franziska schroeder center for the creative and performing arts (ni) an interdisciplinary arts...

Franziska SchroederCenter for the Creative and Performing Arts (NI)

An Interdisciplinary Arts ProgrammeQueen’s University Belfast

THE ANATOMICAL THEATRE REVISITED | University of Amsterdam | 5-8 April, 2006

Redesigning the Body

The Body Skinned

ww

w.lib

.kyush

u-u

.ac.

jp/m

ichel/p

ics/

valu

erd

a1

64

7_e

corc

he_l

o.jp

g

I examine performances of “the body skinned”

The Body Skinned

- a body incised into

- a body opened up by technology

- a body re-designed and re-made

- a body where the process of its re-design

constitutes the performance (French artist Orlan)

Overview

Consider the changes that affected the skin

To highlight the changes in the treatment of the performative body in technologically mediated

environments

Overview

By re-designing the body, these performances explore the paradoxical and the ambiguous

within the body

These performances expose threshold conditions that the body highlights and incite one to

question the body’s role and place in technologically informed performance

environments

Argument

Steven Connor (2004)

The skin allows one to keep in touch

with oneself

Psychoanalytical interpretation of Didier Anzieu

Sense of Self

Importance of skin contact in early childhood

Skin contact of the infant with the carer

“peau-moi”: the skin-self

The skin as a border between self and not-self

The Skin

First, a symbiotic relationship with the carer

The skins of both infant and carer merge

The infant soon distances itself from others

The Skin

Jacques Lacan: “Mirror stage”

The primordial experience of identification takes place

The Skin



The infant identifies with an external image of the body

The Skin




This image of another gives rise to the mental representation of an "I”

The Skin





It gives rise to the infant’s perception of “self” (Zuern, 1998)

The Skin





It gives rise to the infant’s perception of “self” (Zuern, 1998)

The skin takes on “a function of individuation for the self, which transmits the feeling to the self

that it is a single being” (Anzieu 1996)

The Skin

The skin as a covering that kept the body together

Maintained the integrity of the body

Inattention to the Skin

The skin as a covering that kept the body together

Maintained the integrity of the body

The Greek physician (anatomist) Galen

“De anatomiciis administrationibus”

His instruction on the dissection of a body highlights

an inattention to the skin (Connor, 2004, p.13).


The Medieval Period

The skin as organ of interchange

A permeable membrane

The skin was understood to be “traversable in two

directions” (Connor 2004, p.21)

The skin’s function is taking into consideration

(crucial for maintaining the body’s well-being,

as in sweating for example)


European Renaissance

The taboo of cutting the skin was released

Jonathan Sawday

“The culture of dissection” (1995)


Andreas Vesalius

(Belgian physician, 1514-1564)

in “De humanis corporis fabrica” (1543)

The skin is neglected

It is seen primarily to gain access

Vesalius’ Anatomy Theatre

http://images.umdl.umich.edu/w/wantz/images/vesdt01.jpg

Andreas Vesalius

(Belgian physician, 1514-1564)

in “De humanis corporis fabrica” (1543)

The skin is neglected

It is seen primarily to gain access

Heightened interest in the body itself

Sawday (1995): “new science of the body”

Vesalius’ theatricum anatomicorum =

a purpose-built space for the

“anatomy theatre”

Vesalius’ Anatomy Theatre

http://images.umdl.umich.edu/w/wantz/images/vesdt01.jpg

Joseph Plenck

(Viennese military surgeon)

“Doctrina de Morbis Cutaneis qua hi morbid in suas

classes, genera & species rediguntur” (Vienna, 1776)

The skin is an organ in itself,

with its own structure and functions

In/Attention to the Skin

Joseph Plenck

(Viennese military surgeon)

“Doctrina de Morbis Cutaneis qua hi morbid in suas

classes, genera & species rediguntur” (Vienna, 1776)

The skin is an organ in itself,

with its own structure and functions

Contemporary Period

Michel Serres

The multiplying functions of the skin

The most various of organs

It is as an entire environment

It is a meeting place for the other senses

It is a milieu of the other senses

The “milieu of the milieux” (Serres 1998, p.97)

In/Attention to the Skin

Michel Serres’ ‘philosophy of mingling’

“in the skin, through the skin, the world and body touch, defining their common

border. Contingency means mutual touching: world and body meet and caress in the

skin. I do not like to speak of the place where my body exists as a milieu, preferring

rather to say that things mingle among themselves and that I am no exception to

this, that I mingle with the world which mingles itself in me. The skin intervenes in

the things of the world and brings about their mingling”

(Serres 1998, p.97)

The Skin mingles

Michel Serres’ ‘philosophy of mingling’

“in the skin, through the skin, the world and body touch, defining their common

border. Contingency means mutual touching: world and body meet and caress in the

skin. I do not like to speak of the place where my body exists as a milieu, preferring

rather to say that things mingle among themselves and that I am no exception to

this, that I mingle with the world which mingles itself in me. The skin intervenes in

the things of the world and brings about their mingling”

(Serres 1998, p.97)

The other sense organs exist as “convolutions or complications in the skin”,

such as the scooping out of the mouth for example

(Connor 2004, p.34)

The Skin mingles

Skin’s changing role highlights the changes in the treatment of the performative

body in technologically mediated environments

The body ceases to be considered solely from the outside in,

as something covered by the skin

Also from the inside out, more akin to a milieu, like the skin itself

Changes for the performative body

Changes in performance technology

Not only for attaching onto the body from the outside

Also for the opening up of the body

Changes for the performative body

Preoccupation with the “border”

New ways of conceiving of the bodily interior and exterior

Derrick de Kerckhove:

“borderless tactility and of physical borders dissolving in global cyberspace”

(Becker 2003)

The individual is no longer tied to a certain place

Touch ceases to depend on the actual contact with another person

(Becker 2003)

Transgression of the body’s border

The Body Skinned, by being opened up and incised into,

highlights the bodily border (or its absence)

ThresholdThreshold

Changes in the conception of the body

Performance technology that is designed not only to suit or mimic the body

The body is being made and re-made in order to suit the performance technology

ThresholdThreshold

Stelarc’s Suspension (1976 – 1989)

The skin not only delineates a certain bodily border

The skin is the pre-requisite for the performance The suspension of one’s body by one’s own skin reinstates the skin as interface, as the surface that forms the common boundary between inside and outside

Performances exposing the Threshold

www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/suspension/images/2


Testing ground for the body’s re-making

For the body’s potential for expansion and re-location




Testing ground for the body’s re-making

For the body’s potential for expansion and re-location

The performances highlight a primordial desire of modifying and redesigning one’s body



Lewis Mumford “The Myth of the Machine” (Mumford 1967)

The body is seen as biologically ill-equipped, inefficient and fragile

Believers dedicated to the improvement of the human condition often refer to themselves as “Post-humans” or “Extropians” (coined in 1988 by T.O.Morrow)

Urge for Redesign

www.ladygodivas.ca/wpeE2.jpg and www..stevehaworth.com/graphics/stevecbr.jpg

http://www.electronicstalk.com/guides/bluetooth-module.html

Ray Kurzweil: Human Body Version 2.0 (physical and mental systems are upgraded)

Natasha Vita-More conceptualised and devised such a redesigned body and titled it “Primo Posthuman 3M+”

Urge for Redesign


Natasha Vita More, «Primo Posthuman 3M+, 2000www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/primo-posthuman/images/2


“eXistenZ” (David Cronenberg, 1999)

The computer game lives inside a biotechnological organism

It is transferred to the body through a "bioport” or “game port”

The body physically redesigned or incised into in order to perform

Body’s Redesign in Gaming


www.darkhorizons.com/1999/existenz/exist4.jpg


The Body Skinned - Design process of the body as performance

Orlan’s Surgical performances

Posthuman motto:“what I am is what I make myself into”

Self-portraitureSelf-perfection Self-questioning of her identity

Wo(man) as performing animal


http://english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/whoisorlan.htm.jpg





The surgical performances give rise to the body

“Theatre of the Self” (David Moos 1996)

Man’s urge to investigate and alter his own physical body








Not only performances conceived from the outside in, as incision into the skin

Also, technology is used for the opening up of the body and for establishing the body as a meeting place for others

The Body Skinned - a body re-made, re-interpreted and intervened into








Man as a self-making individual

Not as homo sapiens or homo ludens, but as homo faber, as man the maker

Maker and designer of his own self

“[M]an is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal […]. Until man had made something of himself he could make little of the world around him.” (Mumford 1967, p.9)








The endeavour of man to understand his own body

A reflexive act, an act allowing man to reflect on himself

In this act of understanding himself, man has to be seen as a performing animal, as “homo performans”, since “in performing, [man] reveals himself to himself.” (Turner 1987, p.81)








Orlan’s and Stelarc’s performances showthe bodily interior and exterior

They expose the threshold conditions, which the body highlights

The performances show how a performative act is able to highlight the transgression of the body








Brings to the fore the urge for redesign and relocation of the body

It makes one question the body’s place and meaning in a performance environment

Bodily borders and future applications of technologies and their impact on the human body are questioned

The performances highlight the ambiguous nature of the body

They expose the body as residing on the threshold

The Body Skinned - Summarised



Anzieu, Didier. 1996. Das Haut-Ich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Becker, Barbara. 2003. Marking and crossing borders: bodies, touch and contact in cyberspace http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/home.htm edn. UK: Department of Performing Arts/Brunel University.

Connor, Steven. 2004. The Book of Skin. New York: Cornell University Press.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2003. Human body version 2.0. Available: www.kurzweilai.net [February, 2006].

Moos, David 1996. Memories of Being: Orlan’s Theatre of the Self. Art + Text 54 edn. pp. 67-72.

Mumford, Lewis. 1967. The Myth of the Machine. London: M. Secker & Warburg Limited.

Plenck, Joseph. Doctrina de Morbis Cutaneis qua hi morbid in suas classes, genera & species rediguntur, Vienna, 1776.

Sawday, Jonathan. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. Routledge edn. London and New York.

Serres, Michelle. 1998. Les Cinq Sens. Paris: Hachette.

Turner, Victor. 1987. The Anthropology of Performance. AJ Publishing Company.

Vesalius, Andreas. De humanis corporis fabrica, 1543.

Zuern, John. 1998. Lacan: The Mirror Stage. CriticalLink website, University of Hawaiihttp://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/index.html[June, 2005].

www.ranjiv.com

References

URL’sStelarc

www.stelarc.com[February 2006]

Orlanwww.orlan.net[March 2006]

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Franziska SchroederCenter for the Creative and Performing Arts (NI)An Interdisciplinary Arts ProgrammeQueen’s University Belfast

[email protected] URL: www.lautnet.net

www.ranjiv.com

KONTAKT

franziska schroeder center for the creative and performing arts (ni) an interdisciplinary arts...

Documents

skin slide

body inattention

body skinned

skin connor

body highlights

skin wa

performative body

body redesigned