Elle était fort déshabillée
Et de grands arbres indiscrets
Aux vitres jetaient leur feuillée
Malinement, tout près, tout près.
_
Toutes les femmes qui l’avaient connu furent assassinées.
Quel saccage du jardin de la beauté!
– Rimbaud
_
I want to be a good woman
And
I want for you to be a good man;
That is why I am leaving.
– Cat Power
Everything is a body producing other bodies. We should begin by theorizing the body as a social and psychological construct within historical terms. Quite quickly we can notice the inquiry being transformed into one concerning reality and fictions, or perhaps more precisely a constellation of meta-realities which act in narrative terms. There has always been a fictionalized corpus of literature surrounding the body, and indeed one can soon agree with many feminist critics who position the body as a site of performance for various socio-political narratives. As a sociological construction, a distinction between body as physical entity and body as image or construction should be made, and thus the capitalized Body will be used throughout this paper in reference to the latter. (I wish to view the body as a performance of power within the discourse of a dislocalized power in Foucauldian terms) I also wish to further confuse my epistemological aim by incorporating a particular notion of the Real, which is required for any discussion of aesthetic expression, and indeed representation in a more broad sense. What I wish to posit as the Real is the narrative constructed by the Self in order to provide an ontological basis for conceptions of time and space by which the Self may operate in pragmatic terms. The Real is a fiction necessary for the localization of the Self within subjective terms, or rather to negotiate subjective experience of everything which is ‘not-I’ in relation to that which is understood as the Self. By definition (within Derridian terms), identity is created specifically by the intersection of Self and Other, and in this regard the Body can be seen to be a product of and an existence within the public sphere. More precisely, the Real provides a means for self-actualization, for the application and understanding of meaning and purpose to the Body and consciousness. Fundamentally the Real is related to the ego within Freudian and Lacanian conceptualizations, and consequently is dependent on the intersection of nature and culture. For the latter, the ego functions akin to what I am positing as the Body, namely the projection of an imagined corporeality into public discourse.
It is here that I wish to make the rather bold statement that for the purpose of cultural aesthetics and production, there was no Real for female subjects until the feminist struggle for agency and self-determination in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course this is intended only as a broad generalization limited to the histories of Europe and the Americas. Individual examples of female subjects who could transcend the limitations of a patriarchal construction of their identity are numerous, yet pale in comparison to the influence of male circumscription of female agency and identity. The Real was defined within an essentially masculine ontology. Woman was the categorical Other, a difference from an essential normative (male) Body; in this capacity, woman is the first foreign body. As such, the female Body functions as the locus for the Real for both sexes, and more precisely in the sense of negation for the male psyche. This is true in spite of the fact that the female body, in particular during pregnancy, itself represents the intersection of nature and culture. My desire to confound (or perhaps even misunderstand) the theoretical tangents associated with the discourse on the body is an (enfeebled?) attempt to understand the body as a field of heteroglossiac readings and misreadings which when performed reify identity within public space. The corpus of imagery that I wish to invoke is intended to act as a collected structure in the vein of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau project (see below), and consequently should not reflect any gestural attempt to totalize and unify into a cohesive and monolithic theorization concerning the body. There are innumerable bodies and, to borrow a phrase from Julia Kristeva, innumerable body-Selves, and consequently there can never be a generalization of the Body as a single conceptual entity. The Body is a function of social and cultural discourse and is fundamentally a historical and geographic construction, and as such is privy to structural and ontological transmutation just as other socio-historical constructs. Most importantly for the aims of this paper, the Body should be regarded as a site for the production of knowledge, and therefore relates to a larger structural concern as to the exercise and performance of knowledge / power in the Foucauldian sense. It is within these terms that I wish to examine the work of several female modern artists, in particular Frida Kahlo and Mina Loy.
I
The history of western philosophy and social discourse (a generalized term, to be sure, and yet one whose tendencies and commonalities admit some degree of utility in this context) demonstrates a rather clear differentiation between the mind and the body, reflecting an ancient Platonic instinct for the transcendence of consciousness. The body was conceived as the least important aspect of human existence, a distant echo of an eternal and authentic whole usually associated with the divine. The body is the locus for disorder, destruction, irrationality, and bondage, and serves in many respects to hinder the capacity of the mind to develop. The mind, lacking a physical manifestation and yet able to alter physicality (within certain parameters, of course) to adhere to its will, is by virtue of its rather ephemeral nature posited as more authentically human. And yet even Plato could properly situate the mind, despite its transcendent nature, as having some germinal root in the body. The Symposium, for example, outlines a healthy consciousness emerging from the cultivation of the senses; love in Plato becomes the reification of subjective experience. (In the discourse of contemporary neural science, the fact that sense-information processed by the mind is mediated and given a certain immateriality (becoming neural information) through bodily experience is demonstrative of the filter which is consciousness; the conscious mind can be seen as an aperture limiting information passed to it from the body.) The change that came with the medieval period was a moralizing of this binary construction, with the mind given a sort of preternatural existence within the realm of goodness (godliness), and the body became associated with the degradation and transience of temporal existence. There can be no legitimate attempt to map the Real in the terms which I have outlined above, for all of temporal existence was fictionalized against the (hyper) reality of divinity and the afterlife. (In this sense the Real and the fictive unite, mirroring the unification of body and mind.) Key to this construction is the understanding that all materiality is a priori in a state of suffering, as all material and corporeal forms seek a kind of divine annihilation (a gesture to merge with the godhead). I will return to the annihilation of the Real as a historical concept with a discussion of modernity proper below, and in particular with a discussion of several of the works of Frida Kahlo.
It is important for the progression of modernity to chart the influence of certain artefacts of Christian dogmaticism concerning the body. Christian ideology had – through many of the Church ‘fathers’ such as Ambrose, Tertullian, and Augustine – associated the body, and in particular the female body, twice removed from the divine as it was created from Adam’s own body, as the site of evil and corruption. The feminine form was more thoroughly theorized as the entry for evil into the world in both philosophical and pragmatic discourse; as the fifth-century bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom wrote, “the whole of her body is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum and the fluid of digested food ... If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and the cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is only a whitened sepulchre." It should be viewed as one of the great ironies of history that irrationality was inscribed upon women’s bodies in such an obviously irrational manner, reflecting contemporary superstition rather than the triumph of the rational(ly male) mind.
Perhaps the most damning castigation of female bodies emerged with a (deliberate?) misreading of one of the books of Genesis. Tradition posits that original sin was a bodily experience precipitated by the inability of a woman to curb her instincts against a sensory pleasure leading to transcendent knowledge. In this capacity, the Fall serves as a metaphor for the importance and conscripted bondage of the male body to pre-industrial society, which in turn figures as the locus for economic production. There were no bodies as such in Eden, or more precisely there were no Real bodies, but rather humans existed in a form of divine pre-cognate beatitude in a non-civilized state of existence. It was the body of woman who tied man to a fate of suffering as it was she who introduced not temptation, but the succumbing to temptation, and consequently the pleasures associated with the female body were themselves transformed into a form of suffering. The female body is figured as the means by which evil and suffering are given materiality. Yet there was a degree of a unified binary in the medieval period concerning the body, as both body and consciousness remained within the conceptual realm of nature as the living soul. It is the non-living soul, or the essence of identity stripped of corporeality, which is transcendent. Achieving the Real requires the annihilation of the body and consciousness through sacrifice (love, in the Christian sense): “the obliteration of the body and of the Body’s image are nevertheless hypostatized in Christ, and this leads to the abolition of the Self (of the body-Self)” (Kristeva 1987: 145). In the sense the Real is associated with a proper moral existence; in other words, the Real becomes the performance of morality through the body itself. Morality is, of course, a social construction, which consequently reflects a certain engendering of the performance of power. (I would not agree with some critics who posit the reproductive process as constitutive of gender, with social structures revolving around this biological function; performance is more fundamental to gender than function, biological or otherwise. This construction of gender seems to remain in line with a patriarchal socio-historical depiction of femininity as essentially a biological trope, and thus the female is limited against the more transcendent and adaptable masculinity. Frida Kahlo was to struggle with such notions of biological determinism in her art; see below.) As such, one must mediate temporal (bodily) experience by a strict and dogmatic morality in order to keep the mind, and hence the soul, pure. The female body was made a priori immoral as the site of desire, temptation, and corruption.
Any such notions of subjectivity were put aside, however, as the binary of mind and body entered its most absolutist phase with the Enlightenment period. Descartes’s cogito posits the conscious subject as transcendent to, and thus autonomous from, nature, and thus the split between mind and body reaches its most logical extreme. The Self is itself made transcendent as the I of Descartes’s most famous formulation. The mind becomes a preternatural construction, hierarchized above nature and the body. In this capacity the mind-body split is extended to the origin of knowledge, or (as I will later elaborate in a rather subtextual and implied manner,) Foucault’s sense of knowledge/power. After Descartes the mind became an operation for reflection upon space, bodies, and time, and thus the locus for the Real. Cogito ergo sum was the monolithic phallus reflecting a cultural sense of masculine identity as self-contained, sovereign, and transcendent. (The path has been opened for Nietzsche to deny the legitimacy of a ‘godhead’ and for the twentieth century to emerge as a particularly important historical distinction, as the Will to Power was the first salvo fired against the decadence of non-subjective or autonomous experience, and served as the key to opening the portal for the modern subject to emerge.)
So what might this rather lengthy exposition have to do with the project of modernism? It is my belief that the modern period inaugurated an aesthetic of absolute subjectivity in which the Bodies involved in art production and reception are brought to the fore, frequently to the point of displacing the importance of the given subject represented by an art piece. The subject may indeed be the Bodies of the artist and/or audience, functioning as the logical extreme of self-reflexivity. Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (The Cathedral of Erotic Misery) project (1920?-36), for example, is highly evocative of the subjective space between the art-object and the participants: using a massive archive of cultural detritus that Schwitters had collected, a new living space was created which questioned the lives and spaces of art producers – Mondrian and Hoch had grottoes dedicated to them, or more precisely using them: hair, urine, sketches, house keys, etc – in relation to other ‘cultural’ producers – murderers, sex criminals, businessmen, etc. It also served to question the new ‘space’ created by the relationship between the consumption and production of art and cultural information. Fundamentally, Schwitters’s life project demonstrated that the intersection of Self and Other (culture, other people, etc) can be localized as the internalization of desire, memory, violence, and regret within the realm of the Real. (There is no outside of the Self in this sense.) Merzbau is Schwitters’s own house, and yet perhaps more accurately it is a exterior manifestation of his own subjective experience.
Like memory, Merzbau functions by heteroglossia, with older works obscured or even obliterated by new ones. Most importantly, older schools of art production such as the dadaist works of the teens and twenties were glossed over by newer (post-1925) sculptures and architecture which diverged or even critiqued the older aesthetics. Seen in this light, the Merzbau stands as a physical manifestation of the organization of consciousness as mediated by bodily experience: space is consciousness in terms of subjective experience. The project’s most totalizing conceptual gesture is the removal of the viewing subject from conventional space in order to place them into a construction formed by their own cultural impact. Artefacts of the ‘real’ world are given new conceptualizations, thus a bus ticket or a soup advertisement can be used to obscure a jar of faecal matter or one of van der Rohe’s drawings, for example. The medieval cathedral was a unification of all the arts of the period, and likewise Schwitters attempted to refigure all of his contemporary culture into one localized space. This space flows and connects like the interior of a body, and yet it is clear that the ‘lifeblood’ of the building is composed of dead cultural artefacts given a life separate from their original function. The dislocation of Schwitters’s own body into the work – hair in a corner, nail cuttings along a wall, urine scattered throughout – suggests an organic being stretched beyond its capacity for self-containment. And yet this is precisely what the work is: a body, with passages and limbs and processes, and an almost organic predilection toward continual internal restructuring. The work is thoroughly modern in terms of a gesture to transcendence, namely the imposition of inorganic over organic space as a means to impose an order onto chaos (and thus it is in an ontological sense an echo of Cartesianism). Simultaneous to this gesture is the reification of a life (and its consequent body) into a physical space, reflecting Walter Benjamin’s thoughts in One Way Street: “autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and with what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities”. The modern Body represents itself by means of these discontinuities and fractures, and indeed the many fractured aesthetic forms that emerged in the period – Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism in painting; Serialism and Musique Concrète in music; Imagism and Expressionism in literature; Montage in cinema – can all be related with the Freud’s conception of the projection of the ego into public space, which Lacan, Kristeva, and others have redefined in terms of the ego being constructed in the public sphere. Hence the Real in terms of Modernism can be seen as the Body fractured and reconstructed within a specifically localized context: one body entering into the public sphere.
Interlude: an excuse to purge
There can be no real (Real) escape from immanence. It is a degree of tangentiality to the intersection of body and consciousness which has no parallel. There can only be a destruction of time and space at this instant, for they are merely narrative categories.
The body has a memory while the Body does not. Memory is a trace, a mark, a jouissance produced by an archon performing its function. In individual terms the archon is the unconscious process; in structural (social) terms the archon is a socio-economic construction, and thus deeply historical. Scar tissue is the manifestation of the pleasure of inscription. Inscription cannot occur within the public sphere without acknowledging that there is nothing other than inscription and re-inscription. There is no true memory within a culture as there are no scars.
Pregnancy – or more precisely the female form during pregnancy, as pregnancy can carry a wide symbolic association that can elude gender positions – becomes the manifestation of this ontological gesture. It is a roundness which bridges culture and nature, indeed it is the chasm or rupture between the two, a suture. No other possibility can occur at the moment of birth other than a complete and wholesale subordination to the subjective moment between mother and child.
Technology is itself the birthing of a tabula rasa; technology is frequently depicted as clean and antiseptic by the Moderns. Simultaneously, technology represents a rupture, a means by which humanity faces its ontological nature by losing a sense of itself to an Other which initially seems antithetical to the Self. The centrality of the body in representation stands in opposition to the displacement of the subject by technological means or aesthetics (Cubism as relative to cinema). Homo sapiens has become homo technica by exteriorizing technology from the Self; not a wise move.
Bodies matter and produce and subsume and burn up; there is only intensity.
II
One area which presents itself as an obvious construction of the Body as public space is the smaller locus of the domestic. The field of the home is eroticized by many modern writers, for the same reason that all parts of the body itself have been eroticised over the centuries. It is a narcissistic gesture required for the proper creation of the Self; bodies of the Other are fetishized in order to affirm the importance of the Self. Perhaps the most (in)famous text to represent the eroticisation of the domestic is Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1911-14). (Standing as a Barthesian punctum for my reading of her text is ‘A New Cup and Saucer’, with a degree of immanence caught in language, reflecting de Sade’s eroticised self-reflexive violence of subject positions in Justine and 120 days of Sodom: “Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon”. The reader is pained by a relocation within this immanent subjectivity.) Yet I do not wish to spend a great deal of time on this particular well-travelled text. That women have traditionally been tied to the domestic sphere allows a rather obvious language and Body to emerge. As Mina Loy stated: “My conceptions of life evolved while ... stirring baby food on spirit lamps – and my best drawings behind a stove to the accompaniment of a line of children’s cloths hanging round it to dry” (Last Lunar Baedeker, lxvi). This is reflected in the blatant eroticism of several of her visual works, such as Snails (1903) and Moons I and II (both 1902), which are ostensibly tentative relocations of the Body as anthropomorphized objects. I have chosen Loy’s work as emblematic for literature in the context of this paper precisely because she began her career as a visual artist, becoming the star protege of Angelo Jank in Munich during her late adolescence. In addition to the prominence of the Body within her work, the autobiographical detail of the altering of her name from Lowy to Loy, as well as the continual use of pseudonyms within her poetry itself, represents a unique conflation of Kristeva’s conception of the semiotic, in particular the position of marginalised literature, as located within the subversion of the Law of the Father elaborated in Desire in Language, as feminine writing (again, in this context it is the performance of gender which is more important than the substance of sex). This gesture itself figures as a means by which an incorrect Real as applied to the female Body by a patriarchal heritage is cast away in order to recreate the Self in a self-sufficient manner.
Throughout many of her poems, Loy seems enraptured by membranes and transmission. It is possible to interpret this fascination as a recognition of the interplay between Body and society. Frequently this liminal space is allegorized as skin, as in ‘The Dead’:
We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off
...
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension
We are turned inside out
Skin marks the passage between culture (Body) and body, between Self and Other, and functions as the most delicate and eroticised organ of the body (it serves tangentially as a vaginal membrane between Self and Other in terms of Kristeva’s birth process; see Tales of Love, bold text, pp. 253-6). Similarly in ‘Parturition’:
I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
...
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without.
This passage is also playing with the notion of a lack within the female Body, such being a cultural production of femininity which obviates a denial of female essence within the Real. It is a form of question answering itself a few lines later: “Why? / The irresponsibility of the male / Leaves woman her superior Inferiority”. This poem seems to be interrogating the particular historicity which has circumscribed the feminine Real as a heritage of Christian (patriarchal) indoctrination. Woman is made to deny her body in order to replicate the most transcendent of denials, the sacrifice enacted by Mary (her sexuality) in order to give corporeal form to the divine: “Mother I am / Identical / With infinite Maternity”. In this context, by metonymic inversion, Loy is describing man as positioning himself as the saviour for civilization, as indeed the universalized saviour figured in Christ, by positing all women as Madonnas “Wearing a halo / A ludicrous little halo / Of which she is sublimely unaware”.
It is precisely at this moment that Loy wishes to insert the eroticised female body into culture; a proper construction of Body acknowledges that only through the flesh is the ‘spirit’ (the transcendent gesture) legitimated. This gesture is reified by the eroticisation of objects touched by the Body, as in ‘Love Songs to Joannes’:
Licking the Arno
The little rosy
Tongue of Dawn
Interferes with our eyelashes
We twiddle to it
Round and round
Faster
And turn into machines
Till the sun
Subsides in shining
Melts some of us
Into abysmal pigeon-holes
Passion has bored
In warmth
The erotic body (and indeed orgasm, or jouissance to invoke a Derridean association) is here linking natural generative processes, signified by the sun (the primal source of organic life), and technology, with the Body serving as the suture between such ostensibly disparate domains. The erotic has conditioned and constitutes the Real in this capacity, and as such it serves as a transmissive medium, or perhaps more appropriately a translational medium, between object and subject, between perception and understanding. This generative capacity allegorized through the erotic can also be observed in ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird’, itself a reflection on another modern art piece:
As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal
The procreative act has relocated the Real within the realm of materiality in the form of a body, further elaborated as ostensibly female by a later line describing the act of art production as “this breast of revelation”. The breast is allegorized as the locus for the Real, which functions – again to use Kristeva’s diction – as an intersection “turning nature into culture and the ‘speaking subject’ into biology”. Furthermore, “even though orality – threshold of infantile regression – is displayed in the area of the breast, while the spasm at the slipping away of eroticism is translated into tears, this should not conceal what milk and tears have in common: they are the metaphors of nonspeech, of a “semiotics” that linguistic communication does not account for” (Kristeva 1987: 249). The conception of the female breast as a source of knowledge production and transmission has a parallel in Frida Kahlo’s Nana (1937) (see below). In ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, Loy is critical of a social creation of the Real along patriarchal lines:
Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out
A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror
Here she is implicitly citing the female gaze as both an interior and an exterior, with the construction of the Body performed as both a social and personal exercise. The theme of the poem as a whole is the consumerism of female bodies, and in particular the repression of female sexuality (virginity as a sacrifice to be revealed to its one true God, a self-reflexive worship of the phallus).
Some questions emerge: Can the Self be located outside of subjective experience? Can the Self be realized outside of social experience? Can there be a localization of a body without reference to the social construct Body? Painting by its very nature differs from literature in terms of its entrance into public space. While literature is indeed a product within the public sphere, its exhibition falls under the visual rubric of book-object, which necessarily differs from its linguistic content. The visual arts on the other hand integrate the physical and the semiotic – body and expression – into one ontological gesture. (Seen in this light, painting is a more immediate expression of the Real.) In this regard, painting is the simultaneous exhibition of the Self and subjectivity.
Through many of her works, Frida Kahlo can be seen to be interrogating the essential characteristics, and indeed the ontology, of the female body and its position within social discourse. Almost universally throughout her paintings, Kahlo places herself as the subject in question, usually within the guise of an autobiographical sketch that questions the role of technology, social practise, and gender performance within patriarchal society. While her body does not enter into the art pieces themselves in the manner in which Schwitters reifies his own autobiographical sketch – the blood of many of her ‘hospital’ pieces is not actually hers but a representation, for example – the totality of her art is a transfiguration of her body into public space in a similar manner as the Merzbau. I will not go into too much biographical detail, yet the accident which forced Kahlo into continually submitting to the medical system in order to alleviate her suffering and continue to allow her a degree of mobility figures as an essential historical trace within her art. Masculine and feminine identity come to the fore in her oeuvre, the former usually representing an operation of patriarchal control over the latter. This frequently manifests itself as an association between masculinity and technological processes, and femininity with transcendent generative processes. In all of her self depictions, Kahlo gazes in an intense yet simultaneously detached manner at the viewers of her work. This gesture invites the viewing subject to relocate themselves into her own subject position within the thematic topography of the painting. Her body is made to figure for the social creation of Body, and the viewer is meant to position themselves simultaneously as a body (Kahlo’s female body) and as the creator of Body in a larger cultural sense. Somewhat hesitatingly, I interpret her self-portraits with monkeys, from 1938 and 1940, as an ironic gesture to the origin of bodies within an evolutionary context, and thus consequently Body enters into scientific discourse and becomes satirized as such. Simultaneous to this is the rather pessimistic irony involved in Kahlo’s usually blatant self-deprecation, as she did not find herself to be representational of female beauty. In this sense, these portraits act to doubly question patriarchal forms of knowledge and understanding.
The Body presented as Kahlo’s is transfigured into a figure of divine reproductive capability in Nana (1937) (although one has to figure Kahlo herself as inheriting this position from the masked woman who is suckling her; that the woman’s right breast is ‘heteroglossed’ as a tree emerging from the infant Kahlo’s mouth suggests this), Roots (1943), and most prominently in The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, and Senor Xolotl (1949). Roots posits the female form as inhabiting the only generative space in an otherwise desolate landscape, and indeed in this guise Kahlo figures herself as the landscape itself. Metonymically it traces all of mankind to the female form, in an obvious gesture to transcend racial categorization. Her mid-section, from which the titular roots and leaf structures (found in many of her paintings) spring, is left bare, as though Kahlo is suggesting that viewed solely as a generative essence woman is without substance. Such would be a reductionist and problematic interpretation however, as the very existence of the painting suggests a re-mediation of the generative process into artistic production (and by extension language itself, avant la lettre in Kristeva’s formulation). Woman is indeed the entry point for life into materiality, and as stated above pregnancy in particular can be seen as the suture between nature and consciousness. Another biographical note must be made here, as Kahlo’s accident in her youth prevented her from having any children, despite a profound desire to procreate. Consequently, the traditional form of feminine identity was not available to her, and thus her conceptualization of Self and Body required a negotiation of the Real within these terms. That Kahlo positioned herself so prominently within her paintings to a degree denies the pessimism which she felt concerning her own reproductive capacity. Art provided Kahlo with a means to negotiate her identity within a society (or language itself in Lacanian terms) requiring the female Other to be bound by pregnancy.
The Love Embrace of the Universe is even less evasive about its gesture to the transcendence of female sexuality. While the universe itself remains an asexual ghost enveloping the remaining subjects, (light/dark) the Earth which represents material life is clearly female. The male (Diego Rivera) figures for the search for knowledge and truth, as signified by the mark of knowledge on his forehead – the third eye, of ancient cultural origin – and the flaming object which he holds in his hands. With this painting, Kahlo has located knowledge as springing from the female generative power, and thus she implies that truths can only reveal itself as such if the Real is distanced from the uniquely masculine perspective in which it is currently located. In order to understand this particular formulation, I wish to invoke the artist’s Self-Portrait Between the Borderline of Mexico and the United States (1932) in order to examine another view of the engendering of technological process and the production of knowledge. In this painting, the artist stands at the suture between an ancient symbolic topology of her native country and the modern technologies of the United States. The former is associated with the natural powers of the elements (the sun, moon, and lightning in the sky) and the productive capacity of the earth (the flowers at the bottom left), while the latter is associated with destructive or otherwise lifeless powers (the smoke billowing into the sky from a Ford plant, the chemical processing plant in the middle foreground) and the production of (existentially useless) technical devices. In both paintings, the allegorized woman stands at the borderline between nature and civilization, and between the production and destruction of knowledge.
By positioning herself as this suture, Kahlo is envisioning her function as artist (as body and as Body) as in a sense an oracle or shaman of the Real for the viewing subject. While Loy sees “a comic dissonance between machine and self” (Armstrong 1998: 116), in several of her paintings Kahlo seems to suggest that the machine is the self, although in a work such as Broken Column (1944) this is certainly not a joyful realization or a celebration of technology in the vein of the earlier Futurists. Human technology might indeed function as contrary to nature, yet it is still ontologically in the realm of the human body (and Body). There is no difference between technological civilization and motherhood when medical science is required to bring life into the world. That technology is fundamentally a natural element of human existence is evident by the importance of the use of medical equipment to situate the subject Technology incorporated into the Self anticipates both the pain and pleasure of existence. Technology is consequential for the Real in this sense. When read through the rubric of a Real engendered as masculine, both Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and Tree of Hope (1946) suggest the brutal dictatorship of scientific practise – and masculine interrogation through reason and cultural discourse – which inherently must destroy in order to understand. ****** Several of her paintings such as A Few Small Nips (1935) and Self-portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (1951) depict the female subject as regulated and circumscribed by the male gaze; The Little Deer (1946) acts in a related manner, positioning Kahlo as the symbolic target for the gaze of the viewing subject, with a subject position relocated within the realm (or more precisely for this particular piece, the arc) of the phallus. The male actor in this first painting seems to be emotionally detached from his subject, and one is led to question whether the woman is a victim in a narrative as well as thematic sense. Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill is particularly potent in terms of its interrogation of the extent to which the female body is made a disempowered Other by a patriarchal system which essentializes the Real within masculine terms. The portrait of the doctor, in the genre of traditional ‘respectable’ portraiture (in other words, the subject is depicted with an aura of authority and dignity suitable to his social position and function), is aligned in such a manner that he stares dispassionately towards Kahlo’s own face, and she in turn stares directly at the viewer of the painting. By this triangulation of subjectivities, Kahlo is allowing the viewer to subject the original male gaze itself to a discourse of power relations: one questions where authority might be located, for the doctor has not fulfilled his intended function as Kahlo has not been healed despite her repeated surgeries. The doctor’s patient, which should be the locus and legitimizing function for his performance of power, is denied any sense of Self by the rationalized quantification of her body as the object of his performance of authority. It is for this reason that he has been denied a sense of the Real within the topography of the painting. Kahlo has rescued herself from the subjection to his false domination by relocating the doctor to the hyper-reality of the portrait within the portrait. As disembodied Other, the doctor is made to be an end product of Kahlo’s re-mediated generative capacity. She uses his own objectifying gaze to achieve these ends; this appropriation is made literal by the depiction of a heart as the paint on the palette used to create his portrait. In a very real sense, the medium of transmission and understanding, in artistic or broader terms, is blood.
The appeal to a somewhat dated trajectory of philosophical discourse which began this present examination is an intended problematic, for while the theories, derived from Nietzsche through Foucault, which I wish to utilize concerning the performance of identity (which by extension is a performance of a certain discourse of power, relative to the subject in question) gesture toward a rejection of antiquated philosophical percepts such as binaries and transcendence, at the same time the past and the present are ontologically unified as mutual disruptions which reflect each other. This problematic is intended to reflect a rupture necessary in modernism, which Jameson has in numerous instances posited as the period of the post-modern and which anticipates a true high modernism that signals a renouncement of ties to a formal school descended from antiquity. Arguably modernism is itself an incomplete project, and the continued bondage of the body to detrimental social constructs is one of the artefacts of this failure (or more precisely, its incompleteness, which suggests a lack of time rather than of motivation or direction). That the female form continues to be the locus of sexual (and consequently political, economic, and cultural) identity and for the feminine to remain a degree of categorizational rather than subjective discourse presents the modern individual with a creation of the body which remains tied to essentialist philosophical principles. The body brought to its most extreme subjectivity is the Body of the modern. It is the fractured body meant to ontologically unite the aesthetic with the transient, with the art piece’s own deconstruction through criticism.
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