Images of Difference, Part 3 "What Can a Body Do?"

What Can a Body Do?, inspired by Gilles Deleuze's 1990 critical essay on Spinoza of the same name, is an upcoming exhibit of nine contemporary artists exploring, more accurately, what a body cannot do, spanning from October 26th to December 16th in a schedule of events at Haverford College. Curator Amanda Cachia aimed at counter-claiming Spinoza's posits, “We do not even know what a body is capable of...” and “We do not even know of what affections we are capable, nor the extent of our power"(1), through examining what the disabled body is not capable of doing and its lack of power through contemporary art. Cachia asks; What does it mean to inscribe a contemporary work of art with experiences of disability? What shapes or forms can these inscriptions take? How, precisely, can perceptions of the disabled body be liberated from binary classifications such as “normal” versus “deviant” or “ability” versus “disability” that themselves delimit bodies and constrain action? What alternative frameworks can be employed by scholars, curators, and artists in order to determine a new fate for the often stigmatized disabled identity? (2). I am especially interested in the limits these binary classifications hold over bodies in practice. Cachia's project addresses "classifications" of disability in ways I find satisfying and justifying; attending to the visualities of difference in pungent and tactile ways.

Despite the "body" being so much a part of what being a human means, contemporary anthropologists who study it are not in the majority. My humanistic preferences pull me back to philosophy and the arts time and time again, and more so when anthropology can't articulate what I'm curious about. The below photo, part of a set of three plus a video piece, from Polish artist Artur Zmijewski provides such fodder for my imagination.

Zmijewski's project, Oko za oko (An Eye for an Eye), expresses the duality of able/disabled while reflecting upon the precarity of helped-states of ableness. Oko za oko explores bodies in 'composition' with each other, compensative measures and the bodily integrity of the 'helper'. He dialogues with Deleuze as well, whom I'm appreciating more and more, and shows an almost sardonic recognition for his ideas of becoming and unity.

Despite the attitude towards visual disabilities I was indoctrinated with, that of the infamous "don't stare" ideology, I did indeed stare, and want to stare, at physical disfigurements. It seems to me the most natural thing in the world for a child, sans the "world experience" a more mature being has, to observe difference with rapture and the same voracious curiosity they apply to nearly everything else. To my child-self, amputees were positively science-fiction, people of the extreme of both ends of the height spectrum were reasons for excitement and those with all manner of disfigurements and disorders had me visually transfixed. These curiosities, as the story goes, were also made quite clear to be "impolite" and "not lady-like", by all manner of opinionated adults whom I was simply to shy to share my interests with. Today, the humanities allow for that 'need to know' drive to be satiated. Projects of difference, like Cachia's curation and Zmijewski's photo, are therefore stimulating and contemplative spaces for exploration and analysis of what I was "not" staring at all these years.

Deleuze was a coincidental (critical)fan of Francis Bacon's so I've included one of his works as well. Make of it what you will; I've always liked Bacon but I won't pretense that I am an expert on his vicissitudes!

Bacon, Francis. Studies of the Human Body, 1979, 1980.


References...

1. Gilles Deleuze, “What Can a Body Do?,” in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 226.

2. Cachia, Amanda. "Essay & Bibliography". What Can a Body Do?

3. Smith, Daniel and Protevi, John, "Gilles Deleuze", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

http://exhibits.haverford.edu/whatcanabodydo/
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
Haverford College