.....June 26, 2003
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.....June 26, 2003 |
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 Statement Epicene Bodies I was tempted to speak about digital art, about the process in which the data defining the work is comprised of stored bites and eventually output in digital form, and to discuss my work in relation to the “milieu”—that is, whether it is created on, influenced by, or simply manipulated through the computer. I have decided instead to speak about “Epicene bodies.” The title is intended to signify the “content” of my work, polymorphous bodies, and fusion of organism, machine and gender. In these ten minutes I want also to speak about its “context”: or how technology enables us to re-conceptualize these “epicene” bodies. Disorienting the viewer with uncertainty, and reconstructed in an almost surgical manner, the body is the common element in my work. I have focused on ambiguous bodies that dissolve the boundaries between the human and machine, between the inside and outside, between the natural and artificial. The body in my work is recomposed as a series of fragmented images of the male, the female, the organism, and the machine. These elements are composed of symbolic materials, interactions, and historical anatomies of multiple possible bodies. Bodies are conceived as partial identities, as work-in-part as well as whole. Issues of gender, anatomy, and technology permeate my work. I deliberately work with internal structures and organs, which are not sex-specific, in an attempt to move away from the neutral, unmarked, historically white and masculine anatomical body. I am interested in anything that destabilizes, blurs, transforms, or re-creates the signs of sex and gender. But I am even more interested in simulating or re-constructing epicene bodies, that is “intersexual” bodies, bodies that have the characteristics of both the male and the female, or of neither, rather than those of the one or the other. The body, the physical substance of the human organism, has, in recent years, been radically rethought by both science and philosophy. The body has been materially restructured by science through practices such as genetic engineering, artificial insemination, and artificial devices. We can no longer see the body as a purely natural or physical object; the body has also become a cultural representation. A culture’s body speaks about how that culture perceives itself, or how it wishes to be perceived. As a cultural representation, the body gains meaning only through language. Language organizes the body according to the beliefs of a particular culture. This means that the human body is no longer a universal concept but rather a flexible idea that can be interpreted in diverse ways, depending on time, place and context. As the feminist artist “Nicky West” writes: “It is difficult to imagine the body in the abstract. It becomes easier once is imbued with the category of a sex. The body then becomes more easily definable and enters the realm of the social. The body has its place, its role, and its function. It also has a gender”. Society has always been, and still is, completely locked into the assumption that there two sexes and two genders and each sex naturally implies a given gender identity. We know these two genders very well because we are introduced to them from birth—through clothing, colors, signs, and even words themselves. In Spain, as elsewhere, we give gender to nouns: “EL hombre,” masculine, “LA mujer,” feminine. We are taught two gender identities, we practice them, and sometimes we become very good at them. Questions of gender become more complex with genetics. The DNA, perhaps the clearest anatomical marker of gender, is problematic. First of all, XY and XX aren’t the only possibilities. Other chromosomal combinations that have been observed include XXY, YY, XX and XO. Secondly, the relationship between XX/woman and XY/man is not as certain as most people like to believe. The Human Genome Project, dealing just with the variations of the XX or XY chromosome pairing, has observed that possible mutations and combinations are very high. Understanding human differences at the molecular and cellular level, how cells and tissues are organized and behave, all are aspects of the “body structure,” in addition to gross anatomy We can know the body, the bones, muscles, organs, tissues, fluids, the proportions, and the angles through the traditional techniques of measurement and dissection. Furthermore, the new techniques of radiology, echography, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, all can now for the first time penetrate the internal secrets of the body. The scientific gaze has turned the body into a series of fragments. For many years images and objects made by artists and anatomists were judged too disturbing for non-medical audiences. The mezzotints of Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, the flap anatomies of Pietro de la Corona, the skeleton landscapes of the great Andreas Vesalius’ “De humani corporis fabrica,” were intended for the artistic as well as for the medical study of the human form. Artists from different cultures and different times, including the present, have long explored how best to represent the fragmented anatomized human body. Today, when the public is treated to surgical operations on television, such “anatomical” gazes have assumed a markedly different status. Genes, cells, tissues, organs, cavities and appendages remind us that our physical bodies’ boundaries are precarious. But, replacements, prostheses, enhancements, artificial devices, and extra-corporeal machines demonstrate to us that those boundaries are now far from immutable, and that pieces, or fragments, can be moved and added to change the once unified design This brings me to my last point: how are we to make sense of all these fragments? How do we stitch ourselves back together? We do so by merging flesh and circuits, by combining living and artificial cells, by joining the human and the mechanical. The result has been called many things: hybrids, bionic systems, vital machines, androids and “cyborgs.” By “cyborg” I mean Donna Haraway’s idea of a “cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism without a fixed social, political, or gendered identity.” Technology has clearly had a powerful impact on our ways of thinking about the body; the biological organism has often been compared to a mechanical structure, with its variously moving or stationary parts. Images of embodied or humanized mechanisms are central metaphors for the dreams and nightmares of societies undergoing rapid technological change. As the philosopher “Jennifer Gonzalez” writes, “From montages of body and machine parts, to electronic implants, imaginary representation of female/male bodies take over when traditional bodies fail.” In the seventeenth-century the French philosopher René Descartes saw the robot “l’ automate“ as a model for a living organism, a “machine vivante” that stands at the intersection of “being” on the one hand, and “seeming” on the other. During the same period, another French philosopher and physician, Julien de la Mettrie, in his provocative essay “L’homme Machine” wrote, “The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. Its is a living image of perpetual movement.” In 1886 Villiers de L’Isle Adam, the French pre-symbolist poet, wrote “L’Eve future,” or “Tomorrow’s Eve.” In this novel Thomas Edison, the master scientist, becomes the inventor of the perfect mechanical being. In 1948 the mathematician Norbert Wiener introduced cybernetics, or the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. He believed that bodies and mechanical bodies are self- regulated systems; that the body as an electronic system is a communications network, totally comparable to a machine. By the late twentieth century, we had all become chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machines and living organisms; “cybernetic organisms”; mirrors of the human body. To conclude, my work, of which “X/Y Machina” is part, is a metaphor, a composite conceived as a partial means to explore the perfect female/male body. A “mechanomorph” fusion of organism, machine, and gender. And at the end, it is an historical record of changes in human perception. New York 09/06/2001 |
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