Back to Bodies
Texts written above, behind their literal meanings, try to underpin an argument that the representational still image is a kind of image that is limited, linear, fixed and arbitrary, doing their best to continue the Western tradition of categorising and separating objects and subjects, remarkably Plato and Descartes[v]. In the context of this essay, they endeavour to put our bodies in a position as if they were only a negative and motionless recipient or container, waiting to be filled with abstract meanings and managed by external manipulations.
Though the writer of this essay is not identified as a female, this essay agrees with what Rebecca Coleman articulates in her journal article: “Feminist theoretical work […] has complicated and disrupted and clear distinction between subjects and objects by arguing such a distinction is inherently masculine”[23]. Such masculine power in the previous discussion is the mechanisation of bodies and the financialisation of how we present and perceive ourselves.
However, as indicated at the beginning of this essay, hyphenation between the body and images connects these two concepts. More importantly, the hyphenation is not meant to fill the gaps between those two, generating a continuous and unified narrative of a harmonious spectacle, but in contrast, underlining a kind of flux and discreteness lies below the consortium of bodies.
Movement and Becoming
There is movement-image mentioned earlier by Deleuze, emphasising a kind of cinema that is mobile, indivisible, heterogeneous and real movements within concrete durations. This is a valuable insight that helped us to distinguish the nuances between true moving images and still images. However, this section will discuss the body in its constantly moving conditions, which may not be perfectly suitable for the discussion, but the methodology within it is transferable. This methodology does not examine things as static and isolated but instead keeps shifting and constantly encountering, no matter what it relates to things, people, events, and even time and space.
In 1872, English photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by a railroad magnate, Leland Stanford, to verify a widespread debate at the time: whether all four feet of a running horse would leave the ground when trotting. His designed running track and sequence of cameras clearly capture the result, showing all feet off the ground[24]. It is a historical moment, manifesting the capabilities of cameras of crystallising movement and time and revealing what human eyes cannot see. Around one century later, after World War II, artists were tired of the museumification of modern art[vi] and took their own path to resist such a trend, making art in the way of unsellable and unpredictable aesthetically and thus, performance art emerged.
Performance art is also a general description that can include multiple isms and art movements since the early 20th century. This essay is not meant to analyse them or criticise them; instead, it tries to point out that artworks themselves are also media, filtering how we perceive such artworks and our bodies, how artists’ bodies have played, and how these works are presented after the performance is over.
Mainly, this essay wants to take Bruce Nauman and his work Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear produced in 1994[25]. The work is a short video, and in this artwork, the artist uses a slow-motion camera to record the action of using a finger to poke holes in the artist’s face, including eyes, nose and ear. From the perspective of this essay, this work can explain the above questions and provide a means of resistance through the ideas of body-without-image (how we perceive it) and body-image (how artists have played and how the work is re/presented).
Let’s start from the first aspect. In the text of Featherstone[26], he adapted ideas from Massumi[27], describing that body-without-image emerges at the moment when an interruption or an event shows up, where the body-without-image registers via additional visceral sensibility (interoception) through the intensity of our senses and accordingly generate a kind of affect, which in detail, is “the ability to affect and openness to be affected”, and in Deleuze’s word, from the essay’s understanding, is entering a plane of immanence[28]. The artwork by Bruce Nauman is exactly an encounter when you browse an art space, and such a provoking piece shows up. For one thing, the slow motion magnifies the momentum of the finger rushing towards the fragile and precious organs of our body/face and the movement of deformation of the surrounding skin and muscles (now you might understand why this essay cited the moment of Eadweard Muybridge shoot the running horse), which inflames a kind of affect of fear, afraid and even phantomlike pain, imagining how I (as an audience) would feel if these organs were hit like this and what the consequences would be. For another, more importantly, it is not only beyond the mirror-vision[29] that seeing oneself as others see one in a still condition, but also generates a kind of movement-vision[30] that is proxied but authentic, for which the audience encountered Bruce Nauman’s face being poked through the movement made by the finger imposing to his face, and thus the audience’s own muscles begin to intense due to the affection, realising and prioritising the existence of their own eye/nose/ear without seeing themselves or being seen by others in a mirror or an image. Just as Nauman said in an interview: “It’s probably more painful for the viewer than it was for me. I didn’t hurt myself.”[31]
The second aspect is more straightforward in the context of this essay but still worth considering. Correspondingly, Coleman, in her article, has given a relatively short definition of body-image: “Bodies become through images”[32]. Just by reading the words literally, it is easy to misunderstand the sentence as images behave like a medium that displays bodies. However, suppose we follow this approach to understanding the relationship between bodies and images. In that case, we will again fall into the old structure of assigning bodies as objects and images as subjects. Actually, what Coleman wants to argue is that there is no distinctive separation and absolute independence of bodies and images – bodies are “produced through, or become through, these images”, and images “produce knowledges, understandings, and experiences of bodies through which these bodies become.”[33] In the work of Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear, there is also no separation between Nauman’s body/face and the video in which his body/face is shown, no matter how many duplications these videos have and where they were exhibited. In this specific work, as well as other images or videos documenting the performance, artists use their own bodies as a means of creation, for which their movements and becoming (especially for those performances that highlight the endurances and repetitions) engrave into the media of images or videos, and simultaneously, the movements and becoming of their bodies in their work are captured by such media. If bodies disappear in such videos, the latter would be vacant and correspondingly, if their performance is undocumented, they would vanish[vii].
Possibilities of Resistance?
Paying attention to movements and dismantling the distinction between images and bodies seems a possible way of overturning the tyranny of body image and the masculine system behind it. But do they really work, or can they always be effective? From the views of this essay, the chances are diminishing, notably with the chase of today’s technologies, which are more than ever integrating into our bodies and lives.
All in all, the whole structure of relations between bodies, images, and technologies, in the view of this essay, is pessimistic, which inevitably duplicates the classic dialectical master-slave relationship articulated by Hegel in his book The Phenomenology of Spirit[34]. On the one hand, in this text, the slave (bondage) is dependent on their master (lordship), counting on their master to live. On the other hand, however, it is the slave that is closer to the objects sustaining the master’s life because the latter does not work and exposes objects to the slave; therefore, the master becomes the one who is not independent and needs to be taken care of. The situation is just like how we are interacting with images and technologies. From the beginning, we were independent, making our living by our own hands, but all of a sudden, Prometheus brought us fire, and therefore, we are able to be aware of time and even ahead of (predicting) time[35] as a result of handing over our abilities to technologies.
Today, the status of tools is “ready-to-hand”[36] when they encounter their situated condition, and we are able to know it, as described by Heidegger, may no longer be valid since we have submitted ourselves to technologies and they are integrating them into our bodies, becoming our all-time prosthesis. But who knows, if Deleuze and Stigler are correct, we might still have a chance of getting out of this mess by realising and actualising the potentials, by nomadising and becoming, by contribution economy and making art.