Art and the Fragmented Body
On Bones
Many years ago, well before the phrase “body horror” was coined, I was briefly obsessed with a book I pulled from some obscure corner of the stacks of Wells Library. It was called Master of Death, and it examined the work of Pierre Remiet (fl. 1380s), who was a particularly vivid illuminator of corporeal images.
My dissertation in a very broad sense was on images of the body in the history of political thought, so to me what we might call the “exemplary corpse” — specifically as a warning, a reminder/memento mori, a sober image of common frailty, or in some cases a humorous provocation — I found especially interesting. The body in its decline and dissolution into constituent parts was especially important, as as site of particular concern and collective anxiety: given the Pauline emphasis on the resurrection of the body, that is, numerous late antique and medieval thinkers raised the objection about the (literal) incorporation of bodies into other bodies. What happened to persons (for example) who died on the battlefield or in pandemics, whose bodies in turn became the bodies of other predatory animals? If in the Christian understanding of messianic time we would be returned to our actual, specific, corporeal and fleshy bodies, how would (what we can only call) the time of other bodies be undone?1
To me, the answer was less important than the question. I was (and am) really interested in ascetic practice as a form of political and religious rebellion, perhaps even most essentially against the human condition of mortality. In this sense the body is a blazon, a message to others in struggle against the appetites for sex and food especially, but also maybe most fundamentally as a unified and functional whole. When the body — or its constituent parts — are taken away and reinserted into other bodies and their processes, we feel a sense of dread. In our own age of organ transplants and various prostheses, we seem to be alienated from this. But in things like the “body horror” I mentioned above, the dread returns.
What brought me to this memory of the body-in-pieces is a series of stories that are unrelated on the surface, but which convey some subterranean resonances. The first concerns one of those amazing headlines that one only finds in the New York Post:
The drug in question is a new form of synthetic weed plaguing west Africa in particular. Again, the content of the story is to me less important to me than the underlying sense of dread about human remains — in this case bones which btw have not been found in any samples of “kush” so far — and their incorporation into our lives. As I was reading the headline, I recalled in a horizontal or rhizomatic way one of the typically paranoid subplots of a Pynchon novel — I think it was the Crying of Lot 49 — which discussed a rumor or urban legend that an American cigarette maker was using human bones in its charcoal filter tips. And then this reminded me of the actual historical practice — which I learned about I think through reading W.G. Sebald2 — of English and farmers harvesting bones from battlefields as a form of phosphoric fertilizer. While these are from clearly different contexts, they convey a deeper, maybe even structural underlying continuity that is perhaps our modern counterpart to the kind of Pauline concern over body disintegration and re-incorporation that I mentioned above.
From here we can also move to Hal Foster’s observation about the fragmentation and disfigurement of modern art, that is, its origin as a kind of documentation not only about body parts-as-products, but about forms of modern violence that tear the body apart, especially on infernal factory floors and the battlefields of World War I.3 This is what he says:
The 1920s were dominated by two tendencies: on the one hand, various returns to the figure often neoclassical in nature, most of which were reaction-formations against the mutilated bodies of World War I as the fragmented figures of high modernism, and on the other hand, various machinic modernisms, most of which were also concerned to make over this body-ego image that had been damaged in reality and representation alike. (“Prosthetic Gods,” pg. 6-7).
In this aesthetic space we open onto a new form of political awareness of a set of conditions that are as pressing to us in modernity (being a victim of war, having one’s hand or arm torn off by a piece of factory machinery) that are as dreadful and provocative as the medieval obsession with body disintegration and re-incorporation during for example times of plague.
(from Foster, “Prosthetic Gods”)
Whether rooted in historical fact or contemporary fantasy (body horror or the scourge of smoking human bones to chase a harmful high), there are some interesting currents circulating just beneath the surface. One wonders what forms of art will emerge out of our current moment, with its real-time genocide displayed prominently on our smartphones 24/7. Who will capture and convey the shattered bodies starved and bombed by Israel? How will we transmute this infernal spectacle of bodily disintegration into the various human endeavors of representation? I ask this question honestly in a spirit of hope, knowing that in the end this process of transformation and transmutation may be all we have in the face of unfathomable (but still human) inhumanity. How will Gaza be represented? We do not yet have a Guernica for our own time; we do not yet have a “Master of Death” illuminating our smartphone screens. We do have interesting headlines which suggest that the dread persists, even if the collective catharsis through aesthetic experience remains repressed.
In my imperfect memory, this question was raised by Caroline Walker Bynum in her excellent book Holy Feast and Holy Fast (University of California Press, 1988).
Rings of Saturn? I think?
Foster is one of my favorite thinkers. See his “Prosthetic Gods,” in Modernism/Modernity, Vol 4 No 2, 1997.