Abject Bodies Abject Art

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Abject Bodies / Abject Art
Teri Frame

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Introduction
This course of study began in the summer of 2005 as a way of academically
supplementing my studio-based artistic research. At the time, I was juxtaposing clay
body parts as a way of exploring the physical and emotional dynamics of interpersonal
relationships, particularly those among family members. This body of work had often
been referred to as 'abject.' After being encouraged by one of my studio professors to
gain a better understanding of this concept, I began a course of research and my findings
are culminated within this paper. They are as follows.
Abjection is a concept as theorized by Bulgarian linguist and psychoanylist Julia
Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). Abjection, along with
Georges Bataille's concept of the informe, would eventually influence a major body of
artwork that defined the 1990s. It is referred to in the art world as abject art. Kristeva's
concept of abjection is partially influenced by Bataille, who was one of Surrealism's
major philosophers and writers, and was arguably as influential to the movement as
Andre Breton. As if by way of cosmic consciousness, his obscure writings were being
reexamined by art historians such as Yve Alain Bois, Judith Butler, Hal Foster and
Rosalind Krauss simultaneously to the publication of Powers.
This study is divided into three sections and begins by observing the significant
relationship between the abject and the informe as well as the ideas set forth by
anthropologist Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966). The objective is to focus on
the points where these theories intersect. The second section traces changing bodily
paradigms as found in 20th century art until the late 1980s and the beginning of the
Culture Wars. Section three describes the way in which the art world has interpreted
Kristeva's theory of abjection, and the physical manifestations that best epitomize it.
The section also traces the exhibitions that initially propelled abject art, and the artists
who best exemplify it in their work.

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Abjection
After its release in English, Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection became extremely influential in the art world. Although her essay is often
criticized for having contradictory elements, perpetuating the powerlessness of women,
relying too heavily on the theories of her former teacher, Jaques Lacan, and
misrepresenting Georges Batailles’ concept of the informe, one can not deny her
expertise on the subject, thorough and inclusive investigation, arresting and poetic use of
language, and the depth of insight concerning her concept of the abject. The premise of
Powers is to demonstrate how the abject is at work in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory,
modern literature in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and the history of world
religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity.
Kristeva has drawn her concept of the abject from various sources but she has
been most directly influenced by the work of Georges Batailles and Mary Douglas.
Kristeva’s theory of the abject as a social construct is closely connected with both, and
Bataille’s concept of the informe has influenced abject art as much as Kristeva’s theory of
the abjection. Although many art historians vehemently emphasize the differences
between the two concepts, I have chosen to focus on their similarities throughout this
study and will treat them synonymously.
In Powers, Kristeva reveals her phenomenological examination of abjection in
precise and poetic limning. Defining that which lies on the fringe of the definable is a
precarious task, and if anything, abjection is the catalyst for this need to order. Perhaps
for that reason Kristeva approaches abjection for what it is not, for it is ‘neither subject
nor object.’
“the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by
such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable
object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I
name or imagine... The abject has only one quality of the
object- that of being opposed to I.... [It is] a ‘something’
that I do not recognize as a thing... a weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing
insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-
existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I
acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection
are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”1
Primal differentiations allow humans to cope with the mysterious and enigmatic
workings of the natural world and its link with social reality. Rules, and therefore
taboos, were established in order to more clearly define the boarders that designate
proper ways of living, of being a part of the social body. According to both Douglas and
Kristeva, the earliest of culture’s demarcations took place in order to separate not only
human and animal domains, but also the realms of male and female. Any place in
between these distinctions is the space in which the liminal, the abject, exists. It
becomes the domain of those things that are jettisoned from the social structure, for their
1
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982): 1-2.

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ambiguous nature acts as a threat to society. Hierarchy is the construction of humankind.
It is simply evidence of a system that has organized and categorized, placed and
excluded.
Kristeva gives an example of these human/animal and male/female demarcations
and how they are evident in the defining of sexuality. “For that purpose, intercourse
between same and same will have to be prohibited- neither promiscuity within families
nor homosexuality. Nor can there be contact with another group as constituted by law:
no adultery, no zoophilia.”2
Both Douglas and Kristeva demonstrate that gender distinctions are most evident
in their relation to the unclean. Douglas uses the term pollution, while Kristeva prefers
defilement. They can be considered congruent and according to Kristeva, they are abject.
Mary Douglas has stated that, “It is only by exaggerating the difference between within
and without, about and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of
order is created.”3
“In primitive cultures, almost by definition, the distinction of the
sexes is the primary social distinction... Then we find pollution ideas enlisted to bind
men and women to their allotted roles...”4
Douglas points out that some societies are more pollution conscious than others
and designates that where women have more social power there is more pollution belief.
She discusses the Ubanyali’s aversion to filth, which for them includes fluids such as
those associated with sex (especially unsafe for infants), menstruation and childbirth.
They also have a strong aversion to the corpse and the blood of enemies. A man is in
danger if he has any contact with menstrual blood. He cannot eat food that has been
prepared by a menstruating woman without going through a series elaborate rituals.5
Kristeva points out similar practices that are described in the Old Testament.
Because the mother is considered unclean, her son must be purified through the ritual of
circumcision, and her daughter is considered unclean for two weeks after birth. The
mother is considered unclean after giving birth to a girl and must make a sacrifice to
redeem her from a state of filth.6
Kristeva links religious prohibitions with behavior prohibitions and recognizes
that they are put in place to avoid defilement. One will find cross-culturally that women,
especially mothers, are a main source from which defilement springs.
“ritualization of defilement is accompanied by a
strong concern for separating the sexes, and this means
giving men rights over women.... [in any society] it is
always to be noticed that the attempt to establish a male,
phallic power is vigorously threatened by the no less
virulent power of the other sex, which is oppressed... That
other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a
radical evil that is to be suppressed. [The mother] being
coded as abject points to the considerable importance some
2
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982): 103.
3
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, (London and New York: Routledge, 1960): 5.
4
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, (London and New York: Routledge, 1960): 173-4.
5
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societies attribute to women (matrilineal or related filiation,
endogamy, decisive role of procreation for the survival of
the social group, etc.). The symbolic ‘exclusory
prohibition’ that, as a matter of fact, constitutes collective
existence does not seem to have, in such cases, sufficient
strength to dam up the abject or demoniacal potential of the
feminine. The latter, precisely on account of its power,
does not succeed in differentiating itself as other but
threatens one’s own and clean self, which is the
underpinning of any organization constituted by exclusions
and hierarchies.”7
According to Kristeva, defilement has two sources, that of excrement and that of
menstrual blood, both of which are the domain of the maternal and/or feminine. The link
between the menstruation and the maternal/feminine needs no explanation. In order to
explain how women are linked with excremental defilement, Kristeva refers to Freud’s
placement of sphinctoral training. When a child begins this process he/she is mapping
his/her own body, choosing to make his/her own distinctions and categorizations of filth
and placement. The child has now entered the world of the symbolic “...the symbolic
light that a third party, eventually the father, can contribute helps the future subject... in
pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an
abject. This abjection, which threatens the ego... [explains] the incest dread of which
Freud speaks.” “A whole facet of the sacred, true lining of the sacrificial, compulsive,
and paranoid side of religions, assumes the task of warding off that danger... The
function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity
sinking irretrievably into the mother.”8
Here Kristeva applies the same need for segregation to the animal kingdom. “The
abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the
territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a
precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or
animism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.”9
Douglas points out that there is a general conception (perhaps a universal one)
that women are more closely associated with the animal world than men. Douglas gives
two other examples where there are human links with the animal territories. The first is
evil, those “humans who become sorcerers. They turn their back on their own kind and
run with the hunted, fight against the hunters, work against diviners to achieve death
instead of healing. They have moved across to the animal sphere and they have caused
some animals to move in from the animal to the human sphere...”10
The other ambiguous mode of being is concerned with fertility. It is believed by
the Lele that human birth involves pain, danger and singularity. Animals, however, are
thought to be naturally fecund, as their births happen in pairs or litters. A human couple
that has produced a birth beyond the singular is an anomaly, for they have broken into the
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territory of animals. They have a counterpart in the animal world, one that straddles the
divisions within the animal kingdom (it is covered in scales but climbs trees, lays eggs
but nurtures its young) as well as the division between human and animal territories, for it
gives birth singularly. Both the parents who have born twins or triplets and the pangolian
are celebrated for their fertility. Rather than shunting the pangolian, the Lele partake of
its flesh in order to increase fertility among their community.11
Both Kristeva and Douglas have found that those things, which fall among the
gray areas of existence are universally shunned, and regarded as taboo. “...one
encounters it as soon as the symbolic and/or social dimension of man is constituted, and
this throughout the course of civilization. But abjection assumes specific shapes and
different coding according to the various ‘symbolic systems.’”12
In Powers, Kristeva
examines evidence of abjection as found in taboo (as well as in defilement, food, and
sin).
Douglas makes the connection between categorization and taboo when
pinpointing the two main themes discussed within Purity and Danger. She explains that
taboo is that device which serves to keep the social structure organized and reduces
disorder. It shields the distinctive categories of the universe from contamination.
Douglas poses the question, “Why is it necessary to protect the primary distinctions of
the universe?”, then answers it bydescribing the discomfort that humans feel concerning
ambiguity. Her claim is that “taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the
category of the sacred.” Her findings show that the concept of dirt in contemporary
culture is analogous to taboo. We denounce behavior that infiltrates the classifications of
the universe by calling it dirty and dangerous; primitive cultures taboo it.13
The link between taboo and dirt is quite clear. Douglas explains that dirt as a
physical substance does not exist, “there is no such thing as dirt; no single item is dirty
apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit.”14
Food is not
dirt unless it spills on one’s blouse. We call the blouse “dirty” because food does not
belong on it. It is displaced matter. The premise of Purity and Danger is that dirt is a
universally offensive concept. Cleanliness, for Douglas, is a highly classified way of
living, and dirt is that which impairs order. Cleaning is a way of “positively re-ordering
our environment... dirt, in the form of bodily excretions, produces a universal feeling of
disgust...”15
Kristeva’s thinking on the subject is parallel: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or
health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”16
Douglas goes on to suggest that “dirt involves reflection on the relation of order
to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.”17
Kristeva takes
uncleanliness and its link to death a step further by saying,
11
12
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982):
13
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, (London and New York: Routledge, 1960): xi.
14
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, (London and New York: Routledge, 1960): xvii.
15
16
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“refuse and corpses show me what I permanently
thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this
defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and
with difficulty, on the part of death. There I am at the
border of my condition as a living being... Such wastes
drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing
remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-
cadere [to fall] cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of
the border, the place where I am not and which permits me
to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border
that has encroached upon everything... The corpse, seen
without God and outside of science, is the utmost of
abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something
rejected from which one does not part, from which one
does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary
uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up
engulfing us.”18
Both Kristeva and Douglas point out the link between uncleanliness bodily
borders. Douglas discusses body fluids as the stuff that leaks from the body through the
marginal areas of its orifices, which symbolize the body’s most vulnerable points.
“Spittle, blood, milk, urine, feces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the
boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat...
All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental
experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.19
Douglas explains that any type of treacle gives an ‘ambiguous sense-impression.’
The fact that it is neither liquid nor solid makes it anomalous within this set of
classifications.20
This statement automatically brings to mind the writings of Sartre.
Rosalind Krauss provides the connection between Visqueux (slimy) and Kristeva’s
theory on abjection, and describes it as follows:
“a condition of matter that [Sartre] analyzes as
neither liquid nor solid, but somewhere midway between
the two. A slow drag against the fluidity of liquid-
‘Sliminess is the agony of water,’ Sartre writes-this flaccid
ooze may have some of the qualities of a solid- ‘a dawning
triumph of the solid over the liquid’-but it does not have the
resistance of solids; instead, as it clings stickily to the
fingers, sucking at them, compromising them, it is ‘docile.’
Solids, Sartre reasons, are like tools; they can be taken up
and put down again, having served their purpose. But the
slimy, in form of the gagging suction of a leech-like pest
that will not release its grip, seems to contain its own form
18
19
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of possessiveness... [This substance] which Sartre
relentlessly characterizes as feminine-yielding, clinging,
sweet, passive, possessive- producing yet one more parallel
with the analysis Kristeva would come to produce. For the
ontological condition here, analyzed as a function of
substances, has as its psychic component a threat to
autonomy and self-definition due to the suffocating
nearness of the mother.”21
Both Kristeva and Douglas describe the ways in which art and/or literature
explore the realms of ambiguity. Douglas notes that “The richness of poetry depends on
the use of ambiguity, as Emerson has shown. The possibility of seeing a sculpture
equally well as a landscape or as a reclining nude enriches the work’s interest.
Ehrenzweig has even argued that we enjoy works of art because they enable us to go
behind the explicit structures of our normal experience. Aesthetic pleasure arises from
the perceiving of inarticulate forms.”22
Kristeva explains that literature has directly addressed the abject for centuries and
points to the writings of Aristotle, Artaud, Batailles, Baudelaire, Celine, Dostoyevsky,
Kafka, Lautreamont, Plato, Proust, and Sartre. Kristeva states that “Language is a way of
organizing, distinguishing, and categorizing. Poets try to come up with a word that
means both pleasure and pain.”23
She expands upon this by saying that “The various
means of purifying the abject- the various catharses- make up the history of religions,
and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of
religion. Seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience, which is rooted in the abject
it utters and by the same token purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity.
That is why it is destined to survive the collapse of the historical forms of religions.”24
She concludes Powers by stating, “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version
of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions
might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do
not exist or only barely so-double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed,
altered, abject.”25
In his article, Abject / Informe / Trauma, Jan-Ove Steihaug explains the
theoretical discourse concerning the differences of interpretation of George Bataille’s
discussion concerning the informe among Julia Kristeva, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind
Krauss. Steihaug explains the polarity involved in the abject/informe argument, and
posits that Hal Foster’s concept of trauma is the mediator between the two. However, I
will look at Batailles’ interpretation as understood by Bois and Krauss in order to
demonstrate the common relationships between his concept of the informe and Kristeva’s
writings on the abject in Powers. “Krauss grants that Bataille himself used the term
abjection, and states that what Kristeva takes over from him is “the linking [of] the sacred
21
Rosalind Krauss, “Informe without Conclusion,” October no. 78 (Fall 1996): p.92.
22
23
24
25

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to horrific powers of impurity...”26
I will demonstrate the commonalities in Batailles’
concept of informe and Kristeva’s concept of the abject by taking a look at a number of
issues. They include the lack of order as congruent to formlessness, the hierarchal
establishment and hence separation of human and animal worlds, horizontality and its
link to declassification, heterogeneity as a synonym for waste, madness, and
simultaneous attraction and repulsion, and the boundaries of maternity.
In Steihaug’s interpretation of Batailles, formlessness can be thought of in
comparison to a lack of order, and its antonyms shape and form, designating what is
orderly, or as Kristeva would say, clean and proper. “...formless is not only an adjective
having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world,
generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any
sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for
academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has
no other goal... On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is
only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.”27
“[Batailles’] examples of informe are all gathered from what is coded as low, in
terms of animality - a spider, and earthworm - or in terms of ambiguous matter,
“squashed,” with “no rights.”28
This directly relates informe to Kristeva’s conception of
the abject in three ways. First, it recognizes the hierarchical separation of humans from
animals. It then implies the ambiguousness of the formless and goes on to say that that
which comes into contact with ambiguity lacks power. This last point directly correlates
with Kristeva’s findings that women are perceived as being more closely linked with the
animal realm and thus step into the shadows ambiguity more often than men.
Bataille’s concept of informe can be directly related to Kristeva’s writings on
classification. According to Yve-Alain Bois, “[informe] is not so much a stable motif to
which we can refer, a symbolizable theme, a given quality, as it is a term allowing one to
operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and taxonomic disorder.”
Krauss links “the systems of spatial mapping”29
with Bataille’s concept of horizontality
which further strengthens my argument against the Bois/Krauss interpretation of
Batailles.
Steihaug describes the numerous meanings and implications of Batailles’
reference to the heterogeneous:
“Bataille’s word for matter which exceeds social
homogeneity is the heterogenous. He defines as
heterogeneous ‘everything resulting from unproductive
expenditure [what is contrary to principles of classical
utility]... everything reflected by homogenous society as
waste or as superiour transcendent value..’ This includes
‘the waste products of the human body and certain
analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body;
persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the
various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses;
26
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p 23.
27
28
29

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the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous
society is powerless to assimilate...’ The heterogeneous is
also defined by him in subjective and affective terms as
provoking ‘sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion, and
in certain circumstances, any object of repulsion can
become an object of attraction and vice versa,’and further:
‘Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize
heterogeneous elements to varying degrees...’30
Here Batailles’ connection of the heterogeneous to human waste and trash can be
directly correlated with the previous discussion of dirt and uncleanliness and their
relationship to the body as posed by both Kristeva and Douglas. His reference to dreams,
neurosis and madness relates to Kristeva’s situating of Freud’s work on dreams as well as
his description of the borderline personality. One must also take into consideration that
simultaneous attraction and Kristeva has described repulsion as within the realm as the
abject. “Abjection is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a
hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor
who sells you up, a friend who stabs you. . .”31
Krauss recognizes that in the experience of Batailles, opposites only exist in
language as a way of making categorizations. “In the confounding of the logic that
maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of
the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of
demonstrating; that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to
be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of
death... ”32
Hal Foster discusses the idea of Trauma “in terms of Kristeva’s concept of
abjection and then goes on to the concept of the informe, seemingly unproblematically
integrating them. ‘Here, as often in horror movies and bedtime stories alike, horror
means, first and foremost, horror of maternity, of the maternal body made strange, even
repulsive, in repression.... Such images evoke the body turned inside out, the subject
literally abjected, thrown out. But they also invoke the outside turned in, the subject-as-
picture invaded by the object-gaze.... At this point some images pass beyond the abject,
which is often tied to substances and meanings, not only toward the informe, a condition
described by Bataille where significant form dissolves because the fundamental
distinction between figure and ground, self and other is lost...’33
This idea of boundaries between self and other is synonymous with the way
Kristeva applies her interpretation of Freud to abjection, that there are psychological
boundaries between self and other that are discovered when the a child begins to
understand itself as an entity that is separate from the mother. During this separation the
child abjects the mother. Simon Talylor interprets Kristeva’s writings concerning this
topic:
30
31
32
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p 21
33

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“In the pre-Oedipal stage, she explains, the child’s
experience of the world is totally undifferentiated and
narcissistic, unable to distinguish the world from its own
immediate desires and needs. During this period, the
mother represents an “anaclitic” (self-preservative) prop,
the first part-object to which the child develops a
phantasmatic attachment as a primary love-object. In a
very striking way, Kristeva, following Lacan, characterizes
childhood development in an anti-idealist portrayal,
focusing on its aggressivity and sadism. The child splits
the figure of the mother, like the breast, into a “good”
object and a “bad” object, depending on the dialectic of
presence and absence, that is, the mother’s ability to gratify
and frustrate the child’s self-preservative needs and
libidinal desires.”34
In conclusion to this section which describes the intersection of these theories as
set forth by George Batailles, Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, it is evident that Charlene
Roth’s description of the abject would satisfy them all:
“The abject, when it moves from the private sphere into a public space, is deemed
horrible by most societies. What is abject may vary from culture to culture but usually it
is characterized by evacuation, eruption and dissolution-the leaking, peeling away,
melting and accompanying stain, of a body’s (a system’s) insides moving to the outside.
Abject art makes viewers uncomfortable, in part, because it threatens traditional or
known order.”35
34
Jack Ben-Levi, Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, Simon Taylor, Abject Art (New York: D.A.P.,1993): 61.
35
Charlene Roth. “Skin and Bone,” Artweek v.28 (February 1997): p22.

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The Body in the 20th Century
“The twentieth century has restored and deepened the notion of flesh, that
is, of animate body.”36
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
In order to gain a better understanding of the body and its place within abject art,
it is essential to understand the changing climate of the twentieth century in relationship
to a shifting bodily paradigm, and how this has been demonstrated within the visual arts.
Tracey Warr describes this transformation of thought in her introduction to The Artist’s
Body.
“Throughout history artists have drawn, sculpted
and painted the human form. Recent art history, however,
reveals a significant shift in artists’ perceptions of the body,
which has been used not simply as the ‘content’ of the
work, but also as canvas, brush, frame and platform. Over
the course of the last hundred years artists and others have
interrogated the way in which the body has been depicted
and how it has been conceived. The idea of the physical
and mental self as a stable and finite form has gradually
eroded, echoing influential twentieth-century developments
in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology,
medicine and science. Artists have investigated the
temporality, contingency and instability of the body, and
have explored the notion that identity is ‘acted out’ within
and beyond cultural boundaries, rather than being an
inherent quality. They have explored the notion of
consciousness, reaching to express the self that is invisible,
formless and liminal. They have addressed issues of risk,
fear, death, danger and sexuality, at times when the body
has been most threatened by these things.”37
The work of those artists who employ the body as a medium and/or material
demonstrates a cross-fertilization of discourses and ideologies from various disciplines
and cultures. The ideas expressed by Freud concerning the unconscious mind and its
power over a subject’s behavior has radically changed the way that Westerners view the
correlation between mind and body. The Dada movement, which came to life shortly
after Freud’s major writings were published, involved the reality of the physical body
within its subversive, performative and multidisciplinary strategies that challenged
traditional representation in art. Dada eventually developed into Surrealism, which was
more psychologically bent and in turn, helped to popularize the Freudian fascination with
sex, dreams and the unconscious. “The collage, photomontage, installation, performance,
36
Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body (unpublished doctoral thesis): 45-50.
37
Amelia Jones, Tracey Warr. The Artist’s Body. (New York: New Phaidon Press Inc, 2003): 11.

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environments and assemblages of Dada and Surrealism broke out of the frame and the
flat plane of painting and began to engage with everyday life.”38
Several Modernist artists have been known for their fascination with ‘primitive’
cultures. Picasso helped to popularize this phenomenon with his Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907), his interest being most evident in this work. The advent of
anthropology was a catalyst for various exhibitions dealing with primitive colonial
cultures, and was the catalyst for Western enchantment with ‘irrational’ paradigms. A
less repressive view of body and mind became favored within this atmosphere. Artists in
particular became enthralled with “traditions in which altered states of mind such as
dreaming, insanity, hallucination and near-death experiences were directly related to the
body as forms of somatic knowledge... Non-Western cultures were not so focused on a
notion of the individual as a central, cumulative point, but rather on an understanding of
self as part of a continuum in time, a community, an environment, a cosmos. Ecstatic
rites, alien social customs such as human sacrifice, ritual initiation, circumcision, body
painting, scarification, tattooing and piercing, were observed to use the body as access to
another plane.”39
Viennese artist Oskar Schlemmer understood the massive impact of the First
World War, as is made clear in his statement written on the battlefield, ‘the new artistic
medium is a much more direct one: the human body.’ Tracey Warr expands upon this:
“The scale of death and destruction brought the
reality of corporeal existence into sharp focus, dislodging
previously held beliefs and values and altering the status
quo in terms of race, class and gender. By the dawn of the
Second World War, erupting into a world that had hardly
had time to heal from the physical and emotional wounds
of the First, attitudes to the body had altered irrevocably.”40
That alteration was made most evident in the work of the Abstract Expressionists.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the distorted and monstrous women painted
by Willem de Kooning. As a whole, those who made up the New York School had found
themselves unable to paint traditionally and representationally. The devastation caused
by the war had made it impossible. Those who worked with paint had to find a more
direct way of handling their medium.
“For the Abstract Expressionists working in post-
war New York, the canvas was the receptacle for the
artist’s psychic self-expression. Attention gradually turned
away from the painting as an object, and focused on the
very act of painting itself; indeed, the movement also
became known as ‘action painting’. The process of
painting was as important as the resulting work, and the
artist’s chosen method of mark-making on canvas became
38
Amelia Jones, Tracey Warr. The Artist’s Body. (New York: New Phaidon Press Inc, 2003): 11-12.
39
Amelia Jones, Tracey Warr. The Artist’s Body. (New York: New Phaidon Press Inc, 2003): 11-12.
40

14
the subject of the artwork. The artist’s presence in the
work through the act of painting led to the artist’s body
becoming a tool for applying paint, akin to the paintbrush,
leaving a direct trace of the body in the work.”41
The work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Marc Rothko was
centered in somatic ideology, and was extremely influential to artists working with the
body in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s.42
Although Rothko was not an action painter, the
significance of the body within his work directly related him to the action painters. All
three artists employed proprioception (bodily knowledge) as a device for their classic
painting methods, using canvases that related to the scale of their bodies in order to
express an message imbued in the corporeal. The importance of the painter’s and/or
spectator’s body and its link to the psyche was emphasized.
Through their artwork, De Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko responded to the
“philosophers of the body.” The writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Freidrich Neitzshe, Carl
Jung, Paul Schilder, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty contributed toward their thinking and
making processes. Their ideas were interconnected and adamantly anti-Cartesian. The
18th century philosopher Rene Des Cartes viewed the body as a mechanical organ with
deceptive senses. His focus was on reason, mental purification, and the separation of
mind and body. Sartre, on the other hand, emphasized the body, claiming that it is the
conscious incarnate. Pollock, De Kooning, and Rothko were influenced by his writings
and explored his ideas within their artwork. Rothko’s work with color and emotional
response makes evident his readings of Neitzsche. In his Genius Resides in Instinct
Neitzsche stressed that instinct is conscious intelligence, and states that human beings
have strayed from the instinctual aspects of themselves. He posits that this instinctual
wisdom is carried by the body.43
Pollock, who was a patient of Jung, was extremely
influenced by their psychotherapeutical sessions. Through the way in which he used his
body during his classical drip paintings, Pollock was able to tap into an unconscious of
which Jung spoke, and ‘unify body and spirit.’ It was the only time in his life that he was
able to overcome alcoholism.44
Schilder, in his book The Image and Appearance of the
Human Body, stated that the body image is in continual flux, and stresses its mobility,
flexibility, and fluidity. This strongly echoes De Kooning’s method of painting,
especially in his women series of the 50’s and 60’s. Unlike Rothco’s highly controlled
painting style, De Kooning’s was fast and wild. He used the feeling of his own body to
gauge where the head, shoulders, chest, and hips, of his female figures would fall into
place on his canvasses. He spoke of the internal changes that he went through as he
painted and how they affected the marks that he made. Essentially, he painted his body
in flux as he himself was fluxing. Schilder also related the body image to feelings,
attitudes, emotions, and the unconscious. He stated that the body image could shrink and
expand. It can give parts to the outside world and can take parts into itself. He saw the
body as the primary subject of art. He used the term ‘body image’ not only as a
psychological construct, but also as a depiction of the body in art.
41
42
Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body. (unpublished doctoral thesis): 35.
43
44

15
Merleau-Ponty had read Schilder and contributed to recovering the meaning of
the body in the life experience. He posited that myth is rooted in the body and there is
an inherent need and understanding of myth. He studied indigenous peoples’ view of the
corporeal, and noted that they see themselves as fusing with animals.45
During an
interview Rothko once described himself as “one of a small band of myth makers” and
said, “[We are] concerned with primitive myths and symbols that continue to have
meaning today . . . only that subject matter is valid which is timeless and tragic. That is
why we profess kinship with primitive and archaic art.” Here, Rothko is speaking of De
Kooning and Pollock, for they also had a strong interest in primitive art and had read
anthropological writings by Levy Bruel and James Frazier. In fact, Pollock looked
almost exclusively at Native American art for his inspiration.46
Merleau-Ponty also
theorized that the body had its own implicit thought which he referred to as Tacit-cogito,
and is evidenced in learned movement and muscle memory. He stressed the lived
physical experience and believed that one could acquire skill through the body. Jackson
Pollock acknowledged the implicit wisdom of his own body, and is known to have tapped
into its rhythm. He experienced psychic and physical transformations while action
painting and said “When I am painting I’m not aware of what I am doing...”47
His
methods would influence not only the next generation of young artists, but the
generations that followed them as well.
“It was the ‘action painting’ body of Jackson
Pollock that provided one of the most powerful
performative inspirations for artists who looked to activate
the body in relation to the work of art. Pollock’s body had
been obscured in critical discourse throughout the heyday
of Abstract Expressionism (from Clement Greenberg, in his
typically Kantian, ‘disinterested’ claims for the immutable
value of Pollock’s canvases, to Harold Rosenberg, coiner
and celebrator of an unnamed but clearly Pollock-inspired
‘action’ painter)... However, Hans Namuth’s
internationally circulated photographs of Pollock in the act
of flinging paint onto prone canvases disseminated the
seeds of Pollock’s paternal influence from the US to
Europe and the Gutai artists in Japan. As Allan Kaprow’s
famous paen to the artist, the 1958 essay ‘The legacy of
Jackson Pollock’ makes clear, Pollock as the photographic,
and thus embodied, action-painting hero, becomes the
major figure for subsequent generations of artists to
negotiate.”48
In the mid to late 1950’s artists like Georges Mathieu, Saburo Murakami, Kazuo
Shiraga, and Shozo Shimamoto brought the visceral way in which Jackson Pollock
45
Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body. (unpublished doctoral thesis): 36-50.
46
Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body. (unpublished doctoral thesis): Notes 9-30.
47
Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body. (unpublished doctoral thesis): Note 82.
48

16
approached the canvas into the three dimensional world. They painted with their bodies.
But this time the focus was not on the painting as an object, but the act and/or process of
making. “The artist’s presence in the work through the act of painting led to the artist’s
body becoming a tool for applying paint, akin to the paintbrush, leaving a direct trace of
the body in the work. In some works the body itself became the ‘canvas’ on which to
paint.”49
By the beginning of the 1960’s many artists had abandoned the object in search
for an art that was fused with life, an idea having its roots in Dada. Through this search
were born Happenings and Fluxus, both of which would be based upon the non-
commodification of art and the bodies of non-heroic artists and spectators alike.
According to Amelia Jones, such acts and groups were closely associated with the
metaphysical aspects of action painting. Loosely planned and unrehearsed public
performances modeled after mundane everyday life events were the focus of the artists
involved. However, some of these Happenings, such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy,
went beyond the mundane, and entered into the realm of hysterical and sensual frenzy.
Schneeman says of Meat Joy, “it has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent,
a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent
plastic, rope, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic - shifting and
turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any
moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a
psychic and imagistic stream in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by
the energy complement of the audience.”50
By the close of the decade a raw and intense kind of artwork had emerged. The
stage had been set both socially and art historically for the most radical and revolutionary
artworks of the 20th century, perhaps any century, to materialize. Body Art had been
born and continued along the extreme paths of Happenings as an art that would be
independent of the gallery. Artists writhed during the onslaughts of the Vietnam War,
and tested their own physical limits in response. Vito Acconci bit his own body in every
area within reach of his mouth. Dennis Oppenheim suspended himself between two walls
for long as possible, only to move them further apart each time that he fell. Chris
Burden bore wings of glass and fire, locked himself in his school locker for five days and
nights, and had himself shot, as well as nailed to a Volkswagan. In a piece titled Rhythm
0, Maria Abromovik put her body at the mercy of her audience members, offering them
seventy two objects which they could use on her as desired. “By the end of the
performance all her clothes had been sliced off her body with razor blades, she had been
cut, painted, cleaned, decorated, crowned with thorns and had had the loaded gun pressed
against her head. After six hours the performance was halted by concerned spectators.”51
Jonathon Benthall writes of the body in art and in life during these turbulent
times, “Demonstrations, street art and sit-ins are literally and palpably embodying
arguments to challenge verbal mystification and lies... all repressed groups will tend to
find their most effective and confident expression through the body’s wider resources
rather than within [only] the enclosure of verbal language, in so far as they opt for self-
49
50
51

17
assertion rather than for integrating with the norms of the majority.”52
These words are
particularly true for the rights movements, for in the words of Amelia Jones, “The artists’
gestures in public were in the 1960’s often transformed into a particular form of activism,
which introduced a political dimension to the work.”53
This continued throughout the
70’s, 80’s and 90’s, in the body-based artwork non-white, non-male artists who have
become known as the ‘Other.’ “According to feminist and multiculturalist analysis, the
notion of the Other inevitably implies a hierarchy. To be Other is to be considered less
than the male and less than the individual of white European heritage. The Other is
viewed as marginal, a sideshow in the grand narrative of world history.”54
Women, racial
minorities, and homosexuals, are shunted into this realm and many of these artists have
employed their bodies in order to get political messages across.
Feminist’s views in the 1970’s and the decades to follow would vary greatly and
widely. However, their focus on the body cannot be denied. Many women artists of the
1970’s felt that their experience of the world was uniquely female, and their approach to
art reflected it. Feminist critic Lucy Lippard agreed that a female sensibility could be
found within their work and pointed out that eggs, spheres, biomorphic shapes, and
vaginal imagery, as well as a tendency toward the body and body-like materials, were
reoccurring themes. “First Wave Feminists who had celebrated female sexuality and
publicly exposed their own, often voluptuous, naked bodies were criticized for playing
into patriarchal power structures.”55
They were found guilty by other feminist groups of
‘essentialism’, and were accused of embracing the designations imposed upon women by
patriarchal culture- woman as nature, woman as body, woman as emotion- and merely
changing them from negative to positive qualities. Postmodern feminists chose not to
serve any ideologies, nor to show positive images of the female experience. They instead
revealed the ways in which ideas of womanhood and femininity are socially constructed.
In place of what society referred to as femininity, they saw “a set of poses adopted by
women in order to conform to societal expectations about womanhood.”56
Those who have found themselves on the socially repressed side of the ‘color
line’ generally made statements concerning their social status by looking at historical
models:
“Postmodern multiculturalists attack the assumption
of the Other by seeking the origin of racial and ethnic
Otherness in the way in which history is constructed.”
Modernist history justified the European colonialisation as
‘the White Man’s Burden’, by their views of history as a
“linear development towards universally embraced social,
political and philosophical goals. The rules involve the rule
of reason, the establishment of democracy (literacy) and the
progress of science of technology.” To them colonialisation
was justifiable because it saw these cultures as backward,
52
53
54
Eleanor Heartney, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 65.
55
56

18
slow to evolve, and primitive forms of perhaps even
themselves.57
James Luna, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena have used their bodies in
pseudo anthropological displays in order to point out the ways in which the paradigms
behind colonization continue to influence Western thought. In The Artifact Piece, James
Luna laid atop an exhibit table at San Diego’s Museum of Man, and was labeled with a
nametag along with written documentation involving how the scars on his body were
obtained during a drunken binge. Accompanying him in the exhibition were two display
cases containing his personal documents and some ceremonial items. Warr states that
“Luna’s literal presence as a museum exhibit disrupts the viewer’s ability to observe the
ethnic and historical ‘other’ by the presence of a consciousness and answering gaze.”58
Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena take Luna’s approach a step further in Two
Undiscovered Amerindians Visit.... In this piece the two artists cage themselves, dressed
in Hollywood style Native American costumes, and humor those visitors who drop coins
in a box with their ‘native’ song and dance.59
By the mid-1970s it had become obvious that a critical dialog on the notion of the
body needed to be set forth. October magazine made this discussion its priority. It was
in this theoretical climate that supported Jaques Lacan psychoanalytic and theory and
French poststructuralist thought that “the body in culture was seen as discursively
constituted and outside discourse at the same time, as a border of discourse opening onto
something other.”60
At this point in time the artist’s body appeared within two genres, activist
performance art and the portrayal of the fetishized and objectified self. The latter would
gain momentum throughout the 1980’s. Warr explains, “The anti-commercial, sober
enactments of everyday experience in Fluxus in the early 1960s give way to the activist
projects of, for example, Hi Red Center, the Guerrilla Art Action Group, Suzanne Lacy
and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the simulacral self-masquerades of Yayoi Kusama, Urs
Luthi, Eleanor Antin, Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Laurie
Anderson, Jeff Koons and Lyle Ashton Harris.”61
In the 1980s body art branches into a
performance which is staged, leaving the audience mostly uninvolved, and
commodifying photographic self-portraiture that reflects the general sentiment of a 1980s
preoccupation with wealth and its signified equivalents. This era is known for a “wide-
scale embrace of consumerist culture at least in US and British contexts, the body/self is
experienced in a more and more alienated, commodified form, calling for an increasingly
dramatic mode of representation. In the 1980s exaggeration rather than critique thus
becomes the dominant means of negotiating the alienation of everyday life in
pancapitalism.”62
As the decade progressed many artists became increasingly social
aware.
57
Eleanor Heartney, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 65-66.
58
59
60
61
62

19
A significant number of artists began to incorporate
political and social topics into their work in the eighties, a
discernable trend unmatched in magnitude since their
mobilization against the Vietnam War. This tendency
burgeoned in two main directions. They first surveyed the
landscape for signposts of racism, sexism, and
homophobia... The second, related course was set by the
devastating impact of AIDS. Artists targeted governmental
mismanagement and inattention to the problem, channeled
grief and resignation into action, and put a human face on a
frightening pandemic.”63
The body had become a ground for political action and artists were getting their
messages across by employing their own bodies as an art medium. Although they owed
much to predecessors such as Acconci and Burden, they were also strikingly different.
“Artists [of the 1980’s and 90’s] tended to take more overtly political stands, using these
as a metaphor for the marginalized and victimized members of society. And they also
tended to pursue a more theatrical format, acting on stage before real audiences, rather
than setting up actions to be observed only by a few friends, or by a still or video
camera.”64
The 1980s marked an era of increased wealth, influence and media attention for
artists and subjected them to “more intense scrutiny as they entered the mainstream.”65
Artists whose work investigated the corporeal were left vulnerable to the onslaughts of
conservative politicians who, along with leaders of the religious right, sought to repeal
funding from those whose work they found offensive.
The ensuing culture wars were a series of conflicts that have been in the forefront
of our media since the late 1980s and have caused heated debates concerning art, free
speech, obscenity, politics, and religion. The 1991 Whitney Biennial curator Lisa
Phillips wrote in the biennial’s catalogue, “In the realm of culture, pornography and
obscenity had replaced Communism as a new threat to American values.”66
Well known art critique Eleanor Heartney noted that the body had become the
battleground in these culture wars.67
“Urine, excrement, blood and semen have all been
central elements in art works which have raised the hackles
of the religious right. A discomfort with these overt
evidences of bodily processes is, in part, a lingering legacy
of American Puritanism. It also conforms to the Cartesian
tendency to see the body as a mere machine which is
animated by the injection of the mind or spirit.... In such a
schema, the workings of the body, though necessary, are of
63
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p4
64
Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics, (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004): 59.
65
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p5.
66
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p5.
67

20
a lower order of importance than those of the mind. Or, to
take another contemporary analogy, fluids are waste
products of a system which must be controlled and
regulated, but certainly not celebrated. Meanwhile the
AIDS crises has placed a political spin on body fluids like
semen and blood, which became potential carriers of
disease.”68
Perhaps the most infamous of these controversies revolved around a work created
by Andres Serrano. Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) (a piece in which a crucifix floats
within a glass bottle of urine) was attacked vehemently by Jesse Helms as a ‘sickening,
abhorrent, and shocking act by an arrogant blasphemer.’ Serrano had received several
thousand dollars in fellowship money and the National Endowment for the Arts was one
of his contributors. Steihaug describes the results of Helms’ condemnations:
“The American Family Association and various
political and religious leaders launched, together with
Helms, a campaign that led to a tumultuous public
controversy over state regulation of art and the First
Amendment rights of artists and museums. It culminated in
the annulment of several NEA grants and the insertion of
an obscenity clause in NEA proposal guidelines.”69
Karen Finley was another artist who was targeted by conservatives. In We Keep
our Victims Ready Finley dealt with materials that represent bodily fluids in order to get
her point across. By smearing herself with chocolate she demonstrated how women are
treated ‘like shit.’ After covering her chocolate smeared body with red heart candies she
explains, ‘after a woman is treated like shit she becomes more lovable.” Finley then
covered herself in bean sprouts that she associated with semen ‘because after a woman is
treated like shit she is jacked off on.’ Heartney points out that Finley’s, amongst others,
“offense was connection to the public exposure to bodily excretions... What seemed most
objectionable to these conservative critics was the foregrounding of the physicality of the
human body and its excretory functions.”70
By the 1990’s the body in art begins to emerge with tremendous momentum.
Warr states, “what Vergine calls the ‘love of romance of the self in earlier body art’
makes way for a return to the art object or staged installation. But this return is one in
which the body is obsessively referenced... This new articulation of the artist’s body... is
paralleled by American scholar Michel Feher’s formulation about the meaning of the
body in contemporary life:
‘The body is at once the...actualizer of power
relations - and that which resists power... [It] resists power
not in the name of trans-historical needs but because of the
68
69
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p 4-5.
70

21
new desires and constraints that each new regime develops.
The situation therefore is one of permanent battle, with the
body as the shifting field where mechanisms of power
constantly meet new techniques of resistance and escape.
So the body is not a site of resistance to a power which
exists outside it; within the body there is a constant tension
between mechanisms of power and techniques of
resistance.’ Artists in the 1990’s tend to perform this body
as exploded from within as well as from without, prompted
by the frenzied tensions of pancapitalism, in which the
body is the site of both resistance and power.71
71

22
Abject Art and the Body
“The proliferation of bodily fragments and
degraded materials in contemporary art represents [that]
malevolent associations of the other with the abject (e.g.,
women and menstrual blood, gay men and disease, the
working class and trash, blacks and dirt) have been
deployed by artists to force stereotypes to resignify and
circulate in alternately parodic, celebratory, and non-
oppressive ways. Abjection within recent art practices
signals a profound attack whose weapons are the very
forces that the armored subject most fears: ‘sexuality and
the unconscious, desire and the drives, the jouissance...that
shatters the subject that surrenders it precisely to the
fragmentary and the fluid.’ The recent production of abject
art, at a time of AIDS, backlash against women’s rights,
and ‘private telematics’ (the dematerialization of the body
in postmodernism), signifies the irrepressible resurgence of
the body in an era of diminishing returns.”72
In his study Abject / Informe / Trauma, Jan-Ove Steihaug asserts that there are
three ways in which abjection has been defined within the contemporary setting. The
first is by the four curators of the Whitney Museum’s Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire
in American Art, who recognize abjection as a central theory in 1990’s art that employs
abject materials and debunks the high status of fine art. The second definition comes
from the writings of Hal Foster in his book Return of the Real. Foster claims that this art
form can be seen in two categories, which are generally separated by gender. There are
female artists who explore the repression of the maternal body by paternal law and those
male artists who twist ‘the paternal law of difference - sexual and generational, ethnic
and social.’ A somewhat opposing definition in relationship to gender is noted in the
ideas set forth by the Swedish Curator Gertrud Sandqvist who organized the exhibition
Abject. Her interpretation of the concept is that it applies only to women and the
psychology of the female child; therefore, the exhibition included only female artists.
Sandqvist acknowledged abject art as a strictly contemporary phenomenon by placing
only the works of young and recently emerging within artists the show.73
It was in the year of 1990 that Sandqvist organized Abject, and Michael Wilson
deems it the year that abject art began to surface in the United States as well. It became
evident when three exhibitions that explored similar types of work came to fruition in a
72
73
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>. p17-8.

23
mere matter of months. They include Just Pathetic at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los
Angeles, Work in Progress? Work? at Andrea Rosen Gallery and Stuttering at New York
City’s Stux Gallery. Between the three, these exhibitions represented some of the artists
who would become key individuals in abject art’s ‘anti-movement.’ However, it wasn’t
until the London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts exhibited True Stories in 1992 and The
Whitney hosted Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art in 1993 that this genre
became notorious within the artworld.74
Other exhibitions which confirmed the potency
of the abject art during the 1990’s were the Centre Georges Pompidou’s femininmasculin
(1995) and L’Informe: Mode d’emploi (1996), which shared six of the same artists
(Marcel Duchamp, Jean Fautrier, Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, Mike Kelley, and
Robert Morris).75
At the same point in time that the latter was being planned it was
found that yet another Parisian exhibition, entitled From the Informe to the Abject, was in
its early stages. Eventually it was cancelled after the curators were made aware of
L’Informe’s similar and earlier intentions.76
Although many of the artists featured in these exhibitions were young and
upcoming Generation Xers from the postmodern era, there were equally as many mature
artists included, many of who were Modernist heroes. The question then becomes how is
it possible that artists from these supposedly dissonant eras within art history exhibit
together in a contemporary setting under a body of work whose genre, the abject, wasn’t
termed by Julia Kristeva until 1982? Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois explain that it
was during the early eighties that “certain artistic practices with which Georges Bataille’s
name had never been associated... could only be characterized adequately through the
operations of Bataille’s informe.” and also point out that “the repression of certain
careers or certain parts of famous oeuvres”77
(perhaps in part by Clement Greenburg?)
has made it necessary to take another look at a great deal of Modern Art with fresh eyes.
Let us not forget the tremendous influence that Modernism’s Dada had on bodily
and performance art, as well as on work that includes found objects and/or base materials.
Jennifer Riddell points out that some of Jean Arp’s writing on Dada is very in tune with
“contemporary” thinking behind abject artwork. He wrote, “I had accepted the transience,
the dribbling away, the brevity, the impermanence, the fading, the withering, the
spookishness of our existence. Not only had I accepted it, I had even welcomed
transience into my work as it was coming into being.”78
Riddell posits that 1990’s abject art asserts the material presence of the body in
the use of ‘not-art’ objects. This includes the ‘realm of lived experience’ as opposed to
high art mediums. Much abject work shows a ‘lack of deliberateness (although not
intentionality)’ as viewers, rather than approach an esteemed object, simply ‘stumble
across’ it.79
This is strongly reminiscent of Dada’s most notorious functions.
The curators of Abject Art quote a statement made by Claes Oldenberg, yet
another Modernist, which shares the sentiments of contemporary abject art:
74
Michael Wilson. “Michael Wilson on Sore Winners,” Artforum v.43 no.2 (October 2004): 117
75
Yve-Alain Bois and Rosiland Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 236.
76
Rosalind Krauss. “Informe without Conclusion” October no. 78 (Fall 1996): 89.
77
Yve-Alain Bois and Rosiland Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 9-10.
78
Jennifer L. Riddell. “The Abject Object,” New Art Examiner v.20 (October 1996): 29.
79

24
“I am for an art that is political - erotical - mystical, that
does something other than sit on its ass in a museum....I
am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap &
still comes out on top.... I am for an art that is put on and
taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks,
which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great
contempt, like a piece of shit.... I am for the art of punching
and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of
kids’ smells. I am for the art of mama-babble....”80
Some of the many Modern artists who have been included in abject art’s realm are
Louise Bourgeois, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Robert Morris,
Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Andy
Warhol. Each of them has made reference to the abject body within their work, despite
the fact that this type of acknowledgement seems to be a postmodern phenomenon. The
curators of Abject Art note in the introduction the exhibition’s catalogue:
“Scatological assemblages, bodily fragments, and
base materials - dirt, grunge, and the traces of sexual
difference - have defiled the white cube of the gallery
space, calling into question its ideological ‘neutrality’ as a
site encoded with a rhetoric of contamination. This body
of production often incorporates what Lacan terms ‘imagos
of the fragmented body,’ which is to say, ‘images of
castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation,
evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body.’
Representing an oppositional practice rather than an
ontology, this insurgent materialism in art asserts the
claims of the body, sensuality, and difference and is against
societal repression and its institutional architecture.
Historically it may be situated in an art historical genealogy
characterized by its insistence on ‘antivision’ which, as
theorized by Rosalind Krauss, includes an important
phenomenological component, with an emphasis on the
haptic and tactile qualities of art.”81
Jennifer Riddell has similar thoughts regarding bodily hierarchies: “...that which
is abject can be thought of as a metonym for the body itself, indexing an array of
historically seated privilege, repression, or negation of specific forms of art practice
(painting over craft, sculpture over fiber, the permanent over the ephemeral, the precious
over the pedestrian).”82
The same sentiments can be found in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Claes
Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
80
81
82
Jennifer L. Riddell, “The Abject Object,” New Art Examiner v.20 (October 1996): 27

25
Warhol, who made a series of copper paintings that he oxidized with his urine, is well
known for artwork dealing with the role of the improper body. Both Rauschenberg and
Twombly employed proprioception within their work, as Helen Molesworthy observes:
“Rauschenberg radically reinserts the lower body into art. He desublimates the hand of
the artist, allowing it to smear and rub, press and blur, privileging tactility over sight.
Rauschenberg’s work catalogued the body through its products - shit, stain, blood....”83
Simon Taylor notes that Twombly’s use of proproception involves “scratching,
smudging, and smearing” and that Pollock’s classic horizontal paintings demonstrate a
form of embodiment.84
Postmodernist artist Kiki Smith addresses bodily hierarchy as well. “The way
Smith explores the exterior and interior regions of the body, examining the nervous,
digestive, and urogenital systems, skin, orifices, and bodily fluids, suggests an
investigation of body symbolism, one that rejects the bourgeois hierarchy of the body,
which privileges the head and denigrates the lower bodily stratum. Many of her most
recent works focus on the body’s excretory functions-shitting, pissing, cumming,
vomiting, and bleeding...’”85
Smith says of her own work that the “mind/body
dichotomy...has had enormously devastating ramifications in the society...to justify great
quantities of oppression...we have this split where we say the intellect is more important
than the physical. And we have this hatred of the physical.”86
Smith’s bodies are often maimed and/or fragmented, leaking through their orifices
those abject fluids. Their skin no longer offers a barrier between inside and outside, as
organs protrude through and fall away.87
About her work, Kiki Smith says: “When
people are dying, they are losing control of their bodies. That loss of function can seem
humiliating and frightening. But, on the other hand, you can look at it as a kind of
liberation of the body. It seems like a nice metaphor - a way of thinking about the social
- that people lose control despite the many agendas of different ideologies in society,
which are trying to control the body(ies)... medicine, religion, law, etc. Just think about
control - who has the control of the body? Does the body have control over itself? Do
you? . . . Does the mind have control over the body? Does the social?”88
“As Judith Butler states, the body is a materialization of a norm, it is the
performance of an ideal construct, which one has to comply with to ensure his or her
subjectivity so as not to be abjected, excluded, and marginalized into the spheres of
nonsubjectivity. But as Butler also affirms, one never quite succeeds in complying with
the norm he or she is supposed to reiterate. So abject performances of the female
body are those where the failing to reproduce the norm is made manifest where the
spectre of abjection is being played out. Abject art is saying to the viewer: this failure is
not necessarily unproductive, for it can have the effect of complexifying the body. “89
83
84
85
86
87
Christine Ross. “Redefinitions of Abjection,” Res no.31 (Spring 1997): 152.
88
89

26
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an abject person as “one who is cast off; a
castaway, and outcast; a degraded person.90
Julia Kristeva has implied that the maternal
body essentially represents that which is both abject and is abjected. In the words of
Christine Ross it is the site where ‘nature confronts culture,’ and ‘supplies the paradigm
for social othering...’91
Kiki Smith as well as Cindy Sherman, Mona Hatoum, and Judy
Chicago, creatively explore notions of the maternal body.
“Kiki Smith’s sculptures frequently refer to the
maternal body and the reproductive organs; in the most
explicit cases, this involves sculptures of wombs and uteri,
paper scrolls depicting fetuses, lactating women, and
pregnant bellies. “Trough” (1990), one of her most
horrifying sculptures, consists of a white plaster cast of a
hollowed-out female body, sliced crosswise and mounted
horizontally on the wall to form a watering hole, which
literalizes notions of the woman’s body as cipher and
vessel. That a woman’s agency, as conceived in patriarchal
society, depends upon her reproductive capabilities
explains why those who work to proscribe abortion border
on the fascistic. Such reactionary attempts to limit define
women through the maternal role deny fundamental matters
of agency.”92
Often discussed in relation to the work of Kiki Smith’s is that of Cindy
Sherman’s. Both are interpreted by a feminist theory that posits the body “as a site for
political struggle,” leading logically to a “politics of representation of the body.”93
The
subjects of Sherman’s work are thought of by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey to
chronologically shed their skin as each new body of work develops. Her “Untitled Film
Stills” explore feminine stereotypes in the form of various girls next door, femme fatales,
vulnerable clerical workers and recently of age sex kittens - the list goes on and on.
Throughout the early 1980’s Sherman begins to partially remove the devices through
which the women’s affectations are delivered. This can be exemplified in the her 1983-
84 “fashion” photographs which “pitted gorgeous outfits against dermatological
derangement.”94
“The cosmetic facades that fit over the heroines of the early work like
so many glossy carapapaces of perfection were organized, like the fetish itself, as a
monument to lack, as a cover-up for the fact that the castrated woman’s body is the site of
the ‘wound.’95
“From the hardened outside - all images - of the
film stills, to the idea of the feminine interior as limp,
90
91
92
93
Steihaug, Jan-Ove. Abject/Informe/Trauma. www.forart.no/steihaug/toc.html>.
94
Wayne Koestenbaum. “Fall Gals,” Artforum v.39 no.1 (September 2000): 151.
95
Rosiland Krauss. “Informe without Conclusion” October no. 78 (Fall 1996): 93.

27
moist, formless, of the erotic reveries of the centerfold
pictures, to the parodic fashion-plates that Sherman made
in the early 1980s and then the horrific fairy-tale
illustrations from about the same time, Sherman is seen by
Mulvey as playing on this inside/outside topography of the
woman’s being in which nothing can be imagined behind
the cosmetic facade but a monstrous otherness, the
wounded interior that results from the blow of a
phantasmatic castration. Sherman, she says, is exploring
this ‘iconography of misogyny,’ one that women
themselves identify with not only in adopting the cosmetics
of the masquerade but in pathologically attempting to
expunge the physical marks of their own femininity: ‘The
images of decaying food and vomit raise the specter of the
anorexic girl,’ she writes, ‘who tragically acts out the
fashion fetish of the female as an eviscerated, cosmetic
and artificial construction designed to ward the ‘otherness’
hidden in the ‘interior.’ But it is in the body’s final
disappearance into the spread of waste and detritus, in the
work of the late 1980s, that ‘the topography of
exterior/interior is exhausted,’ since ‘these traces represent
the end of the road, the secret stuff of bodily fluids that the
cosmetic is designed to conceal.’ with the removal of this
final veil and the direct, unblinking confrontation of the
wound - ‘the disgust of sexual detritus, decaying food,
vomit, slime, menstrual blood, hair’ - the fetish now fails
and with it the very possibility of meaning that the mark of
the phallic signifier puts into play: ‘Cindy Sherman traces
the abyss or morass that overwhelms the defetishized body,
deprived of the fetish’s semiotic, reduced to being
‘unspeakable’ and devoid of significance.’96
The work of both Sherman and Smith are compatible with Mary Russo’s
‘monstrous feminine’ and ‘female grotesque.’ An element of the carnivalesque is imbued
by a performance of hysteria, theatricality and masquerade. Much of their work has been
produced in response to women’s issues such as abortion, rape and a backlash against the
rights of women. It has been suggested that Smith’s and Sherman’s portrayal of the
abject, along with Julia Kristeva’s, reinforces the patriarchal ideas that they attempt to
subvert.97
Art critic Joseph Koerner has stated that “abject art exposes the mechanism
whereby some subjects are expelled in order to objectify the sovereignty of others.”98
If
96
Rosiland Krauss. “Informe without Conclusion” October no. 78 (Fall 1996): 93.
97
98
Joseph Leo Koerner. “The Abject of Art History,” Res no.31 (Spring 1997): 31.

28
anything, this is the case in Mona Hatoum’s Corps etranger, which has been referred to
by Kristeva directly as a work that evokes the abject.99
“Corps etranger consists of a cylindrical white
enclosure with two openings through which the viewer may
enter to stand over a large circular video projection of a
medical scan of the interior of the artist’s body.
Penetrating into a variety of orifices, the scanner takes the
viewer on a dizzying ride along the channels of digestion,
reproduction and defecation, through opening and closing
valves where liquids gush and swirl, while the body’s
breathing is manifest through a whistling sound that
changes character depending on where the pulse has been
taken. At odd moments the camera resurfaces to the
outside of the body, where it records giant pores and hairs,
only to plunge back inside on its disorienting journey
through the internal landscape. Simultaneously penetrating
and distancing, the medical gaze of the camera offers an
intimate insight into Hatoum’s body. At the same time the
scale of the projection, enclosed in its womb-like space (the
constructed enclosure), threatens to engulf the viewer.”100
Hatoum’s work deals not only with the othering of the feminine, but of the
foreigner as well. Corps etranger imbues the myth of the vagina dentata- the woman as
a vampire, animal or spider with a devouring sexuality that dissembles masculinity. It
also signifies the foreign Palestinean body that is abjected by the Western subject in order
to form cultural identity. The viewer is now confronted and consumed by the ‘other,’
and when observed from a medical point of view is the same.101
Judy Chicago employs maternal fluids in Menstrual Bathroom, in which the
display of menstrual blood can no longer be shunted into a private realm. This exposure
of the maternal body is a threat to patriarchy.102
In discussing the work of Kristeva,
Elizabeth Gross explains: “Horror of menstrual blood is a refusal to acknowledge the
subject’s corporeal link to the mother.... It marks the site of an unspeakable and
unpayable debt of life, of existence, that the subject (and culture) owes to the maternal
body.” In Kristeva’s terms, Chicago uses “nature” to confront “culture” and thus disturbs
identity, system, order.”103
Just as the abjected bodies portrayed in the work of Mona Hatoum, Kiki Smith
and Cindy Sherman recognize “the horror of loss, decay, and illness,”104
the homosexual
body as signified by artists such as Robert Gober approached in a similar fashion. Simon
99
100
101
Christine Ross. “Redefinitions of Abjection,” Res no.31 (Spring 1997): 151-2.
102
Christine Ross. “Redefinitions of Abjection,” Res no.31 (Spring 1997): 151-2.
103
104

29
Taylor explains the dynamics of fear within heterosexual culture by citing Judith Butler:
“Judith Butler theorizes abjection in relation to
constructions of homosexuality and heterosexuality in her
essay ‘Beyond the Logic of Repudiation.’ She identifies
abjection as a strategy used to remove the different threats
gays and lesbians present to the heterosexual. The gay
male poses the threat of castration and feminization and
therefore homosexualization, while the lesbian represents
the ‘monstrous phallicization of the feminine.’ Looking at
how constructions of heterosexuality inform constructions
of homosexuality, Butler explains that heterosexually
‘sexed positions are themselves secured through the
repudiation of homosexual abjection and the assumption of
a normative heterosexuality.’ This does not mean that the
homosexual is inherently or essentially abject; rather, that
homosexuality becomes ‘abjected’ in the construction of
normative heterosexuality.”105
Jennifer Riddell points out, “abject art claims and asserts what has been made
invisible.”106
Robert Gober’s work exposes the public to a gay male desire that has been
marginalized for centuries. Like many individuals who have “come out” to friends and
family members, gay culture has in term “come out” to the public. Simon Taylor points
out that “the dismembered limb in Gober’s work is, among other things, a metaphor of
the pathology of homophobia. Ideologically, the fragmented body functions as a critique
of the body politic, continuing a long tradition in political satire and iconography,” and
that the use of prosthetics in Gober’s works “invoke the abject through... a horror related
to the fear of dismemberment and death.”107
His uni-sexed torsos consisting of hairy-
chested breasts confront the deterioration of male/female boundaries by implying
androgyny and the hermaphroditic, which further disrupt the designation of sexuality and
gender.
Much of Gober’s work has been centered on the public’s response to the AIDS
epidemic, and has addressed the panic affiliated with spread of the disease as well as the
proposal to expose those who have been plagued by it. His sink pieces deal with the idea
of purifying the disease. Taylor explains that the absence of functional elements such as
plumbing fixtures denies access to water. The lack of this restorational (both physically
and spiritually) fluid cuts off the access to cleanliness and represents, according to the
artist, the lack of a cure for those who are HIV positive. In 1989 William H. Buckley Jr.
publicly insinuated that men who were HIV positive should be branded on the buttocks.
“Gober’s apparent response was a sculpture of a male backside and legs emerging from a
wall; on the backside is engraved a musical score in imitation of a figure from
Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. ( Kristeva refers to the grotesque
105
106
107

30
imagery of the body in Bosch’s fantastic visions and links abjection to biblical
abomination in Judeo-Christian culture.)108
Gober, along with Mike Kelley, has been known to engage in processes that enter
into the realm of ‘women’s work’ such as sewing.109
This type of work “is often imbued
with an oppositional, feminine sensibility, irrespective of the maker’s gender. Its
materials are associated with roles and tasks constructed as feminine: household items,
fabric, food, and other found ephemera.110
Therefore, not only does this work extend
Gober’s blur between the boundaries of the sexes and proscribed gender roles, but for
artists such Kelley, it addresses a kind of abject masculinity, one which refuses to
conform to paternal law. Taylor points out, “One of the most controversial issues
surrounding Kelley’s work has been... a general interest in ‘unmanly’ things like dolls.
Influenced by the feminist critique of masculinity, as revealed in several of his
caricatures, stuffed animal sculptures, and felt banners, Kelley produces objects deeply
involved in issues of sexuality and gender difference.”111
Along with the theme of gender, Rosalind Krauss has located both excremental
substances and Kelley’s use of “lumps” as other ways in which Kelley explores the
‘low.’ She states that:
“Excrement both as bodily waste and as the traces
of infantile use that stain the stuffed toy animals ...cast
scatology in the familiar terms of abject art... Kelley’s
work Monkey Island (1982-83) - particularly its poster Ass
Insect, in which symmetrically linked monkey profiles
generate the image of leering eyes from the animals’ paired
anuses, in a direct allusion to the role of the monkey in the
whole series of [Bataille’s] ‘Pineal Eye’ texts, as well as
‘La Jesuve... Batailles discussion turns to the forces of
exclusion in the field of the social and takes the path of
Marx’s old mole, which, Bataille says, ‘begins in the
bowels of the earth, as in the materialist bowels of
proletarians. So it is not surprising that Kelley should have
done a work called Lumpenprol (1991), which with its
slightly smaller version, Riddle of the Sphinx (1992), stages
the jesuvian process... The ‘lumps’ in these two works are
generalized as invasive conditions, erupting within the
horizontal field of the work.112
Hal Foster expands upon the deeper meaning of Lumpenprol by giving the
sociological context for its root, Lumpen, a term that is clearly associated with the
abjected other:
108
109
110
Jennifer L. Riddell. “The Abject Object,” New Art Examiner v.20 (October 1996):27
111
112
Rosiland Krauss. “Informe without Conclusion” October no. 78 (Fall 1996): 101-2.

31
“Lumpen, the German word for ‘rag’ that gives us
Lumpensammmler (the ragpicker that so interested
benjamin) and Lumpenproletariat (the mass too ragged to
form a class that so interested Marx, ‘the scum, the
leavings, the refuse of all classes’), is a crucial word in the
Kelley lexicon, which he develops as a third term between
the informe (of Bataille) and the abject (of Kristeva). In a
sense, he does what Bataille urges; he bases materialism
‘on psychological or social facts.’ The result is an art of
lumpy things, subjects, and personae that resist shaping, let
alone sublimating or redeeming. Unlike the Lumpen of
Napoleon III, Hitler, or Mussolini, the Lumpen of Kelley
refuses molding, much less mobilizing.”113
Much like Andy Warhol, Kelley’s work expresses a cynicism and irreverence
toward the New York School through the use of abject materials and devices. In some of
Kelley’s felt banners the profane is exalted and the elevated function of ‘fine art’ is
sublimated. These works “mock the implicit machismo of the [Abstract Expressionists]
and their works... Rothko’s Blood Stain Artist’s Conception/Body Print (Self-Portrait as
the shroud of Turin) (1985) is based on a remark made by one of Rothko’s friends after
the artist had committed suicide - that the bloodstain Rothko’s body created was his best
stain painting. By invoking the auratic presence of the artist-messiah, Kelley appears to
be mocking the mystification of art-world ‘masterpieces.’”114
Kelly’s employs what he calls ‘the worst and trashiest stuff that the main culture
abhors’ as artistic materials. The pitiful looking found objects and stuffed animals that
compose his sculptures and installations are stained with baby’s drool, urine and feces.
Rhonda Lieberman notes that “Mike Kelley’s sock dolls are... moving and pathetic,
pinned to the wall in some kind of S & M Romper Room moment.”115
The only other
artist who can vie with Kelley for his use of the infantile and the excremental is Paul
McCarthy. Jan-Ove Steihaug refers to his viewing of Paul McCarthys video installation,
Bossy Burger, as one of his three most compelling experiences he has had as a viewer of
art. He describes the documented performance in which McCarthy has been staged
within an old sitcom set:
“[McCarthy] is dressed in a chef costume, with
oversized clown shoes, plastic gloves and a cartoon-like,
Alfred E. Newman mask. He begins by repeatedly banging
the set doors and walking back and forth in the studio. He
then sticks his fingers in a ketchup bottle at a kitchen
counter, smears the ketchup all over himself, covers a chair
with it and slides around on it, all the while talking to
himself, groaning, crying, and filling yogurt cups with
mayonnaise. He also cuts the ketchup bottle with scissors,
113
Hal Foster. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October no.78 (Fall 1996): 119-20.
114
115
Rhonda Lieberman. “Stuttering,” Flashart v.32 (March/April 1991): 137.

32
puts a chopstick with mayonnaise up his behind, while
repeating ‘Fuck it up the butt,’ cuts off the fingers n his
glove, laughs hysterically while spinning around, hits
himself with a door, etc. The end the video focuses on a
hole in the wall. He peers through it and tries to push his
face through it, climbs up and ‘fucks’ it. These are some
fragments of this chaotic and ritualistic happening. With
this piece, we seem to be drawn into an infantile psychic
space of pure desire and aggressiveness, prior to
subjecthood, symbolic order and culture. The performance
submits excremental food-substances, ‘holes’ and body
openings into a turmoil of primary fantasies, creating a
space of psychic regression and undifferrentiation. Two
words to describe this might be bliss and horror.”116
Art critic Micheal Cohen, in an article on Paul McCarthy in Flash Art, takes a
look back at one of McCarthy’s 1974 performances. To it, he applies Julia Kristeva’s
theory on abjection. After describing a piece entitled “Meat Cake Yum Yum, he says
‘What is this? What compels someone to subject himself to degradation, and to revel in
filth? It is abjection, the revolt of being. What Julia Kristeva described as a threat that
emenates from an indeterminable inside and outside.”117
116
117

33
Conclusion
'Abject Art' is a body of work that was named and popularized during the1990s.
Although Julia Kristeva is the thinker who coined the term abjection and described it
theoretically, one must not discount the writings of Georges Batailles and Mary Douglas,
as well as a plethora of others who have written about similar dynamics throughout the
centuries. Abjection is a complex and widely encompassing theory that explores
humankind's primal need to categorize and define. Those things that lay on the borders of
classification are abject. They are liminal, marginal, and ambiguous. They are unclean,
formless, low, and infantile. They are tabooed. Abjection accompanies art and literature,
religion, the body, madness, and corpse. It is shunted from the symbolic system along
with those most closely associated with it, particularly women.
The objective of this study has been to gain an understanding of the concept of
abjection and how it has been physically manifested within the visual arts throughout the
20th century. My findings have shown that abjection is closely associated with a great
deal of Catholic art, both contemporary and historical, and I plan on exploring this topic
further. I have also found that abjection can be affiliated with the animal, deformed,
grotesque, marked, macabre, and monstrous, and will be expanding upon these
relationships continuation of this study.

34
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