Title: Eating Art, Digesting Politics: Representing the Body Politic trough the Edible and Post-Edible in Contemporary Art
Author: Rowan Roscher
Publication Year/Date: May 2024
Document Version: Art & Philosophy Hons dissertation
License: CC-BY-NC-ND
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20933/100001303
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Eating Art, Digesting Politics:
Representing the Body Politic through the Edible and Post-Edible in Contemporary Art
Art and Philosophy BA (Hons)
Word count: 8,020
*Excludes image captions, footnotes, references, bibliography, abstract, contents, and list of figures
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree in Art and Philosophy.
Abstract
This dissertation examines the ways contemporary artists are using food to represent a more inclusive ‘body politic’: to visualise how people in society are interconnected, and question accepted modes of thinking about bodies.
I use the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) as a key image of the metaphorical ‘body politic’ which is metaphysically involved in the liberal ideals of individualism and the disembodied political subject, as addressed by political scientist Chad Lavin in Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics (2013). I expand Lavin’s discussion through Julia Kristeva’s theories of food abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) to analyse the visual and visceral impacts of the edible (food) and the post-edible (the eaten, digested, or decayed) in three contemporary artworks by Sharona Franklin, Helena Walsh, and Helen Chadwick’s.
I provide a visual analysis of the frontispiece to examine how this image sterilised the ‘body politic’ and discuss ‘the politics of disgust’ in terms of the abject. I then analyse Mycoplasma Altar (2020) by Sharona Franklin which illustrates the relationships between food-sharing and vulnerability in terms of trans-corporeality and conviviality. Through discussions of Helena Walsh’s placenta-eating performance, Consuming Colonies (2007), I examine ideas of embodiment through a feminist lens.
Helen Chadwick’s vertical compost heap Carcass (1986) culminates my discussion in its explosive celebration of the natural vulnerability of human life
I conclude with a reflection on how these artworks call for the recognition of the right to vulnerability in liberal politics, and highlight the value of food as a medium in political art.
List of Illustrations
Figure 1:The Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), engraved by Abraham Bosse, 1651. (Source: Google Images) 8
Figure 2: The figure of the sovereign shown in the upper half of Leviathan’s frontispiece. (Source: Google Images)......................................................................................................................................11
Figure 3: The alternative version of Leviathan’ s Frontispiece. (Source: Google Images) 11
Figure 4 : Sharona Franklin, Mycoplasma Altar, (2020): Gelatin powder, rose thorns, flowers, juniper berry, metal nuts, kidney beans, amoxicillin pills, hydroxychloriquine pills, methotrexate pills, antibodies in glass syringe vials, sunflower seeds, almond extract, papier mache, wood, acrylic, plaster, New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing (2020), [photograph] King’s Leap Gallery
<https://www.kingsleapfinearts.com/exhibitions/new-psychedelia-of-industrial-healing> [accessed 9th November 2023]. 18
Figure 5: Helena Wlash, Consuming Colonies (2007), film stills (Top 5 images), photo from live performance of Consuming Colonies at the National Review for Live Art Festival 2007 (bottom image), from artist's website, <http://www.helenawalsh.com> [accessed 9th Novemebr 2023] 24
Figure 6: ‘Carcass’ by Helen Chadwick, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1986), [photograph] The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery. .............................29
Figure 7: Helen Chadwick, ‘Of Mutability’ (1986), with ‘The Oval Court’ and ‘Carcass’ (through the doorway) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, [photograph] The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery. ....................................................................................................30
Introduction: Food for Thought
In this dissertation, I take the concept of ‘food for thought’ literally, to examine the intersection of art, food, and philosophy in the context of the ‘body politic’: to explore the ways people in society are interconnected, and question accepted modes of thinking about bodies.
The term ‘body politic’ is a metaphor that has existed since ancient times which imagines society as a body - organic, natural, and complete - with each member having a vital connection to one another and to the body as a whole, like organs 1 This metaphor has roots throughout history: from 1500 BC Hinduism; to Aesop’s fable ‘The Belly and its Members’ in Ancient Greece; to the Christianization of the phrase in the 11th century, which imagines the church and its people forming the body of Christ.2
However, in the seventeenth Century, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed a new version of the ‘body politic’ which mirrors a transition from an organic to legalistic world view 3 Hobbes’ highly influential book Leviathan (1651) argued that society should be constructed through social contract and ruled by an absolute sovereign (the monarch) to defend civilisation against the ‘state of nature’; the threat of a return to a primitive, disordered way of life. The idea of nature as threat to civil society rejected the organic ‘body politic’. Instead, Thomas Hobbes reimagined it as an artificial body contractually formed through the agreement of individuals to externalise their own authority upon the sovereign. This body was not constituted of interdependent organs but was structured through a dependence upon the sovereign head by discrete, rational individuals. Hobbes’ idea is famously visualised as a printed frontispiece for Leviathan, a precisely detailed and composed etching which depicts a giant towering figure constructed from the outlines of many smaller bodies.
Leviathan’s frontispiece is recognised as an influential artwork that has had profound political and cultural repercussions. Specifically, this re-imagination of the ancient metaphor of the ‘body politic’ is considered proto-liberal, in the sense of establishing the liberalist ideal of individualism through Hobbes’ illustration of distinct, sovereign subjects.4 However, author and professor of political science, Chad Lavin notes an important negative repercussion of Hobbes’ ideas and imagery. In his book Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics, which explores modern food anxieties and issues of ethical consumption, he explains that whilst the imagery of Leviathan was designed to protect the integrity of the individual through establishing sovereign individuality, by replacing the organic body
1 Chad Lavin, Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) p. 25.
2Joelle Rollo-Koster, Body Politic (2017) <https://www.britannica.com/topic/body-politic> [accessed 1st December 2023].
3 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 38.
4 Ibid. p. 38.
politic with an artificial one, Hobbes’ image erased the vulnerable and needy aspects of the human condition in his representation of society. Lavin links this to the liberal ideal of a disembodied political subject and the growth of shame and anxiety around displays of vulnerability and difference that threatened this ideal, fostering a ‘politics of disgust’. 5 Expressions of vulnerability, corporeality, and mortality thus became associated with the fear of social disorder.6 Lavin links this disgust especially to food and bodily operations such as eating which became more a “shameful reminder of crude animality than a material experience of commonality.”7
However, Lavin proposes that food, in its visceral intimacy to our bodies, which connects us to each other, and the world, is “the most intense and material reminder of the mutual dependence of living things across the globe”.8 His discussion thus focusses on the need to examine food to tackle issues of body politics (e.g. gender, sexuality, disability, racism) which “require intimate encounters with mortal, vulnerable, and corporeal bodies.”9
In this dissertation, I will take an aesthetic approach to Lavin’s discussion, to argue that food is a crucial medium for artists to explore body politics - not in abstract terms, but in organic and visceral ways.10
I will use the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) as the basis of my discussion. In the first section, I will provide a visual analysis of the frontispiece, then through engagement with Chad Lavin’s Eating Anxiety, I will expand on its relation to liberalism and the politics of disgust.
I will expand on the key point of Lavin’s argument, the idea that food holds a key interconnecting power between people which needs to be recognised in politics, through Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 11
I will then apply these ideas to an analysis of three contemporary artworks which use food to explore political issues: Sharona Franklin’s Mycoplasma Altar (2020); Helena Walsh’s Consuming Colonies (2007); and Helen Chadwick’s Carcass (1986) I will examine the visual and visceral impacts of the edible (food) and the post-edible (the eaten, digested, or decayed) in these works through Kristeva’s ideas of food abjection, and contrast this to aspects of Hobbes’ imagery.
5 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 44.
6 Ibid p. 43.
7 Ibid. p. 43.
8 Ibid. p. 153.
9Ibid. p. 144.
10 Ibid, pp. ix.
11 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)
My discussion of the wobbling, melting Mycoplasma Altar by Sharona Franklin will illustrate the relationships between food-sharing and vulnerability in terms of the ideas of trans-corporeality and conviviality. I will analyse this example alongside Kristeva's ideas of sharing in her essay ‘Liberty, Equality Fraternity… and Vulnerability’ to convey the importance of art in reinstating vulnerability in politics.
Next, through discussions of Helena Walsh’s placenta-eating performance piece, Consuming Colonies, I will focus on the interesting case of the placenta’s dual identity as both food and body to examine ideas of embodiment through the feminist lens of the feminine abject
Helen Chadwick’s vertical compost heap Carcass will culminate my argument in its explosive celebration of the natural vulnerability and mutability of human life.
I will conclude with a reflection on how these artworks call for the recognition of the right to vulnerability in liberal politics, and re-emphasise the value of food as an medium in political art.
Leviathan’s Frontispiece: A Visual Metaphor
The frontispiece of Leviathan (1651) is a greatly discussed image which acts as the opening to Hobbes’ revolutionary text. 12 Indeed, the word ‘frontispiece’ is derived from the architectural term for a decorative entrance to a building, suggesting this imagery as “the entrance to a book in the sense of being an introduction to its argument…” 13 Imagery is understood as key to Hobbes’ political strategies, and so the frontispiece of Leviathan would have been very thoughtfully considered by Hobbes and French engraver Abraham Bosse under his instruction.14
One of the distinguishing features of Leviathan’s frontispiece is the way the figure in the upper half of the image is constructed from the outlines of many smaller bodies As Chad Lavin describes:
“ the individuals on the oft- discussed frontispiece of Leviathan, maintain their discrete borders separating them from one another. They are not digested into a political body but are contracted into an artificial person. Comings and goings, transactions, and exchanges, remain legal and discrete, rather than chemical, biological, or gustatory.”15
This aspect is the main difference between Hobbes’ ‘body politic’ and the organic body politic, showing people coming together to form an artificial body, rather than an integrated natural whole. The imagery is a literal visual translation of Hobbes’ idea of the social contract where “A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular”. 16 In this sense, the artificial body of the Leviathan is birthed from social contract and an agreement of power to the sovereign, rather than a natural birth from any kind of mother nature. This conglomeration of bodies conveys Hobbes’s idea of sovereign individuation: a separating out of all individuals as self-governing and distinct from one another. In this sense, Hobbes recognised both authoritative political bodies of individuals and
12 The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. by Patricia Springborg, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Cambridge Collections Online, [accessed 4th December 2023] p. 1.
13 Quentin Skinner, ‘A Bridge between Art and Philosophy: The Case of Thomas Hobbes’, European Review, 30 (2022), 627-638 (p. 628), < https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/abs/bridgebetween-art-and-philosophy-the-case-of-thomas-hobbes/6D48E9D022A25ADDC4234C4CBAB70090 > [accessed 9th November 2023].
14 “Without this appreciation of the force of images, one cannot properly grasp the distinctive quality of Hobbes’s political philosophy, which culminates in Leviathan. For just as vision reacts to physical pressure, so politics is enacted through pressure exerted in space-time, producing the images that people everywhere encounter… there has been no philosopher or theorist of state before or since who so emphatically pursued visual strategies as core political theory.” Horst Bredekamp, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. By Patricia Springborg (Cambridge Collections Online: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27-60, p. 40.
15 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 44.
16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, I.16.13, cited by Columbia College New York, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, by Abraham Bosse, with creative input from Thomas Hobbes, 1651, <https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/frontispiece-thomas-hobbes%E2%80%99-leviathanabraham-bosse-creative-input-thomas-hobbes-1651> [accessed 4th December 2023].
bodies politic (states) but does so through a rejection of the natural imagery of the original ancient metaphor.17
17
Eye contact is another visual component Hobbes employs to illustrate the idea of the social contract.18 The tiny bodies of the people all face away from the viewer and look up towards the crowned head of the king. In fact, two versions of the frontispiece exist, the final one which shows the people facing towards the sovereign, and another earlier version which depicts the people looking out towards the viewer.19
The direction of eye contact in the frontispiece was important enough to Hobbes that he changed the image. The bodies all turning themselves to look upwards reflects the idea of consent, conveying a respect for rights and will of the individual as well as the sovereign As Quentin Skinner explains:
“On the one hand, sovereign power keeps the peace, and is therefore entitled to respect. So the people are shown, in a further visual metaphor, looking up to their head of state. On the other hand, we are shown that sovereigns are emphatically not entitled to reverence, as would commonly have been assumed in Hobbes’s time. If this were so, the first act you would need to perform in the presence of your sovereign would be to remove your hat. But not a single person here has done so.”20
Skinner reads the image as a ‘coming together’ through respect between the individual and the sovereign, as illustrated by the hats left firmly on heads. Where the organic ‘body politic’ conveyed a mutual dependence of all people like the organs of the body, Hobbes’ body politic depends on the authority of the head.21 But, whilst Hobbes’ image does promote a sense of freedom through consent, the image also conveys a sense of power and authority in the way the figure looms over the land, brandishing a sword and crosier, symbols of military power and the authority of the church.
In the lower half of the frontispiece is a grid of other images, drawn as framed pictures, symbolizing aspects of the formation of the commonwealth, such as the pope’s Mitre, representing the church, cannons and guns indicating military power, a crown for the sovereign, and a draped banner indicating the text’s title, ‘Leviathan’.22 However, Quentin Skinner interprets these images as “the deadliest enemies of stable government” , and describes how these threats are ‘kept under’ in the composition placing them below the Leviathan, thus emphasising the need for a single representative of power, the sovereign, to maintain peace on behalf of the individuals.23
18 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 48.
19 Bredekamp, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies’, p. 40
20 Skinner, ‘A Bridge between Art and Philosophy: The Case of Thomas Hobbes’, p. 638
21 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 39.
22 Skinner, ‘A Bridge between Art and Philosophy’, p. 633.
23 Skinner, ‘A Bridge between Art and Philosophy’, p. 638
Awe is an important visual component of this image, as German art historian Horst Bredekamp examines in ‘Thomas Hobbes’ Visual Strategies’:
“The people, to return to the beginning, are in constant danger, according to Hobbes, of reverting to the natural state, ‘when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe’. All civilized achievements are in contradiction with natural passions, and thus Hobbes needed this power, in line with ‘the terror of some power’, in order to implement and maintain it.”24
This analysis effectively conveys Hobbes’ message that the society must defend against the ‘natural’ through social contract. The sense of awe, which is also maintained by the title ‘Leviathan’ referring to the biblical many-headed monster, conveys domination over this natural threat by a man-made power. Chad Lavin describes the awe of the Leviathan as protective of “an ideal of discrete, bounded, and sovereign subjects immune to invasion from the outside world…” .25 He explains, “Hobbes promotes this not by appreciating our vulnerability but by “aggressively masking it” , to defend bodily integrity.”26 The consequence of this is the sterilization of the ancient organic ‘body politic’. In other words, the visceral, organic, vulnerable, and unruly qualities of the ancient metaphor were replaced with an artificial, reasonable, cleaner, body. By being cleaned up the organic becomes unclean or impure and is thus demonised as a threat to order which the Leviathan must protect the people from.27
The Threat of Food
In his book Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics (2013), political theorist Chad Lavin describes the impact of Hobbes new image of the body politic as ‘ontopolitical’, in that its emphasis on sovereign individuality is metaphysically involved in liberal politics.28 In other words, liberalism intrinsically requires the Hobbesian idea of individualism which recognises the authority of the individual within society, in upholding democracy, civil rights, enterprise, and order.
This sterilization of the body politic aligned with changes in thinking in the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, which celebrated reason as the path to knowledge, power, and social
24 Bredekamp, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies’, p. 50
25 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 42.
26 Ibid. p. 42.
27 Ibid. p. 42.
28 Ibid. p. 40.
harmony. 29 As politics and philosophy came to favour intellect and knowledge, associated with the mind, the bodily was aligned with animalistic vulnerability, incompatible with the sovereign and reasoned subject. This reflects the mind-body dualism perpetuated in philosophy particularly by Descartes in the seventeenth century The separation of mind and matter provides the basis for a hierarchy of the senses which pointed to “hunger, thirst, pain, and so on” as “confused modes of thinking which have their origins… the union and apparent fusion of the mind and the body.”30 In this sense “demonstrations of individual vulnerability come to bear the weight of the fears of social and political disorder.”31 Consequently, food in its association with the body was considered not worthy of philosophical attention, and the ideal of the rational political subject became disembodied.32
However, Lavin recounts a ‘digestive turn’ in the 19th century, a change of thinking which challenged Hobbes’ sterile body During this period the likes of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche emphasised “the gastrointestinal tract as the locus of most intimate contact between self and world…” 33 This was largely influenced by a new understanding of ‘energy’ as the vital life source of all living things.34 Similarly, new understandings of vital bodily processes and changes in political discourse around the capitalization of the productive energy of bodies now understood all matter to be connected and moved by the same forces, including how bodies are energised by food.35 This new understanding is reflected in the coining of the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ or “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” (Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” ) by the French gastronome
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, in 1825, in Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (Physiologie du goût : Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante).
As it became more difficult to maintain the mind-body distinction, the social threat posed by food, and associated bodily fluids and functions revealed itself in the growth of what Lavin describes as
29 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, pp. 42-43.
30 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, pp. 30-31, and, Howard Robinson, and ‘Dualism, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [online], <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/> [accessed 4th December 2023].
31 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, pp. 42-43.
32“The associa-tion of food with bodily as opposed to intellectual pleasures,and the prevalence in traditional philosophy of views which ranked the mind as more important than the body, probably contributed to the historical disregard of food as a legitimate philosophical topic of inquiry.”
Paloma Atencia Linares and Aaron Meskin, Food, Art, and Philosophy, Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, 53, (2021), 3–11 (p. 5). <https://www.academia.edu/64202294/Food_Art_and_Philosophy> [accessed 6th January 2024].
33 Ibid. p. 52.
34 Jacob Molschott, ‘Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy’ (1850), cited in Chad Lavin, Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics by Chad Lavin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) p. 52.
35 “As such, the digestive turn marks a turn away from the conceits of objectivity and sovereignty; subjects are not removed from and looking at the world but are rather implicated in and actually composed by the world.”
Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 52.
‘the politics of disgust’. This disgust is triggered by anything which can “blur or permeate the borders between self and the other”, undermining the imaginary and unattainable ‘discreteness’ of the disembodied individual as wholly separate from others and the world. Lavin links these ideas to phobias and discriminatory policies surrounding racism, ableism, sexism, and fat-phobia through notions of contamination and impurity 36
Food, and its associated digestive processes, bodily fluids, and excretions, is particularly provocative of the politics of disgust, not only in its visceral intimacy to bodies, but also in its sacrosanct relationship to our cultures, politics, and economies:37
“…allowing the natural world to invade the bounded space of our bodies, to enter into our mouths and then biochemically become part of the self – amounts to an experience of the limits of the self. This moment of considering and confounding the border between me and not me offers a singular opportunity for examining understandings of identity, authenticity, and responsibility that form the backbone of contemporary political ideologies.38
In other words, what we eat reveals something about the vulnerable, hungry, interdependent nature of the human condition which challenges the principle of absolute sovereignty and individualism which are the basis of liberal social institutions.
The saying ‘you are what you eat’ rings true and is vastly political.
The Abject and The Politics of Disgust: A Subject for Art
The inner workings of the politics of disgust have been explored in depth by French-Bulgarian Philosopher and Psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), which examines these issues through the theory of the abject: forces which threaten human notions of identity of the self. In Powers of Horror Kristeva provides an in-depth analysis of the abject through literature and language to provide a semiotic analysis of disgust.
The abject is understood by Kristeva as that which is “neither subject, nor object” a “weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant...”39 which inflicts profound discomfort, repulsion, disgust, or horror; abjection 40 The abject is more complex than a crossing of borders
36 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 143
37 Ibid. p. x.
38 Ibid. p. x.
39 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) p 2
40 Ibid. p. 9.
between things but is “above all ambiguity”: a blurring of the boundaries that maintain identity This encompasses various taboo aspects of the human condition such as bodily fluids, decaying food or corpses, crime, and excrements.
Kristeva uses the term Jouissance to describe the violent sense of attraction and repulsion inflicted by abjection which both fascinates the subject and warns it of threat.41 It is this sense of threat to the borders between the self and the other which uphold our human sense of order and identity.42 Thus, the abject is “what I permanently thrust aside in order to live”, a disgust that protects us from this breakdown in identity, and which is thus a ‘primer of culture’; essential to understanding the construction of individual and social identity 43
Kristeva emphasises that “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.” Think of the etiquette of not talking with your mouth full: As Lavin notes, this does not pose any real threat to health, rather, as Kristeva would understand it, the sight of chewed food in the process of being taken into the body offers a horrific reminder of the ability of food to muddy the distinction between inside and outside the body, and also of the processes of digestion which further contaminate identity through consequent excretion.44 Therefore, the abject is not merely a reaction to issues of sanitary contamination, but of a deeper contamination of identities Indeed, the first example that Kristeva gives of the abject is one of food abjection; the sense of repulsion she recalls experiencing to the ‘skin’ on a glass of milk given to her as a child. She addresses this in the section ‘Pollution by food – a compound’, where she states that:
‘When food appears as a polluting object it does so as oral object only to the extent that orality signifies a boundary of the self’s clean and proper body. Food becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between nature and culture, between the human and non-human.” 45 46
Here Kristeva explains how food disrupts the border between the body (self) and the world (other) through the process of eating. Kristeva describes the ‘clean and proper body’ as the acceptable body which does not provoke abjection, parallel to the sterilized, disembodied political subject of
41 Ibid. p. 9.
42 Ibid. pp. 2-3.
43 Ibid. p. 3.
44 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 29.
45 Kristeva invokes a separation here between nature and culture which I feel does not align with the ideas of trans-corporeality which I discuss. In this context I would read nature versus culture instead as human versus non-human.
46 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 75.
liberalism, where table manners and rules are designed to mask the ‘grotesque’, abject, natural body.47 Whilst all food is ‘liable to defile’ according to Kristeva, examples of the edible which are inherently corporeal, such as milk or meat, hold notable abject powers, reminding us of our body’s organic nature and animality. So too do food remainders, as reminders of the process of eating, digestion, excrement, break-down and decay. I refer to such examples as ‘post-edible’, whether rotting food, chewed food, or digested food (excrements), as materials still connected to the process of eating, but which are no longer viewed as nourishing.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, Kristeva’s Powers of Horror became highly influential to artists, birthing the term ‘Abject Art’. This new form of art was not concerned with the beautiful, but rather the disgusting, corporeal, vulnerable aspects of the human condition. The artworks that I examine in this dissertation engage with just that, through use of the edible and post-edible. My analysis will unveil how these works harness the powers of food abjection to illustrate a ‘body politic’ through digestive metaphors, more representative of, as Lavin puts it, “…the interpersonal vulnerability that is an unavoidable condition of existence.”48
47 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 41.
48 Ibid. p. 66.
Jelly, Vulnerability and Conviviality in Sharona Franklin’s Mycoplasma Altar (2020)
‘Turning to jelly’ is a saying that describes bodily weakness in the face of fear Mycoplasma Altar (2020) by Canadian artist Sharona Franklin, is a large-scale gelatine sculpture that makes physical this metaphor, to illustrate the artist’s own experiences of living with disability. As a centrepiece to her exhibition New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing (2020), in King’s Leap Gallery, New York, Mycoplasma Altar rises as a blobby, organic-shaped tower upon a silver pedestal. Suspended within the wibbling, yellow, translucent body are a variety of objects, including food, plants, and medicines: symbolic “survival tools” for Franklin, who lives with several disabilities and chronic illnesses.49 Franklin uses techniques associated with domesticity, including ceramics and patchwork, but is most known for her medicinal Jell-O sculptures. These various ‘meditative assemblages’ highlight the intersections of her treatments and domestic life, especially through food. In an interview with Something Curated about New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing Franklin explains the importance of the edible in her work:
“It’s super important that my sculptures are edible because I began working with gelatine as an ingested medicinal treatment… Domestic materials are important to me in that I’ve always created work near or close to my bed or kitchen. My treatments are held in the fridge, as are the gelatines.”50
Not only does Franklin’s use of gelatine/jelly provide an interesting visual metaphor, but gelatine, being rich in protein as it is derived from animal bones, also acts as a medicinal treatment. The edible components within the jelly body include expired pills, syringes, flowers related to herbal remedies, and more everyday foodstuffs like beans, juniper berries and sunflower seeds. Franklin’s use of the edible not only includes ‘food’ but considers a wider scope, where food and medicine overlap. In ‘Intimacy Between Disabled People and Assistive Technology’, Leilan Mei Yin Wong51 considers Franklin’s work as an exploration of the ‘trans-corporeality’ of disabled life. This term is defined by Stacy Alaimo in The Post-Human Glossary as the recognition that all “embodied beings are intrinsically intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms
49 Sharona Franklin, ‘Interview: Artist Sharona Franklin On The Politics Of Gelatine & Therapeutic Memes’, interviewed by Something Curated, 4th May 2020 <https://somethingcurated.com/2020/05/04/interviewartist-sharona-franklin-on-the-politics-of-gelatine-therapeutic-memes/> [accessed 9th November 2023]
50 Ibid. para. 13 of 16.
51 Leilan Mai Yin Wong, Ventilators, and Gelatin as Disabled Assemblage : Reimagining the Intimacy between Disabled People and Assistive Technology, (Canada: University of British Columbia, 2022) <https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0412949> [accessed 8th November 2022].
them, and is transformed by them” 52 These intersections are made visible by the combination of medicine, food, and body inside Mycoplasma’s Altar’s translucent flesh.
Another key aspect of this work, hinted at by the dripping form of the pedestal, is the fact that it was left to naturally decompose during six months in the gallery. Gradually rotting, moulding, warping, and leaking onto the gallery floor, OFLUXO describes this process as “an opportunity to witness the physical ramifications of [the] organic degeneration”53 of the artist’s body. The result of this is an abject visualization of the idea of ‘turning to jelly’ which associates weakness with the effects of illness. Leilan Mai Yin Wong also discusses Wendy Wall’s ‘Shakesperean Jello: Mortality and Malleability in the Kitchen’, in relation to Franklin’s work. Wall describes jelly as an “almost alive substance defying categories”.54Wall relates this confusing quality of the translucent wobbliness of jelly to phrases in Shakespearean texts, where the substance was used to describe fear and shock (“Gelatin was the thing that you actually might transform into when scared out of your wits…A person could literally turn to “jelly.”) 55 The ambiguous, animate, yet unstable nature of the jelly body further provokes abjection in its uncanny corporeality
Through decay the jelly becomes ‘post-edible’ – an abject state which Julia Kristeva relates to illness in Powers of Horror as a threat to the clean and proper body:
“Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from within: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death.”
56
Kristeva compares the decay of food to the decay of the body through illness She examines the discriminatory nature of this abjection in her essay ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity… and Vulnerability’,
52 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeality (2018), p. 1, <https://www.academia.edu/32205792/Alaimo_Trans_corporeality_for_The_Posthuman_Glossary > [accessed 15th December 2023].
53New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing (2020), OFLUXO Online Platform for Contemporary Art <‘New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing’ by Sharona Franklin at King’s Leap, New York – OFLUXO > [accessed 22nd November 2023].
54 Wendy Wall, ‘Shakesperean Jello: Mortality and Malleability in the Kitchen’, cited in Leilan Mai Yin Wong, Ventilators, and Gelatin as Disabled Assemblage : Reimagining the Intimacy between Disabled People and Assistive Technology, (Canada: University of British Columbia, 2022), p. 45 <https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0412949> [accessed 8th November 2022].
55 Ibid. p. 45.
56 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 71
referring to the abjection aroused by ill or disabled bodies as causing a ‘narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled; he inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death, fear of collapse”.57
However, jelly also holds connotations of celebration, especially in the placement of Franklin’s jelly on pedestal. For Franklin, the edible nature of her work is important in exploring the social relationships of eating in terms of ‘conviviality’: “the social relationship food offers when eaten together”.58 Conviviality is etymologically connected to food - the Latin “convivium” meaning "banquet," suggesting “full-bellied joviality” 59 To think food trans-corporeally considers an intrinsic conviviality of all living things, all eating together. The fact that Franklin has created a large celebratory jellies, but left it to decompose in the gallery, highlights the exclusion of disabled people from these social relationships of food, whether due to specific diet, fatigue, or social exclusion/isolation. In this way, Mycoplasma Altar thus calls for a need to share food, as a means of social inclusivity
Julia Kristeva describes an interesting type of sharing concerning vulnerability in ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity… and Vulnerability’. Here she suggests an expansion of the motto “Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité”, which are the key principles of the French Republic that first appeared in the 17th century as concepts of The Enlightenment.60 These concepts underlined the fundamental values of democratic life, expressing the right of the individual to live freely, be treated equally under law, and live in solidarity. However, Kristeva argues for the addition of vulnerability to this motto:
“By adding a fourth term (vulnerability) to the humanism inherited from the Enlightenment (liberty, equality, fraternity), analytic listening inflects these three toward a concern for sharing, in which, and thanks to which, desire and its twin, suffering, make their way toward a constant renewal of the self, the other, and connection.”61
Kristeva does not suggest the abandonment of these traditional ideals but rather argues for a need for sharing which can be promoted by the addition of vulnerability to challenge the abject otherness
57 Julia Kristeva, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and . . . Vulnerability” (2012), cited in Josh Dohmen, ‘ Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance’ Hypatia, 31, (2016), 762-778 (p. 763) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44076536> [accessed 8th November 2023].
58 Sharona Franklin, ‘Interview: Artist Sharona Franklin On The Politics Of Gelatine & Therapeutic Memes’, interviewed by Something Curated, 4th May 2020 <https://somethingcurated.com/2020/05/04/interviewartist-sharona-franklin-on-the-politics-of-gelatine-therapeutic-memes/> [accessed 9th November 2023].“
59 ‘Convivial’, in Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, <https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/convivial> [accessed 7th January 2024].
60Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (2022), Elysee France < https://www.elysee.fr/en/french-presidency/libertyequality-fraternity > [accessed 30th December 2023].
61 Kristeva, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and . . . Vulnerability” (2012), cited in Dohmen, ‘ Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance’ , p. 763
of disability. She discusses this in terms of the French verb partager which is oversimplified in English translation as ‘to share’ but has connotations in French of both sharing and division:
“The term “partager” has several senses that imply connecting and several that imply division. It is as if the English “to share” had both of its senses: “to have the same as” as in “I share your view” or “I share your pain” or “to share a meal,” as well as the sense of “to share out” or “to divide up and divvy out…”62
Kristeva harnesses the dual meaning to convey a dialectical relationship: “sharing the unsharable” between disabled and non-disabled subjects.63 A sharing which still recognises the singularity of the individual whilst promoting a coming together through interaction. In Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance, Josh Dohmen examines Kristeva’s idea of sharing as a “political link” to overcome the separation between people caused by the politics of disgust. He examines Kristeva’s essay as calling for an “intimate revolt” against the abject, where “interactions with others or art will be opportunities for working through narcissistic defences as much as psychoanalytic sessions might be.” 64 In this way he reads her idea as a way to restructure the unconscious abjection to disability through interpersonal interactions in which vulnerability is intimately shared, such as through engagement with the work of disabled activists and artists 65
It is important to note that Kristeva’s discussion refers to “humanism”, however I would like to expand her ideas vulnerability to a trans-corporeal mode of thinking. Stacy Alaimo directly associates trans-corporeality to the body politics of disability, feminism, and racism in how the systematic objectification of these groups is challenged by undoings of the boundaries between bodies, place, and other matter 66 In this sense, transcorporeality directly challenges the detachment, hierarchies, and exceptionalism of philosophical traditions of mind body dualism, and thus Hobbes’ sterilised imagery.67 Franklin’s treatment of domestic objects, medecine, flesh, and food, trans-mutated into an uncanny jelly body which then decomposes, returning to earth, is thus directly opposed to Hobbes’
62 Julia Kristeva, “A Mediation, A Political Act, An Act of Living” (2009), in Kelly Oliver, S. K. Keltner. Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, (New York: SUNY Press: 2009) 19-27 (p. 27),
<https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=281666&authtype=shib&site=ehostlive&scope=site > [accessed January 6th 2024].
63 "to take part in particularity beyond the separation that imposes our destiny on us, to participate without forgetting that each is 'its own part' (chaucun est 'à part'), in order to recognize 'its' unsharable part (sa part l’impartageable)", Kristeva, “A Mediation, A Political Act, An Act of Living” (2009), cited in Dohmen, ‘ Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance’ , p. 763.
64 Ibid. p. 775
65 Ibid. p. 775.
66 Alaimo, Trans-corporeality (2018), p. 2.
67 Ibid. p. 2.
sterilised body politic. Hence, it compares the vulnerability of food in its decay to the artist’s vulnerable body but presents a bridge to share this vulnerability through the idea of food-sharing.
Where Hobbes’ image of the Leviathan is reflective of the ideals of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ in its focus on sovereignty, I believe that Mycoplasma Altar promotes the sharing of vulnerability which Kristeva discusses. Medicine and healing are not aspects depicted in Hobbes’ frontispiece, whilst weapons of war, and other symbols of power such as the crown and mitre are present. Indeed, as Lavin describes “the very idea of disability(…) is predicated on the ideal of sovereign, fully abled, Platonic individuality that continues to animate thinking about selves and politics despite its manifest unrealizability.” 68 Mycoplasma Altar deconstructs this idea through depicting a trans-corporeal conviviality. Through her use of edible materials, Franklin harnesses the abject as a tool to create an intimate depiction of her body in all its interdependent vulnerabilities Franklin’s ideas of food sharing highlight the need for vulnerability to be shared, calling forth a convivial and trans-corporeal ‘body politic’ Where Hobbes’ image of the Leviathan tries to protect the vulnerability of the body through drawing boundaries which separates and hides vulnerability, Sharona Franklin serves her vulnerability on a silver platter, calling that it be shared. 68 Lavin, Eating Anxiety,
Political Placentas and Feminine Incarnation in Helena Walsh’s Consuming Colonies (2007)
Irish Artist Helena Walsh’s performance Consuming Colonies (2007) plays with the duality of the placenta as both food and body Walsh extended a dinner invitation to male friends, young and old, in which she cooked up and served her placenta from her recent birth. Stills of footage from the performance show the artist’ table laid with cutlery, plates, a tablecloth, and a vase of flowers, like a regular dinner party. The men sit whilst Walsh serves then her placenta which she has fried in a pan. This meal was filmed and shown as part of live performance at the National Review of Live Art Festival 2007.
This performance incorporated members of the audience as guests in what Walsh describes to the audience as a restaurant serving only free range, organic, meat, which “results in life, not death” and which will remind the diners “of the warmth and safety of a place [they] can no longer remember” 69 Walsh acts as server to these customers, recalling her experience of working as a waitress during her first pregnancy, also appearing pregnant during the show. She instructs the members of the table, this time a mixture of men and women, to choose an option from a menu of placentas from around the world. Whilst serving the guests wine, the film of Consuming Colonies is shown, including documenting footage of the consumption of her placenta, as well as footage of it being birthed from her body, and prepared in the kitchen.70 The film is accompanied by the fictional voice of a “parasitic” foetus who describes themselves “colonising the bodies of women… [using] their blood to build the walls of our space.” 71
The performance culminates in a violent re-enactment of the birth of her baby onto the table, screaming, and pulling a long umbilical-cord-like object from between her legs. She describes this as a quick demonstration of “how today’s dinner reaches the table”.72 The lights fade as the guests make their final choice from the menu.
Walsh describes on her website how she uses the placenta in Consuming Colonies as a metaphor for the violence of the occupation of one country by another, referencing Irish colonial history of
69 Helena Walsh, Helena Walsh: Consuming Colonies, National Review of Live Art Festival, 2007, University of Bristol Theatre Collection’s Digital Archive, [mp4.] <https://theatre-collectionbristol.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_aef5807e-90e6-49dd-ad76-6c49c0856a28/> [accessed 6th January 2024].
70 Helena Walsh, Consuming Colonies (2007), Helena Walsh Live Art and Performance, (para. 3 of 3) <http://germinalproductions.com/helena/current2.html > [accessed 8th November 2023].
71 Helena Walsh, Helena Walsh: Consuming Colonies (2007), National Review of Live Art Festival 2007 [mp4.]
72 Ibid.
occupation by England and the abject idea of pregnancy as an invasion of the body.73 In her own words, her work aims:
“ …to expose gender constructs as central to Irish national identity, to interrogate and subvert the ideals of femininity and nationhood as reflected in the symbolic appropriation of the female body within Irish nationalist iconography.”
74
The Roman Catholic religion constitutes a large part of the identity of Irish sovereignty which upholds “pro-life” and “pro-family” traditions of patriarchy, which feminism and reproductive rights discourses are portrayed as a threat to.75
Whilst patriarchal ideas of servitude are suggested in these performances, the serving of the placenta is also presented as an act of care.76 This servitude plays with female domestic stereotypes but is interestingly counteracted by Walsh’s use of the placenta as a “symbol of human closeness and individuality”, conveying the intimacy between mother and child through the nourishment of the womb 77 This is both a performance of the violence of birth and patriarchy, and an intimate act of care
Serving-up her own body seems to me to be a play on the Roman Catholic tradition of the eucharist, the symbolic consumption of the body of Christ during mass. In the essay ‘Contemporary Performance Art by Helena Walsh: Embodiment as Empowerment in an Irish Context’ , author Valerie Walsh describes the performance as an act of embodiment; eating being a most literal and direct embodiment, and pregnancy also being an embodiment of an other.78 Embodiment is parallel to the religious idea of incarnation in the eucharist. However, Walsh’s is a much more visceral eucharist, expanding the cannibalistic imagery of incarnation, in which the boundary of body and food is blurred, to consume “the fear of human difference”, polar to the sterile disembodied political subject connected to Hobbes’ ‘body politic’ 79
73 Helena Walsh, Consuming Colonies (2007), Helena Walsh Live Art and Performance, (para. 1 of 3)
74Helena Walsh, ‘Incarnating and articulating The Female Other. Interview with Helena Walsh’, interviewed by Christelle Serée-Chaussin and, Irish Self-Portraits: The Artist in Curved Mirrors, Études Irlandaises, 43 (2018), <Incarnating and Articulating the Female Other. Interview with Helena Walsh (hal.science)> [accessed 8th December 2023].
75 Siobhán Mullaly, “Debating Reproductive Rights in Ireland.” Human Rights Quarterly, 27 (2005), 78–104 (pp. 82-83) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20069780> [accessed 8th December 2023].
76 Helena Walsh, Consuming Colonies, 2007, Helena Walsh Live Art and Performance, (para 1 of 3)
77 Helena Walsh, Consuming Colonies (2007), Helena Walsh Live Art and Performance, (para. 1 of 3).
78 Valérie Morisson, ‘Contemporary performance art by Helena Walsh: Embodiment as Empowerment in an Irish Context’, Miroirs : Revue des civilisations anglophone, ibérique et ibéro-américaine, 1 (2016), 132154 (p. 133) <https://hal.science/hal-03640339/document> [accessed 8th November 2023].
79 Helena Walsh, Consuming Colonies (2007), Helena Walsh Live Art and Performance, (para. 1 of 3).
In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva analyses the abject nature of the maternal body through the gender separations perpetuated in the Bible. This relationship between religion and disgust is relevant to Leviathan’s frontispiece considering the depiction of the church and the pope’s mitre as part of its imagery of power Kristeva discusses many taboos related to the fertilizable maternal body, including menstrual blood, breast milk, and the placenta. In the section “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination”, Kristeva focuses on the idea of the clean and proper body in terms of biblical ideas of purity. The section “Food and the Feminine” draws a parallel between food abjection and the feminine body:
“Dietary abomination has thus a parallel unless it be a foundation in the abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body (menses, childbirth)….a boundary, a border between the sexes, a separation between feminine and masculine as foundation for the organization that is "clean and proper," "individual”...”80
Kristeva relates the feminine to the ‘pollution’ of the clean and proper body in how the excretions of the fertilizable body and the internalization of the male by the female in pregnancy blur the gender binary, disrupting notions of male power over the female body. The taboo around menstrual blood and other feminine excretion is indicative of this threat to patriarchal social structures. Breast milk and the placenta further blurs identities of gender in the overlap of mouth/body/food, a transcorporeality present within the female body which Consuming Colonies explores It is this confused boundary which plays with cannibalistic associations
Kristeva refers directly to the placenta, describing how it transforms from food to excrement through “a violent act of expulsion through which the nascent body tears itself away from the matter of maternal insides... “, resulting in “a placenta that is no longer nourishing but devastating…”81 In other words, the placenta becomes a threat to the clean and proper body when it becomes expelled through birth, a threat from within the body. This idea is played with in how Walsh gives a voice to the foetus, presenting it as a “parasitic” invader, who describes its takeover of the mother’s life and identity 82 Thus, when presented as a meal, the sources of the placenta’s abject powers are twofold: in its expulsion from the female body, and then also its consequent consumption by other male bodies. Whilst both men and women are depicted as part of Hobbes’ body politic, the overarching
80 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 100
81 Ibid. p. 101
82 Helena Walsh, Helena Walsh: Consuming Colonies (2007), National Review of Live Art Festival 2007, [mp4.].
imagery is male. 83 In her essay ‘Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Joanne Boucher explores different gendered readings of Hobbes's Leviathan. She conveys that whilst some feminist readings applaud the way Hobbes presents men and women both as sovereign bodies in the frontispiece, considering this progressive for the time, others see this diminished by the patriarchal imagery.84 Boucher references author Janice Richardson’s interpretation of the frontispiece, which makes an interesting comparison between the construction of the Leviathan’s body to pregnancy:
“
…the sovereign’s type of pregnancy does not in any way mimic or honour a biologically female type of pregnancy. Consequently, the sovereign’s pregnant body overwhelms and consumes rather than nurtures those within the bounds of his body.”85
Richardson explains that through the trope ‘patrogenesis’ Hobbes’ image appears to affirm the male sex right in reproduction to a patriarchal structure. This patrogenesis is not a nurturing gestation, but a contractual, power-based one, which reflects the male appropriation of reproductive powers by patriarchy. Hobbes’ body politic thus appears to be a gendered and power-based construct.
Furthermore, Kristeva describes the ‘binary logic’ of the clean and proper body as shaping the body “into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows” over which power is exerted; compare this to the way Leviathan towers over the land, invoking the idea of man’s dominion over nature 86 Consuming Colonies also discusses the female body as an exploited territory, akin to Irish colonial history. Especially in the live performance, where the menu of global placentas links the capitalisation of female reproductive rights by patriarchal ‘bodies politic’ around the world.
Where Hobbes depicts an embodiment that perpetuates an all-consuming power, Walsh uses food to create a display of communal embodiment Consuming Colonies re-contextualises embodiment not as an act of domination of the other, but as an act of sharing vulnerability, through interaction and intimate revolt. Like Mycoplasma Altar, this invokes a trans-corporeal conviviality through
83 Horst Bredekamp, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge Collections Online: Cambridge University Press, 2007) pp. 27-60, (p. 50) [accessed online] < https://magazines.gorky.media/nz> [accessed 22nd of November 2023].
84 Joanne Boucher, ‘Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Hypatia, 36 (2021), 636-656 (p. 640-645) <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/masculine-power-agendered-look-at-the-frontispiece-of-hobbess-leviathan/1CA1FA5447A8A90006F6F2CDF4611E04 > [accessed 8th December 2023].
85 Janice Richardson, ‘Hobbes’s Frontispiece: Authorship, Subordination and Contract’ (2016), cited in Joanne Boucher, ‘Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Hypatia, 36 (2021), 636-656 (p. 646)
86 Kristeva. p. 72.
eating, highlighting the ‘interpersonal vulnerability’ between mother and child, men and women, and bodies all around the world.
Walsh symbolises the interconnections of ‘bodies politic’ through embodiment, rejecting the disembodiment associated with Hobbes’ image. Through eating, difference is consumed, politics are embodied and digested, power structures are broken down.
Mutability and Regenerative Remainders in Helen Chadwick’s Carcass (1986)
Artist Helen Chadwick is well known to have been influenced by Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic philosophy during the time of the creation of her seminal artwork Of Mutability, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1986.87 This installation was formed of a diptych of two installations, The Oval Court and Carcass, exploring the mutability of life – its ever-changing, transient, and unstable nature; life as a state of flux.88
The Oval Court, consisted of a large-scale, sprawling blue photographic collage incorporating imagery of plants, animals, food, and the artist’s own body. Produced using a photocopy scanner, Chadwick pieced together each part of the image from unnumerable direct scans of real food, animal carcasses, and her own body, printed in a blue toner which invoked spaces such as the sky or sea. The collage makes pictorial references to the idea of an Edenic life cycle, treating the artist’s own body as an interconnected site of nature, pleasure, sexuality, animality, life and death 89
However, I would like to focus on the second component of ‘Of Mutability’ which ‘counterpoised’ The Oval Court: Carcass, a monumental vertical glass column filled with food waste. Standing alone in a dark room, it was placed adjacent to its counterpart as a totem of death and decay, illustrating the permeability of life and death, living and wasting.90 Chadwick viewed the two artworks as ‘Not in opposition or conflict but integrative, complimentary.’, completing the representation of a natural life cycle.91 Indeed, despite the suggestion of death in its name, ‘Carcass’ was brimming with life, so much so that the insides of the structure began to leak from its encasing, and Carcass was removed from the gallery a mere month into the show. Because of this, Carcass seems to be significantly less discussed than its partner The Oval Court. In 1996 in an interview with MarkHaward Booth for Portfolio Gallery, Chadwick reflected on the unanticipated extent of the work’s liveliness:
“…what I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that there would be this fermentation process, particularly with the weight compacting the lower, older material down, and it was constantly percolating bubbles which you could watch kind of fizzing up.”92
87 Marina Warner, One Work: Helen Chadwick, The Oval Court (London: Afterall Books, Central Saint Martins, University of The Arts London, 2022) p. 91.
88 Ibid. pp.15-29.
89 Imogen Racz, ‘Helen Chadwick’s ‘Of Mutability’: Process and Postmodernism’ (2007), Journal of Visual Art Practice, 16 (2017), 61-76 (P. 63)
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/14702029.2016.1206442?needAccess=true > [accessed 6th January 2023].
90 Warner, One Work: Helen Chadwick, The Oval Court, pp. 26-27.
91 Ibid. 27.
92 Tate Online, Helen Chadwick, Carcass, <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/abject-art> [accessed 25th of October 2023].
Standing at seven feet tall, and bubbling away, the tower was considered by the artist as a kind of body, very much alive. This body holds not only life, but decay as a natural and necessary biproduct of living, seeming to embrace and embody the abject associations of the post-edible
The ‘masses’ of food waste required were collected by the artist from her neighbours in Hackney, as well as waste materials from the production of The Oval Court, only excluding animal products as a matter of fear of the “putrid possibilities”, suggesting even Chadwick’s own discomfort towards the waste. 93 The fact that the material is largely food from households emphasises the role of food and food ritual as an interconnecting element between people. The source of the food, and the sheer amount of the waste, suggest more than a singular body, pointing to a transcorporeality between people, between life and death, the edible and the post-edible, and food and body In this case, Carcass could be seen as a representation of many people in one greater body, similarly to Hobbes’ Leviathan’s Frontispiece.
An anonymous author for Tate Online makes this connection, explaining that “the body here also stood in for a more general decay within the body politic – a social fragmentation played out within the fixed boundaries of the tower.”94 I find this interpretation compelling in terms of Carcass as an image of the body politic, however, it does so less through a representation of ‘decay’, but more so through the idea of regeneration. Whilst Kristeva explores the abject nature of the post-edible in Powers of Horror, she also notes a second connotation of ‘remainders’ of regeneration and rebirth which Carcass evokes. She explains how under some conditions, such as in religious sacrifice, the act of eating remainders is associated with symbolic rebirths:
“In similar fashion, if what remains of a sacrifice can be called abject, in another connection consuming the leavings of a sacrifice can also be the cause of a series of good rebirths and can even lead to finding salvation… defilement as well as rebirth, abjection as much as high purity, obstacle at the same time as incentive toward holiness … there is a residue in every system in cosmogony, food ritual, and even sacrifice...” 95
The understanding that there is “residue in every system” accepts the possibility of rebirths from waste, in contrast to remainders’ polluting capacity as abject residues of people, in their association with waste/excrement, and death 96 Carcass’s display of the fermentation process evokes this sense of regeneration in its fermentation; indeed, fermentation involves bacterial ‘colonies’ and ‘cultures’a word that fermentation expert, Sandor Katz describes as encompassing “the totality of all that
93 Warner, One Work: Helen Chadwick, p. 26.
94 Tate Online, Helen Chadwick, Carcass
95 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 76.
96 Ibid. p. 74.
humans seek to pass from generation to generation.”, conjuring an idea of a changing, evolving natural ‘body politic’ 97 The glass encasing allows the viewer to understand the layers of fermentation as they break down. It is contained, but not hidden, celebrating the interconnected, organic nature of the human condition. Again, this representation of the ‘body politic’ does not fully disregard the value of sovereignty, being contained, but in the breakdown of the food waste of many people, a shared vulnerability is recognized through our digestive needs and metabolization by food. Carcass is thus a representation of a digested ‘body politic’, Its glass encasing still maintaining the a sense of sovereignty without eliminating the ‘chemical, biological or gustatory’. 98
Where Hobbes sought to protect the individual, he portrayed the natural body as a threat, as I have illustrated Carcass could be compared to the frontispiece of Leviathan where the ‘towering’ figure, is paralleled by the form of the monumental glass tower. In Leviathan’s imagery, a sense of awe is portrayed to protect against the threat the ‘state of nature’. In Chadwick’s Carcass, however, the body politic is already digested and fermenting, returned to a natural state. The form of the tower still holds a sense of awe, but this could be seen less as a mode of inflicting ‘terror’ of power, but to symbolize strength in the unity of a digested whole.
As I have mentioned, Carcass met its death less than a month after the start of the show’s run, after the sculpture began to leak, emitting a strong organic stench, and was removed from the gallery.99 In later exhibitions it was only included as a projection, and only reconstructed years after Chadwick’s death 100 To me, the Carcass’s leaking from its boundaries is indicative of the futility and danger of masking the vulnerable and corporeal through a politics of disgust. We cannot hide from the fact that we are organic matter, constantly wasting, regenerating, and interacting and changing with the world. In this way, Helen Chadwick invokes the metaphor of the ‘body politic’, one which embodies the trans-corporeal, interdependent, vulnerable nature of living. It is a celebration and monument to life’s mutability and mortality.
97 Sandor Katz, ‘The Art of Fermentation’, cited by Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke, Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (United Kingdom: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2016) p. 21.
98 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, p. 44.
99 Warner, One Work: Helen Chadwick, The Oval Court, p. 27, and Racz, ‘Helen Chadwick’s ‘Of Mutability’: Process and Postmodernism’, (p. 63)
100 Racz, ‘Helen Chadwick’s ‘Of Mutability’: Process and Postmodernism’, (p. 63), and Michael Phillipson, Art-Life-Mutability-Wasting, Helen Chadwick Remembered (2021) <https://www.thelondongroup.com/art-life-mutability-wasting/> [accessed 25th of October 2023].
Conclusion: Digesting Politics
In this dissertation I have discussed how contemporary artists use food to represent a more inclusive ‘body politic’: a metaphor which describes the ways people are interconnected and which has dictated modes of thinking about bodies.
The sterilisation of the ancient organic metaphor of the ‘body politic’ through the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan underlies this discussion Lavin’s Eating Anxiety provides the historic-political relationship of Leviathan’s frontispiece to the liberal ideals of individualism and the disembodied political subject, and demonstrates how this imagery has demonised the vulnerable, corporeal aspects of humanity, creating a politics of disgust.
The idea food as a point of connection between people is developed into an aesthetic discussion of three contemporary political artworks which contrast Leviathan’s frontispiece. By examining the visceral intimacy of the edible and post-edible through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, I have illustrated how these three artworks reappropriate the powers of abjection to reject the politics of disgust
My discussion of the ‘body politic’ has focussed on interdependencies between people, but the idea of transcorporeality discussed in Mycoplasma Altar by Sharona Franklin, questions the boundaries between our bodies and the wider world Mycoplasma Altar considers the importance of understanding transcorporeality to address issues of ableism and other forms of abjection.
In ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity… and Vulnerability’ Kristeva suggests a need to share vulnerability. Her essay highlights the value of art in creating interactions which deconstruct abjection against disabled people. I have used Kristeva’s argument to highlight the transcorporeality of eating, which is made visible in Mycoplasma Altar, an idea which I also apply to the other artworks discussed.
My exploration of the ideas behind Consuming Colonies by Helena Walsh enabled a comparison between incarnation in a religious context and the ideas of embodiment in the work, as explored by Lavin and Kristeva. The comparison of ideas of embodiment through a feminist lens between this artwork and Leviathan’s frontispiece has emphasised both the gendered nature of Hobbes’ body politic, and the need to reject it.
Carcass by Helen Chadwick provides perhaps the most succinct image of a new organic body politic, encompassing both ideas of decay and regeneration in its celebration of the natural. I have shown Carcass to be an emblem of the connecting and regenerative power of celebrating vulnerability.
Carcass’s ultimate destruction is a powerful example of the politics of disgust, which all three artworks reject.
Overall, my analysis of these works has revealed the importance of recognising vulnerability as a universal right in liberal politics, to tackle issues of exclusion. It is suggested that re-instating vulnerability as a key connecting factor in the trans-corporeal network between people - the ‘body politic’ - is the first step of this.
The artists’ use of the edible and post-edible conveys how food as a medium in art can explore abjection, trans-corporeality, and the complex symbolism of embodiment. The effect of harnessing the aesthetic powers of food pushes art beyond the purely visual and beautiful, provoking visceral responses: a means of thinking about art and politics through the body – a forum in which to digest ideas.
By chopping off the head of the Leviathan, and instead exploring the contents of the stomach, these artists are reinstating vulnerability into the metaphorical ‘body politic’
Cover design by Rowan Roscher, Thomas Hobbes, and Abraham Bosse.
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