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Marilène Oliver |
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Amelia Jones 16 August 2007 Failed Knowledge and the “Respect for Otherness” in Marilène Oliver’s “Le Grande Jeu” In 1994 the US government’s National Library of Medicine (run by the National Institute of Health) famously produced the first installment of the “Visible Human Project,” documenting the body of Joseph Paul Jernigan. The corpse of this 39 year old convicted murderer was frozen and sliced to produce thin slabs of flesh that were then scanned using CT and MRI technologies to produce an array of visual imagery (with the actual body disintegrating into mush once scanned). A woman’s body was later subjected to similar treatment. The official website for the project notes: The Visible Human Project ® is an outgrowth of the NLM's 1986 Long-Range Plan. It is the creation of complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies. Acquisition of transverse CT, MR and cryosection images of representative male and female cadavers has been completed. …. The long-term goal of the Visible Human Project ® is to produce a system of knowledge structures that will transparently link visual knowledge forms to symbolic knowledge formats such as the names of body parts. The fantasy of “transparent” links between visual and cognitive knowledge –that seeing is knowing, that by taking the proper vantage point and using tools to enhance visual acuity so as to bring huge things closer or make microscopic things visible and so knowable— has a long history in European culture, finding its apogee in the theories of the Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers. In his 1435 “Treatise on Painting,” Leon Battista Alberti thus theorized knowledge through the act of vision, which was to be concretized by the painter or architect in visual and/or spatial form: "The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen…. [Painters should] know that they circumscribe the plane with their lines. When they fill the circumscribed places with colours, they should only seek to present the forms of things seen on this plane as if it were of transparent glass.” Western representation itself thus hinges on this belief system, which posits seeing as knowing—a belief system pivoting around the observer as physical body in space (as is clear through Alberti’s description) and as subject mentally capable of transcribing the sensual knowledge of the world, gathered via the senses of the physical body, into intellectual and emotional knowledge. In fact, it has long been one of the fundamental goals of knowledge in Euro-American culture to come to an understanding of the human body– whether this understanding is visual, psychoanalytical, anatomical, biological, genetic, and/or chemical. Marilène Oliver’s project is to use the tools developed through the “Visible Human Project” as well as those tools afforded by subsequently expanded and refined MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imagery, which is magnetic wave based) and CT (X-Ray based computerized tomography) scanning processes to explore the aesthetic, political, philosophical and conceptual issues posed by both the belief in seeing as knowing and the desire to comprehend the human body through visual knowledge. Oliver herself has argued that such digital imaging biotechnologies produce a new relation of vision that she calls “pivotoptic,” noting that this new relation “allows us to enter the information/world at ground level and spin around inside it.” Oliver continues to note that pivotoptic vision replaces Albertian laws of perspective with “density of information around the axis,” such that the “more we pivot, the faster we spin, the more information we acquire…. and it is impossible to get an overview of data.” For Oliver, given this new system, “the only way to find the information we want is to go inside it.” Oliver’s project richly explores the permutations and implications of pivotoptic vision, a thoughtful new concept of how visual knowledges accrue and come to mean in contemporary culture. I would suggest, however, that, rather than replacing perspectival vision, these technologies extend it into virtual space. In fact, the pivoting around an axis is, precisely, a reenactment through the terms of internet and computer imaging of the subject centered in vision (albeit often, as in the case of internet gaming, via an avatar rather than an “actual” body). So much is explored in physical and visual form in her new works Heart Axis and Womb Axis, two installation pieces that deploy the multiplanar reconstruction tool, which allows the user to set an axis point in the body (the heart and womb respectively in this case) and then pivot visual information around it, to refigure the dataset of “MELANIX,” an anonymous female body CT scanned and available to download as individual images. Approaching these “bodies,” we become acutely aware of the centres – or, in Eastern terms, Chakras—of our own bodies (women in particular will respond to Womb Axis, of course). The fourth (heart) chakra and the second (naval/sacral) chakra are pivotal seats of bodily and emotional health, linked respectively to love and compassion and to desire, sexuality, and procreation. Even if the viewer is not aware of the theory of charkas, she would tend to respond viscerally to the layered body shifting in space via the part of her own body referenced by its axis. Too the bodies thus abstracted might also remind a seasoned yogi of stretching and exerting her body in various yoga poses. At the same time, they decompose in space, their layers never adding up to the firm, heavy flesh we expect a “real” body to inhabit and enact. The decomposition shatters any holistic sense of the body particularly on close-up view at which point these arrays of transparent [Mylar?] sheets covered with vibrant greens and reds are revealed to be composed of tiny squiggles. Approximating the doodles of a bored or psychopathic draughtsman (filling in an existing contour with obsessive and repetitive swirls), the squiggles of course “represent” the intricate layers of flesh that comprise the organs of the human body. But the mode of representation has complex implications. The lines and shapes are a digital reconstitution of the X-Ray, a pattern of 0’s and 1’s arranged via digital imaging to indicate the exact original composition of the various parts of the body. By re-working such representational systems in her work Oliver explores the shifting relationship between bodies (the body photographed; the body of the artist; the body of the viewers), visual imagery, and knowledge. While most theorists of digital imaging have tended to argue that it is not indexical, that the digital relation breaks the material connection between (in this case) the body and the image, art historian Laura Marks argues for a more complex understanding. As Marks notes, digital technologies are not exactly indexical but they do maintain a material relationship to the things they document or encode: “within digital circuits, electrons continue to exert themselves in analog ways…. Although it no longer bears an analog relationship to its initial object, the digital image relies for its existence on analog processes [such as photography] and on the fundamental interconnectedness of subatomic particles,” which convey the signals that comprise the image and enable it to resemble with precision the “original.” Oliver’s description of the relationship between this vision and the information it provides– the necessity of going inside information—defines something radically new about how we approach the world now that such precise imaging technologies seem to promise an infinite array of information about (in this case) the body. Heart Axis and Womb Axis seem both to put us “inside” the body and to defer the possibility of our ever attaining a holistic rendering that makes full sense of it. The question that is productively begged by Oliver’s work is whether this seemingly infinite array actually brings us any closer to “knowing” the body (as a specific subject or a universal sign, as promised by the Visible Human Project) than Alberti was through his model of painting. What Oliver’s project ends up suggesting, in fact, is that the multiplication of images, and the fact that they are (in one form or another) “photographic,” digitally accurate and precise, ” rather than painterly brings us no closer to “knowing” what constitutes the human than did Alberti’s “cone of vision” model (the claims of the Visible Human Project, noted above, notwithstanding). Her project also points to the limits even of the concept of visual knowledge itself: for what exactly is it that we seek to know from looking at the body? Simply its mechanical secrets (as in physiological branches of biology)? Its chemical workings (chemistry)? Or, more likely, its role as a substantiation of the “subject” of the body herself (as in psychoanalytic models, the “identity” and “selfhood” of, in this case, MELANIX – paradoxically, an anonymous female). Oliver’s 2001 I Know You Inside Out, which made use of the “Visible Human” data printed onto sheets of acrylic in order to (in her words) “put him [Jernigan] back together” again, both mimics and mocks the pretensions of the project’s official website – the aesthetic rendering of Jernigan’s body is no more or less “truthful” than the 1871 cross-section CT images available (for a fee) through the website. Her Family Portrait, 2003, in which she had herself and three additional family members MRI scanned (at 90 scans per body) and then printed life-sized onto acrylic sheets, reconstructing these in layers to approximate the bodies in space, also intervenes in these structures of knowledge and belief. Family Portrait reconstructs bodies out of the multiple scans; rather than delivering each family member to us in some “truthful” form, the piece renders instead ghostly traces of presence. Even more than the melancholic effect of analogue photography (noted with such eloquence by photography theorists such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag), Oliver’s Family Portrait points to the inevitable failure of representation to secure the immortal existence of the “real” subject (its tendency, instead, to mark inexorably the retreat of the person always already into the past, her date with death always imminent if apparently deferred momentarily through the image). Oliver herself has noted the melancholic personal dimension of this project for her. The four bodies hovering like ghosts in the space of the gallery and heir contingency on perception and the engagement of others is made evident through the fact that they shift in space, disappearing from some angles while looking almost “complete” from others. This contingency marks the impossibility of their actual togetherness as a family: her parents divorced long ago, and all of them live across the globe at this point. In her new work Oliver takes the relationship between the body and technological imaging processes and animates it even further. Through the use of a Macintosh-friendly freeware DICOM viewer system called OsiriX (which includes the multiplanar reconstruction tool noted above), she takes existing CT-based information and cuts through it along multiple axes, exploding its static informational status as horizontal slices and making it (in her words) “pirouette around internal or external axes,” thus animating it in three dimensional space. In Dervish she makes use of the MELANIX CT dataset. Evoking the “pivotoptic” gaze noted above, she animates the body of MELANIX in three dimensions—and each of the five reconfigured MELANIXes pivots around a different axis (centre, spine, belly button, left side, right side). The resulting installation is again a ghostly refiguring of a body in space in multiple forms (each of which, as she notes, offers a “differing encounter… with the body”), one that begins with purely virtual digital code, reconstituted and manipulated through the OsiriX software, materializing it in physical form. But what, in 2007, does “purely virtual” mean? Can we assume that there is a distinction between a “real” or “material” body and a “virtual” one? As Marks’s theory suggests, there is not so clear an opposition between the virtual (or digital) and the analog—both enfold information, and rely for their appearance and form on “the fundamental interconnectedness of subatomic particles.” In fact, the most important insight afforded through an encounter with Oliver’s work, I want to argue, is that there is no clear distinction between the virtual and the real, between the coded and the analog, between the body and representation (clearly, in terms of the latter, the very existence of these datasets, based as they are in the case of the Visible Human Project on documenting micro-slices of human flesh now dissolved, begs the question of how different these latter two are). First of all, on an experiential level and in phenomenological terms, as Oliver notes, scanning and manipulating images that emanated originally from a fleshed body (or corpse), in itself affords an exchange that redefines her relationship to the bodies of others and thus to herself (“I have been able to invest myself and my ideas into it…. I wanted to create a sculpture that … exposed not the body itself but that exposed the vision that is seeing that body.” Secondly, in terms of theories of representation, we have come far from the Platonic and modernist belief in that there is a “real” body that is then secondarily (and in an inferior way) rendered through representational means. As Judith Butler notes, bodies “matter,” but their matter does not secure their meaning or truth; nor is the “material” body somehow more “real” than the representational one. Both are equally discursive, and reciprocally determined in relation to the world: “As a projected phenomenon, the body is not merely the source from which projection issues, but is also always a phenomenon in the world, an estrangement from the very ‘I’ who claims it.” The bodies in Oliver’s works are “projected phenomena,” and aggressively so. They are clearly representational and yet also vaguely “material” (they exist in space; they are recreated from photographically precise images of sections of bodies). By concretizing aspects of MELANIX’s body through the maquettes in her new Grand Finale project, for example, Oliver further explores the tension between the “real” or “material” and the “virtual.” What does it mean to make solid objects – tiny colored transparent “bodies”— out of informational animations based themselves on an anonymised body of a woman we can never “know” (either as a person or as a biological entity, in spite of the detailed photographic information available)? Oliver’s new work points to the tension between knowing and not knowing, between seeing and knowing; it also ultimately exposes the tension between our desire to know the other and our desire to have him (the beloved, in particular), which in turn links up to our desire to know (ourselves) and to be in some stable way, usually defined in our culture through a relationship to a body that secures us. By wanting to know the body of the other we hope to reveal something fundamentally true about ourselves, just as by wanting to have, to love, the other we yearn to know ourselves. While other artists and entrepreneurs have explored these tensions to different effects—from Orlan’s public plastic surgery events from the past decade, in which she has her body flayed and reconstructed with scalpel and stitches, and Mona Hatoum in her brilliant 1994Corps Étranger, in which the viewer is confronted with video footage of Hatoum’s interior body taken through a anthroscopic video camera, to the ridiculous but also menacing plastinated human corpses in Gunter von Hagens’ recent Body Worlds exhibitions—Oliver takes this exploration further and subjects it to a more extreme interrogation, addressing it on the level of the signifier itself. While Orlan brilliantly questions our desire to remake our bodies medically in order to match internal or external ideals, and Hatoum questions the boundaries between the inside and outside of the body (and suggests that we cannot “know” a subject through such photographic explorations), and while von Hagen is happy to suggest that his plastinated corpses render the truth of the human body, Oliver continually questions her own motivations and pushes the technologies to their limits ethically and philosophically. Ultimately, by querying the link between vision and knowledge at the levels of the body and the signifier, Oliver produces works that activate the viewer and encourage her to acknowledge the limits of the fantasy that seeing is knowing. As noted, our new regimes of digital imaging and globalised circuits of information exchange exacerbate the tendency in the West to disembody vision, adequating it with knowledge itself. Laura Marks notes that a haptic approach to vision “might rematerialize our objects of perception,” leading us to an awareness of how we “change in the process of interacting” and thus reembodying vision. Oliver’s project engages us in what Marks calls a haptic visuality, evoking an erotic relation that returns us to the politics of an embodied relation to the world: By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of myself…, losing myself in the intensified relation with an other that cannot be known. … I lose myself as a subject (of consciousness) to the degree that I allow myself to be susceptible to contact with the other…. What is erotic about haptic visuality, then, may be described as respect for otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other. This “respect for otherness” is completely lost in van Hagens’ Body Worlds and the Visible Human Project – both of which purport to deliver the “truth” of the other by rendering his body in explicit (and excruciatingly precise) detail, while in fact evacuating the bodies of whatever (unknowable) experiences and emotions made them human while they were animated in and alive. But the respect for otherness is precisely what Oliver expresses both in her written descriptions of these new works in “Le Grande Jeu” and in the projects themselves. Explicitly acknowledging the impossibility of knowing the other through visual (or bio-technological) means, no matter how “advanced,” the works in “Le Grand Jeu” render these mostly anonymous bodies in tender and (in Marks’s terms) erotic ways. Noting herself that she gives as much as she takes with these works (“[t]he more time I spend working with and through computers the more I feel I they way I interact with others and even myself is changing. I definitely have both a physical and a virtual reality but I am still not confident about who I am in the virtual reality – am I a digitised version of who I am in physical reality or someone very different?,”) Oliver’s project sparks us to an awareness of both the limits and the infinite possibilities of our connection to other bodies in the world.
NOTES See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible _human.html. The website also document s a female body, with more precise imaging at .33 mm (versus the male body’s 1.0 mm) intervals. Alberti, On Painting (1435-6), tr. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1979), 43, 51. These citations are from Oliver’s fascinating article describing her technique and the processes she makes use of, “Making Dicom Dance: The Use of Medical Scan Data to Create Time-Based and Sculptural Artworks,” 2007; manuscript p. 10. I am grateful to Oliver for sharing this text with me. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 171, 174. Oliver “Making Dicom Dance,” ms page 1. See Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), where he explores the melancholic contingency of the body in the photograph: “what I see [in the photograph] has been here, in this place which extends bet infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); ... it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred,” 77. See Oliver, “Making Dicom Dance,” ms p. 4. Oliver, “Making Dicom Dance,” ms p. 11. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 17. See my discussion of Hatoum’s work in chapter four, “Cinematic Self Imaging and the Televisual Body,” in Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject ( New York and London: Routledge, 2006). That there is a religious dimension to the desire to know and to secure the immortality of the human body is clear through van Hagens’ Body Worlds project and in the way it is marketed in particular. His plastination techniques are embraced by religious organizations, such as the Catholic church: “ In 1983, Catholic Church figures asked Dr. von Hagens to plastinate the heel bone of St. Hildegard of Bingen, (1090-1179)….. His later offer to perform Plastination on Pope John Paul II foundered before serious discussions.” And, as if the plastinated human body gives access to transcendence, van Hagens himself has noted: “I hope for the exhibitions to be places of enlightenment and contemplation, even of philosophical and religious self recognition, and open to interpretation regardless of the background and philosophy of life of the viewer.” See “Dr. Gunther van Hagens,” on the Houston Museum of Natural Science website, http://www.hmns.org/exhibits/special_ exhibits/bodyworlds/bodyworlds_vonhagens.asp?r=1 Oliver not only eschews such fatuous “spiritual” claims; she offers a complex intellectual exploration of biotechnological and visual renderings of the body that is also aesthetic and open-ended. Her project acknowledges the gap between visual knowledge and emotional impact without fetishising the unknowable in religious terms, as do van Hagen and his followers. Ibid., 19, 20; she is citing Levinas’s work in this concept of losing the self. The idea of haptic visuality echoes Barthes’ theories of photographic meaning cited above; in Camera Lucida Barthes writes: “the photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity,” 12. On the lack of respect for the subjects who originally inhabited van Hagen’s plastinated corpses, see Lawrence Burns, “Gunther van Hagens’ Body Worlds: Selling Beautiful Education,” The American journal of Bioethics 7, n. 4 (2007); available on-line at http://www.bioethics.net/journal/j_ |
Biography 1977 Born in UK 1996 - 1999 Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design B A (Hons) in Fine Art, Printmaking and Photo media 1999 – 2001 Royal College of Art, London M A (RCA) in Fine Art Printmaking 2000 Artist in Residence, Takumi Studio, Gifu, Japan 2003 - 2005 Fine Art Digital Co-ordinator, Royal College of Art, London 2003 Visiting Lecturer, Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, London 2004 Visiting Lecturer, Brighton University 2005 Visiting Lecturer, The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University 2005 Visiting Lecturer, Royal Academy, London 2006 Visiting Lecturer, Royal College of Art, London 2006 to present MPhil Royal College of Art Solo Exhibitions 2003 Intimate Distances Beaux Arts, London 2004 Intimate Distances SPHN Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2004 Intimate Distances Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham 2006 When Two Worlds Collide Beaux Arts, London 2006 Family Portrait Howard Gardens Gallery, Cardiff 2006 Selected Works The Hospital, Covent Garden, London 2007 Le Grand Jeu Beaux Arts, London Group Exhibitions 1998 22 Printmakers, Standpoint Gallery, London 1999 Screensavers, Lauderdale House, Archway, London 1999 Now Vision, Victoria and Albert museum, London 2000 Divine Expiration, Takumi Studio, Gifu City, Japan 2001 Never Look Here, Foyles Gallery, London. 2002 ART2002, Beaux Arts, London 2002 Beaux Arts, London 2004 Print Open, Invited artist, RWA, Bristol 2004 Summer Exhibition, The Royal Society, London 2004 Gods Becoming Men, Frissarius Museum, Athens, Greece 2004 Beaux Arts, London 2004 The Magic Inside, The Science Museum, London 2004 Technique, Royal College of Art 2005 Art 2005, Islington Design Centre 2005 Royal Academy Summer Show, London 2005 Young Masters, Art Fortnight, London 2005 Summer 2005, Beaux Arts, London MiniArttextil 2005, Como, Italy Oliver & Perucchetti, Beaux Arts, London 2006 Acts, Kulturhof Flachsgasse, Speyer, Germany Royal Academy Summer Show, London Summer 2006, Beaux Arts, London Kunst-Körperlich Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche, Osnabrück, Germany Medicine and Art , Kunst Museum Ahlen, Germany Universal Leonardo, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford
Art 2007, Islington Design Centre Seen and Unseen, The Hub, Sleaford Productive Matter, Café Gallery, Southwark Interim Exhibition, Royal College of Art, London Through the Looking Glass, Building 1000, London Have A Good Nose, Kunstverein Bad Salzdetfurth E.V. Bodenburg, Germany Diagnose Art, Kunstspreice Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany Royal Academy Summer Show, London Summer 2007, Beaux Arts, London Forthcoming Exhibitions 2008 East Wing Collection 8, Courtauld Institute of Art, London Public Collections 2004 The Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham 2004 The Wellcome Trust, London 2005 The Victoria and Albert Museum, London Bibliography 2001 The Times, page 5, 30 th May Friday Review, The Independent, 1 st June Bizarre Magazine, August Printmaking Today, page 5, Autumn 2002 Art Review, December / January Art Tomorrow, Edward Lucie-Smith, Vilo International, October 2003 Jeanette Winterson, Catalogue Essay, Beaux Arts The Art Newspaper , no.139, September Wallpaper, page 245, October Printmaking Today, page 21, Autumn 2004 Familienfotos aus dem Kernspin-Tomografen ART-Das Kunstmagazin Intimate Distances Exhibition Guide, Kunsttermine, page 30, January Körperscheiben , taz Berlin, 21 st January Ungewöhnliches Abbild einer Familie (M. Lintl), Neues Deutschland, 23 rd January Erkundungen an verschlossenen Orten Berliner Zeitung, Kulturkalender, Blick unter die Haut Berlin Live, Berliner Morgenpost, page 23, 15 th January Geisterfamilie (R. Preuß), Der Tagesspiegel, Ticket No. 3, page 10, 15 th January Exhibition Guide artery Berlin – Berlin Gallery Guide, January/February Intimate Distances The Exberliner, No.12, page 102, January Intimate Distances Prinz magazine, February Marilène Oliver: (Skulpturen) Highlights Kunst, tip Berlin page 102, February Kunstforum International , page 230, February Die Welt , 13 th February Marilène Oliver: Intimate Distances (R: Berg), Kunstforum International, vol. 169, page 230-231, March/April Marilène Oliver: (Skulpturen) tip Berlin, March Marilène Oliver: (Skulpturen) tip Berlin, April Printmaking Today , page 10/11, Summer Metro , Metro Life, page 17, 27 th July Evening Post, page 21 2 nd September, page 3, 30 th July The Independent, The Information page 13, 24 th July The Guardian, The Guide, 21 st August Leonardo Magazine, Issue 37:5, Artist Statement, Autumn 2005 Daily Telegraph, page 19, 1 st June Evening Standard , page 18, 20 th June Eine Rekonstruktion des menschlichen Körpers (J. Schindelbeck), Speyerer Morgenpost, 10 th October Akt-Ein Spiegel persönlicher Wahrnehmung (S. Mertel), Die Rheinpfalz 2006 Michael Symmons Roberts, Catalogue Introduction, Beaux Arts Prints Now by Gill Saunders & Rosie Miles, V&A Publication, Spring Kunst Körperlich, Körper Künstlich, Osnabrück 2007 Diagnosis [Art] Contemporary Art Reflecting Medicine Wienand research rca Royal College of Art Rising Stars of the contemporary art world The Times, 28 th June Amelia Jones, Catalogue Essay, Beaux Arts Awards, Prizes & Commissions 1999 Now Vision, Cannon Photography Prize 2001 Alf Dunn Prize 2001 Printmaking Today Prize 2004 Sound response by Max Richter to Intimate Distances 2005 Art meets Science Award, Highly Commended 2007 Matthew Hay Commission, Aberdeen 2007 The London Original Print Fair Prize, Royal Academy of Art Summer Exhibition Broadcasts, Talks and presentations 2004 FAB (Fernsehen aus Berlin) Kultur-Check, Ausstellungsbeitrag, 22 nd January 2004 RBB Kulturradio (M. Groschupf), 3:15pm, 28 th January 2006 Putting the bits and pieces back together again, RSA, 23 rd November 2006 The Great Lady. Discussion with Francis Wells, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, 31 st October 2007 Resurrecting the Digitised Body: The use of the ‘Scanned In’ body for making artworks. Presentation at Eva, London, 13 th July 2007 Leonardo’s Great Lady. Discussion with Marilène Oliver and Francis Wells, presented by Geoff Watts on Leading Edge, Radio 4, 2 |
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