body of the viewer at the same time that that
viewer is, by the tenets of perspectivalism, seemingly dissociated from that which is
seen (1997: 89).80 In this way, the mimetic optical unconscious that Benjamin sought in
the photographic image is important to the moving images Back and Caress. I aim, within
a reflexive mode articulated by Bean above, to bring the body/s of the audience into a
performatively intimate and tactile contact with these partial objects/subjects that
transcends the traditional subject-object dichotomy. When encountering the
overwhelmingly intimate detail of flesh, both on the detailed surfaces of the Take series
and on my back, mimesis denies a stable identification of the images and redefines
identification as a process of contamination; contagious movement, as Bean puts it, that
confronts boundaries between inside and outside: my body and the body/s of the
audience.
In this way technological advances in high definition macro filming (and projection)
employed in Caress enlarge mimetic powers. In this context there is an irony in
Benjamins notion of the decline of photography that is linked to his doctrine of
mimesis that requires some discussion. As Cadava notes, Benjamins notion of the
decline of photography, positions this decline as located in the technological advances
in photography that renders it less mimetically powerful. This is because Benjamin
locates an auratic value in the atmospheric or phantasmatic qualities of early
photography that is diminished by technological advances. As Cadava writes: It
suggests that the most faithful photographs, the photograph most faithful to the event of
the photograph, is the least faithful one, the least mimetic onethe photograph that
remains faithful to its own infidelity. It dislocatesit is the dislocation, from within, of
the possibility of reflection (1997: 15). It is in this sense that Benjamins doctrine of
Schneider is arguing for these sensuous properties of mimesis as exploited and kept secret
within commodity capitalism where the object in display plays on the sensuousness of the
(dislocated) viewer, beckoning the viewer to enter (purchase) the object presented (1997: 89).
80

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mimesis presupposes a congruence between subject and technique that corresponds

to, is congruent with, an essential incongruence (1997: 15). This is to reiterate the idea
that representational completion would undo mimetic force. Related to this is Benjamins
perception of similarity that is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash. It slips
past, can possibly be regained, but really cannot be held fast, unlike other perceptions
The perception of similarities thus seems to be bound to a time-moment (Zeitmoment)
(1979: 66).
Having said this, Benjamins decline of photographywhich itself can be taken to be a
paradigm for a decline between the work of art and what it represents inaugurated by
photography (Cadava 1997: 14)can be seen, not as a diminishing of the mimetic
faculty but as its transformation. As Susan Buck-Morss writes paraphrasing Benjamins
On The Mimetic Faculty, what appears to be the decay of this capacity of mimesis,
may be, rather, a new stage in its transformation (1989: 267). Here Benjamin can be
seen as equivocal, especially in his Work of Art essay. While he saw technological
advances as hindering mimetic power, in relation to the development of film and
cinematic experiences, he foresaw an enlargement of mimetic powers:
For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film
has brought about a similar deepening of apperception With the close-up, space
expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a
snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though
unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. (1999: 229230)81
This is to draw distinction between mimesis as re-presentation or re-production in
variance with technical production by means of fragmentation of image, sound and
duration. On this point Buck-Morss, with reference to Benjamins Work of Art essay, writes:
It is in this way that technological reproduction gives back to humanity that
capacity for experience which technological production threatens to take away. If
industrialization has caused a crises in perception due to the speeding up of time
and the fragmentation of space, film shows a healing potential by slowing down
time and, through montage, constructing synthetic realities as new spatiotemporal orders wherein the fragmented images are brought together according
to a new law. (1989: 268)

81

Buck-Morss elaborates on this point of view (Buck-Morss 1989: 267).

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The idea that these effects of framing and montage reveal new structural formations in
the subject is taken up by Taussig when he refers to the way in which Eisenstein, in the
context of mimesis, understood the interdependence of montage with physiognomic
aspects of visual worlds (1993: 28). He refers to the physiognomic quality of Eisensteins
film The Old and the New (1928) and the influence that Kabuki theatre of pre-modern
Japan had upon the filmmaker.82 In referencing The Cinematographic Principle and
the Ideogram in Film Form, where Eisenstein gives his estimation of the importance of
Kabuki theatre for the future of film, Taussig refers to an unprecedented slowingdown of movement beyond any point we have ever seen, and disintegrated acting,
performed in pieces detached from one another, acting with the right arm only, acting
with the left leg only, acting with the head and neck only (1993: 29). In this regard,
expectations of naturalism, and representation, were alleviated in favour of what
Taussig refers to as exploiting the nature of magic (1993: 29).
I will return to what Taussig means in his reference to magic in significant detail. For
now, Eisensteins theory of a physiognomic effect in viewing film underwrites
Sobchacks endeavours to undermine general tendencies in contemporary film theory to
emphasise the scopic rather than somatic experience of the viewer and refers to what
Laura Marks refers to as the skin of the film and touch of the cinematic experience in
the context of haptic visuality (Sobchack 2004: 55-57).83 Marks seeks, within the
context of the digital age and a rethinking about optical visuality, to make links between
bodily haptic encounters and opticality. She also stresses a closeness to the surface of
objects in a new media cinematic encounter that is mimetic. As Marks writes: Mimesis
is a form of representation based on getting close enough to the other thing to become
it (2002: xiii). This contesting of our relationships to the optical and the haptic is
interesting because it positions the body/s of the audience in what Marks describes as a
loss of depth, we become amoebalike, lacking a center, changing as the surface to
which we cling changes. We cannot help but be changed in the process of interacting
(2002: xvi). Again, I value this insight as it becomes another way of contextualising
Kabuki allows for a coincidence derived from the Japanese alphabet which Sergei Eisenstein
saw as a language of hieroglyphs and ideogramsfor example: a mouth + a bird = to sing,
and, a knife + a heart = sorrow (Ebrahimian 2004: 67). And see David Bordwell who points
out that Kabuki also grants various sensory channels an equal status in triggering
spectatorial response (2005: 125).
83 In referencing Miriam Hansen, Sobchack refers to the way a mimetic aspect corresponds to
a level of physiognomic excess (2004: 60 ).
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Caress as a mode of haptic participation (Cut 2) that, in its intimacy, touches audiences
with mimetic closeness. As is the case with Back, these moving images emphasise closeup surfaces intended to thwart optical reason, the balance of the viewer, and avoid
literal figuration, all enhancing a possibility of embodiment. As Marks notes of the video
works she focuses on:
Haptic looking tends to rest on the surface of its object rather than to plunge into
depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is a labile, plastic
sort of look, more inclined to move than to focus [inviting] a look that moves on
the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what it is
she is beholding. Haptic video resolves into figuration only gradually if at all,
instead inviting the caressing look (2002: 8)

BACK, 2008

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CARESS, 2008

This reinforces Beans comment that mimesis involves intimate contact as a

contagiousness that is important to my unfolding argument. In this context I draw
comparison between an ambivalence in the partial object and the ambivalent nature of
the cinematic gaze outlined by Sobchack.84 Her focus is to describe the embodied

In arguing for the somatic effects of cinema, Sobchack refers to Benjamins two essays, The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and On The Mimetic Faculty. She refers to Benjamins
concepts of tactile appropriation in the former, and interprets his notion of the mimetic faculty
as a sensuous and bodily form of perception in the latter (2004: 55). She does this to argue
for a phenomenologically inflected materialism evident in Benjamins opus. In this context it
should be noted that Benjamin traces a transformation from an archaic sensuous arena of
similarity to a notion of non-sensuous similarity based in language. In Doctrine of the Similar he
refers to a disappearance of a sphere of life which once seemed to be ruled by the law of
similarity, and in qualifying this as sensuous he writes: From time immemorial, a mimetic
faculty has been conceded some influence on language. That occurred, however, without
foundation and without giving any serious consideration to meaning, or even the history, of a
mimetic faculty. In the main, such considerations remained closely bound to the commonplace,
sensuous area of similarity (1979: 65, 67). In relation to the written and spoken text Benjamin
draws out a doctrine of non-sensuous similarity: Thus the nexus of meaning implicit in the
sounds of the sentence is the basis from which something similar can become apparent
instantaneously, in a flash. Since this non-sensual similarity, however, reaches into all areas of
reading, this deep level reveals a peculiar ambiguity of the word reading in both its profane
and magical senses (1979: 68). In this way Benjamin alerts us to a kind of primordial
sensuousness (linked to the optical unconscious) that instantaneously flashes up. This is what
Sobchack wants to argue for as a carnally sensuous reciprocity of the viewer with the cinematic
84

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structures of cinematic experience that emerge carnally through our senses (2004:
8). She argues that such an ambivalence,
has a precise phenomenological structure that is grounded in the non hierarchical
reciprocity and figure-ground reversibility of having sense, and making sense
meaning thus constituted as both a carnal matter and a conscious meaning that emerge
simultaneously (if in various ratios) from the single system of flesh and consciousness that is
the lived body. (2004: 73)
As a means of contextualising ambivalence in the cinematic experience as a liminal
reversibility of figure and ground, Sobchack also refers to Eisenstein, and with reference
to Lesley Sterns writing on the uncanny in film, she outlines the somatic effects of
cinema.85 She quotes Stern in saying that for Eisenstein, the moving body was
conceived and configured cinematically not just [as] a matter of representation, but
[as] a question of the circuit of sensory vibrations that links the viewer and screen86
(2004: 55). Such a linking is couched in terms of a self-doubling that was characteristic
of Merleau-Pontys language of perception as an in-between two (entre-deux) outlined in
the previous chapter. There is an emphasis here that what is seen on the screen differs
from what was in front of the camera. In a Benjaminian sense, this embodies the
repetition of the filmic process, its alteration to optical and acoustical perception, as
something new that doubles and loops the viewer in an enlargement of mimetic powers.
I suggest that this is similar to what Schimmel argues for in the repetitious acts of
Nauman. Pacing around the studio for works like Stamping in the Studio (1968) Nauman
screen. See Rabinbachs Introduction to Walter Benjamins Doctrine of the Similar (1979)
for a critique of Benjamins notion that the origin of language lies in natural correspondences.
85 Sobchack does not employ the term liminal in her text.
86 See Stern in discussing the effects of the uncanny. Stern describes a space of self-doubling.
She quotes Leo Charney in discussing Jean Epsteins writing on the concept of photognie in
Bonjour Cinema and Other Writings, in Afterimage 10, where the concept suggests that
rapid movement through space and time creates an environment of flux, ephemerality, and displacement that found its home in cinema (1997: unpaginated www). Charney goes on to write
that, the object on screen differs from what it was before; the new context makes it a new
object, even if it can be traced referentially to the concrete object that existed in front of the
camera. Photognie embodies repetition, yet the repetition is ineffably different. In mechanical
reproductions reproduction of the physical universe, something new emerges (Stern 1997:
unpaginated www). As previously stated, I am pursuing a notion of disorientation rather than
the uncanny, however Sterns thinking on the uncanny, via Charney, pulls together some of the
aspects I am aiming for in Above and Back: a repeated unfolding of my body through space that
creates flux and displacement where, even though the viewer becomes aware of a body, its
repetition is ineffably different. This is important for the discussion that follows where, via the
writing on Phelan, the body in its performative plenitude (Phelans word), like metonymy,
becomes separated from its referent.

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made works with actions and gestures that he found himself engaging in on an everyday
basis in his studio. These early films and video tapes are the objects by which we view
the performative acts in Naumans studio. Schimmel writes: For Nauman, the
repetition of such simple actions had the potential to force the viewer into his loop.
Eschewing narrative, he opted for a type of recognition that could ruthlessly wear down
the viewer, for an engaging tension that would never be resolved (1998: 91).

BRUCE NAUMAN, STAMPING IN THE STUDIO, 1968

As a circuit of sensory vibrations, both Nauman and Eisensteins montage theories

interest me with respect to close-up framing and a disorientation in the viewing
experience. This itself was a primary objective in Eisensteins juxtaposition of images by
montage (Ebrahimian 2004: 67).87 It created a dynamic interplay between cuts from one

I am less interested in a notion of juxtapositions of shots that was important to Eisensteins

overall concept of montage. As Sean Cubitt points out, his principle of the montage as it was
being voiced in the 1920s was based on the dialectic model of clashes between shots (2004:
106). In The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram, Eisenstein described this in terms
of montage as conflict from one shot to another as distinct from the idea of linkage. The idea of
conflict would function as an explosion, as impulses driving forward the total film. The
nature of the conflict could be manifest in a number of ways, not just through image. These
included: Conflict of scales. Conflict of volumes. Conflict of masses Conflict of depths. And
this also extended to: Conflicts between an object and its dimensions-and conflicts between an
event and its duration (Eisenstein 1949: 38-39). And this later developed into conflicts between
sound and image that was an overall theory of disintegrated actions as Eisenstein states: The
intensity of perception increases as the didactic process of identification proceeds more easily
along a disintegrated action (1949: 37). It was this sense of disintegrated acting that most
attracted Eisenstein to Kabuki theatre (Eisenstein 1949: 42-43). Shots in isolation from the
montage effect are seen as merely figurative, whereas associations between shots in an overall
87

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image to another as manifest, for example, in Eisensteins October where a rapid burst of
two-frame shots of a machine gun suggests the rat-tat sound and where the image itself
conveys the urgency of the sound (Thompson and Bordwell 1994: 141-145). In a related
way, the moving images in The Artist Will Be Present adumbrate a resistance to a desire to
decipher specific meaning in association with specific shots. As ways of disorientating
perception (that might be comparable to the formal ambivalence in the part objects),
they employ suspended camera angles (literally from above) and close-up framing. This,
together with filming in a blacked-out studio, in turn projected in a blacked-out space as
space betweenwith its incessantly looped sound track spatially removed in Over &
Overmakes for a concurrence of parts, with respect to the body that produced them,
and in relation to the body/s of the audience.88

SERGEI EISENSTEIN, OCTOBER, 1905

sequence was sought after (Cubitt 2004: 106). In particular, the notions of conflict between
objects, their dimensions, and between sound and image have influenced my project.
88 It needs to be noted that my reference to Eisenstein is at odds with his overall desire for a
governable art form. Eisenstein did not seek an indeterminacy of meaning in his projects, but
rather, what Cubitt describes as a rhetorical unity of the film image (2004: 109). I am aware
that I am treating Eisenstein in isolation from a broader political contextas Taussig and
Sobchack likewise dowhere an organisation of total cinema was designed as rhetorical
persuasion, to persuade its audience of what they already believed, to impassion them with a
power of shared belief in the vital task of saving the homeland once again from the brute enmity
of the Germans (Cubitt 2004: 268).

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It is in this sense that Eisenstein makes the case for reducing visual and aural
perceptions to a common denominator [so that] visual as well as aural overtones are a totally
physiological sensation (1949: 70). 89 In this regard he writes:
For the musical overtone (a throb) it is not strictly fitting to say: I hear.
Nor for the visual overtone: I see.
For both, a new uniform formula must enter our vocabulary: I feel. (1949: 71)
Following the idea of disintegrated acting, with respect to the dying daughter in Yasha
(The Mask Maker) when the Kabuki theatre visited Moscow, Eisensteins writes: The
whole process of the death agony was disintegrated into solo performances of each
member playing its own role: the role of the leg, the role of the arms, the role of the head
(1949: 43). This reiterates Taussigs observations above and is similar to Stratherns
approach cited earlier that mimesis is the physical counterpart of metonymy in language
where the body parts and movements solicit mimetic partiality.

BRUCE NAUMAN, THIGHING, 1967

In this context a comparison to Naumans work between 1965-1970 bears a close

relationship between the part body/part object casts and his short video sequences. This
traces a genealogy from Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name to works like Thighing

See Cubitt where he discusses Eisensteins reduction of image and sound to a common
denominator as well the influence of Kabuki theatre. He quotes Eisenstein as follows, the
unique combination of the hand movement of Itsikawa Ensio as he slits his throat in the act of harakiri with the sobbing sound off-stage that graphically corresponds to the movement of the knife
(2004: 106).
89

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(1967) in which he films himself manipulating the skin of his own thigh in a close-up
cropped shot, to works such as Stamping in the Studio (1968) in which he walks about the
studio for 62 minutes, at various points in and out of the frame. In each exercise the
body is treated as, in the words of Cadava cited at the beginning of this chapter,
essentially incongruent. Each is strongly mimetic as, in the words of Bean above, their
mimesis redefines identification as process, a contagious movement that renders
indeterminate, fluid, or porous the boundaries between inside and outside (2001: 46).
In arguing a similar progression for The Artist Will Be Present, these are the modes of
performativity inherent in the looking that move between, on the one hand, the tactile
and literal touching of the objects that themselves bear the intimate imprints of
anothers embrace, and on the other, the reciprocal and reversible ambivalent viewing
akin to the cinematic experience. In both, the notion of mimetic partiality will be
contextualised as a condition of formal ambivalence: what we will see is what Mauss
refers to as the poorly executed ideogram.

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Chapter 4
4.1

PERFORMATIVE SCULPTURE/
THE OBJECT OF PERFORMANCE

4.1 PERFORMATIVE SCULPTURE/

THE OBJECT OF PERFORMANCE
Where the last chapter concluded in suggesting a relationship between Naumans part
objects and his performing body, this chapter consolidates on the object of performance
via Minimalism as a way of discussing a notion of surrogate performers. One of
Schimmels aims, while discussing the impact of performance related activities on the
objects that emerged from them, is to examine action-based work and its relationship to
Minimalisms reductive tendencies (1998: 17).90 He discusses contemporary dances
influence on the reductive vocabulary of performative sculpture in the 1960s, as
well as on objects of Minimalist sculpture (1998: 88).91

ROBERT MORRIS, UNTITLED (BOX FOR STANDING), 1961

He refers to works like Robert Morris Column (1961), a hollow column built to Morris
body dimensions in which he stood upright for three-and-a-half minutes until tipping
himself over, or Morris Untitled (Box for Standing) (1961). Krauss begins her chapter
entitled Mechanical Ballets: Light, Motion and Theatre in her landmark Passages in
Modern Sculpture with a similar intention, describing a Minimalist column made by
Schimmels other interests are abstract expressionisms heroic gesture and conceptual arts
objectlessness in work between 1949-1979.
91 See Brentano who mentions the Judson Dance Theatre, in which Morris was involved, that
collaborated with Anna Halprin, a San Francisco based choreographer using natural movement
and everyday tasks as a basis for choreography in the 1950s (1994: 38).
For an emphasis on a chronology from dance choreography through Minimalism see
Heathfield, where, in the context of live performance artists such as Jrme Bel and La Ribot,
he points to: The correlation between performance art and the moving body of dance [which
is] rooted in the minimalist aesthetics of experimental choreographers of the 1960s and
1970s (2004: 11).
90

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Morris for a seven-minute performance organised by the composer LaMonte Young at

the Living Theatre in 1961. The curtain opens to an erect eight feet-high grey plywood
column. After three-and-a-half minutes the column falls prone for the second half of the
seven-minute duration. Only the column can be seen on the stage, prompting Krauss to
call it the performer, and comparing this work to Morris Columns (1961-73) of painted
aluminium which he would exhibit in various physical states (horizontal or vertical) for
museums and galleries (1977: 201-203, 236-240, 295n201). Twenty-two years later
Jones addresses these concerns in a feminist phenomenological critique of Tony Smiths
Die (1962). She refers to Frieds remarks on Morris work as blatantly anthropomorphic
with an implication of an inner, even secret life (1999: 47). In discussing the relative
size of Die in relation to the size of the viewer/s (a six-foot steel cube), Jones, again in
reference in Fried, writes that paradoxically, this huge cube becomes a surrogate
person (1999: 48). This is the performer that Krauss refers to in relation to Morris
Columns prompting Jones to contextualise Minimalism (and body art which she views as
a corollary of Minimalism) as a means of reflexive exchange where there is a
contingency of the body/self on its environment as Merleau-Pontys the flesh of the
world in a process of anthropomorphism (1999: 46-47).92
This history of the surrogate performer is one way of contextualising performative
tendencies as inherent in objects. The fragmented body, as it diminishes a universally
pre-given perception of the world, augments the possibilities of ambiguous or polyvalent
perception. This passes through reductive tendencies in Minimalism that seek to
eradicate artistic intention in favour of prioritising the innumerable interpretations by
viewers. Experience, rather than being private and privileged, becomes fragmented and
inestimable. As Sean Cubitt comments, it indicates a felt need for a cultural form
that excluded subjectivity, and that placed truth outside the human, in closed, rulegoverned worlds (2004: 237-238). And as Butt notes in addressing Frieds contentions
with theatricality, the body of minimal arts beholder wassupposedly unlike that of
Jones notes that Fried rejects Morris work for its blatantly anthropomorphic qualities
inherent to Minimalism and the possibility of an inner, even secret life (1999: 47).
This critique and opening up of Minimalist practice has been important to me in past works
such as Safe (2001) and Sanitate (2004) where some of the basic tenants of Minimalism are
engaged with (the use of reconstructed cake tins or ready-made tissue-box dispensers in serial
formations) but are imploded, or corrupted, by symbolic associations of the body (in bodily
imprints or exaggerated electric cabling). See Natasha Conland where she makes this point
(2005: 5-12).
92

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the spectator of modernist painting or sculpturealready on stage, implicated within the

theatrical space of the work. Such work was theatrical precisely because it depended
upon the presence of the spectator in order to be complete (2005: 9). These two
comments propose a reduction of authorial intent with a concomitant increase in the
value given to spectator interpretation as constituting meaning in art works.
To employ this trajectoryof the fragmented sculptural figure through Minimalisms
reductive tendenciesis useful but fraught, particularly (as I discuss in this chapter) due
to tendencies in the literature surrounding Minimalism to obscure the body. In this
regard there is often a tension aimed at putting the body back in Minimalism,
characteristic, for example, of the writing surrounding the work of Eva Hesse.93
Contemporary artists such as Frankovich, Kosloff and Eskdale offer ways forward on
this trajectory and highlight a powerful sense of the performative object.
It was with Passages in Modern Sculpture that Krauss, prompted by Morris, placed a
phenomenological interpretation on modes of Minimalist practice that takes the
relationship out of the work.94 Morris first advocated this position in his Notes on
Sculpture Part 2 in Artforum of 1966 when he wrote that: The better new work
[Minimalist] takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space,
light, and the viewers field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the new
esthetic (21).95 Krauss advocated a movement from the interior armature of a
sculpturethe internal component parts that give meaning to a workto the surface of
a work, in a sense, challenging a privileged, internal and a priori experience of the body:
But what if meaning does not depend on this kind of prior experience? What if
meaning, instead of preceding experience, occurs within experience (1977: 27). And
in referencing Edmund Husserls The Transcendental Problems of Intersubjectivity
and the Intersubjective World, she relates this to a questioning of the notion of a
self that is essentially private and inaccessible (except indirectly) to others (1977: 28).
See for example Anne Middleton Wagners Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of
Hesse, Krasner and OKeeffe.
94 Krauss has more recently written on Minimalism from this point of view (Bois et al. 2004:
493).
95 For a good essay on these issues see Maurice Berger who discusses Morris trip to Peru to
observe the Nazca lines and his subsequent essay in Artforum in 1975. He traces Morris
movement away from Minimalism and discusses his phenomenological leanings as predicated
on a resistance to the static art object (1994: 18-33).
93

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She argues this de-centering was predicated on the works of Auguste Rodin. His
deliberate segmentation of the human form in The Walking Man (1877), striding
forward with no arms, exaggerates the forwardness of its movement. His Iris Messenger
of the Gods (1890-91) is without significant limbsan arm and a headin denial of the
figures internal orientation and in favour of a more externally perceived signifier of
flight: the sculpture, in its reduced form, resembles the form of a wing. This begins, for
Krauss, a notion of the sculptural object, not as static but as temporal where an
experience of the body is dependent on gesture and movement as they externalise
themselves (1977: 4, 28, 282). 96

4.2 ALICIA FRANKOVICHS FLYING FOX

Akin to the infamous jutting leg of Rodins Iris is Frankovichs one-hour performance
Flying Fox in Auckland on the 24 January 2008. Frankovichs leg was seen coming out of
an upstairs office window clad in jeans and her signature shoe: an adidas hybrid between
a running and gymnast shoe.97

In the same vein, and as a result of progressive reduction of form, Krauss argues that
Constantine Brancusis Sleeping Muse (1910) moves progressively toward his The Beginning of the
World (1924) where the head is not only separated from the bodysevered from the internal
armaturebut its highly reflective surface drives out internal speculation and so resists notions
of internally private and privileged meaning.
97 I am aware in making this comparison that Rodine Iris also signifies a highly sexualised and
yet truncated female body. From such a vewpoint, see RoseLee Goldberg who compares
Rodins Iris with Hannah Wilkes What Does This Represent/What Do You Represent (1978-84) from
a feminist perspective. She contrasts Wilkes posture of open legs, genitals exposed and toy gun
in hand as a protest against the male gaze and the objecthood of the female body with
Iris exposed genitals, normally exhibited just above the viewers face, and the artists signature
engraved into the sole of her right foot. Her point is that, unlike Wilkes presence in the image,
Rodin is nowhere to be seen, but his hands and eyes are to be left everywhere on the ladys
acrobatic torso (2004: 178). In this way Goldberg suggests that live performance, or at least the
image/document of Wilkes body as contesting the objectification of the female subject as
object, allows for more direct rhetorical hits than the still sculpture. While I respect Goldbergs
writing I find this comparison slightly reductive in that Iris, as I am at pains to argue, announces
a highly performative leaning in its fragmentation of the figure, not as static but as a temporal
experience dependent on gesture and movement. Iris also bears the traces of the artists body in
that process as externalised upon its surface, just as I will argue does Carolyn Eskdales Furniture
Objects. While I might agree with Goldbergs observations regarding an inherent sexism manifest
in Iris, I think she creates an artificial divide in her comparision between the two works What
Does This Represent/What Do You Represent and Iris as static and encountered. My view is that
Rodin is everywhere to be seen but that one may be uncomfortable with the politics of his seeing.
96

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While the invitation to the performance indicated that the event would take place in her
fathers upstairs office, on arrival audiences were confused to be left outside. Following a
period of discussion we settled into looking at the leg and wondering how the work
might develop. With the exception of a few foot movements to avoid cramps on the
artists part, the performance stayed the same for the hour and the audience stayed in
the driveway milling about and occasionally looking up for progress. Frankovich
describes the work as soliciting notions of being half-in-and-half-out, not allowing entry,
of setting up an event which will, by nature, fail expectations. She also views the live
performative aspect of the work as necessary for the occasion but redundant in the sense
of the works outcome (Frankovich 2008). Flying Fox was never videoed and lives on as a
photographic print exhibited exactly one week later at Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland.
Frankovich is at some pains to outline her lameness: lame object, lame leg, lame
gymnast. Frankovich is a failed gymnast and much of her work is in response to the
traumatic events of 1992 when, while participating in the National New Zealand
Championships, she found herself unable to perform. She walked out of the competition
never to talk with her coach again and never to continue as a gymnast.98 During our
discussion she mentions her gymnast colleague Zoe Bell, who also presented at the 1992
National New Zealand Championships, and how Bells career has leaped forward, in
particular as Uma Thurmans body double in Tarantinos Kill Bill 2. This exemplifies
Frankovichs sense of failure and lameness deeply entrenched in most of her artwork: a
steady deferring of anything that might structurally function or represent a whole. This
is a calculated deferral and redundancy that plays itself out in multifaceted ways: in the
audiences expectations around the event; in the object that is the photograph mediating
98

See Rob McKenzies Alicia Frankovich (2006).

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the experience; and in the partiality of her presence manifest as this part objectthe
legjutting and disorienting in difference to its normative function and spatial axis. It is
this redundancy that strikes at the force of Flying Fox. This is a denial of the bodys
internal orientation and an erosion of the figure manifest in Krauss notion of
morphological ambivalence discussed at length in Chapter 6.

LARESA KOSLOFF, DEEP & SHALLOW, 2004

In a similar vein, the work of Kosloff, who has collaborated with Frankovich,99 analyses,
in Kosloffs words, how choreographed scenarios, repetition, and physical gestures
might translate into signification (2008: unpaginated www). Deep & Shallow (2004), a
four-minute digital video, depicts a group of six women all wearing black rubbish bags
fully enclosing their upper body, but leaving their legs naked and performing a series of
movements in space. These partially disclosed subject/objects are reliantdue to their
physical reduction and noticeable similarity with one anotheron each other in a
repeated formation of gestures that signify something a priori to experience. Once again I
am arguing for a denial of the figures internal orientation in preference for the
reductive vocabulary of performative sculpture, not as static but as a temporal
experience. Phillip Watkins makes a case for a kind of a priori abstraction and anonymity
in relation to Deep & Shallow when he writes that the figures themselves are, it seems,
a priori anonymous, abstract; all signs of integral difference made void through the
masking of face and upper body. And in terms reminiscent of Morris
phenomenological resistance to the intentions of the author, Watkins notes that they

See The Velodrome Project (2006) in collaboration with Alicia Frankovich, which was a one-day
public event held at the Brunswick Cycling Velodrome in Melbourne, Australia (Kosloff 2008).
99

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also suggest a denial of the assumed independence of individualism, becoming

(particularly in the light of Kosloffs choice of cast) a multi-faceted self portrait (2005
unpaginated catalogue).100 The sense of reductive repetition in Kosloffs Deep & Shallow is
key to a notion of tragic metaphor enhanced by the six-figured dance, andwhen the
work was curated by Juliana Engburg for Make it Modern (2005)with the repetition of the
identical work on a grid of six flat-screen televisions.101 To continue the Rodin analogy,
Deep & Shallow might be compared to his The Three Shades (1880) in their repeated use of
the figure of Adam from the same mould at the apex of the Gates of Hell. In its repeated
use of the identical figuresuggestive in fixed three dimensions of the rotational
movement or dance of the figure/s around the pivotal point of the gesturing outstretched
hands held in close proximitythis work by Rodin announces the temporal dance of
Kosloffs arcane figures, blurring distinctions between performative sculpture and the
object of performance.

To place this excerpt in context, here is a fuller quote: The bagged figures that ritualistically
enact nonsensical or arcane performances, acquire character and identity through their
interaction with one another; a gestural give and take that we as observers read as significant in
some way. But for all these distinctions, which increase the more you watch them, the figures
themselves are, it seems, a priori anonymous, abstract; all signs of integral difference made void
through the masking of face and upper body. Their uniformity, carefully considered by Kosloff,
(to the extent that each participant was chosen on the basis that their physique matched that of
the artist) rather than suggesting a gagging of individuality, creates a being prior to it, prior to
consciousness itself even. Consequently the figures take on the pathos of tragicomic metaphor; a
portrait of humanity, physically isolated and vulnerable, yet reassured and defined by the need
for social contact and boundaries; they also suggest a denial of the assumed independence of
individualism, becoming (particularly in the light of Kosloffs choice of cast) a multi-faceted self
portrait (Watkins 2005).
101 See Deep & Shallow 2004, dvd on six flat screen monitors, in Juliana Engburg (2005), Make it
Modern (Melbourne: Deloitte Office).
100

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LARESA KOSLOFF, DEEP & SHALLOW, IN MAKE IT MODERN, 2005

In this context Hamiltons body object photographs, staged directly for the camera and
presented as still images, declare a similar use of the fragmented body where, rather than
an a priori experience of the body, meaning is announced within experience. Her Body
Object Series #11, Boot (1984/1993) depicts Hamilton in a squarely framed photograph, left
arm at her side and right arm extended horizontally and totally covered with a full length
gumboot which extends up to and covers her shoulder. This very simple photograph takes
on a strangely animistic appearance where her anatomy is altered to the point that we
read her bodys capabilities and inherent meanings differently.

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ALICIA FRANKOVICH,
TO VEER: A SUDDEN CHANGE OF OPINION, SUBJECT OR TYPE OF BEHAVIOUR, 2007

Frankovichs installations inaugurate a similar sense of functional frustration and

redundancy. Her To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour (2007),
suspended between the walls of a Romanesque chapel on Lake Como, resembles an
acromat support system used by gymnasts when working on the trampoline.102 Held by

To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour (2007) was shown at Corso Aperto
during the Advanced Course in Visual Arts, a workshop with the artist Joan Jonas held by
102

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two people to each side of the trampoline, the acromat can be suddenly pulled taut in
the event that the gymnast fails to correctly recover from a somersault.103 For To Veer: A
Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour Frankovichs body was wrapped and
suspended in a dysfunctional acromat of ropes and foam. When presented in its
photographic form her body is, in Frankovichs words, cocooned, defunct, inactive and
lacking (2008). But most interesting is her comment that, for the audience, the work is
about a desire to activate the structure. I interpret this as a desire to undo undesired
outcomes, to undo the failure at the heart of Frankovichs tangle. It is in this light that
Brian Massumi writes that:
The charge of indeterminacy carried by the body is inseparable from it. It strictly
coincides with it, to the extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the
extent that it is dynamic and alive). But the charge is not itself corporeal. Far from
regaining a concreteness, to think the body in movement thus means accepting the
paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real,
material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct. (2002: 5)
In this sense Massumi advances Krauss thesis, inaugurating the passage of the body
through fragmentation and duration, to one of unfolding the body contemporary to its
every move (2002: 5).

4.3 CAROLYN ESKDALES FURNITURE OBJECTS

CAROLYN ESKDALE, BODY POCKET, 2003

CAROLYN ESKDALE, FURNITURE OBJECTS, 2000-03

Fondazione Ratti and curated by Anna Daneri, Roberto Pinto and Cesare Pietroiusti, on Lake
Como, Italy, 2-21 July, 2007.
103 The acromat was more literally referenced by Frankovich in the work Ill Teach You about
Parametres: 9 Overhead Safety Belt Systems, Acromat & Net (2007).

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With an emphasis on exhibiting part objects as a form of embodied fragmentation,

Eskdale employs similar strategies when exhibiting her Furniture Objects (2000-2003).104
Like Frankovich, but stylistically different, she invests her objects with a sense of
functional frustration and redundancy. Her sculptures are hand-held in scale and
exhibited randomly on table-like pedestals. They are not representations of body organs,
or parts of bodies of which they are so reminiscent, but rather, objects that embody the
sensations and feelings we might have toward those body parts. First made from clay
and later cast in aluminium, Eskdale labours over the forms, fingering and manipulating
them. She describes a process, when making the works, of meditatively thinking
through, for example, the lung: How does the lung feel in its unremitting inflation and
deflation? How am I aware of different parts of my body and how might this manifest
through my fingers? (2007).
In this way Eskdales work is reminiscent of Gabriel Orozcos Mis Manos son Mi Corazn
(My Hands Are My Heart) (1991) in which he is videoed manipulating a ball of clay between
his hands in front of his torso. This work presents a gradual process of making a
sculpture as one that is always in process. The very traditional material of clay plays with
the notion of the clay model (or the substance an objet dart might be made from), while the
work as a performed process insists on a lack of closure. In this sense the process takes
presidence over the aesthetics of the form. There is a very poignant thinking through the
sculpture as to how his heart might feel as manifest through his fingers. Together with
this, Eskdales fairly random placement of her objects on pedestal/tables is reminiscent of
Orozcos Working Tables (2000) that, as will be argued in Chapter 6, invite a looking that
is dispersed, suggestive of objects in limbo that might be, as her title suggests, like
furniture re-arranged in some participatory manner.

Some of Eskdales part objects that I discuss were exhibited collectively in Oriface as part of
the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2003) curated by Juliana Engberg at the Australian
Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA).
104

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CAROLYN ESKDALE, RESERVE OBJECT, 2001

GABRIEL OROZCO, MY HANDS ARE MY HEART, 1991

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Eskdales objects were made between 2000-2003 with her journal notes at the time
musing on the process of making them as a wandering of loose associations,
remembered worried forms, openings, non functional forms, internal body cavities, almost
devices bearers of nervous action of the hands and the wandering mind (2007). These
notational comments are significant in that they position these objects as not functional (or
representational) but as operational devices that bear out some physiognomic affect
albeit redundant to a specific biology of the body. She also titles the works individually in
her journal (while these titles have never been individually assigned when the works were
exhibited).105 Body Pocket (2003) is the work she describes as closest to the feeling of how a
lung operates. This works mimetic incongruence with her actual lungjust as Orozcos is
incongruent with his heartis located in Eskdales working processes which are sensuous
and physically located as her moments recognition of how a lung might be. The surfaces
of these works attest to her nervous fingering so that Reserve Object (2001) leaves us with a
well-handled embodiment of the bodys continual intake and outtake of matter. I am
arguing that these objects powerfully stand for all that is left out of their form, as a trace of
how we experience our bodies in action. And that they so manifest Eskdales body alerts
the body/s of her audiences to relate intersubjectively with them as reciprocal and
embodied. Moreover these works direct correlation to our insides allows them to read as
objects that are as much about that which we do not see but constantly externalise in our
minds (my heart and my lungs) as a form of somatic thinking where my subjectivism
becomes chiasmically objectified; my inside flesh as the flesh of the world. This is where
Ear Boxes (2000) presents two objects (both equally mould-and cast-like) that activate what
the channels (the insides) of our hearing might be like; their mimetic fragmentation
conjuring a kind of primal sensation of hearing. The video equivalent of this work is Gary
Hills As It is Always Already Taking Place (1990) in which the artist stripped back 16 small
TV monitors, revealing their objectness as forms, and displaying moving images of parts
of his body on each screen, all nestled within a minimalist shelf housed in the wall of the
gallery. The shiny surface of the monitors, as an equivalent to Constantine Brancusis
reflective metal and stone surfaces, resists the spectators gaze and reveals the materiality
of the objects.106
I have used Eskdales individual titles for each work illustrated.
Another video work which exemplifies these characteristics of disembodied fragmentation is
Laurent Goldrings Petite chronique de limage (Short Chronicles of Imagery) (1995-2002) in which eight
video loops each depicting one naked body animate micro-movements repeated with slight
variations, conjuring up spasms The postures themselves refer more to the body as an organ
105
106

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CAROLYN ESKDALE, EAR BOXES, 2000

This gradual history of the fragmented body has implications for the viewer who is
obliged to view differently, in the words of Krauss, in order to encounter the deep
reciprocity between himself [sic] and it [the object] (1977: 283 emphasis added).
Schimmels term performative sculpture reinforces this overriding sense of liminality
inherent in the play between objectness and performativity, an emphasis of force over
form, and in the case of Morris, performative force literally moving the object.107
It is in this sense that sculptural objects begin to refuse an internally fixed sense of
meaning just as phenomenology questions an internally universal and fixed perception
than as an organism articulated in readable and identifiable terms, as they are in the tradition of
the nude (Parfait 2006a: 142). This is a similar argument to Krauss but where posture
replaces an externally identifiable armature.
107 Schimmel goes on to describe a genealogy from Morris to Nauman where protoMinimalist object[s] document his [Naumans] role as both maker and participant (1998: 90).
Schimmel does not pursue this emphasis on reductionism beyond the quotes I have cited.

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of the world and each other. Merleau-Pontys phenomenology places the subjects
bodyits bilateral symmetry, its vertical axis, its having a front and a back, the latter
invisible to the subjectat the center of the subjects intention toward meaning (Bois et
al. 2004: 495). The notion of intentionality is significant in that a subjects intentions
have a bearing on how the world is perceived and account for discontinuities in
perception. Part of the Minimalist manifesto was to remove a sense of authorial
intention in the sculptural object and have materials speak for themselves. It was this
context that prompted Krauss to state that Carl Andres materials in his floor-bound
pieces are perceived as expressions of their own being (1977: 275). This comment
underlines the importance of viewing artworks as surrogate performers. In the same
light, Krauss evokes French novelists of the 1960s (but does not reference who exactly)
as declaring, I do not write, I am written (1977: 270). In this same sense, Morris essay
Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making contextualises this prioritising of
materials as a form of automation where the process of making [comes] back from
the finished work (1970: 65). Both Morris and Krauss develop this notion that the
making of the work somehow happens by coopting forces in the work. As Morris writes:
However it is employed, the automation serves to remove taste and the personal touch
by coopting forces, images, processes, to replace a step formally taken in a directing or
deciding way by the artist (1970: 65). In this way Morris suggests that the materials,
processes and objects do the performing.
Morris words echo those of Barthes The Death of the Author already referenced in
Chapter 1, referring to the text as creating meaning, in his desire to replace his objects
of the authors intent by introducing systems of automation.108 In this respect Morris
introduction of a number of automations were seen to depersonalise sculptural
artefacts, or, to employ Barthes terminology, to make them multidimensional.109 Important
to the contexts of performativity described above, this is an emphasis on

I repeat these quotes here simply because they are such pivotal quotations for the flow of
discussion: Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher the text becomes quite futile. To
give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close
the writing (Barthes 2006: 44).
109 The sentence from which this term comes is: We know now that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture (Barthes 2006: 43-44).
108

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author/object/viewer where a complex scenario about the process of reading is

articulated. It asks the question as to who gets performed.
Like the performance-installation practice of Martinis Roe, Morris would change the
configuration of identical units during an exhibition so that no single work could
ever be seen to have a stable pre-given shape: an inner idea that would function as its
immutable core (Bois et al. 2004: 494). In a similar way, the Take series of part objects
is scattered throughout Participate (Cut 1). Mediated by video documentation they are
continually changed by viewers who cease to submit even to that term.110
These observations to do with the de-centering of meaning in the artefact, and with a
de-centering of the author in lending the artefact meaning, suggest that meaning is
constructed externally in public or cultural space (Krauss 1977: 278)as Barthes says,
drawn from the innumerable centres of cultureas opposed to the private and
privileged self. In this respect it is helpful to think of the finished work doing the
making as indicating a privileging of the reader over the author.111
This discussion is taken up by Schneider from the perspective of the auteur in theatre
where she describes a shift from solo artist to active agent in a slippage in genre
boundaries together with a shifting of the site of art onto performance understood as an artists
act (2005: 41). She sees this as an unbecoming of the solo performance by means of an
act-based art that is, in turn, recorded as a kind of archive that drives the live
moment. Schneider illustrates this point as a painter becoming a dancer (Pollock)
[or] a conceptual artist becoming a musician (Yoko Ono) (2005: 41). This could
equally be applied to Morris, Nauman, Frankovich or myself as sculptors becoming
performers (or, again for Frankovich, gymnast becoming artist). And this act-based art
is all the more exacerbated by the archive/object of the photographs and videos
Other ways of refuting authorial intent in Minimalism were to make objects from standard
industrial pre-cut units, sometimes installed within given restrictions of a specific space so as to
diminish any a priori compositional decisions. Artists outsourced their work to be fabricated by
industry in order to further minimalise authorial intent. These solutions mimicked aspects of
mechanical reproduction and repetition common to their materials originating contexts of
production in industry.
111 To repeat an earlier quote from Barthes The Death of the Author essay that is apt at this
point in the discussion: The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a
writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination (2006: 45).
110

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(Morris photograph of himself standing in a hollow vertical box structure entitled

Untitled (Box for Standing), Naumans Stamping in the Studio, Frankovichs To Veer: A Sudden
Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour, or Back and Above in The Artist Will Be
Present). This cross-disciplinary emphasisthat might also be viewed in the context of
Jon McKenzies drive to see performance replace disciplinary classificationsresonates
for me in works redolent with the liveness of its making and encounter in perpetual
quarrel with its material existence, or, in Schneiders words, sculpture that gestures
toward its own excess (2005: 42).112
I am aware that the term Minimalism and a fast trajectory into Postminimalism is complex
and requires some clarification in the context of a notion of performative sculpture. A significant
moment in addressing some of the core tenants of Postminimalism was the exhibition When
Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann in 1969 and touring first to the Kunsthalle in
Bern and secondly to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The exhibition, subtitled
WorkConceptsProcessesSituationsInformation, declares a re-evaluation or extension of core
Minimalist values centered on anti-transcendence and anti-illusion. When Attitudes Become Form
presentedwhat might now be considered as utopian idealisma link between art and life that
attempted to sideline the significance and/or necessity of object oriented art. Signaled are a
complex array of practices including Process art, Arte povera, Performance, Body art,
Installation and Site specific art. For discussion of When Attitudes Become Form see Blocker and
Bois et al. (Blocker: 84; Bois et al. 2004: 534).
In this fast changing context Postminimalism therefore denotes a series of diverse challenges
to the dictums of core Minimalist practices. But this is even to oversimplify the idea of core
Minimalist practices which constituted a situation of rapidly identified movements and
counter-positions. Even as the Jewish Museum in New York staged its 1966 survey of
Minimalism entitled Primary Structures curated by Kynaston McShine, two other exhibitions
critiqued Minimalisms non-emotive and geometric tendencies: Lucy Lippard curated Eccentric
Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery on 57th Street in September the same year and Joan
Washburn organised Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism at the Graham Gallery. Lippard
commented that during the winter of 1966 she had been struck by the manner in which
[Eva] Hesse and Frank Lincoln Viner were working both within and outside of the current
geometric tendencies, and [she] began looking for other artists confronting the dialectic (1992:
70). This describes a simultaneous institutionalisation and re-evaluation. Specific Minimalist
criteria had been outlined by Donald Judd in Specific Objects published in the 1965 Yearbook
and by 1966 Morris had published Notes on Sculpture. By the summer of 1967 Artforum
included Frieds Art and Objecthood in which he attacked relational and theatrical tendencies
in Minimalist sculpture. The same edition housed further writings of Donald Judd, Morris and
Robert Smithson who, by this stage, were already testing the boundaries of Minimalist rhetoric
(Bois et al. 2004: 494-495). In endeavouring to place emphasis on the objectness of
performative actions in a context of emerging interdisciplinarity in exhibitions like When Attitudes
Become Form, the background role of Minimalism and the manner whereby it became
contextualised by art historians and critics is polyvalent. While Minimalism placed emphasis on
performatively inspired notions of de-centering of meaning in the artefact and a de-centering of
the author in lending the artefact meaning, it also created a blind-spot in relation to the artists
body so significant for those performative tendencies. Krauss critique is interesting in this light
as she is one of the only art historians from the U.S. to utilise phenomenology with its emphasis
on bodily orientation, as early as 1977 in Passages in Modern Sculpture. See Jones on this point
(1998: 256n261). Yet, in 1979, nine years after the death of Hesse, Krauss essay
Contingentanalysing Hesses now famous hanging latex work of the same name that
appeared on the cover of Artforum in May 1970does not mention the body in relation to a
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The notion of artwork as surrogate performer (or alternative body), and the example of
Morris using his own body in a work such as Untitled (Box for Standing) can be linked, via
an emphasis on body art and process-driven art characteristic of Frankovichs Flying Fox
and Eskdales Furniture Objects, to artists like Franz West. The reductive tendencies
referred to by Schimmel locate Morris Untitled (Box for Standing) as defining only part of
a larger whole. On the one hand they concretely define an aspect of the artists
dimension, while on the other, they gain meaning only as an encounter with contexts of
action and duration. This is what is so significant regarding the Minimalist gestures of
work so malodorous with bodily associations. Despite commentary on Contingent in the context of
the body in this period, Krauss critiques the work uniquely from a point of view of the question
of originality in the context of the format of painting (1999: 96-98). I make mention of this as it
highlights a preoccupation with optical and scopic recognition as opposed to haptic encounter.
It also denotes an over-evaluation with a set of dominating disciplinary concerns as outlined in
Jane Blockers What the Body Cost. Blockers focus is in legitimising female performance in the
1960s and 1970s within the categories of Conceptualism and Process-art. In contextualising
When Attitudes Become Form, she develops the idea that female actions and performance are
eclipsed in this period by a focus on the notion of expressionism as gesture specifically in the
context of the sculpture versus painting debate: They repeatedly argued for the performativity
of the various art genres the show brought togetherconceptualism, arte povera, and anti-form
or process artin order to legitimise them as the leading methods of artistic innovation, even as
they distanced these methods from performances necessary corporeality and attendant
femininity. As Blocker notes, this view does not negate an interest on the part of the exhibition
organiser, Harold Szeemann, who acknowledges performative practices in the catalogue, in
that, the mass of their own body, the power of human movement plays an enormous role for
these artists. Blocker argues that the feminine aspects of performance were shifted onto
painting and then disavowed (2004: 84-85). I am grateful to Blocker who chips away at some of
the more mainstream narratives pertaining to Minimalism. As she cites Anna Chaves
Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power, she points to Chaves argument that Minimalist art
reinforced Frieds modernism by simply investing in different ideologies of authorship and
mastery. As Blocker writes: She [Chave] writes bitterly that in the end Minimalism is not the
interdisciplinary revolution that Fried predicted and against which he warned, but simply more
of the same (2004: 23).
So when, in 1970, Lynda Benglis poured polyurethane into a gallery corner, titling the work
For Carl Andre, she was contributing to such a friction surrounding Minimalist sculpture at the
time: Benglis ironically pursues a call for process-driven attitudes to material as well as a call
against formal considerations of balance and composition. But I say ironic because her work
was also a deliberate contrast to Andres laying out in draft-board formation tonnes of weight of
concrete bricks to fill the gallery floor (Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles in March 1967). While both
sculptures employ industrial materials ready for useconcrete poured from standard moulds
and foam poured directly into the cornerone is hard-edged and pre-determined in its
formation while the other is fluid, less controlled, messy and carrying with it notions of leakage,
seepage and flow. Such comparisons are also typical of the Postminimalist context in which
Hesses works are interpreted: the open geometric galvanised steel mesh cube of Accession II
(1967) with woven plastic tubing, compared to Donald Judds repetitious cube works. In this
regard Hesses work sits on a crossroads where Minimalist concerns evident in her work collide
with other less pre-meditated, metaphoric and bodily motivations.

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Frankovichs Flying Fox, or, as another example, Erwin Wurns one-minute sculptures
such as Open your trousers, put flowers in it and dont think(2002). They are forcefully
reductive of the whole picture but strongly and openly legible.

FRANZ WEST, PASTCK, 1978-79

FRANZ WEST, MODEL WITH PASTCK NO.8, 1982-83

In this regard Klocker suggests that Wests Adaptives such as Pastck (1978-79) function
between concrete legibility and amorphous abstraction where their value is not located
in their sculptural completion, but rather in their animistic character embodied in actions
(1998: 172). In this sense, the gesture of their users makes a process of performativity
visible.113 As with Participate (Cut 1) this describes a process where the communicative act

In this text Klocker describes a general theory of gestures, via Vilm Flusser, in which art is
causually inexplicable and set in contrast with semantic analysis. According to him, [Flusser]
the advantage of this procedures lies in the property of art to unfold the phenomenon under
inspection only in the course of analysis, since the various levels of reading bring different
meanings to light. This gives rise to a multi-plicative effect which enriches the phenomenon and
which is in keeping with the agitative spirit of the object under question (1998: 160). See
Flusser, Vilm (1993), Gesten Versuch einer Phnomenologie (Bensheim: Bollmann Bibliothek), 91,
which I have not referenced.
113

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of handling or wandering about with the objects manifests as a thinking through them
(adding value to them) on the part of the viewer (Klocker 1998: 175).
And along these lines, what was so striking in experiencing Frankovichs Flying Fox was
the conceit on the part of the artist in inviting us to view her leg jutting from a first floor
office window for one hour. This gesture, like Morris Untitled (Box for Standing), was so
slim and formless and yet so open to interpretation; relying on usher audienceto
add value.114 As Guy Brett writes, while Lygia Clark sits on a similar trajectory as artists
like Morris and Hesse,115 the Clark sculptures differ in reliance on the patientthe
term she employed for her viewerto enervate their potential and give them context.116
In this context, as outlined by Manuel Borja-Villel, Clark was interested in a rejection of
the art object in favour of the works as propositions that gained value as they were
participated with by the viewer, as translational objects establishing relations between
the individual and others, or the individual and him/herself (1998: 14). In this sense
Clarks work is described as sitting on a boundary between art and the clinic and
develops the concept of the viewer as patient within a paradigm of therapeutic
performance and ritual. Through her career she moved from seeing the visitor in the
museum, as a participant who might change objects in the space, to inviting spectators
to create or use an object from written instructions, or the artist herself initiating group
experiments. The projects of the 1970s also involved students from the Sorbonne and
were closed to the public (Borja-Villel 1998: 14). In effect, Clark engaged in a form of
art psychotherapy in which viewers are positioned as patients. Objetos Relacioninais was
one of her last works that encapsulated this ideal:

And, from a similar but different position, are the overtly functional qualities of works like
Franz Erhard Walthers Werksatz (1963-1969), where objects, such as soft vests and mats, require
little decoding on the viewers part and form props, functional instruments, always requiring
audience participation but nevertheless exhibited in, for example, shelving storage systems
(Klocker 1998: 193). To compare the performative sculptues of West and Walther is to ask to
what degree the participants perform, and in this sense, author these objects.
115 See Brett where he writes: Lygia Clarks rubber Obramole anticipated such works as Morris
floppy felt sculptures and Richard Serras rubber Rosa Esmans Piece by several years... her
Mascara Abismo have parallels on a formal level to Hesses softly-hanging netted weights, such as
Hesses Untitled sculpture of 1966... (1998: 24).
116 As Brett writes: One of the aspects of Lygias model of reciprocity is its fusion of the roles of
artist and doctor... At about the same time she began her Terapia Lygia ceased to call
herself an artist, preferring the term researcher or psychologist (1998: 33).
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Little plastic or canvas bags full of air, water, sand or polystyrene; rubber tubes,
rolls of cardboard, sheets, stockings, shells, honey and many other unexpected
objects were scattered around the poetic space she created in a room in her house
and which she called the consulting room. They were the elements of an initial
ritual which the author set in motion in a series of regular sessions with each
receiver. (Borja-Villel 1998: 14)
In this way, and with respect to the art object, Clark was interested in ritual as a means to
avoid commodification and enabling the patient to discover and remake his own
physical and psychic reality where the artist induces and channels experience (Borja-Villel
1998: 14).
It is in this context that Bretts essay on Clark analyses a triumvirate of artist, object and
spectator common to the terms by which a notion of performativity is described in
Chapter 1, where authorship is handed to the patient/spectator; the objects are malleable
and changeable, and the patient might change or initiate work within group dynamics.
There was a progressive disinterest in the visual sense of the works: The object was no
longer out there but attached to the body, becoming not an object apprehended by the
senses but a sensorial filter through which the world is experienced (Brett 1998: 21).
As distinct from Clarks resistance to the notion of the exhibitable art object, The Artist
Will Be Present sits in a more ambivalent position. In this regard the viewers
participation in Participate (Cut 1) is mediated by a six-inch lcd screen in a space occupied
by further audiences and, as such, collapses distinctions between the real and the
represented body. Cut 2 transposes such modes of participation into a form of filmic
encounter where the architecture of the space also questions the role of the audience in
relation to these part objects and my partial body. To repeat an earlier reference, this to
speak of the flesh of the chiasm that defines a position which is both subject (a
subjective reality) and object (objectifiable for others), and also simultaneously a
subjectivity which is internally divergent with itself. In other words, flesh expresses the
inscription of difference within the same (Vasseleu 1998: 26). What the project shares
with Clark is an insistence on the notion of objects as transformers: relations of force over
formliminal, reversible and characteristic of lackthat emphasise encounter in
difference to recognition. This is to speak of, in the words of Clark: Tactile shocks to
liberate the body (Bois and Krauss 1997: 158). The possibility that the body/s of the
audience are transformed into the role of patient underscores a desire to have them
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deeply affected (as therapy might facilitate) and therefore altered in the viewing. In
Chapter 6 I outline, via the operations of sympathetic magical action, a concept of the
donor and donee (and their operations of giving and taking), not as one of exchange, but
where these agents are drawn out by the ritual contexts in which they participate. In
this way I aim to advance discussions such as those regarding Clark, above, in an
attempt to undermine notions of doctor, priest or shaman as a kind of tragic subject in
the center of the art work itself.117 I will tender a more reciprocal concept that avoids
the kinds of directional intentions that still place the artist in a position of control within
overly defined performative contexts. I will argue instead for the very impossibility of
defining performative exchanges along these lines.

In this regard see Klocker where he references the work of Beuys, Hermann Nitsch and
Rudolf Schwarzkogler as they employ the magical gesture by assuming the role of the
shaman or the priest They, as well as Monastyrskijs Collective Action Group, claim that art
has a cathartic and healing function and that the artist is an antithetical, indeed a tragic subject
in the center of the art work itself (1998: 191).
117

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Chapter 5
5.1

SYMPATHETIC MAGICAL ACTION

5.1 SYMPATHETIC MAGICAL ACTION

The preceding discussion has emphasised a fragmentation and reduction of the body
that lends it a mimetic force open to innumerable interpretive contexts. It has
highlighted the enigmatic and rarefied contexts of performance-installation as
manipulative and transformative. This discussion raises questions reminiscent of late
19th-and early 20th-century notions of animism in which the relations of similarity and
contagion are central. Crucial to the question of how a likeness might embody what it
resembles was the notion that an object (and the substance from which it is made) might
be viewed as an alternative body in its capacity to host qualities particular to the body
that once came into contact with it. Victorian anthropologists Edward Burnett Tylor
and Frazer formulated the terms by which such a theory of animism could be
articulated within the wider arena of magic, and in particular, sympathetic magic and
how this might be understood in so-called primitive and savage societies. Their
rationalist explanation of magic is burgeoning with evolutionist theories of their time
(Sorensen 2007: 10-11), and the typological system of museum display propagated by
The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford underlines this notion of development.

PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1884 ET AL.

PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1884.58.111

Together with Tylor, anthropologists such as Henry Balfour, the first curator of the Pitt
Rivers Museum, donated large parts of their collections to the museum, which, to this
day, remain in strict typological ordering according to the wishes of Rivers.118 This can
Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827-1900) was typically Victorian in approach regarding museum
arrangement. He was a founder of what has come to be known as the typological system of
museum organisation (Chapman 1991: 135). Such systems call for the grouping of ethnographic
and archaeological materials by perceived formal or functional similarities rather than according
to place of origin or geographical system as is the convention today. Such systems were meant to
118

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be seen in the large draw displays such as 1884 et al. Closely aligned with the developing
collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum are a number of journal and conference
proceedings written by Tylor and Balfour from the late 1860s. These map out Victorian
attitudes to the analogical reasoning central to an understanding of sympathetic magic.
Together with these proceedings, Frazers The Golden Bough (1890-1915) is a key book
that draws together the now famous conditions of sympathetic magic. Mauss A General
Theory of Magic (1902-03),119 acts as a critique of Frazers work and it is this discussion
that forms the backdrop to Taussigs book Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the
Senses.
Inherent in Mauss key notion of the poorly executed ideogram are the operations of
attention and abstraction. I translate these two key operations as the conditions of
forceful persuasiveness and ambivalence. This is to ask how likenesses embody the body in
ways that exceed the parameters of representation. As will be seen, a common condition
of the anatomical votives and art works discussed in this chapter is the ambivalence
Mauss poorly executed ideogramwith which the body is represented. In this context
similarities to the body are not understood as representations of the body. Likewise, the
conditions of contact by which notions of contagion are measured is complex and
Tambiah makes a significant reassessment in the late 1960s and early 1970s of the terms
by which similitude and contagion operate. Mauss understanding of the operations of
attention and abstraction, as embedded in social conventions, while Tambiah does
not reference Mauss, is vital to Tambiahs understanding of magical actions. Tambiah
develops this idea in a model of magical action based on pragmatic contexts of
production and performativity.

represent comprehensive histories of technology, ...one with what we would now recognise as
an implicit Western European bias (Chapman 1991: 137). For Pitt Rivers this was intended to
show the progress or evolution of technology, a uniform character of changes in material arts
and gradual progress in technology over time.
119 Taussig notes that, while this work is attributed to Marcel Mauss, the original Annee sociologique
essay is credited to joint authorship of Henri Hubert and Mauss (1993: 258n214).

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MARCEL DUCHAMP, FEMALE FIG LEAF, 1950

The motivation for discussing this seemingly anachronistic practice of sympathetic

magic is to expand on ways of thinking about works like Martinis Roes Ontological Leap,
Frankovichs Flying Fox, Duchamps Female Fig Leaf (1950) and Naumans Space Under My
Hand When I Write My Name. These works, together with The Artist Will Be Present, share
qualities of ambivalent formlessness and intimacy (similarity of contagion), they present
objects as surrogate performers suggestive of the possibilities of action at a distance,
and they are all embedded in performative acts.
An understanding of sympathetic magical action embedded in performative acts offers a
strongly phenomenological model of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity. The concept and
practice brings with it a set of concerns signalled in Chapter 2liminality, embodiment,
contingency and efficacythat offer a model for performative social transformation. The
emphasis I place on sympathetic magics mimetic principles confound and frustrate a desire
for wholeness in aesthetic representation just as the metonymic is a forced syntagm in
language. At the same time, incongruent mimesis enforces qualities of redundancy and
repetition just as it redefines identification, in the words of Bean cited above, as a process of
contagious movement. Magical action therefore offers a framework for discussing how these
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partial objects/subjects operate as bodies; how they embody a trace of a bodyas

alternative or surrogate bodiesand how such actionnot inert objects but actions
operates across a distance. And this notion of action at a distance becomes inextricably
located in the terms by which performativity is understood in Chapter 1. This is a notion of
action that operates across time in openly intersubjective contexts which insist upon
the openness of this and all subjects to the other (Jones 1998: 67).

5.2 BACKGROUND: SIMILARITY & CONTAGION

Mauss cites Tylors Primitive Culture as one of the first to mention sympathetic magic as
a term that covers those magical rites which follow the so-called laws of sympathy.
Like produces like; contact results in contagion; the image produces the object itself; a
part is seen to be the same as the whole (1975: 12). Mauss notion that a part is seen to
be the same as the whole is useful as a means to understanding Martinis Roes footprints
(as well as her derivative play on historical sources), together with Naumans writing
impression, as a metonymic representation of a whole. Far from being an accurate
representation, the bodies that made these impressions solicit an absence of the whole
by virtue of past contact.
In a paper given to a London audience of the International Folk-Lore Congress in 1891
Tylorfollowing the same laws of sympathyintroduces, from the magician-doctors
point of view, the possibility of curing diseases resulting from sympathetic likeness of one
object with another as well as the possibility of sympathetic harm. Thirty-three years
before Mauss book, and pre-dating Frazer, Tylor develops a much more generalised
notion of animism than Frazer will develop: one where the conditions of similarity are
not as crucial to the question of sympathy. In 1869, in a paper delivered to the Weekly
Evening Meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, he outlined a view On the Survival
of Savage Thought in Modern Civilization in which objects can operate as substitute
bodies, of the lower animism that diseases are caused by spirits possessing or
attacking the patient. It is another principle that spirits may embody themselves for a
time in any material object Thus the disease-spirits may be persuaded to come out of
the patient, and get into some object prepared for them (8). And once again in 1870 in
The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London Tylor noted that, to the savage mind, things
as well as men and animals have souls, the diseased-spirit is offered a surrogate body in

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which to reside: To get rid of this spirit they seem to say, let us get it a new body to
enter or pervade. He refers to Burtons description of the Central African habit of
transferring diseases into bits of stick or rag, &c., which form what is called the keti or
stool on which the noxious infection sits (376-377).
In analysing the principles on which a concept of magic might be based, Frazer devises
two laws, one of similarity and the other of contact, that function under the general
name of sympathetic magic. The first of these laws involving imitation or mimesis is
underscored by the notion that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its
cause while the second, involving contact, assumes that things which have once
been in contact with each other continue to act upon each other at a distance after the
physical contact has been severed (Frazer 1978: 34). Frazer further clarifies his
terminology to describe this law of similarity as homoeopathic while the law of contact
he defines as contagious magic. Both homoeopathic and contagious magic stem from
associated ideas of similarity and contiguity and both assume that things act on each
other at a distance through a secret sympathy (1978: 35). Contagious magic is
generally understood to involve an application of the homoeopathic and is summarised
under the general heading of sympathetic magic.
Frazer defines the most common forms of contagious magic as the magical
sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his
person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of the human hair or nails
may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut (1978:
42-43). His terms of reference are very generalised and he extends this notion to items of
clothing and impressions left by a body, including the possibility of injuring footprints in
order to injure the feet that made them. The native of South-eastern Australia thinks
he can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz, glass, bone or charcoal in his
footprints. And Frazer concludes this section dedicated to Sympathetic Magic by
referring to a maxim with the Pythagoreans that in rising from bed you should
smooth away the impression left by your body on the bed-clothes (1978: 44).120
Didi-Huberman gives Frazers contagious magic too wide an interpretation that favours the
power of images over the notion of touch or contact. He is closer to Tylor than Frazer when he
extends the principle to encompass seals, images on coins and stamps on communion wafers in
the Christian context arguing for an economy of transubstantiation and of real presence
(1997: 49). In so doing he may be misunderstanding the fundamental principle of contact
120

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5.3 INSIDE, OUTSIDE

Tylor backgrounds the idea of transferring diseases from human being to object within
the general notion of animism where savage psychology perceives a soul as sometimes
visible and invisible and an individual ...who scarcely distinguishes his subjectivity from
objectivity, hardly knows his inside from his outside (1870: 371-372).
Such a focus on devices of symmetry and reflection are hinted at by Balfour in his
journal notes for an address to the Oxford Biological Club of 1892 entitled Some Aspects
of Superstition: Sympathetic Magic.121 He describes an intimate relationship between
shadow and reflection as an analogo-telepathy but within confusing terms of
reference as to how a likeness is understood:
... the doctrine of Animism, to capress [sic] the theory of the general possession of
souls and spirits by all animate and inanimate objects(tied to Sympathetic
Magic). The intimate relationship between shadow, reflection, diram [sic]
manifestations, and souls or spirits, is extended, by analogical reasoning almost
universally to material images of representation of objects or persons; thus, it is
supposed that there is a telepathic relationship between an object and its material
image or likeness, acting by analogy and, here it [sic] not an inordinately ugly
and cumbrous [sic] term, we might ca... [handwriting unclear] a word analogotelepathy for this kind of relationshipIt is firmly believed, and this not only by
lowly cultured man, as I shall presently show, that the possession of a figure or
representation of a person or other objects, gives the possessor superhuman power
over that object, and, that any treatment of the image will be reflected in the body
of the object represented, and, on this account it is a dangerous thing for a person
to allow anyone to possess an image or representation of him, as it gives the
possessor means of applying offensive magic to the person represented (2125)122
outlined by Frazer. I acknowledge his catalogue in bringing together artefacts such as: ancient
Roman funerary masks as fragmented objects that have been in contact with the body; Rodins
fragmentation of the figure; and works such as Duchamps Female Fig Leaf. As such this is the
only publication I am aware of that brings these juxtapositions together in the context of
Frazers ethnographic research. However, while Didi-Huberman activates the spatial paradox of
moulds in relation to Duchamps overall project (as Helen Molesworth does without
acknowledging Didi-Huberman), he does not make the links to thinking about a part object such
as Female Fig Leaf within a model of sympathetic magical action that is charged with performative
ritual contexts. He does not therefore see the opportunity of this model in articulating an
authentic performative document as an encounter with the live, which is so important to my
project.
121 I wish to thank the staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, for assisting me so generously in
researching these journal notes and other primary sources including a close hands-on inspection
of their anatomical votive and charms collections.
122 The more generalised ways in which animism, and the specific modes of transference is
discussed moves from Tylors non-specific inanimate object, to Balfours notion of confusion in

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PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1896.77.28 BALFOUR

PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1917.53.666-669 TYLOR

Balfour and Tylor were concurrently collecting anatomical votives that were
accessioned into the Pitt Rivers collections and often displayed in framed groups bearing
their names and date of gift. These include the single arm votive 1896.77.28 Balfour that
Frazer used to illustrate his discussion in The Golden Bough, and a small arm and leg
1917.53.666-669 Tylor with a provenance of Italy or Spain noted on its label.
Together with these were groups of votives such as 1896.77.22-25 Balfour and
1917.48.40-46 Balfour.123
In relation to these growing collections, Tylor and Balfour employ a group of polemical
terms in an attempt to describe a mind that perceives an object as distinctly more
powerful following certain conditions of similarity and contact. As said, terms such as
symmetry and reflection are used in the context of a lack of definition between inside
and outside, visibility and invisibility which results in a sense of confusion between
subjective and objective representation.

a process of analogous telepathy, to Frazers more specific examples of bodily remains or an

impression made by the body: a tightening up the terms by which similitude and contact might
be understood.
123 These framed sets comprise small silver legs, midriff, arms, ears, eyes, hearts and a tongue.
They are not specifically dated, apart from acquisition dates, with provenance details indicating
Antwerp, Belgium and an unidentified Greek church in Jerusalem respectively.

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PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1896.77.22-25 BALFOUR

PITT RIVERS MUSEUM,1917.48.40-46 BALFOUR

Contemporaneous with Frazers The Golden Bough, Arnold van Genneps The Rites of
Passage from 1908 theorised a notion of liminality that was to be significant for the future
development of performance studies. Van Genneps term rites of passage denotes three
categories that include rites of separation, transition and incorporation. For example, a
funeral may involve rites of separation, a pregnancy a rite of transition, and marriage a
rite of incorporation. These three categories are described in terms of liminality: ...a
complete scheme of rites of passage theoretically includes preliminal rites (rites of
separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation),
in specific instances these three types are not always equally important or equally
elaborated (Van Gennep 1960: 11). The notion of liminality as transition is lent spatial
significance in terms of an individuals movement across geographically neutral zones
or territories in classical antiquity. In relation to a notion of sacredness,
...the territories on either side of the neutral zone are sacred in relation to whoever
is in the zone, but the zone, in turn, is sacred for the inhabitants of the adjacent
territories. Whoever passes from one to the other finds himself physically and
magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers
between two worlds. (Van Gennep 1960: 18)
Van Gennep argues that such states of liminality are found in ceremonies themselves
and, by implication, are states of transition within an individual who passes through
certain rites of passage (1960: 18). The concept of reflexivity inherent in a passage
through liminal states of being has, as already noted in Chapter 1 in reference to
McKenzie, given theatre scholars a functional model for theorizing temporally and
spatially, liminal activities [that] allow participants to reflect, take part, and reassemble

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symbols and behaviours and transform themselves and society (2001: 36).124 It is this
sense of passage and liminality that I experience when passing in and out of Naumans
Corridor. To use van Genneps terminology: separated from myself, I transition to a point
of incorporation, only to separate again in the impossibility of seeing myself seeing
myself. Likewise, the imprint that is Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name reunites
its separation inherent in its morphed ambivalence by the effects of contact (contagion)
with Naumans body.
It is in this context that I move from late 19th-and early 20th-century notions of savage
psychology to the self-reflexivity and liminality inherent in the chiasm developed by
Merleau-Ponty.125 I want to draw on the notion of a lack of definition between inside and
outside, and confusion between subjective and objective representation, as described by
Tylor and Balfour, as the territory of the intersubjective and interobjective crucial to the
terms by which performativity is understood. And it is from such a perspective, in refuting
a notion of binary and bifurcated structures in the cinematic experience, that I understand
Sobchacks alert to a commutative reversibility between subjective feeling and objective
knowledge, between the senses and their sense of conscious meaning (2004: 61).
Bois contextualises these phenomena of reversals in terms of Merleau-Pontys
Phenomenology of Perception: To turn an object upside-down is to deprive it of its meaning
(1997: 169). And he quotes at length Merleau-Pontys passage about seeing a face
upside-down on a bed. In discussing how our perception is orientated to our vertical
posture he states:

See McKenzie for an overview of Victor Turners dialogue with Schechner in the early to
mid-1980s in books such as Turners From Ritual to Theatre and Schechners Between Theatre and
Anthropology and the importance of this discussion for the formation of performance studies as
such (2001: 36). See also Phelan where she discusses of the origins of theatre as emerging from
ritual practices. In referencing Michel Foucaults The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1980), she
suggests the possibility that life was invented in order to respond to art, theatre, ritual and
performance (2004: 17). Her use of the term invented suggests, like Foucaults use of the term
sexuality, the emergence of a consciousness between life and art, theatre, ritual and
performance. In this essay Phelan, in reference to Thomas McEvilleys Stages of Energy:
Performance Art Ground Zero?, lists three historical traditions from which performance art
might be said to have derived. These are the history of theatre, the history of paintingwith
particular focus on Pollocks action painting, and investigations of the body through shamans,
yogis and alternative healing practices (2004: 21).
125 Didi-Huberman tentatively lends Frazers theory a phenomenological bent where the powers
of the imprint reunite the effects of contact and dissemination. Frazers theory initiates for DidiHuberman a metonymic function or emprise, a (magical) holding of influence (1997: 50).
124

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Without the consciousness of mirror symmetry the subject would dissolve into
space, and the world, anthropocentric for the Gestalt-orientated human, would be
stripped of its qualities, made characterless, isotropic. We would lose our marbles
there: signs themselves would become empty, flat; there would be smoke without
fire. (Bois and Krauss 1997: 171)
In citing Caillois Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia Bois argues that such visual
reversals result in: Nothing less than a psychasthenic loss of the subject, a burlesque
return to animality, a leaking away in the nondifferentiated (1997: 170).126 This
description comes close to Tylors where, from a Victorian evolutionary standpoint, the
savage mindequated as it is to base animal instinctsexperiences a psychasthenic loss
of itself: a transference from human being to object (animism).

BRUCE NAUMAN, FINGER TOUCH WITH MIRRORS, 1966-67

MARCEL DUCHAMP, FEMALE FIG LEAF, 1950, ON THE COVER OF LE SURREALISME, MEME, 1956

Caillois essay, where he makes mention of sympathetic magic in the context of Tylor,
Hubert, Mauss and Frazer, is not far from such a standpoint as he writes: The point is that
there remains in the primitive an overwhelming tendency to imitate, combined with a belief in
the efficacy of this imitation, a tendency still quite strong in civilized man, since in him it
continues to be one of the two conditions for the progress of his untrammeled thought (1984:
25-27).
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Bois contextualises this loss of the subject in Naumans use of mirrors and the body
part where, in Finger Touch with Mirrors (1966-67), we see the artists hands reflected in
the two axes of horizontal and vertical mirrors evoking the negative and positive
relation of inverted reflection. He concludes with Duchamps Female Fig Leaf as
signaling the indecipherable character of the cast [where] only the caption (itself
comic) tells us what has been cast (1997: 172). And I would add the photograph of
this work used for the cover for Le Surralisme, mme in 1956 where the mould visually
oscillates, with the quality of a black and white negative, between concave and convex
image: we catch a glimpse of the body that was once the source (or the product) of the
mould only to lose it back to negative image. This is the oscillating footprints of
Martinis Roes actions and the tension she places on a reflexive relay between media,
object, photograph and performance. 127

5.4 THE PROBLEMS OF INTELLECTUAL RATIONALISM

An intellectualist and rationalist interpretation of magical action upheld by the
Victorian anthropologists encountered major problems. One was the instance of
Western sympathetic magic in their own society as this contradicted a theory of the
evolution of civilised societies. As evidence of this problem, when Balfour indicates a
sense of confusion in the correlation between an object and its representation, he notes
the possibility of the modern savage:
I refer to the confusion which exists regarding the relationship between an object
and its image or representation. In the mind of primitive manand the modern
savage may well be regarded as in many ways strictly primitive [underlined in red]
as well as socially (?) [sic] cultivatedthere is undoubtedly an indistinct separation
of subjective representations from objective realities. (1893: 12-14)
This dilemma was exacerbated by the researchers clear oscillation between belief and
disbelief in the material discussed. Tylor exemplifies this in his duplicitous attitude to
sympathetic magic when he states that he was in possession of various artefacts that
have ...disappeared mysteriously, suggesting that there is some element of belief
invested in what he earlier described as the intellectual level of the peasant and savage
See Krauss where she distinguishes between the terms of reflection and reflexiveness as she
writes: Reflexiveness is precisely this fracture into two categorically different entities which can
elucidate one another insofar as their separateness is maintained (1976: 56).
127

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(1891: 389).128 Another problem was the clear contradiction in what constituted
similarity, and by what terms contagion might be contained. Accounts of magical
action are riddled with contradictions that go beyond the terms of similarity and contact
as advocated by their model of cause and effect.
With these problems in mind, Sorensen argues that a major difficulty in assessing a
rationalist approach to magic is an emphasis on a theory that tries to explain ritual
actions by mental causes (2007: 13). And if these mental causes are universally
understood it makes it difficult to explain why magic practices still persist in
contemporary society within an evolutionary framework of understanding. Rationalists
navigate this difficulty, Sorensen argues,by recourse to a notion of evolutionary
survivals of certain types of action due to habit[which he states is] a most
unsatisfactory explanation of the profound diffusion of magical practices in all societies
(2007: 11-12). Sorensens explanation goes some way in explaining the oscillation back
and forth between credulity and disbelief as Tylor and Balfour interpret their case
studies. It also goes some way to explaining an inherent contradiction in a series of
recent exhibitions that address magical powers in New York City, Oslo and Auckland
which I comment on in section 5.7 A Recent Trend.

5.5 CRITIQUING FRAZER

The limitations of Frazers conditions of similarity and contagion were initially
addressed by Mauss, and later by Tambiah, whose main objection is that Victorian
anthropology viewed magic as an attempt at science that failed (or more crudely a
bastard science in the manner of Frazer (Tambiah 1973: 218). Tambiahs insightful
essay offers a critical framework for the use of animism in this thesis. He advocates that
magic ritual engages with objectives of persuasion, conceptualisation and expansion
of meaning (219). The implication of this reckoning is to alleviate any residual
For example, in exhibiting an Australian guliwill to the audience that has bits of hair and
nail attached, Tylor argues that this is ...like the practices of sorcerers in our own time in the
civilised world, [and] that there is some difficulty in separating the purely native part of it from
that learnt from European superstition (1891: 388). He then recounts another related story
about a local wizard and alehouse-keeper who held a local magistratea strong advocate of
temperancein contempt and who stabbed and roasted an onion representing the magistrate.
The magistrate was never ill but when his wife had an attack of fever: ...there was shaking of
heads among the wise (1891: 390). In this light he suggests a degree of empathy with the notion
of sympathetic magic.
128

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misgivings about the validity of causal relationships and their viability from a strictly
rationalist perspective. This is important to my ongoing argument in that one of the
perspectives I proffer is a reassessment of magical action as anachronistic, that is, to
examine perspectives on sympathetic analogy and exchange in the Victorian era and
apply them, albeit through a different lens of criticality, to the operations at work in
Naumans part objects and early video works and more recent artists like Frankovich.
This follows Tambiahs thinking when he writes that, performative acts of a
persuasive kind are by no means confined to the primitive: modern industrial societies
also have their rites and ceremonies which achieve their effects by virtue of conventional
normative understandings (1973: 200).129 It should be clear by now that I aim to
employ sympathetic magical action as another tool in articulating a reciprocity of
body/s in performance-installation and to highlight mimetic incongruence (in partial
objects/subjects) as forceful precisely due to their lack (all those absent parts), which seek
a persuasion and expansion of the undesirable as desired.
In a critique of anthropologys methodologies130 not unlike that of the new art history
in a similar period,131 Tambiah questions how Evans-Pritchards study of Zande
witchcraft can ask, from a European intellectual standpoint, questions of cause and
effect with a view to empirical verification: Magical acts are ritual acts, and ritual acts
See Arnold van Gennep for a criticism of the terms by which sympathetic rites are
understood and for a thorough bibliography on the topic up to his 1908 book (1960: 4-5).
130 See Frederick Steiers Research and Reflexivity for a more recent appraisal of reflexive research
methods in the social sciences for which Tambiah can be credited as an early advocate. Steier
argues from a social constructivist approach that principles must be applied by researches to
themselves and to their research when he writes: That is, the research process itself must be
seen as socially constructing a world or worlds, with the researcher included in, rather than
outside, the body of their own research (1991: 1-2). From this perspective, what we know
comes via our own constructing processes. Therefore issues of self-reference informing
methodologies and general research processes are important. Steier asks how we develop
methodologies from a social constructivist standpoint within a context of reflexivity. Selfreflexivity holds that our own assumed research structures and logics are themselves
researchable, and by examining how we are part of our data, research becomes not self-centred
but reciprocal.
131 See Rees and Borzello where they discuss (in the mid-1980s), developments in the discipline
of art history and the emergence of the new art history with particular focus on the issues that I
draw attention to here. Namely an interdisciplinary approach influenced by the social sciences
and a questioning of authorial intention that will allow for an understanding of the reciprocal
operations at work within a notion of performativity: The presence of the new art history is
signalled by a different set of words ideology, patriarchy, class, methodology, and other terms
which betray their origins in the social sciences. Behind them lies a new way of thinking, one
which sees art as intimately linked to the society which produces and consumes it, rather than
something mysterious which happens as a result of the artists genius (1986: 4-5).
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are in turn performative acts whose positive and creative meaning is missed and whose
persuasive validity is misjudged if they are subjected to that kind of empirical
verification associated with scientific activity (1973: 199, 224).
It is in this sense that Tambiah argues that the performative aspect of magical acts
by which a property is imperatively transferred to a recipient object or person
(1973: 199) as the semantic basis of magical acts has been misunderstood by Western
anthropology. To discuss magical practice on the basis of a scientific paradigm of
analogy, as Frazer does, is to have asked the wrong question,
whereas in science the use of an analogy is closely linked to prediction and
verification or of meeting standards of probability criteria, or standing up to
tests of falsifiability and the like, the semantics of a magical rite are not necessarily
to be judged in terms of such true/false criteria of science but on different
standards and objectives. (Tambiah 1973: 219)132

5.6 METONYMY STANDS AS SUBSTITUTE

Tambiahs 1968 Malinowski Memorial Lecture delivered at the London School of
Economics and Political Science elaborates on Jakobsons 1956 use of the operations of
metaphor and metonymy in language. Jakobson indicated a link between these operations
and Frazers principles of similarity and contiguity, the imitative and contagious (Tambiah
1968: 189). Tambiah sees the term metaphor as encompassing simile and analogy, a
surrogate which has a dual reference to the original object and to the object for which it
now stands (1968: 189). For him there are rich implications for the metaphor as a device
of selection and substitution in the ritual action of magic in the transfer of an
attribute to the recipient (1968: 189). Tambiah goes on to say that metonymy stands
for the name of a thing the name of an attribute or part of it This is a case of the
part standing for the whole based on the contiguity principle (1968: 189). And this
concept includes conveying meaning through redundancy in the enumeration of the parts
of an object. This notion of redundancy might be understood as the noise of that which
is extraneous or excessive to a message. In this context metaphor establishes a field of

In addressing the terms by which similitude and contagion might be understood, Sorensen
points to a lack of consideration for ritual processes among the Victorian rationalists: In the
attempt to explain magic as actions that are rational by reference to underlying mental
procedures and beliefs, they disregard the very special status of these actionsthat they are
exactly ritual actionsand thereby almost explain the phenomena away (2007: 3).
132

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possible substitutions or meanings. Metonymy, on the other hand, is generally thought of

as a syntactical axis in that it establishes the possible concrete adjacencies of signifiers in
syntactical units of meaning. At the heart of Tambiahs analysis of sympathetic magical
action, while he does not employ these terms, lies metaphor as the axis of symptom while
metonymy is the axis of desire. As will be further discussed in 6.8 The Force of the Utterance,
performative utterances in specific ritualised contexts unleash persuasive and
transformative forces working against innumerable undesired outcomes such as disease or
the failure of crops. For Frankovich, wrapped and suspended in a dysfunctional acromat
of ropes and foam for To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour, her
body activates a desire to undo the failure of Frankovichs gymnastic career. And
Sorensen points to the significance of this approach in saying that, sacred and magical
language should not be understood as a special type of language but rather as an
exploitation of ordinary linguistic properties in a special performative or pragmatic
context (2007: 21). In this way Tambiah employs a semantics of ritual (1968: 190) to
question Frazers notion of analogical reasoning, bound as it was to the relations of cause
and effect, and transforming those terms to that of affect with objectives of persuasion,
conceptualisation, expansion of meaning (1973: 219 ).
In Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions Stiles employs the terms of metaphor
and metonymy in the context of objects and their relationship to performative acts. She
seeks an augmentation of the metaphorical capacities of conventional static forms of
art with the communicative function of metonymy, wherein artists as receivers,
visualize worlds of experience experienced, showing themselves as connected to what
society itself transmits (1998: 329). Earlier she writes:
For by literally acting in the space between a human viewing subject and the
conventional art objectas the mediator between the twothe artists who
produced action paintings and later actions, exhibited the intersection where
subjects meet object, where the artifactuality133 of the object is born in the event,
and where the artist becomes both a subject who produces an object, and the
object itself. Such art exhibits how the metonymic process precedes the signifying
capabilities of metaphor (objectified in representational objects). (1998: 306)

Stiles probably uses this term in the context of Merleau-Pontys emphasis on the facticity in
the inauguration of the location and the now of the flesh of the world in the context of the
chiasm. See Merleau-Ponty when he states: Much more: the inauguration of the where and the
when, the possibility and exigency for the fact; in a word: facticity (1968: 140).
133

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In this context the very special status of performance as an altered communicative

means enables the possibilities of contiguity or contagion to be activated. It complicates
the metaphorical associations of the apparent body (I want to say superficial) in the
object by compellingly exhibiting the intimacy of the juncture where subjects meet
object. This is manifest in the viewers expressed surprise at being lured into an
unexpected and close exchange with my body in The Artist Will Be Present (both Cut 1 and
Cut 2 within different modes of participation). I will critique Stiles viewpoint further in
6.7 The Force of the Donor. For now I reiterate that this is the kind of ritualistic space
common to sympathetic magical action that Sorensen argues as special and non-trivial
with manipulative and transformative results (2007: 32). This approach places
Tambiah in a category of pragmatic and performative explanations of magic (Sorensen
2007: 19-24). His model of performance and persuasion allows for thinking about the
concept of magic outside the terms of cause and effect and introduces performativity as
a means to understand magical action.134
In the broadest sense, this is the importance of Naumans understanding of objects and
influences their strong resemblance to objects in process and his body in duration.
This is to widen the terms by which we can discuss notions of morphological
ambivalence in partial objects and subjects. It is to discuss the possibility that those
partial images might function as surrogate performers, and the concomitant possibility
of action at a distance. Such functions and actions are tied to Tambiahs conception of
force by persuasion.

5.7 A RECENT TREND

(The following section is a review submitted to Eyeline Magazine. While it repeats (in minor detail)
some of the previous discussion, I think it reiterates, with respect to three contemporary exhibitions, my
interest, not in artists as magicians where rationalist dilemmas of cause and effect need to be justified, but
in interpreting artworks, and contexts of performativity, from the point of view of sympathetic magical
action already in operation.)
Over the past 24 months a number of exhibitions that address magical powers have
emerged, notably in New York City, Oslo and Auckland. All of them employ magical

Sorensens definition of magic sits within the realm of psychological and cognitive theories as
follows: Magic is about changing the state or essence of persons, objects, acts and events through certain
special and non-trivial kinds of actions with opaque causal mediation (2007: 32 ).
134

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action in a way that negotiates their underlying motives regarding magic per se. In the
knowledge of the forthcoming exhibition New Spiritualism in Art at the Centre Pompidou
this year, I am intrigued at what this recent fascination in magic is about and what the
underlying reasons are for its surfacing. Firstly, my hunch is that a suspension of disbelief
in the face of conjuring and cursing camouflages a deeply 19th-century attitude to the
powerful and transformative possibilities of magical action as discussed by recent writers
such as Sorensen. This would be the complex terrain where superstitious or primitive
modes of operating emerge as a critical (but blunt) tool. Secondly, this view of magical
action is adapted and made more intelligible with a correspondence to magic as an
everyday language of persuasion. And thirdly, I discuss this recent liking for magical
action as a way of combating a loss of subjectivity in what Conland calls a move from
senseless intelligence to sensible esoterics (2007: 20).
5.7.1 ARTISTS AS MAGICIANS
The exhibition Strange Powers organised by Creative Time in New York City (JulySeptember 2006) takes as its overarching theme the power of art to invoke the
invisible or to embody a presence to transform our emotions, our experience, and
even our beliefs, writes the artistic director Anne Pasternak (2006: 4). Strange Powers
like the exhibitions Future Primitives, curated by Helga-Marie Nordby and Sylvia
Kochanska at UKS in Oslo (April-May 2007), and Mystic Truths, curated by Conland at
the Auckland Art Gallery (June-October 2007)concentrates on the paranormal and
artists incorporating the magical directly into their broader practice (Pasternak
2006: 4).
Strange Powers co-curators Peter Eleey and Laura Hoptman, in separate essays, compare
the role of art to the transformative power of magic. Eleey, using analogies to healing
via the psychic healer in Euan Macdonalds Healer, emphasises that while such a claim is
empirically unverifiable, it underscores what we hope art can be and do (2006: 59).
In describing Barnett Newmans insistence on the transformative power of art,
Hoptman uses language such as an act of conjuring expressive of magical
agency, and explicitly states that arts creation is the result of primal, inchoate
magic (2006: 9). She drives the point home in stating that this art is meant to be magic,
not about magic (2006: 10). This approach stems from a notion that artists

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themselves exude magical force, and that their powers are worth considering as
promoted by her co-curator Eleey (2006: 61). This is different from an artist such as
Felix Gonzales Torres who was not trying to be the magician when he exhibited Untitled
(PlaceboLandscape for Roni), 1,200 lbs of candies individually wrapped in gold cellophane (1993).
While Gonzales Torres does not feature in this line-up of exhibitions, his work may be
analysed from a magical perspective in that it carries with it characteristics of
sympathetic analogy. This would be the weight of him and his boyfriend as donors so
embodied in the title and pile of candies as a ritualised votive offering that also
implicates the body/s of the audience as they consume that offering. These are the
powerful operations of traditional sympathetic magical action at work in everyday
consumption. This distinction is a crucial one. Gonzales Torres can be analysed from
the point of view of the structure of magical analogy while Strange Powers, Future Primitives
and Mystic Truths often invest their artists with the content of magic claiming them as
magicians.

FELIX GONZALES TORRES, FROM THE SERIES UNTITLED (PLACEBOLANDSCAPE FOR RONI), 1,200 LBS
OF CANDIES INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED IN GOLD CELLOPHANE, 2005

In this light Eleey and Hoptmans insistence on the artist as magician is held at an
ambiguously cynical arms length by some of the artists in these three exhibitions. For
example, Mirinda Lichtenstein in Strange Powers employs a spiritual cleanser for the
exhibition space, and Dane Mitchell hires a witch to create a portal to the spirit world
for the duration of Mystic Truths indicated by a bronze plaque on the exterior wall of the
Auckland Art Gallery in Portal to the Spirit World (2007). This kind of wholesale and
arguably superficial borrowing of magical action is made possible by the fact that magic
is a set of activities or actions rather than a belief system and in this respect the actions
of magic might be borrowed and subverted in something of a vacuum and remain

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recognisable as such. It is in this context that the curatorial approaches for Strange Powers,
Future Primitives and Mystic Truths are driven by an ambiguous relationship to being
magical.

DANE MITCHELL, PORTAL TO THE SPIRIT WORLD, 2007

And there is a parallel to this recent trend common to anthropological analysis of magic
in the late 19th-and early 20th-century by the likes of Tylor as well as Frazers famous The
Golden Bough outlining the terms by which sympathetic magical practice might be
understood. An intellectualist and rationalist interpretation of magical action upheld by
these Victorian anthropologists was one that discussed magical action on the basis of a
scientific paradigm of analogy, and in so doing, asked the wrong questions. Frazer
linked magic to prediction and verification, or of meeting standards of probability. This
emphasis on cause and effect encountered some major contradictions for the Victorian
mind. One was the instance of Western sympathetic magic in their own society as this
contradicted a theory of the evolution of civilised societies. This dilemma was
exacerbated by the anthropologists clear oscillation between belief and disbelief that, I
want to argue, is also a characteristic of some of the curators discussed here. Tylor
exemplifies this in his duplicitous attitude to sympathetic magic when he addresses the
International Folk-Lore Congress in 1891 and states that he was in possession of various
artefacts that have disappeared mysteriously, suggesting that there is some element of
belief invested in what he earlier described as the intellectual level of the peasant and
savage (389). He then recounts another related story about a local wizard and alehousekeeper who held a local magistratea strong advocate of temperancein contempt
and who stabbed and roasted an onion representing the magistrate. The magistrate was
never ill but his wife had an attack of fever, prompting Tylor to write that ...there was

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shaking of heads among the wise (1891: 390), suggesting a degree of empathy with the
notion of sympathetic magic.
5.7.2 CYNICISM OR BELIEF?
Eleeys and Hoptmans comments come close to Frazers and Tylors notion of
misdirected science even though they fall back on the safety net of a tension between
scepticism and belief (Eleey 2006: 63) seen as the core of their agendas. Eleey is
closest to Frazer and Tylor when he states: A number of works, however, specifically
offer evidentiary support for magical thinking, however possibly unconvincing (2006:
62). Hoptman clearly states that the works in Strange Powers profess a belief in magic, but
this profession is not one that relies on proof of the paranormal as this, she states, is
unconvincing. It is a suspended assumption that conjuring, predicting and cursing might
work in the face of the fact that they probably dont that provides a vehicle for a belief in
art as a transformer (Hoptman 2006: 10-11). While their language may not share the
cultural condescension typical of the Victorian anthropologists, these curators clearly
contextualise magic in terms of an ambiguous vacillation between standards of
probability and their failure. While this approach is justified with respect to some of the
artwork curated, I believe it is an inherently flawed approach as to why magical action is
so interesting and persuasive as a structural model of analysis as cited above for
Gonzales Torres work. It is not a question of whether magical action might work that
is valuable. To even approach this question is to start down a rationalist line of thinking
that results in deadlock. Eleey redeems this situation to some extent when he describes
an auratic economy in which the value of an artwork is weighted towards what it
proposes, rather than its effect (2006: 63).
It was along these lines that the anthropologist Tambiah objected in the 1970s to
Victorian rationalism in that it viewed magic as an attempt at science that failed (or
more crudely a bastard science in the manner of Frazer (1973: 218). Tambiah
advocates that magic ritual engages with objectives of persuasion, conceptualisation
and expansion of meaning (1973: 219). The implication of this reckoning is to alleviate
any residual misgivings about the validity of causal relationships and their viability from
a strictly rationalist perspective. It also follows that performative acts of a persuasive
kind are by no means confined to the primitive: modern industrial societies also have

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their rites and ceremonies which achieve their effects by virtue of conventional
normative understandings (Tambiah 1973: 200). And Sorensen recently points to the
significance of this approach in saying that, sacred and magical language should not
be understood as a special type of language but rather as an exploitation of ordinary
linguistic properties in a special performative or pragmatic context (2007: 21).
5.7.3 MAGIC AS EVERYDAY PERSUASION
The idea that magical action may have a correspondence with conventional normative
understandings is a way out of the rationalist deadlock described above. Eleey hints at
this for Strange Powers when he asks of us to be sympathetic to artists efforts to
conjure this force from quotidian materials variously unremarkable (2006: 64). This
is close to Tambiahs model of persuasion as opposed to measurable scientific
outcomes. This is what Conland means when she curates a group of works for Mystic
Truths with inherent Pop references chosen to signify the everyday, provoked by the
exhibitions epitaph The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths, spelt out
in Naumans neon street sign Window or Wall Sign (1967). And this iconic work is aptly
messed with in Mungo Thomsons reiteration of the Nauman phrase as a car bumper
sticker that locates it once more in a place of popular messaging and one-liners. As
Conland writes: This is not a cynical gesture designed to undermine or test the potency
of particular meanings and values, but to strip them back so they sit alongside the values
of common utterance (2007: 23).
For Mystic Truths Conland is much more cautious than Eleey and Hoptman as she
employs the notion of the oxymoron as a suspension of a necessity for belief or disbelief,
while Strange Powers encourages a moment of belief for visitorsfor many, a leap of
faithrather than a suspension of disbelief (Pasternak 2006: 5). Conland writes that
oxymora are exaggerated because they utilise rational understanding and persuasion
by what is deemed irrational effect (2007: 16). In this sense Mystic Truths avoids some of
the reductive tendencies of Strange Powers.

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5.7.4 SENSIBLE ESOTERICS & FORCE OVER FORM

Conland underlines a position on the part of her artists that is (intentionally) not easily
discernible precisely so they can treat the mystical as idea and material, without
owning any particular belief system in standing back from belief or cynicism (2007:
16). She observes that: None of the works in Mystic Truths portrays an obvious position
for the artist who handles this materialmaterial which usually requires an element of
belief. Although they tool the contents in the mode of experimentation, they do not give
the impression of distance per se (2007: 24). This tension of the oxymoron is a space of
non-judgement and opens a hole in the wall to anti-intellectualism, a willing suspension
of rationality and contrary positions. This is what Conland beckons forth in the lines:
The results are a range of aesthetic responses from senseless intelligence to sensible
esoterics (2007: 16 emphasis added). She cleverly makes a flip between a tautological
dysfunction in the rhetorics of Conceptual and Pop art practices of the 1960s (art is life
as life is art) and the possibilities of an oxymoron (bitter/sweet) that allows for greyness
as a transit between certainty and uncertainty (2007: 17, 24). Future Primitives
curator Helga-Marie Nordby, in her text describing Daniel Jensens installation
Phantasms of the Living, reinforces this position by calling for situations where
untraditional perceptions of the world rule (2007: unpaginated www).
To my mind the ground on which magical action can be taken most seriously is on the
basis of force over form. That is to say that ritual contexts and the power of incantation
(both understood in their everydayness) are more important than the representational
form (or verification) of the magical act. This is why the Gonzales Torres work is so
interesting: while its formal aesthetic (and content) would seem not to derive from a
history of magic, its operational force is deeply magical.
In summaryin analysing these very recent trends in visual art for a retrospective
mysticism and fascination for the supernatural, as described by Nordby (2007:
unpaginated www)where I think the curators approaches are critically sharpest is
when they make a correspondence to persuasive language of the everyday while
searching out an underlying objection to intellectual objectivism almost in spite of the
magical focus of their exhibitions (which in my view often treat magic superficially).
Conland is interesting in this respect in her desire for a sensible esoterics and renewed

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interest in subjectivity. The vehicle of magic, while clearly a theme in these exhibitions,
is secondary to this higher ideal.

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The Artist Will Be Present

PERFORMING PARTIAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Chapter 6
6.1

MORPHOLOGICAL
AMBIVALENCE IN THE
PARTIAL OBJECT/SUBJECT

6.1 MORPHOLOGICAL AMBIVALENCE IN

THE PARTIAL OBJECT/SUBJECT
In this section Mauss notion of the poorly executed ideogramcontextualising the
characteristics of imperfect similarity with respect to the body represented, and
notions of contact or contagion, in sympathetic analogyis compared to Krauss
emphasis on erosion, or reduction, in morphological ambivalence in the context of
the part object. When Krauss employs the term morphological ambivalence in
relation to the work of Louise Bourgeois it is because Bourgeois sculptures, like
Trani Episode (1971), designate partial or fragmentary references to the human
anatomy. The body is announced in a way in which a definition of morphology
describes a partial rendering: the form and structure of an organism or any of its
parts, as well as a study and description of word formation (as inflection,
derivation, and compounding) in language.135

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, TRANI EPISODE, 1971

The kinds of objects that tend to be discussed as part objects are those that solicit the
problem of how they might be named. By this I mean that, in their fragmentation, they
are suggestive of a larger whole while, at the same moment, lack a sense of
representational fixityor embrace a sense of formlessnessin determining exactly
what that whole might be. Or, as is the case with Martinis Roes derivative play on
historical models, as fragments that were never from a whole and will never conjure up
a whole to which they can return. It is this dearth of representational fixity that prompts
Anne Middleton Wagner, in the context of Hesses work, to ask the question, what does
her work look like? (1996: 252). When I first read this question I was struck not only by

135

See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morphological.

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Wagners simplicity of enquiry but also at how it struck at the heart of Hesses
polyvalence. Or, as Briony Fer puts it in The Scatter: Sculpture as Leftover: Part
objects focus attention on the body and on a bodily topography (2005: 225). She refers
to Hesses Untitled (1968) where the artist placed part objects in glass vitrines: They are
both working parts and leftovers of other works, like relics without aura (2005: 227).136
What does Fer mean when she writes relics without aura? Her comment reinforces, for
example, the sensation of deferral and redundancy so evident in Frankovichs Flying Fox
and To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of Behaviour. It is also reminiscent
of Eskdales Furniture Objects spread out on pedestal tables. To exist as a relic without the
auratic presence that would have been its function is not an apparent failure in the
object but an invitation to resolve: an invitation for performative reinstatement that
would undo auratic impotence.

EVA HESSE, UNTITLED, 1968

From a slightly different perspective, Fers point enlarges the notion of the part object to part
of a larger body of work stating that parts and wholes are relative, in that everything is part of a
larger whole. In addition to this Fer makes the point that the Orozco objects, unlike Duchamps
Boite-en-valise, do not make an inventory or archive of past works (2005: 223-227). In this sense
Orozcos Working Tables are not collections in the Benjaminian sense as a struggle against
dispersion... In difference to this, Orozco is about anticollecting, where Fer writes, ...the
accident by which it happens to be there (2005: 231). Orozco, on the other hand, invites a
looking ...that is spread out, dispersed, one that scans across the kind of surfacea tablethat
we think we know and that in some way is highly conventionalised but is culturally variable
(2005: 227). Fer compares Gabriel Orozcos Various Models (1992-1995) with Hesses cabinet
works as collections which constitute part of a greater body of work: The fact that they have an
ambiguous relationship to other works is partly the point: it is as if the things in her glass cases
are in limbo in some way (2005: 225).
136

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GABRIEL OROZCO, WORKING TABLES, 2000

Placed in such a context, the part objects and images in The Artist Will Be Present function
as bits and pieces, relics from private performative actions, expressly designed to
embody a sense of process that upsets a propensity for uniquely scopic identification and
for completion. The processes of their making and viewing are antithetical to the
motivations that place such objects on pedestals and border up such moving images with
figural and recognisable narrative sequences. This is at least part of Eisensteins
motivation to disorient sequences by montage.
As such, the term part object denotes a part of a whole never recoverable and therefore
might be analysed in relation to what it is not, what is left out. This is to induce notions
of redundancy or lack, severance and shortfall. In their partiality, part objects imply a
larger whole but it is in their lack of representational fixity that their force resides. It is
this partiality that urges Hartel to invoke the words of Mallarm in relation to the
repetitive and partial images in Ugo Rondinones The evening passes like any other (1998):
To name an object is to get rid of three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem to
suggest it theres the dream (2006b: 244). Part objects and images have a function in
doing or producing in difference to representing. Taussig stresses this point when he
observes with reference to Mauss that in so many instances of sympathetic magic the
copy, far from being a faithful copy, is an imperfect ideogram (1993: 57). It is in this
context that Taussig attempts to answer the question: how much of a copy does the copy
have to be to have an effect on what it is the copy of? (1993: 51).137 As will be argued,
the concept of faithfulness is transferred from the notion of realistic replica, and clearly
In relation to this question of why magically effective anatomical votives are not more
realistic as replicas, see Strathern who discusses Taussigs question as to why the Cuna use
wooden figurines of Europeans as curing fetishes (nuchas), particularly when Cuna magical
power resides in the substance and not in the outer form. The questions remain: why carve
them at all? (1996: 193).
137

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defined intentionality, to a complex set of performative contexts. These are objects

contingent on the process of enactment. In this regard Clarks work is a useful exampleif
viewed alongside sympathetic magical actionof the extreme ambivalence with respect to
the use of objects, and their lack of realism, following many ritual acts. It is the social
conventions of her clinic, the attention with which she affords seemingly mundane objects,
that gives rise to the extremes in her practice. As with the notion of the poorly executed
ideogram, it is not about what it looks like, it is about what it does. Paulo Herkenhoff
extends this idea, placing Clark in relation to a non-object as a non-artist:
In constituting the collective body, Lygia Clark explores exchanges within a
pattern of alterities. Finally, the artists action, the Other, and the relational
objects are engaged in a therapeutic action, overwhelming the limit between art
and life. There does not exist, in this practice, any possibility of action on the field
of the art system, whether it is the museum, the market, art criticism or art history.
Lygia assumes the extremes of her project. It is then that she may declare, with
coherence, to be a non-artist. Her relationship of alterity, through her cultural
action (as in the theory of the non-object), to a comprehending of the Other as a
necessary being and finally as a concrete subject. Canons of aesthetic language are
no longer of interest to Clark, whether established or innovating, but only the
relationships of individualisation. Clark having broken through the limits of art
now submits herself to what ever the ethics of the cure impose upon her. (1998:
50)
Herkenhoff reinforces that, in the context of performativity, an encounter with the
Other over and above the aesthetic nature of an object involves an ethic where
efficacy is embedded in the operations of the performative utterance which can be
transformative. 138 These are the conditions of imperfect similarity and contiguity,
or contagion, manifest in sympathetic magical action. It should be clear by now
that I am not interested in describing artists like Clark as magicians (with the
concomitant associations of priest or shaman) but rather employing the structure of
magical action as a way of elucidating the significance of the operations of force
over form and its relationship to notions of partial subjects and objects in
profoundly performative contexts. I am interested in how objects and images are
defined through these operations as comprehending the other. In this light, and in
describing my silicon cast works from the Fleshly Worn series (2004) Conland writes
rather than casting a representation of the artist, the process captures an
imprint of the performative actionbetween body and material. And then, in
138

See Butt who uses a very similar emphasis (2005: 17).

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referencing a remark I made to Tim Wilson, The New Zealand Herald correspondent
in 2004,139 she continues:
Braddock was asked to comment on his own body, not the symbolic but the
actual, to which he replied, Im a means to an end, Im a vehicle. This off-thecuff comment is revealing of Braddocks personal religiosity, and his belief in the
body as a container and repository of faith. In Fleshly Worns departure from the
iconographic, Braddock reengages with the period of late Minimalist practice, best
known through the work of Lynda Benglis and Eva Hesse, which saw the human
body used symbolically to implode the very non-relational aspects of Minimalist
art. (2005: 12)

C FROM THE FLESHLY WORN SERIES, 2004

139

See Tim Wilsons Body doubles as silicon (Wilson: B8).

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My point at the time was that not any body, but ones own body, becomes implicated as
a site of remedy for others; a relational and efficacious art of the body. In this context
Mauss states: The image is, therefore, defined only through its function which is simply
to produce the person (1975: 68). What does it mean to produce the person? Mauss is
discussing, in the context of sympathetic magical action, the manner in which images
are dispensable: The mere mention of a nameeven thinking it, the slightest rudiment
of mental assimilationis sufficient for an arbitrarily chosen substancebird, animal,
branch, cord, bow, needle, ringto represent the victim (1975: 68).140 Mauss remark
emphasises a lack of value attached to what an object looks like, which concurrently
augments the participants role in determining the utility or the force of an object. This
is the kind of emphasis that was common to a notion of performative sculpture discussed
in Chapter 4. For example, Schimmel cites John Lathams Skoob Tower (1964) where the
work was completed by the viewer standing inside and contributing their attention. The
Tower, as such, becomes, not less significant, but only comprehensible with respect to the
agency of the viewer. And it follows that the Tower, as a generator of meaning, is
indefinably different for each viewers encounter (Schimmel 1998: 55).
It is in this sense that Mauss goes on to note that an objects attribution, that which I am
arguing is its performative status as a surrogate performer, might change during the
course of a ceremony, or that the objective of a ceremony might be divided between
several objects. Mauss offers an example: If one wishes to blind an enemy by passing
one of his hairs through the eye of a needle, which has sewn up three shrouds, and then
sticking holes in the eye of a toad with the same needle, the hair and the toad are both
used in turn as volt (1975: 68-69).141 As will be seen, I make use of Mauss notion of the
poorly executed ideogram in various ways. Firstly, his concept of attention augments
Frazers more superficial observations of similarity in acknowledging interpretation and
intention on the part of any agent in ritual contexts. Secondly, his term abstraction,
which I am calling ambivalence with respect to representing bodies, is not about what it
looks like but about what it does. In this sense part objects and subjects do in difference to

Benjamins Doctrine of the Similar makes the same kind of emphasis as pointed out by
Rabinbach: [Benjamins] Mimetic activity includes thought, behaviour, language and even
unconscious processes such as telepathy (1979: 64n16).
141 The use of the term volt signifies objects that take on status as an alternative body. In this
ritual the persons hair and the toads eyes both assume the powers of contiguity and similarity
respectively.
140

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describe. Thirdly, Mauss makes a significant point when he argues that the terms of
attention and abstraction are indivisible and will not benefit from separate analysis
(1975: 73). One cannot divide modes of encounter from an objects/subjects form:
contexts of performativity are mutually dependent and multifarious. This reinforces
Butts view, mentioned earlier, that the critic is immersed in the field of affects of which
she is an agent. In this sense Mauss stresses that the properties of similarity, contiguity
and opposition142 are interdependent, these abstract representations of similarity,
contiguity and opposition are inseparable from ideas of things, natures of properties
which are transmissible from one being or object to another (1975: 74).
To restate, intentionality becomes something to radically question, that is, the
production of intentional subjects along with their supposed intentions. In alliance with
this is the participants role in determining the meaning of an object always with
unlimited potential: the force over form of the performative encounter determined by the
agency of the body/s of the audience. It is in this sense that the partial objects in the
Take series are only ever near completion in the audiences that engage with them,
which is always never ending. Again, this is why Mauss stresses the importance of
performative actionthe mere mention of a name over and above the importance
of likeness in representation. It is important, as I will argue, that such performative
action is understood as a function of doing something, as in performative utterance. Seen
from this perspective, Morris Columns announce a performative utterance where their
acting, in the sense of surrogate beings, dominates form: force over form. This I see as
akin to an emphasis on performatively inspired notions of a de-centering of meaning in
the artefact and author (abstraction and attention) discussed in Chapter 4 in the context
of performative sculpture.
This is not dissimilar to Morris co-opting of forces in the work where materials and
processes do the performing. Mauss poorly executed ideogram sets in motion
performatively understood, and liminally co-dependent, forces between agents such as
ritualists, donors, objects and contexts of production. And this suggests a potentially
limitless set of associations. The terms by which performativity are couched in Chapter
1 advocate that pinning down specific intentions or interpretations once again restricts
The concept of opposition that I have not emphasised in the previous chapter acts as the
corollary to similarity. If there is similarity then there must be difference.
142

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the meaning of the performative. This is understated in Mauss observation that objects
can take on limitless associations; knots being required to represent love, rain, wind,
curing, war etc (1975: 70).

ROPE & WAX ANATOMICAL VOTIVE, LIMASSOL, CYPRUS

This distinction is born out in Jones disagreement with Stiles vis--vis intentionality.
While Stiles adheres to the possibility of activist intentions having a bearing on specific
events (within what Jones describes as assumptions regarding presence and the real
event), Jones views performativitys radicalness in its ambivalence of engagement. And it is
the limitless possibilities of that engagement (intentions included) that is important here.
She references Stiles as she writes: It is not through any putative intention of enacting
the body in a concrete social practice that body art is potentially radical but, rather,
through the engagements that it encouragesand, in fact, its ambivalence towards the
social (its narcissism as well as its radical opening to the other) (1998: 246-247n237).143
So when Martinis Roe performs at Conical Inc assiduously manipulating clay across her
deconstructed platforms, her fingers leave behind objects flagrant with performative
attention and abstraction that are limited only by the sense of the engagements they
foster. In a similar light, Naumans Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name, also
overwhelming in its partial morphological ambivalence, produces the person in a manner
that signifies each and every possible viewers gesture. In this light, the objects are better
termed traces of gesture by which authorship and completion are problematised.

This reiterates a distinction from relational aesthetics that I outlined earlier in the section
1.3 Introducing Metaphor & Metonymy.
143

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Here I want to emphasise the trajectories outlined in Chapter 4 where The Artist Will Be
Present places emphasis on both the objects role as a marker of process, always moving
towards, but never resolved as productin tandem with an emphasis on the viewer
signing the work. This is to reiterate that no single agent performs. To say again: one
of my main aims is to offer a model of sympathetic magical action as a means of
contextualising the traits of the part object/subjectits fragmentation and concomitant
redundancy (meaning that from a myriad of possible fragments only a couple will be
metonymically held to while the rest are noise)within an understanding of
performative rituals that are richly imbued with notions of contagion and continuity on
the metonymic axis. This model underscores the significance of addressing part
objects/subjects in the context of the agents that offer them attention. This necessitates
speaking of the partial object/subject in their in-between twoness: an objects mimetic
incongruence inseparable from its attention. As noted in the previous chapter, body
arts performative objects, like those of sympathetic magical action, operate in altered
and non-trivial contexts with manipulative and transformational possibilities (Sorensen
2007: 32; Stiles 1998: 306).

6.2 MELANIE KLEIN AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC

MODEL OF THE PART OBJECT
For the exhibition Part Object Part Sculpture at the Wexner Center for the Arts (October
2005-February 2006), curator Molesworth and Krauss, in separate catalogue essays,
contextualise the phenomena of the part object within the theories of British
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (Krauss 2005: 85; Molesworth 2005a: 194-195).144 This is
characteristic of much of the art historical literature surrounding the part object and its
relationship to the body which has employed, as a primary point of reference, Kleins
concept that regards the infants projective identification with the mother as a
process of splitting, projection and identification (Likierman 2001: 159). This
theory has been extremely valuable in addressing how these fragmentary part objects
might function, not as a model of the unconscious, but as a fantasy world operating in
relation to bodily instincts. Kleins theory involves the mothers body partsthose
specific to the needs of the infant, such as the breastforming the infants subjectivity
Molesworth also introduces D.W. Winnicott in describing Duchamps original readymades
as transitional objects (2005a: 197).
144

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enabling a process of identification with the body as parts in relation to the whole. The
breast is both consumed and rejected by the infant in a quest to understand the
boundaries between the subject and object.145 As Molesworth puts it, between inside
and outside, between me and not me (2005a: 197). The literature has, in turn,
critiqued Kleins position, often from the stance of Gilles Deleuzes and Felix Guattaris
Anti-Oedipus which, as Krauss writes, is seen as a stance against the assumption that the
experience of desire must always be a desire for meaning, that Oedipus is the drive for
symbolization, for representation, for the summoning forth of the signified. As she goes
on to write, Deleuze and Guattaris variance to Klein is that: If the desiring machines
This approach is used by Mignon Nixon as she employs Kleins case history of her four-yearold patient Dick in relation to, among other artists, Bourgeois. Nixons motivation is to develop
psychoanalytic feminist readings of aggression that are not grounded in concepts of
essentialism or regression (1997: 178). For Nixon, Bourgeois desire to eat the father and to
eat his words turned into the desire for sculptural solutions or object solutionsa sculptural
solution being, in Bourgeois terms, one that performs an aggressive or desiring operation on an
object the sculpture comes into being as the object of aggressive fantasyas something to bite
or to cut, to incorporate or to destroy. Nixons footnote at the end of this sentence provides a
balanceless evident in the essay itself for these sculptural operations as fantasies of
reparation, of restoring the object perceived to be damaged by destructive fantasies (1997:
161n114).
For a slightly different emphasis and, in her quest to avoid readings of the Kleinian infant as a
singularly destructive, schizoid being, see Meira Likierman who argues that these introjections
are based on the good object: Libidinal pleasure-states, and feelings of love and gratitude that
are projected on to the nurturing breast, are then reintrojected to form such a core. Mental
states and ego-parts can then cluster around this island of security, created with the help of the
human provision received by the infant, and this gradually enables integration (2001: 168).
This emphasis on the positive aspects of Kleins theory suggests that aggression and disturbance
is assimilated into the complete person of his loved object. And Likierman concludes that:
With this thinking, the difference between adult schizoid states and the infantile schizoid
mechanisms is finally clarified. The former represent a highly destructive process in a
vulnerable, over-defended individual, whereas the latter express the aggressive protection of
good experience that alone enables the creation of the egos core (2001: 169-170). While
Likierman does not discuss art, I have a hunch that some of the art historical literature
surrounding the part object takes Kleins theories too literally, to the point that the body of the
mother is imagined in parts. This might be true of Molesworth when she says: The breast
stands alone, distinct and separate from the mother (2005a: 194). I cannot adequately address
this complex question as that would necessitate thorough studies in the field of Kleinian
psychoanalysis. It is worth noting however that for Klein there is a distinction between the
theorised part object and that experienced by the infant. As Likierman states: the mother has
a role in a meaningful gathering of different fragments of her infants response that go to make
up his individual history. It is this that gives the infant a sense of one self that changes over time,
rather than of different selves that emerge as no more than temporal fragments (2001: 165). As
Likierman explains: She [Klein] had always noted that while infantile experience is piecemeal,
and while the first introjects are part objects, they are not experienced as such in the infants
actual phantasy. On the contrary, the good part object is experienced as a total situation, and
the power and fullness of experiencing it represents a whole to the infant. What is objectively
understood as an isolated event, unintegrated into the perception of other aspects of reality, is
not in fact registered as such (2001: 169).
145

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produce, they do not produce meaning, representation, form what they produce is a
flow for the next machine to process (1999: 73). This is the logic viewed as inherent in
the part object: an opposition to a drive for representation that seeks formal visual resolve,
but instead seeks a deferral of meaning. These are part objects as parts of an ongoing
desiring machine that produces in order to produce and so on and so on.146 This view has
been important in grappling with the absence of representational definition in the
fragment of the part object and in addressing the conditions of formlessness or
morphological ambivalence (Krauss 1999: 71) characteristic of the part object.147
Employing the theories of Klein in relation to the work of Bourgeois, Krauss locates the part
object in its psychoanalytic dimensions as the goal of an instinct or drive focused
around so many separate organs and their needs and desires (1999: 54).148 In discussing
the infants world of breasts, mouths, bellies, penises and anuses, she agues for a logic in the
part object that is about a connection between agents rather than between whole bodies or
persons, and this she suggests is reductive rather than abstract (1999: 55).
In this context Molesworth observes: It is tempting to see the three erotic objects of
Duchamp as Kleinian part objects par excellence. All are fragmentary in relation to the
wholeness of both Etant donns and the marriage of two fully elaborated adults (2005a:
197). And with respect to Kleinian psychoanalysis she writes: This psychic and physical
play between interior and exterior creates an intense cathexsis onto objects, as objects come
As OSullivan writes: We are moving towards a notion of the art experience, of art practice,
whether it be making it, seeing it, or writing about it, as complex and expanded. No longer the
static production, distribution and consumption of an object, but art practice as a process, as a
desiring-machine, always in production (2006: 24 ).
147 It has also been crucial to a feminist understanding of the body, that which Krauss describes
(via Luce Irigaray) as the scandal of female transgressiveness simultaneously against forma
decentered, amorphous, nonphallic experience of pleasureand against logos, or meaning
(1999: 74). See also Krauss The Optical Unconscious (1993) where, a few years earlier, she follows a
similar argument in relation to Deleuze and Guattaris critique of Klein where she writes: If the
part-objects are rebaptised desiring machines, the threatened, paranoid body is now labelled the
body without organs. This body, static, non-productive, is also the body without an image, the
gestaltless body, or the body without form (1993: 316).
148 See Krauss as she locates the work of Bourgeois in the realm of the part-object as opposed
to the partial figure. She summarises, as she did in her 2005 essay for Part Object Part Sculpture,
and as she initially outlined her approach in 1977 with Passages in Modern Sculpture, a 19 th-century
preoccupation with the study of classical antique remains, provoking a romantic enthusiasm for
the fragment which, in turn, led to a 20 th-century conviction that it was the vehicle for a
profound, sculptural truth. The body contracted into its most powerful synecdoches: the body as
egg, the body as tree truck, the body as spoonlike hollow (1999: 54). Where Krauss employs
the term synecdoches I might use the term metonymy.
146

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to stand for persons and parts come to stand for wholes (2005a: 197). This comment
echoes Mauss emphasis in the context of those magical rites which follow the so-called laws
of sympathy: Where a part is seen to be the same as the whole (1975: 11).149
Again, in relation to the work of Bourgeois, with reference to the notion of the part
object, Krauss is at pains to draw a distinction between ambivalence and abstraction
(1999: 71-74). She comments with surprise that Bourgeois work has been received as
abstract in the sense of a modernist and formalist logic (1999: 55). Krauss nails her
point as follows:
There is nothing abstract about the part-object. But its logic, which spells the
connection between agentsthe desiring organs on the one hand and the yielding or
withholding objects of desire on the otherrather than between individuals or
whole persons, is reductive: the mother reduced to breast. (1999: 55)
In a similar attempt to articulate such a notion of ambivalence, Molesworth outlines
Wedge of Chastitys characteristics as abstract, necessitating touch, small scale, erotic in
nature and reproducible. Her use of the term abstract is defined as without strict
anatomic definition, a mixture of the bodily and the nonbodily, a merging of two
entities that nonetheless maintain their autonomy (2005a: 179). And elsewhere she
states, the presence of the body is felt but nowhere is it imaged (2005b: 20).150

I want to stress that I am not presenting a model of sympathetic magical action or animism in
any kind of opposition to a psychoanalytic model. While Molesworth does not mention
sympathetic magical action, her construal of partial objects underlines that such a model does
not replace, or act as an alternative, to psychoanalytic models but sits in relation to it. As
another way of wording this (and about another issue), Massumi writes: As usual, it is not a
question of right and wrongnothing important ever is. Rather, it is a question of dosage
(2002: 13).
150 Jones makes similar observations about Wedge of Chastity as she writes: Its title makes explicit
its relation to the thwarted dynamic of erotic union... its anatomy is baffling: While the softly
molded dental plastic suggests human flesh, its shape is extremely abstracted and not directly
analogous to female sexual parts. Nor is the wedge specifically phallic in shape (1994: 90).
149

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MARCEL DUCHAMP, WEDGE OF CHASTITY, 1954

As a means of articulating these notions of formless ambivalence in difference to formal

abstraction, Krauss employs Barthes The Metaphor of the Eye (1963), a critique of
Batailles novel Lhistoire de loeil (The Story of the Eye) (1926). She describes,
a transgression of that formal logic [abstraction] which depends on the
distinction of categorical oppositions, a transgression that thus produces the
scandal of the erosion of form that is the informe.151 It is this erosion of form that
conduces a sense of the abstract152which is to say, the unlocatablein
Bourgeois work. (1999: 71-73)
Mauss influence on Batailles overall project is a fascinating line of enquiry for which I do
not have space to undertake at this point. James Clifford elaborates on the idea that Batailles
treatise LErotisme (1957) was heavily influenced by Mauss seminars at the Ecole des Haute
Etudes. He quotes Alfred Mtraux, who was present at Mauss seminars, in writing that Mauss
edict that taboos are made to be violated, strongly influenced Batailles introduction to
LErotismes key chapter on transgression where Bataille writes: Trangression does not negate an
interdiction, it transcends and completes it. In this sense, Batailles main focus, which was to
valorize transgression in all its various forms was key to Mauss (Clifford 1981: 545546).
See also Krauss who alerted me to this connection and that the group called the dissident
surrealists, which included Bataille and Alberto Giacometti, were closely following Mauss
seminars (1986: 56, 56n31).
152 Krauss use of the term abstract is obviously not employed here as that relating to
Modernist abstract formalism. I would replace the term as it stands in her sentence with the
term ambivalence.
151

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But she states that this erosion of form is not the attack on matter that anti form153
played out in relation to Minimalism, but ...the imposition of distinctions on the
indistinctness of chaosdistinctions like inside/outside, figure/ground, male/female,
living/dead. It is the transgression of these distinctions, the dangerous imagination of
their collapse, that produces the informe (1999: 71-73). In this sense the informe
(formlessness) is understood as a privation of form (or differences such as figure/ground,
or vacillation of difference).
This discussion is well summarised by James Elkins in reference to Krauss The Optical
Unconscious as he outlines a notion of formlessness:
The inform is a disturbance in the modality of alteration, of ambivalence, so
that there can no longer be a stable distinction between figure and ground, or any
pair of alternating opposites. Nothing is secure, and forms and figures vacillate or
shimmer rather than oscillate in a regular motion. The inform is a principle that
works against the concepts of antimony, binarism, opposition, structure, and
ultimately, figure itself. (1998: 106)154

Note that Krauss employs Morris anti-form to different effect, in favour of a notion of
formlessness, eight years later in her chapter entitled Horizontality in Formless. Here she
argues that the strictures of Minimalism, the well-built, enabled forms to resist gravity, and
...what yields to gravity, then, is anti-form. Thus for Morris it was not the thematics of trash or
mess or tangleall of which are images of something in their own waythat was pertinent to
anti-form, but the operations that would make the force of gravity apparent as it pulled form
apart: random piling, loose stacking, hanging (Bois and Krauss 1997: 97-98). Krauss explains
how the felt works were cut on the horizontal floor and make sense as cut-outs in this position
until hung from hooks on the wall: Now scattered, the pattern would disappear; instead, the
gaps would become the index of the horizontal vector understood as a force constantly active
within the vertical fielda force that had been put in play in a move to disable the very
formation of form (Bois and Krauss 1997: 98).
154 Elkins offers a very clear overview of Krauss intentions as she discusses the figure/ground
relationship while utilising three approaches. The first is Lacans L schema used to describe,
not a system of opposites but a picture of permanent circulation, continuous flow as the
object petit a constitutes the ego, which forms the sense of the Other which stabilizes the
philosophic subject, and so on (1998: 105). The second is the concept of the inform as a
surrealist notion for ...whatever works against the meanings generated by the various
differences figure/ground, figure/not ground, and so on. And further referencing Krauss,
Elkins states that: The inform works to produce the absence of difference (1998: 106). The
third approach is in Jean-Francois Lyotards Discours, figure, where Lyotard attempts to write
a theory of the absolutely asystematic and alogical force that informs concepts such as the inform
(1998: 107).
See Sobchack who alerted me to the Elkins text (2004: 73 n63).
153

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In its variance with dichotomous opposition, this stance shares some of Merleau-Pontys
ambition for the flesh of the chiasm and Benjamins thinking on the optical unconscious.
As Elkins writes, again with reference to Krauss: The Optical Unconscious is nomadic,
always looking for alternate pulses, beats, and principles of bad form, so that none
keeps center stage long enough to be subsumed into a fully articulate system (1998:
110).
This is Deleuzes real but abstract that Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation writes,
doesnt preexist and has nothing fundamentally to do with mediation Here,
abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing. This is an
abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relationthat of a
body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it
is, in any here and now). (2002: 5)
The machine that abstracts in this way is an approach to thinking about art as less
involved in questions of definition and more with notions of function (O'Sullivan 2006:
22).155 This is an emphasis Massumi strikes at when he argues for energy over matter, that
which I continuously stress as force over form. And as OSullivan is at pains to underline,
this denotes a field of perfomativity: For the signification effect, or indeed the aesthetic
effect, does not come from the object, but from the object being confronted by (coupled
with) a beholder (2006: 22). Arts role here is a process that never reaches fulfilment and
is constitutively experimental, a kind of blockage in the smooth running of larger
institutional, and indeed global, coding machines (2006: 25).
As a means of articulating a flow of events and their relationship to ritual contexts,
Massumi employs a parable of the soccer match and sketches out the playing field as a
force-field describing the players as part objects and the ball as a part subject. He does
this by defining the ball as the focus of every player and the object of every gesture

In relating this to the desiring machine, OSullivan writes: In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and
Guattari characterise these desiring machines as flow producing and flow interrupting. A
machine produces a flow, another machine coupled to this interrupts the flow, draws it off, and
in doing so produces a temporary halt, an aggregate, an object or frozen event (2006: 22).
See Briony Fer who suggests a similar kind of operation when she writes that Hesses objects
in cabinets share a pursuit of circuits in which parts do not add up to a whole so much as
circulate a perpetual motion (2005: 228).
155

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(2002: 73). He does this so that the player is not the subject of the play but the ball. As
he goes on to say:
Since the ball is nothing without the continuum of potential it doubles, since its
effect is dependent on the physical presence of a multiplicity of other bodies and
objects of various kinds; since the parameters of its actions are regulated by the
application of rules, for all these reasons the catalytic object-sign may be called a
part-subject. The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole but is not itself a
whole. (2002: 73)
In this remarkable piece of writing the body figures not as a whole body but as a part
body: a foot that kicks where the kicking is not an expression of the player inasmuch as a
response to the ball drawing out the kick (just as the body/s of the audience might be
viewed as part object/s (or part body/s) where their participatory agency is not so much
driven by intentional and directed viewing inasmuch as drawn out by the part subjects
of the Take series). And typical of the unlimited contexts in which performativity might
be articulated, the players are drawn out of themselves, looking beyond the ball as they
take in a myriad of external factors that might include, but are never exhaustive of,
other players movements, the crowd, the extended TV footage:
Any player who is conscious of himself as he kicks misses. Self-consciousness is a
negative condition of play. The players reflective sense of themselves as subjects is
a source of interference that must be minimalized for the play to channel
smoothly. When a player readies a kick, she is not looking at the ball so much as
she is looking past it. She is reflexively (rather than reflectively) assessing the potential
movement of the ball. (Massumi: 74)
And the rules and rituals of the game are constantly in variance as the game emerges
and continues to evolve to the extent that circumstances arise that force
modifications to the rules (Massumi 2002: 72).

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PARTICPATE, 2007

Thus, Participate (Cut 1) documents the Take series as part subjects drawing out the
actions from those players as part objects, themselves drawn out of themselves, looking
beyond the objects and taking in a myriad of external factors. So too, Caress (Cut 2),
with its up-close haptic hand panning of the Take series, provokes a deeply (optically
unconscious) reciprocal encounter. In the force-field of potential that is the gallery, the
body/s of the audience figure not as whole body/s but as part body/s where the
touching/participating/viewing is not an expression of the viewing inasmuch as a
response to the artwork drawing out the viewing. Such a relationship between filmic
images and the audience is outlined by Sobchack when she describes the filmmaker-camera
embodiment relation and the spectator-projector embodiment relation. As she outlines the
complexities of the viewing-view/viewed-view of cinema, she suggests that the
spectator-projector embodiment relation is author of that expression of the film that they
[filmmaker and audiences] together enable and enact in the contingency of their
particular conjunction (1992: 203).156 It this kind of contingency that I am wanting to
This notion of the viewing-view/viewed-view describes the complexities of the instrumentmediated perception that film evokes. These relations involve the filmmaker who perceives
an intended world through the camera [while the spectator] perceives through the expressive
instrumentality of the projector an intentional perception of the film-maker/cameras
embodiment relation through which the intended world is perceived (Sobchack 1992: 192). In
this way, the viewer is aware of the camera as a mediating instrument but not of the camera
156

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embellish in the position and placement of the walls and data projectors where the rules
of the field of potential are expanded. In that one point perspective positions the body of
the viewer in a normal standpoint, a questioning of those lines of projection (the rules
of the force-field) draws viewers out of themselves, looking beyond the work as they take
in a myriad of external factors that might include, but are never exhaustive of, other
viewers movements, the wall projections relative to the space in which they circulate,
the fading sound of Over & Over, the conversations etc This disturbance which incites
objects as subjects was at the heart of the previous discussion regarding Clarks Objetos
Relacioninais and Wests Adaptives, where these objects, viewed as part subjects, take on an
altogether different significance as provocateurs (surrogate performers). It is in this
regard that Clark writes to Hlio Oiticica in 1968: True participation is open. We will
never be able to know what we give to the spectator author (quoted by Bishop 2006:
18).
It is in this way that Massumis parable focuses, not on a drama between individual
players, but on a force-field of indefinable agents (such that Clark questions what we
might give to the spectator author). This is what Bois and Krauss alert us to in
Deleuzes and Guattaris objection to Klein.157 Her model, while being one of instability

itself. Yet, for the viewer, while this experience is not mine, the embodied relationship between
filmmaker and camera is perceived and signified as mine. In this context the filmmaker and
camera form an enabling common eye (subject and eye) that is performed both reflectively and
reflexively by both film and/or the spectator. It is in this way that the spectator-projector embodiment
relation authors the filmic image as contingent on both filmmaker-camera and spectatorprojector (Sobchack 1992: 197-203). In relation to my project, Above and Back introceptively
combine filmmaker and the subject of the perceived world (as previously argued, I am
ambivalently the subject and object of both the moving images and the moulds of the Take
series). This common eye is deeply reflexive and the spectators authoringeven as her body is
forced to negotiate close-up and past images, spatially relocating in relation to the projector/s
is heightened in its somatic closeness with my body.
157 The use of Deleuze and Guattaris critique of Kleinian analysis in their Anti-Oedipus features
in a number of essays: see Krauss Sherrie Levine: Bachelors where she discusses the desiring
machines in relation to the Duchamp effect: The bachelor machine of Anti-Oedipus constructs
the relationship between the desiring machines and the body without organs, between the
bachelors world of production and the brides domain of inscription Each machine is a part
object: the breast-machine, the mouth-machine, the stomach-machine, the intestine-machine,
the anus-machine. As opposed to this the body without organs produces nothing; it re-produces.
It is the domain of simulation, of series crossing one another, of the possible occupation of every
place in the series by a subject forever decentered (1999: 181).
See Krauss Hesses Desiring Machines where she discusses Eva Hesses work as in relation
to the part object and Deleuze and Guattaris three principles of repetition, continuity and
desire (2002: 52).

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of human form, in the end ...makes part objects into the agents of intersubjective
relations, and thus players in a drama between persons, not between indefinable, protean
organs (1997: 156). In this regard Deleuze and Guattari emphasise an unconsciousness
as unaware of whole beings as such, where the objective of the infant is to receive and
retransmit, and where a particular part object might be altered in the course of its
function, from reception machine at one point of connection to transmission machine
at the other... from which it follows that part objects are not representations of parental
figures: they are parts of desiring machines (Bois and Krauss 1997: 156). The importance
of this observation is that it offers a model for analysing partial objects/subjects that talks
of encounter as shattering customary ways of being, as art practice that is always a process
in construction.
Deleuze and Guattaris view of a sequence of connections between parts of machines
may be considered in relation to Barthes view on Bataille when he states: he thus
leaves us no other recourse than to consider, in Histoire de loeil, a perfectly spherical
metaphor: each of the terms is always the signifier of another (no term is a simple
signified), without being able to stop the chain (1972: 242).158 The connections
between parts makes for an illocutionary performative force that is unlimited: always the
signifier of another signifier. Mauss draws attention to this as he perceives that there are
surprisingly few symbolic objects adapted for magical action, giving the example that,
magical knots are required to represent love, rain, wind, curing, war, language and a
thousand other things (1975: 70). That the knots stand in for a myriad of possible
associations points to the limitless potential of the chain of associations. These are the
limitless contexts of contiguity that Mauss is beginning to advocate as he describes the
arbitrary business of abstraction and interpretation (1975: 69).

For the terms by which Deleuze and Guattari discuss the way in which organic and
inorganic matter surges through and around us in deterritorialised flows see David Joselit on
the trajectory of Duchamps production as bio-readymades. The swarm for Joselit is a
principle of combination situated somewhere between the undoing of structural logic associated
with Batailles informe and the rule based permutations of Minimalism (2005: 164).
158 Bois and Krauss use this exact quote (1997: 155).

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6.3 THE FORCE OF THE PENDULUM

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, SUSPENDED BALL, 1930-31

In their chapter entitled Part Object for Formless: A Users Guide, Bois and Krauss locate
the notion of formlessness as described above, somewhere suspended between formal and
non-formal characteristics. A sort of operational pendulum that swings from one point to
another but without clear definition, or, later in their chapter, a rotational device that
challenges the verticality of the body in its wholeness (1997: 155, 157).159 These pendular
and rotational devices operate liminally as a means of summoning the mimetic
incongruence that results in a redundancy typical of the partial object/subject. Employing
Alberto Giacomettis Suspended Ball (1930-31) as a visualisation of the pendulums swing,
and Brassais Nu 115 (1932-33) as the rotation, they map out an anatomical
redistribution or, to employ Barthes term, a round phallicism that while collapsing
distinct sexual identity is also a way of eradicating categories and in so doing soliciting a
kind of formlessness (1997: 152-161).160 These are the kinds of anatomical redistributions
that truncate and spatially disorientate my body in Above and Back.
As Bois and Krauss recount, Dalis criticism of Suspended Ball, in his theorisation of what
constitutes the surrealist object, is that objects functioning on a symbolic level
(unconscious desire, sexual perversion, erotic fantasy) cannot be sculpturally formal in
The pendulum is an interesting choice of metaphor as one of the most formal devices for
regulation. In what will become clear later, the crossing of these regulatory devices (the chains of
metaphor as substitution) acts as a violation of meaning which is the force of the metonymic.
160 See Krauss The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths for an earlier discussion
of Suspended Ball in relation to Bataille and the notion of the informe (1986: 56-68).
159

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their relationships. Dali seems to argue for objects that must be synchronistic, displaying
surrealist modes of chance encounter. As Bois and Krauss write, it is in this tension
between the formal concerns Giacometti is accused of and Dalis own conviction that
the baseness of unconscious desire demands an expression that must be extraplastic
that one can locate a struggle over the nature of the informe (1997: 154). This is
certainly to concede that formlessness is unattainable; the extraplastic in plastic form
is tautological. It also places emphasis on the force and flow of desire over form; extra
to form. Elkins is very clear in this respect in reference to Krauss The Optical Unconscious
when he writes that:
Krauss principal strategy is to pose modernism as an autonomous logical system,
self-enclosed and apparently not in need of anything beyond its formal
vocabulary, and then to put the principally surrealist optical unconscious against
it, as a way of thinking about seeing that takes account of the viewers desires,
blindnesses, and implication in the subject. (1998: 103)
Following Elkins observation, and as will be discussed in the next section, the
metomymical axis of contagion is a highly useful mechanism for discussing the axis of
desire constituting all the parts of the whole that we will never attain.

BRASSAI, NU 115, 1932-33

Suspended Ball is compared to Barthes structuralist analysis of Batailles History of the Eye in
which Barthes seeks to interpret the story, not as a series of characters and events, but as,
...an object - the eye - whose characteristics yield the combinatoire from
which the textual fabric is woven, both at the level of its language and in the
dimension of its events. For the grid this object produces is constructed from
the axis of shapes (the chain of globular forms that links eye to sun to egg to
testicles) and an axis of fluids (a series of liquids that mutates from tears to yolk
to semen). It is the crossing of these two axes at their multiple points, Barthes
argues, that produces the precise images with which Bataille operates - such as
when the sun, metamorphorized as eye and yolk, is described as flaccid

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luminosity - and gives rise to the phrase the urinary liquefaction of the sky.
(Bois and Krauss 1997: 154-155)
In a footnote Barthes alerts us that his analysis refers to Jakobsons opposition
between metaphor, a figure of similarity, and metonymy, a figure of contiguity
(1972: 245n242). When Jakobson in turn referred to Frazers principles of similarity and
contact in Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance, it is in
aligning similarity with metaphor and displacement with regard to contact and
metonymy.161 This is to stress a disturbance (Krauss calls it an erosion) of the
metonymic naming of the parts which Barthes constitutes as an exchange, which
undertakes to abolish or vacillate meaning (1972: 245). In this sense the axis of
substitutions and the axis of adjacencies (metaphor and metonymy) is a means to discuss
the conditions of formlessness and intimacy and are, moreover, the operations of
similarity and contagion in sympathetic magical action.
The opposing axes described by Bois and Krauss are, for Barthes, two chains of
metaphoric associations that share similarities and differences. The first has to do with
form and content: (in French, the two words, oeil [eye]and oeuf [egg] have a common
sound and a differentiated sound) and a content (although absolutely discrepant, both
objects are globular and white) (Barthes 1972: 241). Once in motion new metaphorical
extensions are made possible such as a current French usage which calls the testicles
of certain animals eggs (1972: 241). The second chain of metaphoric associations
constitutes,
all the avatars of the liquid whose image is equally linked to eye, egg, and
testicles; and this series is not only the liquor itself (tears, milk, egg yolk, sperm,
urine), it is, so to speak, the very mode of the moist it is all the varieties of the
inundant which complete the original metaphor of the globe (1972: 241)
And it is in the crossing of these two chains of metaphoric association, a transfer of
meaning from one chain to the other, that Barthes posits the metomymic: eye
sucked like a breast, my eye sipped by her lips (1972: 245). And Barthes employs the
term contagion of qualities and actions that is to pull out the eyeball and play with it

See Jakobson, Roman (1987), Language in literature, eds Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press), 113, as quoted by Taussig (1993: 262n210).
161

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erotically or to bite into the bulls testicle as if it were an egg or to insert it in ones
own body (1972: 245).
Bois and Krauss fictitious account of Barthes objection to Dalis term extraplastic as
an impossible term places Barthes in opposition to the surrealist impulse for no apparent
constraint. The structuralist account rejects wildness or freedom (Barthes 1972: 244)
in favour of something more concerted, the syntagm, the connection and
combination of signs on the level of actual discourse, (Barthes 1972: 243n241) that
which constitutes the chain of associative metaphors is constrained by what cannot enter
its chain (Barthes 1972: 244). For Barthes, this evokes the qualities of literatures
technique, which allows for a liberation of contiguities (the metonymic) but only
measured against the associative field of the syntagm (1972: 244-245). For this reason
Bois and Krauss argue for the dilemma in articulating notions of formlessness, that is, its
necessary positioning within formal constraints but liberated by the contiguities of the
metonymic. As already stated above, it is in this sense that formlessness can never be
discussed as a pure term. As Barthes puts it:
This restraint, obviously generates a very powerful kind of information, located at
a distance from the banal and the absurd, since the narrative is encompassed by
the metaphorical sphere, whose regions it can exchange (whence its energy) but
whose limits it cannot transgress (whence its meaning); according to the law which
decrees that the Being of literature is never anything but its technique, the
insistence and the freedom of this song are therefore products of an exact art
which is able at once to measure the associative field and to liberate within it the
contiguities of terms. (1972: 244-245)
This notion is close to Tambiahs use of positive and negative analogies written five
years later resulting in a series of redundancies. As Barthes writes,
all these associations are both the same and different; for metaphor, which
varies them, manifests a regulated difference among them, a difference which
metonymy, which exchanges them, immediately undertakes to abolish: the world
becomes disturbed, its properties are no longer divided; to flow, to sob, to urinate,
to ejaculatethese form a vacillating meaning the violation of a signifying limit
of space; it permits, on the very level of discourse, a counterdivision of objects,
meanings, spaces, and properties (1972: 245-246)
In this light, and as a means of elucidating Krauss distinction between abstraction and
ambivalence, metaphor permits abstraction while metonymy resists the building of an
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organic whole. As signifier leads only to another signifier, the whole is never built.
Tambiahs notion of the metonymic function standing in as an attribute (a part) for the
whole relies on the notion that redundancy is all the bits of the whole not held
significant in the part that does stand in for the whole. And Tambiahs use of positive and
negative analogies are more complex than Frazers initial calculation of like attracts
like (Tambiah 1973: 214). As an example, Tambiah discusses a Zande case study used
by Evans-Pritchard in which a creeper is employed for curing leprosy: the creeper
araka lose their leaves. These are replaced by a double row of bands, joined to the stalks,
which little by little dry, split, and fall in small pieces just as the extremities of the hands
and feet disappear in la lepre mutilante (1973: 214).
Tambiah and Barthes do not reference each other, but seen from Barthes perspective
the two chains of metaphorical associations are those of the creepers falling leaves and
the lepers falling extremities. One chain pertains to growth while the other to disease
that leads to death. We could continue each metaphoric chain with the creepers
spouting, the seeds germination, the penis unfolding as erection, and so on. These
associations are the same and different as metaphor varies them (Barthes 1972: 245).
The crossing of the chains of these syntagmic signs will seek from the two series not
complimentary but distant terms (Barthes 1972: 244), that is to say, redundant
terms. As Barthes describes, it constitutes an exchange which undertakes to abolish or
vacillate meaning (1972: 245). A ritual action applying dried araka creeper mixed with
spittle to a lepers wounds would constitute an object violation of the metaphorical
chains. Crucial to Tambiahs reckoning is that Barthes abolishing or vacillation of
meaning is lent the terms of a persuasive and forceful transfer where the undesirable (the
loss of the limbs resulting in death) is replaced by the desired growth, an avoidance of
death, and, in disagreement with Frazer, the action happens at the level of the symbolic,
not causal action (Tambiah 1973: 215). It is in this sense that the metonymic axis builds
the ritual in piecing together the parts while mimesis happens in the metaphoric
substitution of creeper growth for leprosy cure.
This discussion is similar to a chiasmatic structure of reversibility discussed in Chapter 2.
While Sobchacks project focuses on a sensual engagement with cinema as real and
as if real in the same breath (Sobchack 2004: 73) her words echo Tambiahs emphasis
when she writes:
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Highlighted in these articulationsaccomplished in and through languageis the

very chiasmatic structure of reversibility that exists between and also subtends the
body and consciousness and the body and representation. Whether perceived as
an ambivalent vacillation between or an ambiguous conflation of the real and the as-if real
of the lived body (matter that means) and representation (meaning as matter), this
experience of the fundamental reversibility of the body and language is deeply
feltand often articulatedin these unnameable and undecidable descriptions
(2004: 74)
Sobchack is emphasising a chiasmic relation where a subjective sense of embodiment
and an objective sence of representation are perceived as reversibly figure and
ground (Sobchack 2004: 74). This is heightened in film as an ambivalence between a
real (literal) experience and an as-if-real (figurative) sensual experience. By
comparison, Tambiahs concept of the Zande case-study vacillates between literal and
figural associations: literal mimesis and figural undoing of the undesired. In this context
Tambiah suggests a vacillation between a literal knowing that the creeper is a creeper
and a bodily aphasia that forms a transgression of language.
For Barthes this is a technical transgression of the forms of language, for metonymy
is precisely a forced syntagm, the violation of a signifying limit of space; it permits, on
the very level of discourse, a counterdivision of objects, usages, meaning, spaces and
properties (1972: 246).
Bois and Krauss mediate the dispute between Giacometti and Dali by offering the
accused and complainant different models for voicing their concerns. For Giacometti,
that of an operational pendulum always undoing itself with each swing,
reconstituting the objects parts [and for Dali] a mechanism to resist meaning, to
attack the illustrative or the thematic (1997: 155-156). Suspended Ball is interpreted here
as a mechanism to evade a discrete sexual identity in order to elude categorisation and
cancel out specific meaning:
For the perfect sexual ambivalence of each of the elements of Giacometti's
sculpturein which the labial form of the wedge is stridently phallic and the
active, presumably masculine element of the work, in its cloven roundness, is
yeilding vaginalis made to enter the same migration that occurs in The Story of
the Eye, with one element sent mutating into the next. (Bois and Krauss 1997: 155)

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Seen in these terms, Suspended Ball is interesting for what it is not; simultaneously not a
phallus, not a cunt, not an eye, not a blade: it is visually redolent of a lack.162 In this way
the work does not signify a closure of meaning but the possible plays of substitutions,
none of which will be privileged.
Tambiahs criticism of Frazer is significant with respect to such a lack. In viewing
Frazers terms of similarity and contact as too restrictive and problematic in their
application he opens the terms out to include positive and negative analogies as
described above, and in so doing addresses lack on the metonymic axis: as
transmitting a message through redundancy in the enumeration of the parts of an
object (1968: 190; 1973: 219). This notion of redundancy echoes the erosion inherent in
the part objects that Krauss argues in her distinction from abstraction. Not a Modernist
and formalist logic but a yielding or withholding objects of desire (1999: 55). To
reiterate, redundancy is noise in the sense that there is stuff available and not used that
could have been used in transmitting a message. It could always have been some other
part that would have changed the whole scenario and so on and so on.

6.4 THE FORCE OF THE WEDGE

The previous section discussed the force of the operations of the pendulum as a way of
articulating mimetic incongruence as a characteristic of the poorly executed ideogram.
To analyse Wedge of Chastity along these lines would be to examine the inexhaustible
contexts of performativity in which the object resides. This would attempt to discuss a
myriad of associations characterised by but limited to: the nature of the objects title; its
inscription; its alleged history of production by contact with a model and/or the figure
of Etant donns; its relationship to the fabrication of previous erotic objects (Not a Shoe); its
reproduction in series; its reception by the art world and subsequent history of
exhibition outside of the contexts of its original intention as wedding gift; the
photograph in Molesworths 2005 essay which separates its union and exposes an
interior which, perhaps, was never intended for public exposure; and all the subsequent
texts on the work including this one and so on. To list the chains of metaphoric
See Maurice Nadeaus The History of Surrealism as quoted by Bois and Krauss, regarding the
initial reception of Suspended Ball: Now everyone who has seen this object function has felt a
violent and indefinable emotion doubtless having some relation with unconscious sexual desires.
This emotion has nothing to do with satisfaction, rather with irritation, the kind provoked by the
disturbing perception of a lack (1997: 152-154).
162

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associations similar to that of Tambiahs for the Zande use of the araka creeper limits the
exhaustive possibilities by which the Wedge of Chastity mutates, but nevertheless
articulates some of the elaborate rites of passage surrounding the object as it posits a
number of desired outcomes in the face of the undesirable. In employing such an
operation the Wedge of Chastity seems, then, a matrix of a new trajectory of objects which
are in a sense the different stations of the conjugal metaphor.163
The first variation is that of the wedge and the phallus; this is a double variation, both of
form (in French the two words coin and coincer stand for corner and the action of the
wedge, while coin and coup, to corner and to hit or blow,164 share both common and
differentiated sounds) and of content (while discrepant, both objects fit together in
absolute union) thus the associations of preserving as chaste, stopping, damming up,
locking and protecting, run alongside those of union, coitus and intimacy. This is the
first metaphor of the object.165

The structure, mostly at the beginning, of this account is paraphrased from Barthes where I
replace his wording in describing Batailles History of the Eye with mine associated with
Duchamps Wedge of Chastity (1972: 240-241).
164 See Didi-Huberman who argues that the two words of the title (Coin de chastete) can be
understood as a sexual illusion to the imprint, recounting Duchamps use of the term coin as a
tool to hit or penetrate, while the term chastity is reflected in the nature of the gift and in the
dialectic operation which suggests genitalia cast by some coin [corner] of plaster It speaks of
the erotic impersonal power of the bond of interpenetration. It speaks of the essential nature of
contact and the impossibility of distinguishing the two embracing parties (1997: 159).
165 In a similar way Duchamps titling of other erotic objects can be read along similar lines. The
Objet-Dard (1951) is said to be a plaster object formed from the leftover material cut away from a
mould of the Etant donns breasts (Jones 1994: 91-92). This view is backed by the provenance
label in Philadelphia Museum of Art as follows: The enigmatic moulded items in plaster and
bronze displayed in this case allude to human anatomy and offer insight into the working
process involved in the making of Etant donns. While I do not comment on all the part objects
united in the one Philadelphia Museum of Art display case, the museums attributions are as
follows: Dart Object, 1962 bronze cast of 1951 plaster; Female Fig Leaf, 1961 bronze cast of 1950
plaster; Sink Stopper, Shower Medal, 1967 bronze cast of 1964 plaster; Study for Prire de Toucher
(Please Touch), 1947, plaster. This idea of leftover, redundant materials, common also to
Naumans working processes, underscores the partiality of the object. Jones points out that the
title is a pun on objet dart, or, art object, and that the word dard is slang for penis in French,
suggesting that the art object is the phallus, paradoxically carrying the firm shape of the flaccid
penis: The penis as the cutaway reminder [or remainder?] of the female breast holds an ironic
position as signifier not of phallic plenitude but of formless lack: Here the penis is simply not
breast (1994: 91-92).
163

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MARCEL DUCHAMP, OBJET-DARD, 1951

It is however not the only one; a secondary series derives from it, constituted by all the
avatars of the objects material substance. This would be found, for example, in the
lower components substance of dental plastic with its connotations of teeth, and by
consequence, the vagina-dente; the substance of dental plaster acting as a persuasive
analogy between a material used to cast teeth and that used to cast the pudendum
equating oral and vaginal flesh and allowing for associations of biting, mouthing,
slavering. One could extend this further by suggesting that the bronze of the masculine
element signifies the artist as grounded in fine arts intellectual and commercial
discources, while the female element signifies the maliable and impressionable, but at
the same moment the supposed violence of the vagina-dente.
Another chain of metaphoric associations would be previous artistic production and the
objects repetition; the bronze element of the Wedge is close, if not identical, to
Duchamps earlier work Not a Shoe from 1950. That Not a Shoe is doubled in Wedge of
Chastity as a reverse cast of a pudendum would follow Duchamps fantasy of reversals
(and a Freudian analogy of the shoe as a sexualised fetish object) in constituting Not a
Shoe as therefore a phallus. That the Wedge is reproduced in an edition of 12, even if it is
singled out as possessing a specific ritualistic role by inscription, reinforces the erotic

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nature of the object by use of the mould as an agent of production and reproduction
(Molesworth 2005a: 179-182).166
Yet another chain of associations would be the wedding contract, matrimonial gift
(operating in difference to editioning the work), inscription and Duchamps relationship
to his second wife Alexina. As Molesworth notes: Perhaps Duchamps desire to have
Wedge of Chastity function like a wedding ring was a desire for it to be read along
standard social conventions, for it to be legible, as well as portable (2005a: 193). Like a
wedding ring, the small scale of the object suggests sites such as tables and mantels
lending it an itinerant quality reinforced by Duchamps comment that We usually take
it with us, like a wedding ring.167 This migratory quality suggests objects that partake
or are in waiting for the ritual contexts that enliven them. But in difference to
Duchamp, the Wedge does not replace wedding rings. As such, wedding rings operate as
metaphors understood against normatively habituated contexts (Sobchack 2004: 80-81)
indicative of sayings like: Our love is like a never-ending circle, it has no beginning and
no end. Rings on wedding fingers denote a series of collectively understood parameters
such as sexual unavailability. The Wedge, on the other hand, is a private (yet
transportable) object that functions, in fact, as a false or improper metaphor; a forced
extension of the terms by which wedding rings are understood. The Wedge, in other
words, breaks with Austins correct and identifiable set of ritual contexts. In this sense a
comparison to Orozcos Working Tables is interesting. His objects, in the words of Fer,
are about ...the accident by which it happens to be there (2005: 231). Orozcos objects
await the organisational propensities of the audiences who will (not necessarily
physically) organise the work within infinite variables. And, as noted above, these
objects are transferable from one work to another as well as multipliable even if they are
singled out as possessing a specific ritualistic role. This is to describe a place of
potentiality, a liminality not only with respect to the body, imaginary or otherwise, that

In relation to other or previous artistic production, Molesworth states: The cast objects are
memory folds, fossils of psychic states. Objet Dard is a remnant of a work [Etant donns]or, better
yet, of a process of making a work of art. Female Fig Leaf is the memory of a bodyalbeit a
fictional one. Both are also images of absence (2005a: 179-182).
167 Jones states how Duchamp gave the first Wedge to his second wife Alexina with an inscription
on the top, and quotes Duchamp as saying that: We usually take it with us, like a wedding
ring (1994: 91). Likewise, Molesworth points out that the object is inscribed with the words
pour Teeny 16 Jan. 1954 Marcel as a wedding gift for Teeny Matisse. (2005a: 179).
166

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came into contact with the object, but in relation to the notion of the overall opus of the
artist (that is also common to Duchamps work).

MARCEL DUCHAMP, WEDGE OF CHASTITY, 1954

The chains of association move faster and faster as physical encounter with the object is
entertained. Notwithstanding the objects plausible intimate exchange between Alexina
and Marcel Duchamp, a sense of touch might be necessary to finding out about the
sculpture, dividing it and peering into its pink recess offers associations of caressing, the
moistness and warmth of internal cavities as well as their privateness and secretness.
Significantly, the work is photographed for the first time in its separate pieces for the
Part Object Part Sculpture catalogue. The importance of taking the object apart is evident
when one finally sees inside it, having for years looked at the two connected parts joined
together in various exhibitions and illustrations. But this action of prising open that
which is secretive, in turn, performs the Wedge in ways that cross its very intimacy. This
constitutes the crossing metaphoric chains of private, intimate sexual aid with published,
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exhibited, public, touring art object; a crossing prompted by Duchamp as he edited the
object.
The crossing of these chains of metaphoric association results in persuasive and
transformative forces working against innumerable undesired characteristics, not least to
be devoured, bitten off, at the mouth of the vagina, or to bite at the cunt or to plug its
entrance forever. These are the possibilities of contagion that operate on the metonymic
axis of lack and redundancy that is the real Wedge: it is the phallus that is not a phallus
and the artwork that is not an artwork; the force of this object residing in all that it is
not, all the noise of the absent parts.

6.5 ANATOMICAL VOTIVES

WAX ANATOMICAL VOTIVES, NICOSIA AND FAMAGUSTA, CYPRUS

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WAX ANATOMICAL VOTIVE, FAMAGUSTA, CYPRUS

Having analysed the Wedge of Chastity in relation to the force of redundancy or excess
that is characteristic of mimetic incongruence, my aim has been to establish the
conditions of sympathetic analogyin a lack of representational fixitythat make the
Wedge so ironically faithful in copy and so embodied of an encounter between Marcel
and Alexina Duchamp. These characteristics of the poorly executed ideogram are
manifest in the wax anatomical votives fabricated at the Papadopoulou Workshop,
Nicosia, Cyprus.168 They are fabricated in three main categories, representing the
figure, body-parts and internal organs.169 In a combined 1961 essay Rudolf Kriss and
Hubert Kriss-Heinrich170 describe these votives as not accurately copying the body but
tracing aspects of the bodys substance and measurement where special orders are

This practice is unusual to Cyprus given the prohibition for the Eastern Orthodox of sculpted
figures of saints.
169 Sheila Girardon suggests a causal relationshipa direct line of descentfrom votive donaria of
the ancients to contemporary usage and usage in the medieval period (1994:384). Frazer stems
from this tradition but rarefies the factors at play to those of similarity and contact through a
late 19 th-century notion of animism.
170 All my illustrations of anatomical votives from Cyprus are taken from this publication in
which they are undated. My thanks to Ilse Marie Erle for the translation of this text.
168

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available in the life-size, or weight, of the donor (136).171 The concept of attention is
bound to both wax as a substance together with the intricate means by which bodies are
approximated by means of measurement and mimicry.
In this light, Fife recounts practices at the time of St. Radegund in the sixth century
where donors were instructed to measure:
the circumference or length of the body with a string and then to offer a candle
of that length, using the measuring string for a wick. The concept motivating this
act is that the body itself is brought as an offering in the wax candle and that
through this vicarious offering healing could be procured. (1939: 249)
Fife also gives an example of a woman who had suffered many miscarriages and
through the intercession of Saint Mary of Soissons, gave birth to a normal child. She
offered in thanks ...a candle which corresponded to the circumference of her body at
the time of her pregnancy (1939: 249).172 This seems closely reminiscent of Terry Foxs
Levitation (1970) where Fox drew a circle with his own blood the diameter of which
equaled his height, and to Tom Marioni where he recorded the length of his body
moving from a crouch to a standing position in a series of pencil lines that traced the
motion at Richard de Marcos gallery in Edinburgh (Schimmel 1998: 111-113).173
Seen from this perspective, Nauman can be viewed as an artist whose use of wax and
the dimensions of his body in works like Space Under My Hand When I write My Name and

See Strathern in relation to a notion of embodiment as animating inert objects. Strathern

references Thomas Csordas as noting that embodiment is being used to refer to human beings
only, and not to material artifacts: Yet we know also that such artefacts may carry powerful
meanings as extensions of the human body or in being modeled on the human body (or vice
versa). Hence, it is difficult simply to restrict embodiment to the living human being (1996:
197).
172 And Fife offers another example where: Epileptics were frequently healed at the grave of
Bishop Gualterius of Pontoise after they had offered candles the length of their bodies (1939:
250). In questioning the parameters by which similitude and contagion might be understood,
the work of an artist such as Felix Gonzales Torres comes to mind. He describes a space of
sympathy with his and his partners bodies in approximating their combined weight in Untitled
(PlaceboLandscape for Roni), 1,200 lbs of candies individually wrapped in gold cellophane, 1993. This is
not dissimilar to the pouring of the donors weight in wax described above. Such material
conditions, while not directly involving touch, embellish the objects with a dimension or aura
not common to imitationthey connect, make contact, with the substance of the human
condition.
173 Schimmel also makes reference to quantifying the artists own body in relation to Manzonis
Artists Shit (1961) or Bodies of Air (1959-60) and a work in 1960 where Manzoni produced boiled
eggs for the public to eat bearing the artists fingerprints on them (1998: 47-49).
171

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Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists combine to produce the person in various
mimetic ways.

BRUCE NAUMAN, WAX IMPRESSIONS OF THE KNEES OF FIVE FAMOUS ARTISTS, 1966

Mauss notion of the poorly executed ideogram, while not referred to by Kriss and
Kriss-Heinrich, is reinforced by their contextualisation of these anatomical votives
where it is the interpretation and intentions of a devotee that determines a votives
efficacy with respect to an act of healing. Together with this, the formal representational
qualities of the votives are outweighed by their function. As Kriss and Kriss-Heinrich
write: There were a lot of undefinable lumps which could be seen as hearts, stomach,
liver, kidneys or uterus and it is up to the intention of the donor regarding attribution
(1961: 136). This gives rise to ambiguous attributions for their illustrations prompting
them to note,
just like the wax votive, the silver votives have single forms like heads, breasts
fig. 69 has the same outline as the head next to it but does not show any engraved
facial lines. Maybe here we have a piece that will get worked further after it has
been ordered by the buyer but it could just depict a heart. (1961: 136)
This reinforces the notion that the devotee activates the object by her participation in
the ritual context.174

Likewise, the conditions of contact are difficult to measure. Again in discussing the wax
anatomical votives of Cyprus, Rudolf Kriss in a later 1963 essay, points to a dilemma in the
medieval period with such a broad application of the terms of contact when he writes that
the belief systems have been quite folkloristic, so that everything that came in touch with a
sacred object, place, image, human body or body part of a hero or saint, with a relic or with
consecrated things like oil, water, host etc., became a medium and container for supernatural
powers itself. Therefore the church had to fight with the toughest means against the habit of
putting objects under the altar cloth. They would have been removed after Mass and used as
magical means (1963: 98).
174

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THE PAPADOPOULOU WAX VOTIVE WORKSHOP, NICOSIA, CYPRUS

The point to be made is that these objects, employed as part of the rituals of sympathetic
magical action, cannot be understood as inert objects of display in the sense of scopic
recognition. That this is sometimes the case, as and when they are collected for
museums such as the Pitt Rivers, removes these objects from their performative contexts
by which they can be understood as embodying their donor with forceful efficacy. In
relationship to this problem of an objects removal from ritual contexts, Klocker notes,
in the context of the art object, the desire to possess by collection is central to the
mechanisms of the information machines in the Age of Enlightenment and
Modernism, that lend these objects their recognition. He argues that the artist needs to
resist the idealistic process of collecting in order to retain autonomy. In a comment that
is as pertinent to the anatomical votives described above as they enter the collection,
Klocker writes: The flow of communication would freeze and be robbed of the
agitative capabilities which form the nucleus of its being (1998: 159).175 This is to
underline that these anatomical votives are deeply contingent on their ritualistic
operations involving the complex roles of producer, donor, shrine etc.

I would add that while collections short circuit notions of performativity, they bounce them
into another arena of performative interaction.
175

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ALICIA FRANKOVICH, FLYING FOX, 2008

PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1985.49.113, MEXICO

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To sum up at this point, these anatomical votives are therefore very apt objects with which
to articulate embodiment as an encounter with the body as process. Their formlessness, or
partness, makes them always complexly contingent upon their contexts of production for
any determination of their efficaciousness. In this sense interpretations and intentionsthe
attentionof all ritual agents including the donor are always open to disappointment and
failure: representational completion would undo such a force.176 This disappointment alludes to the
axis of metonymy as the axis of desire. Here desire is the name for that which one will never
have and what this object will never be for me.177 That Frankovich did not appear for Flying
Fox, other than her leg jutting from an upstairs window, indicates the power of the
metonymic action crucial to her performative-object. Her leg metaphorically stands in for a
whole episode in her life as (failed) gymnastthe substitutions of ballet/sports shoe and the
leg frozen in aerial cartwheelwhile the rest of her (unseen body) is the redundancy
charged with potential like all of Massumis soccer players not in contact with the ball. Or,
put another way, Flying Fox brings into play two axes of metaphoric substitution, the artist
and gymnast, where the crossing of these metaphoric chains forms the metonymy of a
forced syntagm.

As Francis Sparshott notes, representations as vicarious efficacy do not necessarily belong to

classifications of art within classical lines where imitative play or disengaged communication sits
at the heart of artistic resemblances. Sparshott establishes such conditions within mystic lines of
representation. Here, operations and products have a primary significance that is radically
other than the aesthetic (1982: 372 ). He goes on to state: A magical image is not as such
meant to be contemplated or appreciated An aesthetically insignificant image would do
equally well if it happened to do the job what matters is what will actually control or embody
the force in the relevant way (1982: 375-376).
177 This is where Krauss is coming from in terms of the desiring organs on the one hand and
the yielding or withholding objects of desire on the otherrather than between individuals or
whole persons, [as] reductive (1999: 55). Krauss is employing Lacans objet petit a as a
primordial relation of my being in the world that defines my being as a lack attempting to fill or
complete itself by an object of desire constitutive of the objet petit a.
See also Krauss Objet (petit) a where she discusses a relationship between Klein and
Jacques Lacan where the objet (petit) a is seen as a continuation of Kleins theories. Lacans
mirror stage describes a moment when, confronted with its own reflection, as whole and
coherent, the infant adopts a sense of ego and structure, calling this system of visual
identification the imaginary (2005: 85). The part object takes a letter as a signifier. The
subject is always a function of the signifier. So the erotic object acts on the imaginary axis as an
objet (petit) a, as extensions of the infants image bank Here Krauss suggests that: In
shaping the infants self-image, the objet a seems to point to the developing subject, in a
relationship that semiology terms deictic. And her crucial sentence that ties her theory to
Duchamps erotic objects: The deictic function of capturing the subject thus marries the
corporeal part object to the sculptural fragment with all its associations to casting (2005: 88).
176

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6.6 ANN HAMILTONS MALEDICTION

ANN HAMILTON, MALEDICTION, 1991-1992

Ann Hamiltons performance Malediction might be interpreted from the point of view of
the poorly executed ideogram. Seated with her back to the viewer, the work included a
repeated action which involved the artist retrieving mouthful amounts of bread dough
from one pile, briefly masticating the dough until it resembled the contours of her inner
mouth and, carefully retracting the object, placing it on an adjacent pile in a large
wicker casket from the turn of the century used to transport bodies to the morgue.178
These bread dough casts of Hamiltons inner mouth cavity constitute a complex
fragment of a larger whole. To discuss these partial objects requires that they are seen as
contingent on the duration and repetition of the performances ritual, the substance of
the work, and their morphed ambivalence together with a certain partiality in the figure
of the artist. Their casting process develops over the duration of the one-month
performative installation, slowly repeated every day until the basket was filled halfway.
Their substance of bread dough, combined with the artists saliva, is suggestive of
Mauss concern for substance as a transmitter, through some means of contagion, in
I have only commented on an aspect of the whole performative installation entitled
Malediction. Other aspects involved viewers walking through wine soaked rags, a wall of stacked
bed linens and a sound track reciting sections from Walt Whitmans Song of Myself and The
Body Electric. See Joan Simon where she points out that the Louvre Gallery, NYC, was
initially the R & K Bakery on Prince Street, thereby adding to the works site specificity
common to many of Ann Hamiltons projects. Simon emphasises the oral significance of
Malediction where the soundtrack of Whitmans poems, combined with the mouth moulds, are
dispersed into the air as the actual internal skin of the bodys cavity (2002: 121-125).
178

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specific ritualistic contexts. The small-scale, malleable part objects refuse an internally
fixed and outwardly perceivable armature. Such flagrant lack challenges an
inside/outside, figure/ground relationship so that the objects, and the subject from
which they flow, are somehow unlocatable and formless: not a body-part, not an internal
organ, they embody an eroded space that lies liminally in-between felt experience and
speculation. Together with objects like Naumans Space Under My Hand When I Write My
Name and the Take series, these objects concur with Taussigs observations of anatomical
votive figurines. In fact, Taussigs notes on Nordenskiolds pictures of Cuna curing
figurines (1993: 51) draws a remarkable parallel with the Hamilton and Nauman works.
Like these figurines, the objects produced from Malediction may not resemble a mouth,
nor does the object produced from the space between Nauman writing his name and a
surface resemble the movement of a hand from left to right. Without knowledge of
provenance, performance or ritual informing us of what they are meant to represent,
the mouths and moving hand gesture might fail a realist test. This is the technical
transgression of language where metonymy is the forced syntagm that Barthes describes
as violating the signifying limits of space (1972: 246).

ANN HAMILTON, MALEDICTION, 1991-1992

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Mauss concept of abstraction is achieved by the ambivalence (theoretical and formal)

of these bread dough forms that are left post-live performance. They exemplify a sensual
yielding of the body that remains open-ended with respect to representation. The
objects are caught between the act of production, in the ritual of the performance, and
their subsequent display or collection. Moreover, Mauss concept of attention finds
purchase in the substance of bread dough as inextricably linked to digestion and
nourishment. Again, an application of Taussigs notes is appropriate, but this time in
relation to magical action designed to keep men faithful (using their semen and pubic
hair) engaged in a ritual on a Colombian sugar plantation in 1972. It incorporates the
partners head and pubic hair mixed with his semen taken from ones vagina after
intercourse (without orgasm to keep the sperm as pure as possible), placed in a bottle
with alcohol and buried in the ground outside the couples house. Taussig says of the
ritual (in stressing that both likeness and contact operate in a fused fashion) that they
suggest profound forms of material bodily contact as well as indices of sexual
attachment , impregnation, and the making of children: it becomes virtually impossible
to separate their being signs from their being ontologically part of the sexual partnered
Other (1993: 55). Correspondingly the work of Hamilton suggests profound forms of
material contact as well as the point that bread and saliva not only act as signifiers of
nourishment, but are ontologically part of her sustained and nourished being in the
performative act.
Along these same lines, Mauss places emphasis on an objects substance as transmitted
through contact in specific ritual contexts: The Magicians prepare images from paste,
clay, wax, honey, plaster (1975: 53) to which could be added the more obvious bodypart remains of hair, nails etc. He goes on to state that: Magic performed over the
residues of meals follows from the idea that there is a continuity and complete identity
between the remains, the food consumed and the one who has eatenthe latter being
substantially identical to the food partaken by him (1975: 65). In this respect, the
intimacy with which Hamilton invests that pile of bitten bread dough solicits a range of
emotions particular to contact and touch, inviting leading questions: could she use
another person to perform the role or does the artist need to perform the work? An
answer lies in Taussigs consideration that what makes this copy faithful: the material

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conditions of the artists mouthher skin, her bite, her saliva.179 It is in this sense that
these partial objects produce the person and, in Mauss terms, there remains a continuity
between these remains and the one who has eatenthe latter being substantially
identical to the food partaken by her (1975: 65 emphasis and gender changed).180

6.7 THE FORCE OF THE DONOR

The agency insisted upon by a notion of the artists body as donor circumnavigates
some of the problems associated with the notion of the artist as doctor, high priest and
shaman with its propensities for directing (authoring) the intentions of ritual. The artist
as donor incorporates an embodiment of herself within the operations of the ritualised
space and other agents (donors, donees, audiences) who intermingle in the ritual. To this
day in cities like Padova, and churches such as S. Antonio, anatomical votives are
chosen by those donors in supplication, or in thanks, for healing of particular body parts
(a leg for a broken leg, breast/s for breast cancer etc.).

Heathfield makes an important point in relation to my emphasis in this thesis on objects that
bear the marks of contagion via the artists body. He describes this process as incorporation,
whereby the artists body, its adornments, its action and its residues are not just the subject, but
also the material object of art (2004: 11).
180 This topic of substance has a lot more mileage. For example, why does Nauman go to the
effort, when making a work such as Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists (1966), of
replicating the look of wax in another medium (like resin) and reiterate the deception in the title
of the work? One answer lies in the substance of wax with deeply held mythological significance
as linked to seals of approval and religious ritual as much as to the studio methodologies of cast
and mould in sculptural practice. In these ways, just as bread dough for Hamilton is linked to
sustenance and nourishment, wax might be historically linked to an approximation of the bodys
substance. For an interesting analysis of the substance of wax, see Fife where the substance of
wax follows categories of mimetic function, sacredness and economy: wax might be employed in
mimicry of a particular accident because beeswax resembles flesh or skin; sacredness because of
the history associated to candles and light and that popular tradition in Europe dictates that bees
...were created by a special act of God to furnish wax for the ritual of the Church linked to the
idea that bees were created from the wounds of Christ; and economy because of its
availability, malleability and re-cycling qualities, a substance easily heated and poured into
moulds but always capable of melting, never fixed, always transient (Fife 1939). For my own
practice, a material such as silicon operates as a technologically mediated substance both out of
the body and in the body. Its use in, for example, breast implants and in the production of sex
toysas well as being a substance immediately identifiable in many high-tech moulding
processes (the Postmodern plaster-of-Paris)locates it as a contemporary substance of
mythological status. When viewers handle works made from silicon there is a profound indexing
of all these connotations. It also leaves an oil residue (and artificial smell) behind on the body/s
of the audience that they carry away with them.
179

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PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1912.92.209-299, PERU, BOLIVIA

PITT RIVERS MUSEUM, 1985.50.141, PERUGIA, ITALY, BREAST

Mauss offers a view of economic exchange between donor and donee that frames a
notion of gift giving by the terms of the law of contagion and one that is applied to

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exchange in anatomical votives.181 He writes in relation to the gift giving of taonga by

Maori in New Zealand that: What imposes obligation in the present received and
exchanged, is in fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been
abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him. Through it the giver has a
hold over the beneficiary (2002: 15). This is a concept related to action at a
distance discussed in Chapter 5 that things which have once been in contact with
each other continue to act upon each other at a distance after the physical contact has
been severed (Frazer 1978: 34). Mauss perceived Maori as adopting an exchange
system where gifts were ultimately either reciprocated or returned and which he further
outlines as the obligations to give, to receive and to reciprocate (Mauss 2002: 13, 5055). Derrida critiques Mauss The Gift with its emphasis on economy, exchange and
contract as speaking of everything but the gift (1992: 24). He points out that if
the gift is to be really a gift it must be forgotten both by donor and donee. And this is a
radical forgetting where the gift not only must not be repaid but must not be kept in
memory, retained as symbol or a sacrifice, as symbolic in general (1992: 24). And this
points to the impossibility of gifting. As soon as a gift is acknowledged as such it ceases
to be a gift: If the gift appears or signifies itself, if it exists or if it is presently as gift, as
what it is, then it is not, it annuls itself (1992: 26-27).
A significance of Derridas critique is that Mauss interpretation of gifting would always
position the donor as having specific intentions that relate, in turn, to specific
obligations. The question with respect to the donors of anatomical votives, and of
Hamilton, is who or what does the giving? These anatomical votives are the focus of
every donor within the force-field that is the shrine. But the votives on their own, like
Massumis soccer ball, are not enough as they need this field of potential; the ritual that
is embedded in institutional possibilities. This is to say that these part subjects catalyse
the ritual but are themselves parts of larger wholes. Larger wholes in the sense of what is
lacking in the specific diseased parta desire to undo the undesiredand of all those
other parts that we desire in a wholeness of being (this would be the successful outcome
in the Kleinian sense when the adult has brought together those disparate parts of
infantile projection into a mature and defined ego). From such a standpoint the
In his writing on Maori taonga Mauss does not use the term law of contagion. This is my
addition in relation to his A General Theory of Magic cited above. See Miranda Green for a
discussion about anatomical votives as gifts that retain an attachment to the person who
produced them in terms of relationships of debt (1999: 67-91).
181

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anatomical votives move the donors and congregations. The donors are the objects of the
votives within the force-field that draws them out. It is in this sense that performance
(the body art project) plays with the rules of that force-field, transforming the gallery for
Hamilton into an unlocatable space of transition (bakery, morgue, workhouse, museum)
or transforming the gallery into darkness (Cut 2) as theatre or no specific place.
Performance and the live body of the artist disrupts, always having the potential to
mutate. And since the votives (think Hamiltons bread dough casts and the Take series)
effects are dependent on the corporeal presence of a diversity of other bodies and other
votives of assorted kinds, these catalytic object-signs may be called part subjects, making
each donor its part object.182
This drawing out of the donor is the force of an endless series of givings and takings, the
context for which cannot be saturated. The donors agency, like that of Hamiltons,
engages them in deeply performative and intertwined reciprocity with other donors who
add their part objects to the same shrine and congregations who witness these multiple
displays of part subjects. In this respect the body of the donor/artist is offered in an
ambivalently performative sense. In other words, to tie the donors agency down with
specific intentions would, with respect to Derridas thinking on the gift, annul the force
that draws them out. Just as when Massumis soccer player focuses on the ball and misses,
the donor must look past the gift where her participatory agency is not driven by
intentional and directed giving inasmuch as drawn out by the part subjects of the votives.
This discussion is transferable to other contexts such as the Catholic Eucharist, itself not
inapplicable to Hamiltons ritual. The communion wafers as the part body/s of Christ
assume the role of part subjects as they catalyse the ritual. Their partness solicits a desire
for all the parts of the body of Christ that are absent in individual subjects and as
community, in the sense of the always lacking community of believers. The wafers are
the focus of every communicant within the force-field that is the church and the
celebration of the Eucharist. The communicants are the objects of the wafers. And the
performative utterance (in liturgical cantation and part objects/subjects) would be the
force over form that is transubstantiation. It would be a rationalist outlook that would
insist on a physically and scientifically proven transformation from the material

182

The end of this passage is paraphrased from Massumis Parables for the Virtual (2002: 73).

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substance of bread to flesh (such a physical transubstantiation is what I recall being

brought up to believe as a child), and one predicated on cause and effect. Instead the
sympathetic and magical action of the Eucharist is manifest as a transformational and
manipulative affect (held by conventional normative understandings as a minimal play
of contiguity that allows for a crossing of these lines of metaphorical substitution: eating
a shared meal together becoming metonymically violated as the eating of anothers flesh
and, as such, at the limits of understanding in a counterdivision of objects) that is
deeply persuasive and conceptualising. In this regard the Eucharist and the force that is
transubstantiation is, in the words of Tambiah (while he does not reference the
Eucharist), an analogical cum performative act (1973: 226).
And given the nature of photographic documentation, itself interpreting only part of a
larger performed event, and in Hamiltons case, not depicting viewers, it is easy to forget
Jones third notion of an intersubjective exchange with audiences. Once again, to
muddy the subject/object paradigm, Hamilton acts as a partial object where the viewers
(the crowd) are continuously locked out of any formal exchange with her as a
paradoxical indication of their intimate participation with the private act at hand.
Dave Hickey quotes John Shearman's Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian
Renaissance in relation to Hamiltons deliberate lack of acknowledgement, or denial, of
the viewer as he enters her installation spaces and moves around. Hamilton is in most
cases focused on the repetitive labour at hand. For Tropos (1993)as was the case with
Maledictionshe is seated at a wooden table in the middle of the Dia Foundation space
in lower Manhatten burning words out of books, the floor around her completely
covered in shaved horse hair. For Shearman, this lack of engagement heightens in the
viewer a sense of privileged access:
Raphael's Tommaso Inghirami introduces a paradox. Can it be right to interpret
a spectator-subject relationship when the subject is explicitly described as unaware
of anyone but himself? There are a number of very beautiful, very imaginative
portraits of this kind, that is, of the creatively distracted like Inghirami or of the
utterly absorbed reader such as the scholar in Correggios picture in Castello
Sforzesco, or of the man lost to the world altogether, in a state of reverie, as in the
extraordinary Moretto in London. In such portraits the reverie is descriptive not
of a generlised state of mind, as it might still be in an idealised image, but in a
space of particularlised characterthat happens, it seems, because the context of
the state of mind is emphatically particularised in other ways, such as lighting,
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texture, environment, and not least by a descriptive affinity with the spectator. But
I find that in such cases, when the viewer is made to feel that, in a sense, he ought
not to be present, he is all the more aware that he is, that his position and affinity
are particularly privileged. Also, these portraits engage us all the more because
they, preeminently, redefine the question, What is represented? as What is
supposed to be going on? (Hickey 1994: 133 quoting Shearman)
As with the operations at work in Above and Back, where the viewer is positioned
outside the image, he is all the more aware of a privileged affinity to the image.
Shearman also alerts us to an ambivalence in Hamiltons performed representation. It is in
this sense that I argue her absence makes her so much more tangible, just as the
metonymic operations that produce her mouth and hands make us so desire that which
is redundant or lacking.
From this perspective the partial subjects Hamilton produces, and the artist as partially
revealed objecttogether with her audiences partially restricted encountermight be
contextualised from the point of view of magical ritual acts. From such a standpoint I
evoke Tambiahs comments on a Trobiand spell that coalesces both metaphor and
illocutionary force by summoning the taytu yam to toss out foliage like a spider
spinning its web:
The spider covers up, the spider covers up
The open space, the open space between thy branches, O taytu the spider covers
up, Shoot up, O head of my taytu Make mop upon mop of leaves, O head of
my taytu (1973: 222-223)
In this example the metaphor (a visual similarity between the spiders web and the
fruitful growing of the taytu yam foliage) meets with a ritualised performative force of
the spell in order to persuade (conceptualise) growth. Tambiah goes on to say:
The objects manipulated are chosen analogically on the basis of similarity and
difference to convey meaning. From the performance perspective, the action
consists of an operation done on an object-symbol to make an imperative and
realistic transfer of its properties to the recipient. Or, to put it differently, two
objects are seen as having resemblances and differences, and an attempt is made
to transfer the desirable quality of one to the other which is in a defective state.
(1973: 222-223)

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Seen from this viewpoint, the objects Hamilton manipulates, in the words of Tambiah,
are chosen analogically on the basis of similarity and difference to convey meaning. To
paraphrase Tambiah: from a performative perspective, Hamiltons actions consist of
producing object-symbols in order to make an imperative and realistic transfer of
properties to various recipients: herself, her audience and, within an even greater
sphere, those who have previously passed through the space. She performs her casts,
over and over, producing part subjects charged with notions of nourishment, digestion,
patience, tenderness and speech and places them in a wicker casket used to transport
corpses. She sits in a space burgeoning with the silence of that exploited workforce of
immigrants, women and children who laboured at the turn of the century in SoHos
sweatshop clothing industry. Hamilton makes an attempt, by a complex process of
similarity and difference, to transfer the desirable qualities of nourishment and speech
to the other which is in a defective state: bread dough, following repeated mastication,
takes the place of all those dead. The metaphorical associations, in the sense that they are
complimentary, are those of bread dough, mouth, saliva, bread buns, womens labour,
and so on. But Hamiltons performative actions present not just these complimentary
but also distant terms, constituting an exchange which undertakes to vacillate meaning
(Barthes 1972: 244-247). In this regard she is an ambiguous and over-determined part
object. She is indeterminate as she is many things (Eucharistic communicant, labourer,
artist at work), while a minimal play of contiguity allows for a crossing of these lines of
metaphorical substitution.183

Along similar lines but from a different viewpoint, see Strathern who discusses the way in
which: Ritual action relates to the roots of language by reenacting in bodily ways meanings
that may otherwise have lost their embodied reference (1996: 27). In referencing Pierre
Bourdieus Outline of the Theory of Practice (1977) (who is, in turn, referencing Mauss), he notes that
this scheme transfer is central to the notion of habitus. Strathern quotes Malinowskis example
(1935) of a Trobriand garden magician mimicking the action of yams growing. As he says
the belly of my garden swells, he transfers the scheme of pregnancy in the human body
over to the scheme of garden fertility, thereby setting up a correspondence that reenergizes both
contexts. What is involved here is not just symbolic action based on metaphor, but also the
bringing together of two separate spheres, which thereby become cosmically fused. The terms
metonymy and mimesis are intended to grasp this process. And he goes on to quote Bourdieu as
stating that he is describing the socially informed body with all its senses (1996: 28). In those
senses the physical and the moral are fused as in the phrase sense of duty which Strathern
refers to as the mindful body of Lock and Scheper-Hughes, adding the concept of mimesis as
one of the means whereby the mindful body shows itself in the realm of practice (1996: 28).
This presents another way of articulating a crossing of the metaphoric chains of references as
cosmically fused while also stressing a socially informed sense of ethics, or sense of duty, that
Stiles and Jones are at pains to emphasis, albeit from different perspectives, within a context of
body art and performative-installation.
183

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Stiles argues that the rarefication of such performative events self-consciously removes
artists from circulation as metonymic figures in actionsomething incorporeal and
intangible as she argues for metonymy as action enabling one to perceive the
contiguity of relations between two things. And she goes on to note that: When such
connection includes human relations, it may have the effect of reducing human actions
to a less complex and usually more concrete realm of being. These qualities are of
particular relevance to the function and structure of the altered communicative means
of live, performed art. And a little later she writes that: Such art exhibits how the
metonymic process precedes the signifying capabilities of metaphor (objectified in
representational objects) (1998: 306).184 I want to expand on (and disagree with) this
argument in that, as a metonymic figure, Hamilton is precisely more corporeal and
tangible (and of the moment) as part of the whole: all mouth and hands like Massumis
soccer players are all legs. And the redundancy (formlessness) that lies at the heart of this
vacillation is all those parts of her that are left out. This vacillation (contrary to Stiles)
cannot precede the signifying capabilities of metaphor in that one cannot have a
horizontal metonymic axis of contiguity without an implied vertical metaphoric one
(this would be a structural rule without context; the grammar of a sentence without
syntagms, rules for a wedding without performing the ceremony).
It is in this sense, and in the context of the ritualistic offering of anatomical votives, that
Hamiltons body as donorher mouth and hands as part objectswhen transformed as
part subjects (in the form of the small votive bread-dough moulds) operate as surrogate
performers. Surrogate because they stand in for all those parts of her (and others) that
are left out. It is by this performative ritual, in which the objects and Hamiltons body
point to the moment of their productionand the possibility of their reproduction as
repetitive mouldsthat these part subjects produce the person in an operation that

To repeat the rest of this quote already used above as it is important in this context: For by
literally acting in the space between a human viewing subject and the conventional art object
as the mediator between the twothe artists who produced action paintings and later actions,
exhibited the intersection where subjects meet object, where the artifactuality [sic] of the object
is born in the event, and where the artist becomes both a subject who produces an object, and
the object itself. Such art exhibits how the metonymic process precedes the signifying
capabilities of metaphor (objectified in representational objects) (Stiles 1998: 306).
184

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transfers desirable qualities (nourishment, voice, honouring) onto a defective Other.185

This transfer is a way of articulating an authentic relationship between donor and
audiences in what Auslander terms performative documentation. The significance of
Hamiltons body in Malediction, and her production of anatomical votives, is accentuated by
two other installations where she employs this votive tradition more literally and with
less resonance. For Offerings (1991) and Accountings (1992) Hamilton cast multiple wax
heads modeled on those she had found in the church of So Judas Tadeu in So Paulo
(Simon 2002: 112). Both installations displayed the wax heads in museum-like vitrines.
For Offerings Hamilton created an installation in three stories of a disused house in
Pittsburgh for the Carnegie International 1991, where, from the top third floor, the
slightly heated vitrine containing the wax heads meant their gradual melting and
dripping through to the ground floor where viewers entered the installation. For
Accountings the heads remained static in their glass vitrine at the Henry Art Gallery,
Seattle, surrounded by walls bearing a repeated soot pattern applied by Hamilton and
her coworkers with burning votive candles. In my view these works utilise references to
anatomical votives with less resonance than is the case with Malediction. I say this because
of the manner in which Offerings and Accountings take the objects out of a performative
circulation of exchange between object/s artist and audiences where Hamiltons partial
body offers a model of reciprocity. In other words, for Offerings and Accountings she has
taken out the live component where her bodyas donorestablishes a metonymic
force with the body/s of the audience. For Malediction, Hamilton herself is
performatively implicated in an event where she operates as both a subject who produces
an object, and the object itself.186 This is to emphasise Mauss conviction, and more so

See Joan Simon where she reads Malediction in terms of a ritual practice of repetitive labor
where the artist is a guardian sitting with and honoring the dead (Simon 2002: 124). While
Simons line of thinking emphasises a redemptive role of artist, objects and audiences that I am
arguing towards in this project, she does not, to my mind, address the crucial significance of
Hamiltons reference to anatomical votives even though they are explicit in these works and
implied in Malediction (2002: 113-120).
186 I understand that for the installations Offerings and Accountings Hamilton may be employing
the wax heads as deliberately removed from their ritualistic sites of production and installed in
museologically charged ways. In this sense the removal of these anatomical votive heads from
their operations of exchange, and their melting through the body of a building in Offerings, may
be the point of these works. Nevertheless, my insistence on the body of the artist as donor
where there is a close and intimate relationship between the dimensions and substances of
Hamiltons body, the substance of bread dough, and her continual and unremitting action in
apparent isolation from the audiences who circulate in the ritualised spacemakes Maledictions
reference to the anatomical traditions more than just a reference. By this I mean that she moves
185

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Tambiahs, that the notion of sympathy resides both in a debt to interpretive contexts of
ritual and modes of partial mimesis. Their ambivalence is intentional in order to keep the
force-field those performative contextsalive.

ANN HAMILTON, OFFERINGS, 1991

In this regard, Hamiltons bread dough mouths lend themselves spectacularly well to an
analysis of the partial object/subject along the lines of sympathetic magical action in the
context of what Tambiah calls performative illocutionary force. As part subjects they do
not describe anatomy, they are performative sculptures that are about process. It matters
little what they look like, they are about what they do and what they symbolically utter.
And to reiterate Jones position on the body, these objects (and including Hamilton as
partial object), can be seen as a locus of a disintegrated or dispersed self, as elusive
marker of the subjects place in the social, as hinge between nature and culture
(1998: 13). In this sense illocutionary force effects changes, not in terms of rational
systems of cause and effect, but in terms of conventional normative understandings as
deeply persuasive and conceptualising. Rather than answering what magic is I have, like
Tambiah, embedded it in ritual seeing it as an analogical cum performative act
(1973: 226).

6.8 THE FORCE OF THE UTTERANCE

Tambiah turns to Austins How To Do Things With Words in describing ritual acts and
magical rites as performing an illocutionary act. That is in the order of utterances which
have a certain conventional force, a performative act which does something (as implied in
promising, ordering, apologising, warning etc.) (1973: 220). He does this in the context
beyond an appropriation of those rituals where she becomes embodied in the very performative
forces and meanings of those traditions.

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of one of Austins primary examples of a performative utterance as that of marriage

vows where the words I do do not describe anything but do something:
Utterances can be found, satisfying these conditions, yet such that
A. they do not describe or report or constate anything at all, are not true or
false; and
B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which
again would not normally be described as, or as just, saying something. (Austin
1962: 5)
He goes on to give examples such as: I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded
wifeas uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony. And continues with the
explanation that:
In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the
appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so
uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the
utterances cited is either true or false When I say, before the registrar or altar,
&c., I do, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it. What are we to
call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence
or a performative utterance, or, for short, a performative. (1962: 6)
Necessary to Tambiahs notion of persuasion is that an illocutionary force and
power by which the deed is directed and enacted is achieved through use of words
commanding, ordering, persuading and the like (1973: 222).187 But important to my
application of Tambiah is that these utterances could be articulated without words as
performative acts. As Tambiah states, it is also possible to enact a performative act
without uttering words at all (1973: 221-222). In a crucial footnote, Tambiah widens
the frame of reference by indicating that an interrelation between the media of speech
and object manipulation might take different forms: These kinds of relations are not

For a different but related emphasis on the power of performatives, see McKenzie who notes
that Judith Butler opens Gender Trouble by citing Sedgwicks reading of J.L. Austin. He quotes
Butler as follows: Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for
instance, are statements which, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a
binding power... The power of discourse to produce what it names is linked with the question of
performativity. The performative is thus one domain in which power acts as discourse (1998:
224 ). This is to reiterate Tambiahs emphasis on the illocutionary force and power of
performative utterances. It also presents another way of contextualising my emphasis in
sympathetic magical action where performative utterances, within the terms of similarity
described above, have the power of discourse to produce what they name.
187

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necessarily exclusive, and any complex rite may express all relations not only between
these two media but between them and others as well, such as music, dancing, use of
diagrams, food prestations, etc (1973: 223n221).188 It is noteworthy that Tambiah
repeats the term force as cited above: the illocutionary force and power. This is the
mystical force that Reinach questioned in 1905 and it is apt at this point to repeat his
emphasis that primitive artists did not desire to please but to evoke or conjure up,
and to remark on its closeness as an idea to that of Tambiahs conception of force as a
mode of persuasion as derived from Austins performative utterance. Hamilton of course
is not far from the 19th-century savage that did not know his inside from his outside.
This is where a re-evaluation of those Victorian rationalist views transforms magical
action as a model for questioning the bodys subjectivity in relation to other body/s.
It follows that a notion of performative utterance might be contextualised in many ways.
In The Artist Will Be Present several factors achieve a pronounced form of utterance.
These incorporate the repeated pulling and pushing of material against my body, the
continuously looped dvds, and the repetitious and cathartic sound-track of Over & Over.
These operations, similar to Bois and Krauss pendulum swings and rotations, provoke a
physiognomic quality akin to that of Eisensteins film making, the vocabulary of the I
feel: a slowing down and disintegrating. The significance of referencing Eisenstein is
that these moving images evoke a sensate doing with the bodygesture always as
verbthat dominates over and above narrative content by means of reductive
utterance. While Sobchack does not reference Austin, she underlies this emphasis in her
writing on the effects of cinema when she states that cinema simultaneously
represents experience through dynamic presentation (the always verb-driven and ongoing
present tense of sensory perception that, through technology, constitutes and enables the
film for us and for itself) (2004: 74). This is underscored by Austin when he writes
about a performative that: The name is derived, of course, from perform, the usual
verb with the noun action: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the
performing of an actionit is not normally thought of as just saying something (1962:
6-7).
In this footnote Tambiah qualifies that an interrelation between the two media is not
necessarily always speech and object manipulation but may be, for one example among others,
complimentary, and linked, for example, the words being metaphorical and the actions
metonymical (1973: 223n221). This is close to Stiles suggestion that static forms are
conventionally metaphorical while the actions inherent in live performance are metonymical.
188

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UGO RONDINONE, ROUNDELAY, 2002-2006

Ugo Rondinones Roundelay (2002-2006), a 360-degree total-surround six-screen dvd

projection has been contextualised in similar terms by Hartel. Two figures, a man and a
woman, walk the architectonic labyrinth of the urban desert of Beaugrenelle, in
Paris (2006b: 246). The figures are fragmented with a variety of wide through to closeup images, but some from the rear, some at their shoes, creating a repetitive rhythm that
Hartel characterises in the words of Samuel Beckett as endowed with missing pieces.
These are not the conventions of film narrative but a circular and disorientating
experience that heightens our normal experience of the everyday yet cathartic
experience of walking, inducing Hartel to reference Eisenstein as she writes: Such are
the foundations that help liberate the imagination, so that we can hear the movement
and see the sounds (2006b: 246).189 This sense of hearing the movement and seeing
the sound is foremost in my mind when spatially separating the sound component/s of
Above and Back: these moving images play in (comparative) silence while their sound
track/s form the related (but dislocated) Over & Over located in the foyer entrance to the
gallery. This is not about the violence of making the form between my legs and hands,
or the pressure required to literally move the material, but the ...violence of repetition
and its structure of the beat, felt as a series of explosive endings always abruptly
propelled into motion again (Bois and Krauss 1997: 163). In Austins terms, not of just
saying, describing, reporting or constating, but performatively doing (1962: 5, 7).190
Also relevant to Eisensteins sense of slowing down and disintegrating is Friederike Pezolds
La Premire Desse Electronique de Monde (The Worlds First Electronic Goddess) (1970-1982) featuring
five stacked video monitors each depicting, in slow motion and without sound, a mouth, breasts,
arm, pubis and feet. Closely associated with the Rodinian fragmentation (discussed above in the
context of Frankovichs Flying Fox), this silent work evokes a sensate experience, once again of
hearing the movement and seeing the sounds (Lageira 2006: 239).
190 Duration and its unbounded quality is a key point here. Bois writes in Formless that the
modernist ontology requires an artwork to have a beginning and an end, and holds that all
189

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There are a number of objects and related actions that can be contextualised in terms of
the performative utterance. For example, when Krauss describes Richard Serras Hand
Catching Lead (1969)a three-minute film of the artists hand attempting to catch a
sequence of falling lead stripsin terms of a relentless persistenceof doing
something over and over again (1977: 244), while she does not employ the notion of
performative utterance, she prioritises the force of the doing over form.191

6.9 THE FORCE OF THE MOMENT

Peggy Phelan argues that the performative speech act shares with the ontology of
performance the inability to be reproduced or repeated (1993: 149). While she does
not use Austins example, she says this because the I do is to do something at that live
moment. To repeat that performative utterance is to describe or denote that moment in

apparent disorder is necessarily reabsorbed in the very fact of being bounded (Bois and Krauss
1997: 26). The quote I have usedthe violence of repetition and its structure of the beat
comes from Krauss analysis of James Colemans Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), where she discusses
Colemans film as emphasising movement itself as a form of repetition, of beats that are
separated by intervals of absolute extinction, even while the urgency of the rhythm promises the
return of another and another. And ...this field of visual representation is doubled aurally by a
voice-over that emphasises both the drive of repetition (go on, go on, again, again, return,
return)... (Bois and Krauss 1997: 162). And in discussing the viewers own body
...automatically contributing to the filmic fabric she writes that ...it also means that the
frequent projections of the sound of breathing - expressed in the sound track as ah/ah,
aha/ah, p-a-m/p-u-m - is giving voice not just to the boxers bodily rhythms but to those of
the viewer as well (Bois and Krauss 1997: 163).
191 In referencing Krauss critique of Richard Serra it needs to be noted that, in difference to
Krauss, I am placing emphasis on the body and manner in which bodies afford performing
utterances in a particularly haptic and felt sense. While Serras work can be interpreted in such a
way, Krauss uses it to argue a repositioning of sculpture in resistance to that of formalist
painting. She argues that this quality of repetition, also employed by Judd and Stella, was a
strategy to escape an American perception of European art as composed: a rationalist system
built on an a priori logic of balance and composition (which was almost certainly a mistaken
perception of artistic practice in Europe at the time by Judd and Stella) (1977: 244). The point I
am making is that, while Krauss frames these performative actions as a systematic recording,
archiving and listing, which prioritises process as the medium, she does so with little regard for a
notion of the performative body. She sees Serraa work as a tenacious positioning of the
discipline of sculpture against European formalism. In relation to this discussion, see Blocker as
she argues that the body is eclipsed by an over-evaluation of the importance of disciplinarity
when she writes that the feminine aspects of performance were shifted onto painting and
then disavowed (2004: 84). In this context the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form pointed to
Serras lead splashings in Leo Castellis warehouse as a confirmation of paintings splash in three
dimensions and therefore subsumed by the notion that actions of spilling, splashing and handmaking have currency in a disciplinary sense, as opposition to paintings hegemony, but not in
relation to experiences of the body.

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what Austin termed a constative utterance. From this viewpoint repetition destroys
performativity in the strict manner in which Phelan adheres to the unrecorded,
unrepeatable moment of live arts enactment. This is a problematic observation as it ties
a notion of performative utterance to the possibility of a pure moment. But Phelans
text is complex and I am in danger here of oversimplifying her argument which is rich
with nuance. On the one hand, Phelan stresses an unconditional uniqueness of live art
that, if saved in any reproductive technology, is at odds with performances fundamental
ontology of disappearance. On the other, her overarching concern with performative
writing underscores her quest to see a way through to finding a form of
documentation/reproduction that is itself performative. To paraphrase Phelan, but
replacing her emphasis on writing with mine of making performatively: the challenge
raised by the ontological claims of performance for the object is to re-mark again the
performative possibilities of the object itself. The act of making towards disappearance,
rather than the act of making toward preservation, must remember that the after-effect of
disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself.192
And Phelan brings Austins linguistic analysis to bear on the grammar of the body
where she declares a move from metaphor to metonymy. She employs an argument
similar to that of Stiles where the body of the performer works to disrupt the associations
of similarity inherent in the metaphor when she writes:
For performance art itself however, the referent is always the agonizingly relevant
body of the performer. Metaphor works to secure a vertical hierarchy of value and
is reproductive; it works by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference; it turns
two into one. Metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal
axis of contiguity and displacement In performance, the body is metonymic of
self, of character, of voice, of presence. But in the plenitude of its apparent
visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents
something elsedance, movement, sound, character, art. (1993: 150)
When Phelan positions the body of the performer as metonymic she suggests that this
body fails to reproduce the referent, indicating an inability to secure the relation
Here is the full quote which I have paraphrased in relation to a method that aims at
disappearance rather than preservation: The challenge raised by the ontological claims of
performance for writing is to re-mark again the performative possibilities of writing itself. The
act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must
remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself (Phelan
1993: 148).
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between subjectivity and the body per se [and in this sense] performance uses the body to
frame the lack of Being promised by and through the bodythat which cannot appear
without a supplement (1993: 150-151).
The spectators gaze, in Phelans analysis, functions, as the supplement might, to secure
and displace the floating signifier of the performing body (Phelan 1993: 150). It is this
violation of representation that constitutes the performers body as metonymic. This is
similar to Tambiahs comment on the performative action of the Trobiand spell
discussed above where metaphor works to secure an analogy of similarity (by
substitution) between a spiders web and the growing foliage of the taytu yam, while the
metonymic utterance conveys a difference of contiguity and displacement. But in the
plenitude of the illocutionary force (the power of the forced syntagm) a transfer of
properties (of growth) is made into desire.
As a significant key to this discussion, Derridas critique of Austins performative
utterance in Signature Event Context analyses an absence of an identified referent with
respect to iterability, or repetition. Derridas primary problem with Austins theory is
with Austins insistence on saturated ritual contextsthe manner in which things are
said, their correct intentions, and the appropriate agents for a specific ritualthat are
present and correct. Furthermore, Derridas problem with Mauss notion of the gift
stems from a similar concern that one cannot saturate the reciprocal contexts in which
gift giving takes place. In this framework Austin argues that performativesoutside
their ritual contextsare unrepeatable and that they become constative in their
repetition thereby forfeiting their performative status. This seems close to Phelans
argument that the performative cannot be reproduced as it becomes something other
than performance.193 In difference to Austin, Derridas view is that it is precisely their
iterability that makes performatives possible. Here the unity of the signifying form (and
force) of the I do in the marriage ceremony (to evoke once again Austins example), is
made possible by the structure of possibility of all previous and future utterances of the I
do. As Derrida writes,

Here is the full sentence that I have summarised: Performances only life is in the present.
Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation
of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than
performance (Phelan 1993: 146).
193

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this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability,
by the possibility of its being repeated in the absence not only of its referent,
which is self evident, but in the absence of a determinate signified or of the
intention of actual signification (1988: 10)
Derrida does not want ritual to be viewed as a structural determinate of every mark but
rather, as a possible occurrence (1988: 15). This is similar to Massumis argument
discussed above, that the rules and rituals of the (soccer) game are constantly in variance
as the game emerges and continues to evolve as circumstances arise that force
adaptation of the rules. Derrida goes on to say that: This structural possibility of being
weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its
context) seems to me to make every mark... the nonpresent remainder of a differential
mark cut off from its putative production or origin (1988: 10). Elsewhere in That
Dangerous Supplement Derrida presses the point that what I am calling the force of
the moment is only legible through its absence: A terrifying menace, the supplement is
also the first and surest protection; against that very menace. This is why it cannot be
given up (1976: 154).194
In this sense the supplement is both total absence and total presence (Derrida 1976:
157) and it is this radical nonpresence that Phelan locates in experiencing the live body
of the performer and that I also wish to locate in the performative object of the mould
(Hamiltons mouth cavity, Naumans space under his hand, the spaces between my
body) as nonpresent remainder. In this sense the remainder is supplementary to
representation just as the mould is supplementary to the cast. It articulates all the
moments of presence by virtue of its always readiness to (inadequately) produce an
originating moment of contact. Analysing Mauss concept of the poorly executed
ideogram through the lens of Derridas critique transforms it as an impossibly locatable
ideogram. This is why Wagner says of Nauman (while she does not reference Derrida),
that his body mould works look like remainders (and reminders) of some obviously
absent form (2007: 121) and why she goes on to say that works like Device for a Left
Armpit (1967) serve as supplements to a body that otherwise would be lost or
wayward or, in some cases, simply incomplete (2007: 125). This work leaves a strong
impression of the effect of something like an elbow, its weight when leaning on to a
See Jones who traces these points also with reference to Derridas That Dangerous
Supplement (1998: 34-35).
194

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surface, yet its cavity is, somewhere, the cavity of an armpit. At the same moment, the
functional quality of the mould is open for scrutiny such that the implosion of the mark is
exposed. Perhaps Derridas words might be applied to Device for a Left Armpit (and the
nature of moulds) as the communication of an original movement... an operation
and the production of an effect [which is] tantamount to communicating a force
through the impetus of a mark (1988: 13). And as indicated in Chapter 2 above, the
part object that is the space under Naumans hand as he wrote his name is neither
signature nor the hand that wrote it. Instead the empty space that is so impossible to
describe (the in-between-two of the chiasm) is lent material form just as Naumans body
in the video works (Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square) reveals
itself in its absence.195

BRUCE NAUMAN, DEVICE FOR A LEFT ARMPIT, 1967

For Phelan, Stiles and Blocker (albeit from slightly differing positions), the use of the
body in performative utterance causes such a vacillation of meaning. It is the
overwhelming presence of the live performer that alerts us to her disappearance. In
this sense, and to evoke Barthes once more, the body constitutes a violation of a
signifying limit of space [functioning as] a counterdivision of objects, meanings, spaces,
and properties (1972: 245-246).

These are Cantzs observations while he does not discuss phenomenology or Derridas
writing on the signature (1998: 49). In Chapter 2 I used these observations about Naumans
works in relation to the Take series and the moving image work Back in The Artist Will Be Present.
195

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In summarising my main objection to at least part of Phelans argument I want to

highlight that there is never a live moment as it is already encountered. It would be
impossible or undecidable in Derridas questioning of the now. In her contrasting
the notions of preservation and disappearance, she would make the live moment the
original and it is only because of the supplement that the original can be discussed,
albeit always already contaminated. Here Derrida writes that the indefinite process
of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there
the space of repetition and the splitting of the self (1976: 163). So the problem lies in
the opposition of preservation and disappearance (which is also the problem of the
inter discussed above). Every presentation is made possible on the grounds of
disappearance and something must be preserved for disappearance to happen.196 Once
again, as Derrida writes, this operation of supplementation is not exhibited as a
break in presence but rather as a continuous and homogeneous reparation and
modification of presence in the representation (1988: 5). And as Adrian Heathfield and
Jones put it:
The supplement, precisely that which exceeds signification and promises but
forever fails to deliver presence, critically dismantles this reliance [on the live
moment] by exposing its limits. All live art plays with or relies on the paradox of
the supplement (the way in which the live body promises something more than
representation but always already fails to give that which can secure meaning (the
real, or immortality) once and forever). (2007: 3)

See Blockers summary of Jones argument for the revolutionary power of the body in Body
Art: Performing the Subject where she underlines this perplexing instability of presence as she writes:
Jones asserts the discomforting impossibility of presence in body art (even when the body is
there, it cannot be grasped), its undermining of cultural assumptions, its inherent loss (2004: 8).
196

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THE ARTIST WILL BE PRESENT, 2007

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CARESS, 2008

This notion of making toward disappearance is crucial to The Artist Will Be Present. My liveness is
always the record of a private action where that action, and the object of my action, are
undisclosed. So too are the partial subjects of the Take series ambivalent and undisclosed in their
encounter both physical (Cut 1) and sensuously filmic (Cut 2). They are not my body parts but
are somewhere located as an in-between two-ness. The inside/outside implosion of the
mouldsas they vacillate between an object of my making and the subject of my body
translate into the mimetic closeness and incongruence of Caress as it summonds a chiasmic
reversibility in the body/s of the audience. By way of the interesting problem of the
performative document that I am at pains to underline, these objects constantly inculcate (in
the sense of driving an issue home by constant repetition) the live moment of my fleshs
pressurethat which slips awaywithin a process endemic with the language of repetition.
With regard to the record of the live moment, Schneider writes that:
The paper, frame, and photo of the action all represent to the viewer that which the
viewer missed that which, standing before the document, you witness yourself missing
again. And yet, in missing you are somehow more available to this excess of the
object than you would be in a situation of presence. (2005: 42)

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The Artist Will Be Present exacerbates this turn of events by recording performances that
took place in private. While this exaggerates a privileged position on the part of audiences
(makes their presence even more palpable and reciprocal), it also problematises the
category of the live by never offering up the presence of my body, by always indulging in
the disappointment of the document, as Jones says of the supplement, promising but
failing to deliver presence (2006: xix). These kinds of operations bring Schneider to the
view that the witnessing of the eventunderstood in the most polyvalent terms as
audiences of persons, objects, documents, photos or testimonies that stand as
witnessesis the site of the event as a retelling: Thus the media undoes the media,
resists the very mode of its manifestation, and pitches itself toward re-enactment in a variety
of forms always alternative to the event itself (2005: 42-43).197 It is with the same emphasis on
objects whose role goes beyond that of scopic recognition that Schimmel locates Naumans
performative sculpture Light Trap for Henry Moore, No. 1 (1967) recorded on film. As
Schimmel writes: In this work Nauman parodies Henry Moores figurative drawings of the
early 1940s, not as static objects for contemplation but as traps that captured the movement
of light. Making circular motions with a flashlight, Nauman formed figures in space whose
traces were frozen in photographs. And in emphasising the importance of documentation
as an object that follows performative acts, he goes on to state: Even at this time he
[Nauman] understood the deceptive nature of documentation (1998: 90). It is in this sense
that I want the up-close documentation that is Caress to perform the Take series.
Furthermore, in other works like Uncovering a Sculpture (1965), as described by Robert Riley,
Nauman tests the viewers ability to discern scale, material, and meaning from the
cinematic presentation of an enigmatic object (2007: 175). This work is a 54-second black
In a similar vein, Heathfield emphasises practices that image/document the artists body and
confuse an objectification of that body as either the subject of artistic authorship or the object of
aesthetic representation. This is the case with the moving image works Above and Back in The
Artist Will Be Present where my body is imaged/documented (any clear division between the two
is not possible) as it performs the force of the making. Yet the object of that making, and my body
as the making agent, remain undisclosed and in constant energetic flux. In this context it is
worth continuing Heathfields quote in full: The physical entry of the artists body into the
artwork is a transgressive gesture that confuses the distinctions between subject and object, life
and art: a move that challenges the proprieties that rest on such divisions. Performance explores
the paradoxical status of the body as art: treating it as an object within a field of material
relations with other objects, and simultaneously questioning its objectification by deploying it as
a disruption of and resistance to stasis and fixity. And with a clear nod to the importance of a
phenomenological approach that endeavours to articulate the complexities of the in-between
two of this subject/object relation described above in my Chapter 2, he goes on to state: The
bodys entry into the frame ensures that the artists exploration of the meanings and resonances
of contemporary embodiment will be received in and through an intersubjective, phenomenal
relation (2004: 11).
197

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and white silent 16mm film of a close-up of a piece of textured material being rolled back to
reveal a sculptural form underneath in the centre of the image. The manual hand-rolling
from left to right assumes a kind of panning device that moves the screen from comparative
blackness to the image, albeit distorted in its close proximity. Similar operations are at work
in Caress. While the works enigmatic object is stationary the viewer is left uncertain as to
which moves (the object or the camera) and, together with the images up-close mimetic
fragmentation, it implies a documentation that is manually haptic and partial. I understand
this as deeply phenomenological in the sense that it constitutes a viewing that is carnal and
about how the body perceives.

6.9.1

THE FORCE OF THE SIGNATURE

Derrida concludes Signature Event Context with a discussion on the nature of signatures
and their relationship to the present and to their source. He expands a notion of
signature to encompass written and oral utterance. In this context Naumans space
under his hand, Martinis Roes fingertips upon the surfaces of clay and video monitor,
and Hamiltons oral utterance as part subject retain, as Derrida writes, [their]
having been present in a past now or present which will remain a future now or present,
thus in a general maintenant, in the transcendental form of presentness (1988: 20).198
And what marks the signature out is the impossibility of its pure reiterationthat is the
difference of the utterance at every live momentwhile its very function relies on it
being repeatableiterablein variance to Austins determination of a noniterable
performative utterance. This is, in effect, a deconstruction that acts as a double gesture,
a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system (Derrida
1988: 20) that Phelan describes as metonymic. As Derrida writes, it must be able to be
detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness
which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its seal [sceau] (1988: 20).
It is in this regard that the signatures inherent in Malediction, Space Under My Hand When
I Write My Name and the Take series utter/write in the form of the supplementary mould,

See Phelan where she discusses Derridas critique of Austin in Signature, Event, Context.
Phelan states that: For Derrida, performative writing promises fidelity only to the utterance of
the promise: I promise to utter this promise. The performative is important to Derrida precisely
because it displays languages independence from the referent outside of itself. Thus, for Derrida
the performative enacts the now of writing in the present time (1993: 149).
198

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the nonpresent remainder.199 This has already been described (somewhat

inadequately) as traces of gesture. By this I mean that the complete presence (physically
and of intentional mind) of the signatory is something to be (conventionally) expected.
But in these works the artists trace has become the subject, necessarily detached, as
noted by Derrida above, from the present and singular intentions of its production. 200
And in this way, as Jones notes, the body in body art exacerbates its own
supplementarity (1998: 107) and that performance exposes the body itself as
supplement, as both the visible proof of the self and its endless deferral (1998: 34-35 ).
The body itself as supplement, together with an infinite chain of supplements including
any form of documentation, form a continuous (chiasmic) reparation of presence. This is
where Phelans argumentwhile being such a significant contribution to the analysis of
the ontology of performanceis too reductive, as she aligns metonymy with
supplementation, but does not say so exactly. In her argument, more sophisticated than
Stiles but based on similar objectives, metaphor is aligned with representation and
substitution and to a possibility of complete presence, while metonymy is employed as
that which violates its presence in the moment of the live. Phelan nails this viewpoint
when she writes that: In employing the body metonymically, performance is capable of
resisting the reproduction of metaphor (1993: 151).201 The problem I perceive with
this discussion is that it risks reiterating the binary that the supplement deconstructs,
reinstating a metaphysics of presence and an artifice of representation. The point to be
made is that the temporal nature of the metonymic is only identifiable through
reproduction, due to its iterability. This is the body of the artist as trace of its own
presence. In this way all these partial subjects/objects mark out the impossibility of their
pure reiteration at the point of their originating live momentthe writing hand, the
mouths utterance, the touching/pressing bodywhile the very function of the mould
relies on its being iterable and physically present in the world. And crucial to Space Under

Together with this notion of the nonpresent remainder is the fact that Space Under My Hand
When I Write My Name has been destroyed and the photograph in this thesis, taken from Cantzs
Bruce Nauman: the True Artist, is the only illustration I can find.
200 While Cantz does not discuss Derrida he is perhaps thinking along similar lines when he
writes, with reference to Willoughby Sharps interview with Nauman in 1970, that these works
from 1966-1970 that bear the imprint of Naumans body act as an index, a trace of the
author which exhausts itself in reference to him (1998: 40). Cantzs interests rest in the notions
of masquerade and withdrawal in Naumans work from this period (1998: 51).
201 Phelan goes on to say that the metaphor that concerns her is the metaphor of gender, that
the metaphor of gender presupposes unified bodies which are biologically different (1993:
151).
199

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My Hand When I Write My Name, Malediction and the Take series is that their possible
interpretations rely on their iterability manifest in the mould/cast routine of
reproduction while these works are, in fact, unrepeatable mono-prints formed by
always changing (live) bodies. All these artists discussed shuffle between their performing
bodies and material form (bread dough, video, resin, epoxy clay etc.) which emphasise
an immanent materiality important to encountering their bodies in the body/s of the
audience. This emphasis on the materiality of the mould/cast visually manifesting the
iter accentuates their having been present in a past now and therefore the physical
impossibility of their pure reiteration. In a related manner, the moving images material
surface, for which I also argue a fleshy tactility, via the writings of Sobchack and Marks,
conjures the bodys surface. It is in this sense that the deconstructive characteristic of
moulds, and the reproductive understandings of digital media and their uncertain
relationship to an original, provides, again in the words of Derrida, the means of
intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of nondiscursive
forces (1988: 21). These are forces outside or other to language and its metaphoric
substitutions, but (as Derrida says elsewhere) without which language would not be
what it is (1978: 27).
In a slightly different emphasis on producing the body outside of language, Blocker
contextualises the performative as somatic language where she states that: The
language I am after is not a language of words; it does not describe the body but rather
performatively produces the body, puts it into effect (2004: 33). For Blocker, somatic
languages metonymic form is perceived by touch which she contextualises in pain, via
the writing of Elaine Scarry on The Body in Pain.202 As Blocker notes, when Scarry
writes that physical pain has no voice, what she describes is the subordination of the
body to language. I would argue that it does indeed have a voice, but one that textual
language does not normally recognize (2004: 36).203
While I am not particularly engaged with the notion of pain, as it integrates mind and
body through performance (Blocker 2004: 34), I take from this idea the significance of
See Elaine Scarrys The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World which I have not
myself referenced.
203 Blocker argues that this problem of how to hear the bodys voice is one particularly open to
female understanding in that patriarchal philosophy has overlooked the body in a mind/body
split.
202

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acting in the body, of the struggle that is always the verbal action in becoming that The
Artist Will Be Present distinguishes from representations of the body. I am interested, from
Blockers perspective, in my own experiences of performing Above and Back in front of
the video camera. Even though the works are continuously digitally looped, I perform
each performance as a continuous duration until I cannot do it for much longer. I do
this to augment the physical struggle of the performance, so the audience gains a sense
of my bodys effort as it sweats and reddens in the process. This insistence on the live
duration means that mistakes (a glimpse of the clay ball I carry and manipulate) cannot
be edited out, obliging me to repeat the performance over again. Part of my tiredness is
due to the fact that the particular take recorded is not the first I have done that day. I
have recorded each work about twenty times and chosen a final version with the least
number of errors. Of course I would hesitate from suffering the gym for this length of
time and, more significantly, doing the same repetitive and back-breaking exercises over
and over that these works demand. During these performances I try to suspend my
consciousness of my body in a way I might do to endure pain or perhaps a long yoga
pose. I try to postpone thinking about my body and strive to exist in it for the duration of
the work. I am always surprised at how bruised and sore my body becomes due to this
deferral that, in real life, I would not undertake. Im interested in how the struggle of
my bodyin the relentless sound-track and in the returning bodily performance/s
makes itself felt in the body of the audience as utterance in distinction to description.

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ABOVE, 2008

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Moreover, Blockers notion of somatic language incorporates the body/s of the audience
as pain might be shared in the second person. As she writes, somatic language talks
back. In that sense, it is spoken in the second person and in the imperative; it implicates
the viewer in performances where the body is shared (2004: 35). When my body is
understood in these terms, its liveness is catalysed by the part subjects of the Take series
(and the partial moving images of them and my body) that draw out its potential. And
the body/s of the audience as part objects are drawn into an impossibile exchange
where the demarcations of donor/donee (subject/object) give way to undetermined
reciprocity. It is from this perspective that liveness is the impossible gift of being alive.
Liveness is what could not be present, what we could not recollect nor had a record of
what had been done.

6.9.2

THE FORCE OF THE MOULD

The previous sections articulate how seemingly inert part objects like the Wedge of
Chastity or Hamiltons bread dough objects, or the the Take series et al. might expand
notions of the live encounter. That through their erosion of form they should catalyse
all those parts absent to them. These are the operations of magical mimesis within
performative ritual contexts where these part objects are transformed as part subjects
catalysing (drawing out) the body/s of the audiences in a reciprocal exchange that is
always one of encounter. With respect to these concept of erosion and formlessness, and
in relation to the mould, Krauss describes Naumans sculptures that cast the underside
of things as the path of implosion or congealing, and the thing to which it submits
this stranglehold of immobility is not matter, but what vehiculates and subtends it: space
itself (Bois and Krauss 1997: 215). Krauss is discussing works such as Space Under My
Steel Chair in Dusseldorf (1965-68) and Platform Made up of the Space between Two Rectilinear
Boxes on the Floor (1966). She observes of these furniture and architecture orientated casts
by Nauman that, without titles, we have no idea what they are, the congealing of
space into this rigidly entropic condition also strips it of any means of being like
anything (Bois and Krauss 1997: 215-216). I would add that Space Under My Hand When
I Write My Name, also completed in 1966, shares the implosion of the other works and
augments the discussion by means of the effect of contagion by human contact upon the
object and the near total absence of the well built industrial metaphor common to

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Minimalism.204 My point is that Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name is even
better suited to Krauss ongoing argument that: What Naumans casts force us to
realize is that the ultimate character of entropy is that it congeal the possibilities of
meaning as well (Bois and Krauss 1997: 216). Space Under My Hand When I Write My
Name, cast between hand and flat surface, offers an ambivalence that truly demands its
title for clarification. This is the kind of work,
... which understood the very specificity of the trace itself (the this) as a form of
entropy, a congealing of the paradigm. Once more it is to join the proliferation
enabled by the mould or matrix to the X that congeals the very possibility of space
even as it marks the spot. (Bois and Krauss 1997: 219)
When Krauss says the congealing of the paradigm she refers to the congealing of the
axis of substitutions: a is a, there is no field of substitutions. In this way, Naumans
literal titling is a play between languages literalism and the possibility of illusiveness
outside the force of language. To my mind, while I appreciate this playfulness, Nauman
undoes something of the violation of the limits of space (the forced syntagm) that his
objects sustain without his titling. I was conscious of this dilemma in titling the Take
series. Were I to opt for titles like the space between the inside of my wrist and the
underside of my chin, I would have obviated to a large extent the viewers searching for
a correspondence with their own bodies.

The background to this observation is complex in that Krauss employs two models for antiforms attack on Minimalism and its insistence on the well built industrial metaphor, rational
tectonics and material strength. These two models revolve around the terms explosion and
implosion. In this context she credits Nauman with an attack far more deadly than Morris
anti-form The latter she observes as an explosion or dismemberment of the
fabricated object to release its material components from the corset of their construction
(Bois and Krauss 1997: 214-215). She refers here to works such as Morris felt Untitled (1967-68)
where the structural logic of the felt sheet, cut in the studio on the floors horizontal axis, is then
scattered (dismembered or exploded). Naumans attack, on the other hand, takes the path of
implosion where an inversion of the spatial characteristics of the mould, rather than a dispersion
of fragments of matter, offers a sense of congealing immobility. I part with Krauss observation
only in minor detail in that works like Space Under My Steel Chair in Dusseldorf does echo at least
some of the functional character of Minimalist objects if the task of anti-form was, in the
sentiments of Morris Artforum essay of April 1968 offered by Krauss, to shatter the
constructed object and disperse its fragments (Bois and Krauss 1997: 214).
204

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MARCEL DUCHAMP, FEMALE FIG LEAF, 1950

In relation to Duchamps Female Fig Leaf, Jones approaches the same logic inherent in
the mould when she describes a non genital crevice. While stating that the Female Fig
Leaf is related to the female genitalia of Etant donns205 in that it is the reverse mould of
the female pudendum, Jones describes this ...as the (non)genital crevice of the nude
itself... [marking] the reciprocality of the convex and concave, and potentially of male
and female genitalia themselves (1994: 91).206

I personally fail to see how any of these objects were employed in the manufacture of Etant
donns. The cunt of the work bears little resemblance to the opposite impression of Female Fig
Leaf. Etant donns has an open, violated wound, not particularly representative of female
anatomy. But if the erotic objects were not directly related to the fabrication of Etant donns, and
neither are they cast directly off the body, I suggest they are made to approximate the charge
(aura) of contact (contagion). Should this be the case, and I wager it is, Duchamp goes to great
effort in creating facsimiles of objects with the characteristics of magical mimesis.
206 Jones notes Rachel Blau DuPlessis discussion of these erotic objects as ...marking not the
reverse of what an actual womans pudenda would look like, but a strange crack - more like the
imprint of buttock than of female genitalia. She quotes Blau DuPlessis as follows: He has
opened the cunt to find the ass and goes on to note that this distortion is due to the bizarre
anatomy of the nude figure of Etant donns (1994: 263n111).
In a similar vein, while not as cogent, Didi-Huberman writes that the heuristic nature of the
mould allows Duchamp to refine [a] fantasy of organic reversal which underlines all of his
anthromorphic theory. This notion accesses a spatial paradox of obstructed openings [that]
allows a theory of appearances elaborated by Duchamp in the Grand Verre (from this point one
could argue that in the Female Fig Leaf the female genitalia appears for the same reason that it
appears in negative (1997: 158). The reversal, in effect, becomes a visual signifier of the notion
of touched or contacted, and by implication, history and delay. That which Molesworth refers
to as memory and loss (2005a: 199-200). It also contributes to a lack of representational fixity
which is a state of the liminal and in which the viewer is obliged to fill the cavity within a
model of performativity.
205

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And as previously noted, Naumans work, like the Take series, announces a bodily
contagion left on the surface of the cast. As in Derridas writing on signatures, these
part subjects, while indexing the language of the mould as reproducible, concomitantly
index their inherent unreproducibility.207 And where the contagious flesh of the artists
body is so evident on the surface of these works (as an absence that the body/s of the
audience might try to encounter) there is a collision between an assumed industrial
mechanics of the mould/cast function and live arts repetition of bodies that always
already disappear. In this way performativity is never stable (there is never a
reproduction if one engages phenomenology or performativity) but it is precisely its
iterability that makes performatives possible. To repeat, it is in this sense that these part
subjects are a manifestation of the nonpresent remainder. This is the supplement that
never breaks with the liveness of the moment but is a continuous and homogeneous
reparation and modification of presence (Derrida 1988: 5) in the performative
document. Molesworth talks of Duchamps erotic objects reproduction in a way that
echoes these concerns of proliferation:
That he [Duchamp] would quickly edition them, reproduce them, or, perhaps
more precisely, repeat them intimates that there is no closure, no complete working
through, no act of reparation that finalizes our pendulum swings from love to
destruction; there are only countless small gestures and acts of reworkings. (2005b:
197)
It should be clear by now that I am interested in a series of partial subjects (casts, moulds,
looped video, sound et al.) that, while understood against a terrain of mechanical
reproduction as their inherent process, bear upon their surfaces moments of fleshy
liveness that are only fathomable in relation to their iterability. Molesworth emphasises
See Krauss in relation to the index where she discusses Duchamps Elevage de poussire (Dust
Breeding) and the photograms of Man Rayboth as objects that result from dust accumulated on
a prone surface over several months or physical imprints transferred by light reflections onto
photo sensitive paper respectivelyas impressions that act as a kind of physical index for the
passage of time (1986: 203). In reference to Andr Bazins The Ontology of the Photographic
Image, Krauss argues that the impressions (linked as they are to photographic processes), by
virtue of their process, are indexically linked to the object itself in ways that exceed
representation. This is useful for my ongoing argument that the conditions of contact or
contagion in the mould/cast operation solicit a proximity to the represented by way of its very
process. As Bazin argues, this is true no mater how fuzzy or distorted the photographic image.
In this sense the force of the process overrides the demands of representation which is a condition
evident throughout my discussion. And in a direct reference to physical imprints, Krauss writes:
The image created in this way is of the ghostly traces of departed objects; they look like
footprints in sand, or marks that have been left in the dust (1986: 203).
207

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these formal (mechanical) devices in relation to bodily repetition when she writes that
biological and industrial models of repetition are porous to one another. And she
goes on to say: Bodily repetitions both emanate from and are governed by the space of
fantasy and desire (2005b: 25). In her assessment of Duchamps erotic objects,
Molesworth suggests that moulds and casting, unlike assembly line reproduction,
offer us repetition of a bodily and psychic nature produced by the reproductive
technique of casting, a process redolent with metaphors for memory and loss (2005a:
179-182). And earlier she underlines that repetition generates the unique (2005b:
20).208 In this way, while she does not reference the notion of the supplement,
Molesworth infers that it is the very iterability of reproduction that drives our desire for
the unique moment of the live.209 While Molesworth does not discuss Naumans works,
her writing in relation to the significance of the process of casting is apt, particularly

Molesworths argument rests on a rejection of mainstream art historical assumptions that the
readymades introduce the forces of mass production into the realm of art (2005a: 188).
She attempts to re-write the Duchampian legacy, not so much from the perspective of the massproduced readymade, but from that of Duchamp from the 1950s: preoccupied with handmade
objects underscored by the dynamics of reproduction and replication. (2005b: 19). Her position
relies on the handiwork and editing of the three erotic objects bleeding into a bodily
interpretation of the handmade readymades produced, first by Ulf Linde from 1960, and then
Arturo Schwarz in 1964 (Duchamp had already editioned the three erotic objects by the late
1950s) (2005a: 185, 189). Her argument relies on the idea that the former editing (in
reproduction) of the erotic objects produced an environment, or precedence, for the latter
replication of the readymades. Significant to her approach is that, by this stage, more or less all
the original readymades had been lost and Schwarzs replicas, overseen in every detail by
Duchamp, enlisted craftsmen to manufacture editions from blueprints developed from earlier
photographs (2005a: 185). In this light the coincidental attention to reproduction and the
handiwork evident in editions of erotic objects and readymades moves Molesworth to make a
link between the erotic objects of the body and the allure of the commodity object and
further that Duchamps sculptural practice is shaped by the relays between such different stages
of desire. And as she goes on to say, the most significant distinction is that the original massproduced readymades offer the problems of reproduction and manufacture while the
handmade replicas of the readymades offer us the problem of repetition and desire of and for
lost objects (2005a: 192). She puts some store in a distinction between handiwork and casting
as opposed to that of the assembly line, that the former process is analogous to erotic or
bodily modes of repetition while the latter relates to industrial production akin to the
concerns of Minimalism (2005a: 192; 2005b: 19). As specific examples of this argument she cites
the Bottle Rack of 1964 which betrays the marks of replication by hand as do all the editioned
readymades. It is not a bottle rack straight off the assembly line. The edition of 12 Fountains,
made one evening at the direction of Duchamp and Schwarz on an assembly line from a mould,
in the words of William Camfield as quoted by Molesworth, relate more to sculpture than to
readymades, given its slight but perceptible modulations of surface which suggest its origin as
handicraft sculpture rather than an American assembly-line production (2005a: 188n112).
209 This idea is lent further criticality by David Joselit on the trajectory of Duchamps production
as bio-readymades (2005: 161). The swarm for Joselit is a principle of combination
situated somewhere between the undoing of structural logic associated with Batailles informe and
the rule based permutations of Minimalism (2005: 164).
208

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where Naumans work employs his hand as an everyday but primary means of touch:
bodily, psychic, and industrial modes of repetition are mutually contingent upon one
another as the desire to repeat the pleasurableness of the erotic encounter transmogrifies
into the repetition of the workday (2005b: 25).210
The importance of understanding casting in the realm of process in variance to product
is underlined by Didi-Huberman when he says that: The imprint touches us with what
proceeds it, that contact finishes, almost fatally, with the thought of separation, of
mourning, of absence. So the imprint does not so much produce itself as much as it is in
process (1997: 181).211 In this sense, for the imprint to occur, the body that made the
contact must have disappeared causing a slippery play between contact and distance,
shattering our rapport between the future and remembrance in a kind of delaying
act the Now and the Former [Maintenant et lAutrefois] reunite themselves in a new
and disconcerting [indite] formation (Didi-Huberman 1997: 181-182). This is a
temporality that invests in the undecidability of temporality inherent in action painting
or performance: a temporality of deferral of actions; the work as a radical absence in the
trace of the gesture. What is specifically of note with regard to many of the works
discussed in this project (Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name, Female Fig Leaf and
the Take series) is the role reversal where the mould is the work and the absent bodies
assume the roles of the casting agents. For to fill these crevasses would not reproduce the
bodies that made them and not reproduce the central and vertical armature of the
figure important to a formal holistic understanding of the figure in space.212 To evoke
the terms used by Balfour, these moulds and absent bodies present a shadow of the
reflected image as an image of analogo-telepathy (1892: 21-25). In this way the artwork
as impression signifies the bodys appearancean action at its originand the
disappearance of the body. This is to describe action or sympathy at a distance: those
magical rites that follow the so-called laws of sympathy: like produces like; contact
Molesworth cites Hesses Accession II and states: These artists are obsessed with returning,
with repetition, like machines and like creatures ruled by the contradictory rules of eros. In each
instance they return to a particular gesture repeating the gesture as a way of making a thing
that is as much about repetition as it is about anything else (2005b: 25-26).
211 The end of this quote is as follows: Pour quune empreinte de pas se produise en tant que
processus While Didi-Huberman does not discuss Naumans works, he pulls together a
triumvirate of concerns focused around the notion of contact under the auspices of a play
between desire and grievance.They are: contact with material; with flesh; and with
disappearance (1997: 11).
212 See Rosalind Krauss Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977).
210

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results in contagion. Crossing space and time, these are the remainder and reminders of
some absent form. The image has a power in the moment of its revelation that
Benjamin refers to as a time-moment ( as referenced in Chapter 3 in relation to
mimetic incongruence) where relations between past and present are dialectical. In this
respect, Buck-Morss begins The Dialectics of Seeing by quoting Benjamin on the notion of
origins; that the term does not mean the process of becoming of that which has
emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and
disappearing (1989: 8n1). In this context the act of repetition is the medium of
redundancy: closure can never be achieved and this is the triumph of the process.
It is in this sense that the mould, and its relationship to a fleshy contagiousness, can be
contextualised by means of the reversibility of the chiasm. The profound difficulty
inherent in naming (or describing) objects like Space Under My Hand When I Write My
Name, Hamiltons mouth casts, Female Fig Leaf or the Take series is that they congeal time
and space in-between two in what Sobchack describes as providing a reversible
ground for the figure of the other (2004: 294). Here, the twoness of the complex
procedure signified in my making the partial objects in the Take series is always nonlocatable and profoundly liminal. Moreover, the moving images that never reveal the
object of their making signify a slippage between my role as subject and object of the
work. Concomitantly, as audiences participate with the Take series and/or their moving
imagesboth intertwining a fleshy intimacythey look past the gift that is the work
adumbrated in a force-field of potentiality.

CONCLUSION
In appealing to expanded notions of the live encounter, The Artist Will Be Present focuses
on how we get to objects; it prioritises performative operations and processes in difference to
artefacts as objects of scopic recognition. To this end, I try to question the category of
the live by never offering up the presence of my body, by always facilitating its loss.
This engagement plays out as performative sculpture and as moving images of my
body always intertwined between the viewed object and the authorial subject. In this
way I attach significance to acting in the body and to the struggle that is always an
action in becoming, that I hope the Take series and its ongoing relationship to the

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moving image works (Above, Back and Caress), and the sound work (Over & Over),
distinguishes from representations of the body.

BACK, 2008

ABOVE & CARESS, 2008

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A series of operations (pendular devices that swing or vacillate, always ambivalent to

stasis) importune this questioning. They are moulds and casts that bear a contagiousness
with respect to the body/s that participate in and with them, and my live body
performed in privatealso offered as a performative documentation that drives the
moment of the live. These operations are supplementary to the force of the moment
and, as such, signify its disappearance while simultaneously ensuring the iterability of
that very liveness. These dual operations present these part objects/subjects as
metonymically redundant (as part of a whole) and the performing live body of the artist
as partial subject/object acting metonymically. If metaphor plays a synchronic field of
substitutions constitutive of a paradigmatic axis, metonymys temporality operates the
additive and dislocative syntagmatic chain. It is with metonymy, as Barthes suggests,
that violations happen in the poetics of forced syntagms. Metaphor documents the live
(substitutions and repetitions); metonymy is the crossing chains of substitution that
violate their meaning in the momentary liveness of the body and its immediate
(simultaneous) loss. This would be the nonpresent remainder that, in its metonymic
underperformancealways manifesting as parts for the whole where redundancy is the
noise of all we do not have but desirestresses the significance of force over form.
The supplementary nature of the moulds that make up the Take series (which vacillate
between objects of my making and the subjects of my body) always elude the body/s of
the audience that try them, and often surprise viewers in their intimate fleshiness: I serve
myself up in this object archive, inviting audiences to touch me but never reach me.
These moving images in their ceaseless digital repetition index the body of the artist at
work, always in a process of performative utterance underscored by the incessant soundtrack of breathing and making (Over & Over). Their imagery, sound and spatial
configuration simultaneously escape their own and audiences concurrence. To my
mind these objects are only ever near completion in the audiences that engage with
them physically (Cut 1) and in a haptic opticality (Cut 2), which is always never ending.
Such an archive, like Derridas writing on the signature, marks out the impossibility of
its pure reiterationthat is the difference of the utterance at every live momentwhile
its very function relies on it being repeatableiterable(in variance to Austins
determination of a noniterable performative utterance in a saturated ritual context) of
every moment of presence by virtue of its (always) readiness to (albeit inadequately)
produce an originating moment of contact. It is on these terms that I endeavour to
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allude to the so-called live moment, to reinforce the impossibility of its pure iteration,
and, like Derridas writing on the gift, the impossibility of the gift of time.
I have wanted to open up a space to reconsider aspects of late 20th-century art (from
Minimalism, through artists like Nauman, Clark and Hamilton et al., towards
performance) through the lens of late 19th-and early 20th-century writing on sympathetic
magical action. A legacy of cultural anthropology dealing with magic (that was
privileged in establishing grounding aspects of structural linguistics), circulates around
Tambiah. Here, a notion of sympathy resides both in a debt to contexts of ritual and
modes of mimesis. In this respect the ambivalence associated with partial objects and
subjects is what keeps the force-fieldthose performative contextsalive. Hence,
sympathetic magical action, in the context of performative illocutionary force, offers
another model of articulating an authentic performative document (in its necessary
ambiguity and contagion) as an encounter with the live.
As such, comparison to anatomical votives and ritual contexts activates a notion of
force-fields that performatively draw out participation to the point that what we call
subjects and objects are affects of this drawing out; hence their partiality. From this
standpoint I tender a reassessment of part objects/subjects in their similarity
(ambivalence) and contagion (performative attention) and suggest that artists like
Duchamp, Nauman, Hamilton, Frankovich et al. indulge in magically ritualised acts that
are deeply performative and based on desires to undo that which is undesired. In this
context, as indicated above, Naumans Space Under My Hand When I Write My Name might
be contextualised as Balfours telepathic analogy: action at a distance that is a shadow of
the reflected live encounter that is its life force; without which it ceases to exist.
It is along these lines that the histories and practices of sympathetic magical action, and
its relationship to mimesis, make foremost not representational fixity, but the force of
performative utterance surrounding images within efficacious ritual contexts. At this
juncture operations have a primary purpose other than aesthetic. The principles of
anatomical votives (when embedded in ritual contexts) offer an instructive context in
which to explicate Krauss notion of morphological ambivalence in concurrence with a
body art that negotiates a liveness that is radical in its reciprocal engagements but

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ambivalent toward putative intention.213 This wording is based on Jones endeavour in

Body Art: Performing the Subject to avoid a concrete social practice in favour of a
productive ambivalence towards the social and its radical opening to the other (Jones
1998: 246-247n237). And in the contexts of performativity, the attention offered in
participation will always seek unlimited potential. This augments discussions in art
history about part objects and widens their terms of reference, insisting that they
become cognisant of the complex subject/object interrelationship to which approaches of
phenomenology and performativity aspire.
In this context, sympathetic magical action (at a distance) offers a model for thinking
about fragmented objects and subjects that engage with performative contact as
disturbing closeness and contamination/contagion. Now performative objects (renamed part subjects) in relation to the artists body and the body/s of audiences have an
ethical and pedagogical social force (manifest necessarily as an ambivalent reciprocity
between subjects and objects). In this regard the body/s of the donor/artist/audience
their dimensions and characteristicsare key to the operations that position these agents
as surrogate performers in the ritual mix; as Marcel Mauss would put it, producing the
person; producing the live. To tie any one of these agents down would annul the force that
draws them out. In all the works discussed in this thesis the artists trace has become the
subject, necessarily detached from the present and singular intentions of its
production (Derrida 1988: 20). And in this way the body intensifies its own
supplementarity and incessant deferral, raising the question as to whether the artist will
be present.

As Derrida writes, the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability, by
the possibility of its being repeated in the absence not only of its referent, which is self evident,
but in the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification (1988:
10).
213

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