PERFORMING THE INTERIOR
By Ric Allsopp
Introduction
The following observations derive from an interest in Phillip Warnell’s work over the last few years. They make some tentative links between the work as a means of ’seeing’, and histories of the body as a site of performance. I would like to start with an observation by Terry Eagleton on the elusiveness of the body:
Part of the point of bodies is their anonymity. We are intimate with our bodies, but we cannot grasp them as a whole. There is always a kind of ‘outside’ to my body, which I can only ever squint at sideways. The body is my way of being present to others in ways which are bound in part to elude me. It slips through my grasp, just as it does when it asserts its own material logic in the face of my hubristic schemes. In all these ways, its mortality is revealed – for nothing is at once more intimate and more alien to us than death. (Eagleton, 2004:167)
The poet Baudelaire once noted in a short essay titled ‘The Philosophy of Toys’ (1853) that talking to our toys when we are children displays an overriding desire ‘to get at and see the soul of [our] toys’. It seems to me that much contemporary artwork manifests a curiosity with the elusiveness, intimacy and mortality of our bodies in its attempts to reveal, to uncover, to rearrange, to provide insight into the multiform relations that constitute our bodies. The tension between the desire ‘to get at and see the soul’ – or at least the inner workings – and the elusiveness of that endeavour in many ways characterises Warnell’s work.
One of the enduring qualities of performance is its ability to make the invisible visible, to reveal those hidden, concealed, overlooked aspects of our behaviours and representations as individuals (or as groups) and place them within discourse. Performance is a lens through which both subject(s) and object(s) are joined. What were considered visionary and imaginary entries into the individual body, associated for example with the traditions of shamanic, magical and theatrical performance, are now routinely materialised through remote imaging technologies which can render the hidden interior spaces of the live, active body visible and transparent. When placed back in the context of performance such techniques can reveal imaginal apertures which in turn disclose other possibilities, other boundaries for our conception of the body (and the body politic) as a transforming and generative site of representation.
Performance also makes the visible invisible. It enables us to internalise what does not belong to us, what is exterior to us. It acts as a metaphor, an expression that personalizes, translates, and interiorizes the world perceived outside ourselves. It familiarises what is estranged, what is not of us. It is like the gelatinous coating of a capsule that enables us to swallow certain modes of discourse, certain outlooks on the world that, once the coating dissolves in our stomach, spread throughout our body, nourish us and become an intimate part of ourselves.
Western civilisation has always had a special interest in notions of interiority and exteriority, of intrusion and extrusion, the ways in which we can negotiate transitions between inside and outside. These notions were always somehow linked with the question of the real, with the question of what really exists. On one hand, as Frances Dyson and others have noted, in the western philosophical tradition (particularly since the Renaissance) ‘the concept of self and other is based on visibility’ and ‘consciousness and knowledge itself [are] defined by sight’ – to see is to know. On the other hand, for example in the writings of Plato or throughout the Christian tradition, only that which is invisible, which is difficult to reach, to bring to light, is considered to be real. Psychoanalysis is based on the idea of the repressed, the invisible, that which is kept inside, far away from the outside, from the surface. Surface by contrast is that which presents itself to you, which is obvious and therefore, by default, not ‘true’. The existence of my intestines, the fact that my stomach acids are at this very moment digesting the remains of my lunch, is not in doubt. I feel how real this is, even though I can’t see it. I might however doubt my sanity or my ability to articulate these ideas.
Such distinctions and tensions between inside and outside, between seeing and hearing as modes of approaching or investigating the subjectivity of the body as an intimate and elusive site, are inscribed in the body of Warnell’s work. For example in the visual transit of a camera through the digestive tract displayed as a continuous nine-metre photographic line (Nine Metre Web Object, 2005) or the amplified sounds of the digestive process (Bororygmus, 1998). As Frances Dyson points out:
To hear but not see (eg. to hear someone’s speech) […] is associated with rumor, noise, ‘bad sound’, the absence, or the uncertainty of knowledge. Hearing gets confused between the exterior and the interior, as sound is both heard and felt at the same time. The voice moves from within the body to the outside, passing from subjectivity to objectivity, from interiority to exteriority: confusing borders, exposing illness and anxiety, revealing emotions through a cough or a quiver, in spite of the speaker’s intention. Sound’s immersive quality, together with the physiology of the ear, destabilizes the subjectivity of the subject; unlike the eye, the ear can’t be closed, unlike the gaze which is always in front of the subject and projected onto the world, listening involves an awareness of the unseen and possibly unwelcome spaces on the periphery of one’s being. (Dyson, …)
What is made visible through performance may both become substantial and material - for instance the material images of theatre or the art object; and remain as immaterial, mirror-like images or ideational forms. This double sense of what is made ‘visible’ and in what sense, is central to Warnell’s work and positions it (like much contemporary arts practice) somewhere between performance, visual and sonic arts.
One of the difficulties with understanding immaterial images (in the sense of what performance makes visible) is that, as James Hillman has pointed out,
[w]e tend to literalize […] the [immaterial] image into a visibility [….] We perceive images with the imagination, or better said we imagine them rather than perceive them, and we cannot perceive with sense perception the depths that are not extended in the sense world. The error of empiricism is its attempt to employ sense perception everywhere, for hallucinations, feeling, ideas and dreams. (Hillman, 1979:55)
This tension between the material and the immaterial image that artwork produces, which is hard to grasp, eluding language, subsisting on the edge of perception, of reason, at the point of going beyond, might be typified by the work of Anselm Keifer – for example the lead books, the lead airplanes – which though massively present in their leaden materiality, speak to something beyond, if only to the ephemerality of the acts of observation, spectatorship
and participation.
The immaterial image, what ’seems to be’, what ‘appears to be’, these ideational forms and shapes or ‘invisible images’ extruding from the work, has a more ambivalent relationship to its material counterpart or twin in Warnell’s work in its curiosity with visibilities that can be achieved through camera or through ultra-sound. The engagement with how interiors are visualized and represented, the relationship between visible forms and ideational forms that are produced through the work, how we as spectators are enabled to interpret what we see or hear, places us within the imaginative mind of the work, that is constantly between material and immaterial forms of the work.
It is this complexity of the image, this ambivalence, or meeting point that forms and produces the intimate and elusive body in Warnell’s work.
A Body of Work
For Warnell the body as a site of exploration has produced a body of work placed in between performance, the visual and the sonic. The work over the last 10 years, utilising live performance, video, installation, ultra-sound, high-speed film cameras, has described and performed a virtual body, a body produced from a number of perspectives, in a range of modalities, an immaterial and often spectral body that reveals itself in relation to certain techniques and material treatments. A considerable part of his practice has concerned itself with the exploration of, and curiosity with, the often difficult or apparent fact of the body’s interior – or more precisely its ‘inside-ness’. It displays a certain fascination with shock, intrusion, the sonic traces and evidences of the interior of the body; embellage – wrapping or covering the body or parts of the body in honey, in rubber, in water – exploring the sensations and representations of ‘insideness’ and of being inside.
The work relates to the use of the artist’s body in performance, and consequently to the histories and traditions of performance, and of vision and visuality. To use Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’ taxonomy of the way in which performance mediates the artist’s body, as a measure:
a) much of the work involves, attempts or implies an intrusion into the body and in so doing challenges our acceptance of those body boundaries in terms of the role of the artwork, and the representation and construction of subjectivity;
b) the absence of the body – either through its concealment or substitution – as for example in ‘Listeners’ & Speakers’ which substitutes the shell for the head; or in the endoscopic pieces where we as spectators are enabled to see inside the body but do not then see the body that contains or enfolds this ‘inside’; or the recent photographic work with collections of gall-stones which are themselves residues and sedimentations of metabolic processes and no longer directly associated with the absent bodies that produced them;
c) the capsule endoscope, or ‘pill camera – in transit through the digestive tract - which links the visible to the mechanism of vision. Prosthetic or extended bodies in the form of remote eyes or ’second skins’ – as instrument; the journey of a seeing capsule that encapsulates and encodes the environment that it travels through, projecting it into the realm of the visual, offering it up, or perhaps ‘bodying it forth’ for interpretation and analysis.
The work sits across the boundaries of bodies as anatomical, physiological objects of research; as a feeling, sensate, metabolizing locus; and as a topos or location of the art work.
Moving across or between each of these ‘measures’, the work explores the interstices of representation – those interfaces or surfaces where materials come together, the momentary opening of an aperture formed by some means of technological intrusion. To take ‘Streaming’ (2000) and ‘Shock’ (2003) as examples:
The small perceptual readjustments that the looped video installation ‘Streaming’ (2000) requires of even the most cursory of viewers, […] are part of a continuing investigation of the bodily sensorium which, through attention to traumatic, defamiliarised, disoriented or displaced physical experience, locates apertures or sutures that question the fixities and conventions of representation and identity. The terms ‘aperture’ and ’suture’ are appropriate to this body of work, indicating not only the ‘wounds’ associated with trauma, and possible points of discursive or visionary entry into the body but also the active mediation and attention of the lens through which both subject(s) and object(s) are joined.
Phillip Warnell’s […] video/ performance work is distinguished precisely by its attention: to detail, to humour, to technique; and to the complex relationship between live performance and video. The body is not primarily used as a resource for performance, but as a sound source or source image, as a presence in the work, a live, active, rather than performed, image. Whilst the work often relates to a live context, it is always mediated. In ‘Streaming’, video acts to maintain an image which cannot be sustained under the conditions of live performance. The role of the body is seemingly passive. It acts as a surface for the liquid to run across whilst at the same time altering the speed and direction of the flow. There is a continual collision between two different qualities - the flow of liquid and the passive physical presence of the body - maintained through a video loop which creates a sense of continuity. In contrast to the reception of live performance, video allows precise control over what can be witnessed in the work. ‘Streaming’ becomes a video work rather than a mediated performance work because it succeeds in focusing our attention on the interim - the immediate relationship between body and liquid - by denying visual access to the (off-camera) source of the liquid flow and thereby disrupting questions of the origin and destination of the events that occupy the frame.
In […] ‘Shock’ […] the investigation of shock takes the issue of the body a stage further and develops shock as a strategy of engagement which departs from a more familiar use of the aesthetics of shock to minimise the distance between subject and object in order to defamiliarise or disrupt fixed conventions of representation.
(Allsopp, 2003)
Both ‘Streaming’ and ‘Shock’ are pieces which produce materials and images associated with an array of traditions of performance that have influenced contemporary practice. I would like to make a link here between notions of interiority, exteriority and the production of imagery, with two forms of performance - spirit mediumship and shamanism – as forms that utilise notions of intrusion and extrusion and which might constitute points of reference for a reading of Warnell’s work – particularly in its relation to histories of performance that explore the transit between interior and exterior spaces.
Aside from its fine art or science reference, Warnell’s work follows in many respects a performance ‘tradition’ that might include Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann or Nam June Paik. The network or array of tropes and images that he has utilised form at least a poetic or metonymic link to such work through his use of shock & trauma as the ‘marks’ of the shamanic – the desire to see beyond. The work uses a similar register of imagery from the position of an exploration of vision in its relation to the body. The materials employed in both ‘Shock’ and ‘Streaming’ as pieces that engage with the traumatic moment
Include for example honey - a ‘plasmic’ substance, preserving, sweetening, which visually defies gravity and covers the body as a second, healing prosthetic skin, which might bring to mind both the protective spirit skin of the shaman and or the ectoplasmic extrusions of the spirit medium which, as Marina Warner has pointed out, ‘approximates, awkwardly, to the hyle of matter in Aristotelian thought, which receives the stamp of the spirit conjured by the medium, and is extruded as form.
Ectoplasm
The discussion and investigations (notably by Scientific American) from the beginning of the 20th century up until the late 1930s of ‘ectoplasm’ - allegedly the materialisation or extrusion of spirits or ghosts through or (more sceptically) from the body of a medium –– attest to the desire to see in-between, to see beyond. The term ‘ectoplasm’ itself - from ecto (outside) and plasma (something to be formed or moulded) – was borrowed from biological usage: ‘an amoeba’s jelly-like body becomes faintly parcelled out into an outerform (ecto) and inner soft (endo) layer’. The phenomenon of ‘ectoplasm’ speaks also to a shifting perception of vision: both vision as registration; and vision as the performance of illusion, or of seeing beyond.
In his discussion of early 20th century ’spirit photography’ - the material by-product of spirit activity - Karl Schoonover describes the extruded substance of ‘ectoplasm’ imagined as ‘ a conduit for a visual message from the spirit world’. Marina Warner notes that ‘ectoplasmic effluvia are phantasmic templates on which the conjured spirit – the incorporeal personal agent - makes his or her mark’. The exaggerated corporeality of ‘ectoplasm’ and the need for substantive physical evidence is linked to new camera techniques developed in the 1920s.
If the spirits parasitically borrow from the body to produce material evidence of their existence, then photographs that document this phenomenon seem to borrow from the corporal spectacle in the same way. Schoonover notes that the ‘bizarre and sensational enactment [of the spirit medium] forces us to reconsider photographic representation as other than transparent reflection’ – and also perhaps to consider performance as a meeting point of approaches that doesn’t claim ‘veracity’ but more simply a ’seeing beyond’ or ’seeing through’. The photographs ‘depict photographic representation as a traumatic proceeding that disrupts and threatens to destroy the event it aims to preserve’ – allowing us to see beyond the event (as performance) without that event being ‘about’ or ‘descriptive’.
It is ‘beyond’ and that, not its reference to reality, is its fascination. The sense of ’seeing beyond’ – with its transcendent echoes – is perhaps more accurately ’seeing between’ – peering into bodily and imaginal apertures and occluded spaces using vision, sound (and humour) to disrupt the sedimentation of layers of the body as a set of representations.
In Warnell’s work the idea that the spirit extrudes and imprints itself on ectoplasmic substance is displaced in a sense into a projection (from a ‘transparent’ camera moving though the system) that allows us visualise the interior environment of a living metabolising body, an indexical registration of a hither-to invisible area. A projection that still has in its turn to be interpreted or absorbed. The connections between the mantic and the techniques of ‘high-tech imaging’ or other forms familiar to contemporary ‘technicians of the sacred’ are still compellingly in place.
Shamanism
Retaining a sense of ‘divine inscription’ (the legibility of the body as a divine text) – shamanism (and other such healing practices and belief systems) constitutes a perspective on the body that can be said to run in parallel (rather than in opposition) to rational, structuralist, or post-structuralist constructions of the body. Shamanism’s central premise is that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living. Shamanic practice requires specialised knowledge or abilities – a mediator talking with the souls / spirits on behalf of the living, able to intervene on their behalf and effect personal (and social) change. The causes of disease are believed to lie in the spirit realm and manifest in the physical and material realm – thus ‘entering the body’. The discussion of ‘intrusion’ – for example in Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘The Intruder’ which holds together ideas of both the intimate and the alien - has a wide-ranging metaphoric resonance.
According to a practicing neo-shamanist Karen Kelly
The concept of soul loss […] is relatively well known to contemporary shamanic practitioners. However in many shamanic societies world-wide, the removal of a spirit which has intruded into a person and caused their illness is at least as common a practice. This form of healing is called shamanic extraction.
In soul loss, a part of a person’s soul is seen as lost and must be found and returned to them. In an intrusion, a spirit which does not belong in a person comes into them and must be removed. Shamanic extraction healing is based on the belief (or perhaps a better way to put it would be to say ‘based on the the experience’) that illness is cause by intrusive spirits - that is, spirits which do not belong in the sick person.
The intrusive spirit may have a physical form. Ethnographic accounts talk of shamans pulling bloody feathers, stones, worms, even small animals from a client’s body, sometimes even when the shaman had been carefully searched beforehand for evidence of ‘props’. At other times it seems that the shaman prepared a physical object that looked like the spirit they had seen and hid it on their person to be produced at the appropriate stage in the extraction.
Karen Kelly notes that the ’shaman must stand between the worlds, and must see both the patient’s body and the spirit intrusion they wish to remove’. Essie Parish – a Pomo Indian ’sucking doctor’ working in southern California during the mid-twentieth century - described this process of pulling out or extracting sickness thus:
And when the power touches the pain, your breath is caught - it gets so that you can’t breathe. But there is no fear. It is as if your chest were paralysed - your breath is shut off. If you should breathe while holding that pain, the disease could hide itself. As the pain quiets your breathing, you can feel the pain there, with the result that your hand can take it out. (Kelly, ….)
The question here is not whether such an extraction constitutes a sleight of hand, or a deception, but is a question of performance as a means of representing an aperture, or a suture, a gap or a join between layers of both the imaginal and the material. Which is precisely the place where the artwork in Warnell’s case, works.
The blinding of Gloucester in ‘King Lear’, the images of mutilation by the Viennese Actionist Schwarzkögler [etc.] are theatrical and performative representations which enable us (within a set of cultural demarcations) to see beyond the material, in the same way that ’spirit photographs’ both question and demonstrate the ‘camera’s unique ability to capture the contingent’ through the agitated and expressive body of the human medium; and, through that same body enacting the indexicality of photographic representation, staging the physical process by which visual evidence of the spiritual world ends up in a photograph.
By re-imagining photography’s role in generating evidence of supernatural phenomena, ectoplasm images mark a shifting of the discourses of photographic representation away from the camera as mystical conjuror and toward photography as keenly sensitive registration process (Schoonover, 2003:2)
The ‘ambivalence’ of Warnell’s work lies precisely in its exploration of such ‘in-betweenness’ – its ability to register – through ‘free fall capsule endoscopy’ or through ultra-sound for example – the experience of, the shock of being in two places at once. It also performs a re-imagining (as Schoonover claims for ectoplasm photography) of the role of visual registration and by extension the potential bodies that such registration produces.
If […] ectoplasms depended on a corporeal spectacle to dramatize indexical registration, then this bizarre and sensational enactment also forces us to consider photographic representation as something other than transparent reflection. (Schoonover, 2003:5)
This might also be true in the case of shamanic extraction or capsule endoscopy. Each ‘technique’ as a means of ’seeing beyond’ - the ‘para-visual’ – is limited by its own blind-spots, assumptions and techniques. The artwork reveals in its exploration of materiality and immateriality that ephemeral space that can contain both the intimate and alien.
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References
Allsopp, Ric/ ‘Shock-Tactics’ in Zero Visibility, ed. V.Valentini
Baudelaire, Charles / ‘The Philosophy of Toys’ in Essays on Dolls
Barthes, Roland/ ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’ in The Story of the Eye
Crary, Jonathan/ ‘Modernising Vision’ in Vision & Visuality
Dyson, Frances/ Forgetting the Phone: Sound, Virtuality and the Rhetoric in-between
Eagleton, Terry/ After Theory London: Penquin
Hillman, James/ The Dream and the Underworld
Kelly, Karen/ ‘Spirit Intruders’ in Sacred Hoop
Nancy, Jean-Luc/ ‘L’Intrus’
Warner, Marina/ ‘Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm’
Warnell, Phillip http://www.phillipwarnell.com
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Performing the Interior MA-SODA December 2008
Sovereignty
State of emergency
Subjectivity
Phenomenology
Reductionism
Situationist International
Culture jamming
Dada