Chapter 3 2 Cut Flesh Chapter 3 Cut Flesh So that story was ended; somebody began another, about that satyr whom Latona’s son surpassed at playing the flute, and punished, sorely, flaying him, so the skin all left his body, so he was one great wound, with the blood flowing, the nerves exposed, veins with no cover of skin over their beating surface, lungs and entrails visible as they functioned. — Ovid1 My body is infested with worms, my skin is cracked and discharging. — Job 7:52 And you die living, and your bones are no more than what death has left, and committed to the grave. If this is correctly understood, every man would find a memento mori, or a death’s head, in his own mirror; and every house with a family in it is nothing but a sepulcher filled with dead bodies. —Quevedo3 Ovid, Metamorphoses 6: 385–90, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 141, line breaks omitted. 2 The Authorized version renders the verse as “my skin is broken.” The New English Bible renders “My body is infested with worms,/and scabs cover my skin,” and adds, in a footnote, “it is cracked and discharging.” See New English Bible (New York: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970), Job 7:5 n. 3 Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas, The Works of Quevedo (Edinburgh, 1798), vol. 1, 35, quoted in Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Valdés Leal, [The] Baroque Concept of Death and Suffering in His Paintings (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1956), 31, translation modified. 1 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 3 Few pictures of the living, conscious body open the skin and reveal what is inside. There are the medical videos of tiny cameras crawling along passages deep in the body, photographs of operations done with local anesthetic, and news footage of people stunned by explosions, looking at their torn bodies. There are also faked wounds, from Night of the Living Dead to Dead Ringers, from Hermann Nitsch’s bloody performances to Philippine “psychic healing” operations done without surgical instruments.4 These examples are not only marginal because they are painful to watch, but because the inside of the body is a powerful sign of death. Even in Beowulf, bodies are “houses of the spirit” or of “bone,” and any cut can be a “wound door” (bengeat) that allows the spirit to escape.5 It is normally impolite even to look at the places where the inside of the body becomes visible—the twilight of nostrils, ears, mouths, anuses, vaginas, and urethras. The inside is by definition and by nature that which is not seen. The early Babylonian demon Humbaba is a spectacular counterexample: he had a face made out of his own intestines.6 (This particular object has an omen inscribed on the back which For the Philippine practice see Jeffrey Mishlove, The Roots of Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1975), 150–51 and plate 9. 5 Beowulf 1122. Bengeat is usually translated as “wound door,” “wound gate,” or “wound offering.” For example Beowulf, An Anglo–Saxon Poem, with a glossary by M. Heyne, edited by James Harrison (Boston: Ginn, Heath, and Company, 1883), s. v. ben–geat. But see Beowulf, A Dual–Language Edition, translated by Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (New York: Anchor, 1977), 113: “Their heads melted,/their gashes spread open, the blood shot out/of the body’s feud–bites.” 6 See further [ ], Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [ ] (July, 1926), [ ], and R. C. Thompson, The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia (London, 1904). 4 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 4 relates to the divination of intestines.7) In the epic Gilgamesh, Humbaba appears as the Guardian of the Cedar Forest, a terrifying monster who challenges the heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu. When they meet Humbaba screams out an imprecation that is only partly legible in the surviving versions (Gilgamesh was written in cuneiform on clay tablets), and all the more frightening for that: “Gilgamesh, throat and neck, / I would feed your flesh to the screaming vulture.” But Humbaba’s awesome face is oddly hidden from our view because there is a lacuna in the tablet just when the heroes get their first look at him. Gilgamesh stares, and whispers to Enkidu, “My friend, Humbaba’s face keeps changing!” The line might also mean “Humbaba’s face looks strange” or “different” but the image of roiling intestines is clearly legible.8 At this point two more lines are missing, so that Humbaba’s face, as a modern editor puts it, is “lost in a break.” How does one kill a monster who wears his insides on the outside? Gilgamesh slays him by turning him once again inside out (“they pulled out his insides including his tongue”). But how could that have been done? What was inside Humbaba when his intestines were already outside? This is all we know of the battle in Gilgamesh, and ancient images do not add much more.9 It is possible that Humbaba was wearing a tegument of intestines, the way that the Aztec god Xipe Totec, “Our Lord of the Flayed One,” wore human hides.10 (In this statuette, Xip Totec wears human skin inside out, with blobs of fat hanging down.) Perhaps Gilgamesh did not recognize Humbaba’s inversion, Graham Webster, “Labyrinths and Mazes,” In Search of Cult, edited by Martin Carver (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993), 23, citing D. Kilmer, “Sumerian and Akkadian Names for Design and Geometric Shapes,” in Investigating Artistic Environments in the Ancient Near East, edited by A. C. Gunter (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1900), 84 and fig. 1. 8 See The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by M. G. Kovaks (Stanford, 1985), Tablet V, p. 42. 9 See W. G. Lambert, “Gilgamesh in Literature and Art: The Second and First Millenia,” in An Farkas et al., editors, Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Modern Worlds (Mainz, 1987), 37-52, and D. Collon, First Impressions (Chicago, 1988), 178 ff. 10 Mary Miller and Karl Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 188. 7 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 5 and killed him the ordinary way, by evisceration: but it may also be that Humbaba already was eviscerated, and could only be killed by being returned to his normal state. I would rather read the story that way, since it provides a myth of origin for the question of inside and outside: before Humbaba, the myth might say, it was still possible to wear intestines on the outside. In Humbaba’s time, the intestines might come out of the body and swarm over its surface. After Humbaba, a normal person will die if his intestines are exposed, and a monstrous person will die if his intestines are hidden. For Humbaba evisceration was life, and death was a paradoxical, fatal restoration of the insides to their proper place. In my reading, the story is about the importance of keeping the insides where they belong. After Humbaba, we all hide the insides of our bodies: we patch and bandage wounds, and we hide the moments when the inside has to come out. It may seem that Humbaba is one-of-akind monster, but his descendents are still around. He was the ancestor of the archaic Greek Gorgon, from whose face we have the Medusa and ultimately our stagy science-fiction monsters like The Blob and The Thing whose insides spill out and kill whoever comes near. Just before this scene in John Carpenter’s version, the Thing had emerged from a dog by peeling it like a banana. Then, to defend itself, it had sprouted insectlike appendages. For the moment, it suits the monster to use the dog’s face, but in the next few scenes, it grows large arms and pulls itself up into the rafters. Carpenter’s film is among the most extreme and inventive fantasies on bodily metamorphosis in the history of motion pictures. There is a moment, just before the monster is apparently killed, when it is nothing but a lump of sodden viscera, as if it were resting from its many transformations. But it senses its attackers, and pops out eyes to see them better. It assesses the danger it is in, and at the last moment eviscerates itself, projecting a lamprey-like mouth. In The Thing, bodies move at the speed of thought: whatever the Thing needs, it can grow in the span of a second or less. Chapter 3 6 Cut Flesh The Thing owes its more purely visceral moments to movies like The Blob, which in turn derives from a British film of the 1950’s, The Creeping Unknown, which is a story about a formless mass that coalesces from the melting remains of an astronaut. The movie was created in consultation with Graham Sutherland, who had been experimenting painting Crucifixions where carcasses and abstract heaps of organs and bones are draped over the cross and studded with thorns and nails (chapter 2 has an illustration of one). Like Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland had gotten the idea largely from Picasso, who had toyed with the idea of a Crucifixion of bones and tattered flesh in a series of paintings and drawings done in the late fall of 1932.11 In this way the inverted bodies of The Thing have their antecedents in British and Spanish painting of the mid–century, and before them in the Greek Gorgon and perhaps finally in Humbaba, the eviscerated monster. The Hungarian psychoanalist Sándor Ferenczi’s reading of the Medusa’s face—as a sign of the female genitalia, according to him the most horrifying thing that can be seen—is one of many possible meanings of Humbaba’s body.12 (Another Mesopotamian Humbaba is shown here.) It must have been a difficult body to comprehend (as Gilgamesh said, it kept changing). What did Humbaba’s genitals look like? For Picasso’s drawings see Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 8 (1932–37) (Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1957), nos. 49 and 50. Picasso also made more curvilinear paintings of the crucifixion: see ibid., vol. 7 (1926–32) (Paris: Cahiers d’art, 1955), nos. 287, 315, and 316, painted in 1930–31. 12 Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), vol. 18, 273–74. In “Infantile Genital Organization,” ibid., vol. 19, 144, Freud credits the idea to Ferenczi. 11 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 7 Was his penis an invagination? Was his anus a snaking penis? Humbaba’s total, encompassing, changing inversion and evisceration is the worst of the catastrophes that can overtake the body. To keep the inside hidden is to stave off death. When a body is opened accidentally, we do everything possible to keep it closed. The history of bandages involves sutures, knots, staples, pins, bolts, clamps, and other devices, all intended to make an airtight closure.13 Older suturing methods include the use of skin substitutes (leather patches, parchment), tied in place with animal cords (cat gut, horse hair, silk), secured with animal paste (fish glue, bone size). This is a sampler, for doctors, showing leather bandages. A wound is a deficit of skin: hence the cure was an excess of skin.14 In premodern Europe, the skin of an animal that had caused a wound was sometimes required to heal the wound. The Irish writer Tomás O’Crohan describes how his leg was saved after he had been bitten by a seal: his friends killed another seal, and “stuck a lump of the seal’s flesh tight” into the gap in his leg—literally sculpting his calf into shape with animal meat.15 Suturing has found new resonance in fiber arts, Early plastic surgey texts are relevant here; see for example J. C. Carpue, An Account of Two Successful Operations for Restoring a Lost Nose (London, 1816), and C. F. von Graefe, Rhinoplastik (Berlin, 1818). For a modern work, see The Healing of Surgical Wounds, State of the Art in the Ninth Decade of the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert S. Sparkman (Dallas: Baylor University Medical Center, 1985). For the connection between airtight closure and theories of disease transmission, see Stafford, Body Criticism, 161–62. 14 E. Chambers, Cyclopædia: or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), vol. 2, v. “suture.” See also Stafford, Body Criticism, 161. 15 Tomás O’Crohan, The Islandman, translated by Robin Flower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 74–79. 13 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh where it has become entangled with the histories of sewing, crocheting, and weaving. The confluence of torturous devices to mend the body and closures in clothes and fabrics makes an interesting field of possibilities, and contemporary art often plays the themes of domesticity and pain against one another, as in works by Annette Messager. Her fabrics and stitched pieces are overtly domestic, but so are her hanging collections of photographs of body parts, which are reminiscent of walls hung with arrangements of family photographs. Some, like this one, are in body-like clumps, and the strings that hold them up are like sutures as much as stitching. The subject of this chapter is the defense against death as the depiction of pain, because where viscera predominate over skin pain is no longer the ruling meaning. Suffering is certainly implied in representations of opened bodies, but it is not the twinge of a sensation on skin (as in chapter 1), or the sharp pull and compression of limbs turned in violent contrapposto (as in chapter 2). Pictures of opened bodies conjure states that edge from pain toward shock, unconsciousness, coma, and death. Assignment 1: inside-out bodies. Find an artwork that has to do with the inside of the body and is not a medical illustration, or find images from movies or comics that don’t try to keep the insides hidden. 8 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 9 The fluid flesh Flesh, as opposed to membranes and skin, is a fluid. According to the linguist Carl Buck, Russian, Lithuanian, and Lettish (Latvian) words for “flesh” all derive “from the notion of a filmy, ‘floating’ covering.” They are related to the Sanskrit prefix pluta–, meaning “floating,” and ultimately to the Indo–European root *pleu–, denoting “flow” or “float.”16 In those languages, as in Indo–European, flesh is something that floats, a liquid rather than a solid like the bones. Skin is like a scum congealed on the body’s surface, and muscles are like curds, sunk in its depths. Greek terms for the body also partake of these liquid metaphors: Greek thumos can mean “spirit” or “anger,” but it can also be a liquid that “boils and swells in the innards.”17 This way of imagining the body as a congealed jelly, part fluid and part solid, has its echoes in 18th century medicine. In the course of pondering the nature of bodily “fibers” and tissues, Albrecht von Haller was struck by the profusion of “net–like” membranes in the body—some hard and thick, others “pervaded by a flux of some juice or liquors,” or formed in the shape of tunics or coats, cylinders, or cones. According to Haller these watery or oily “web–like substances” are one of two kinds of tissues in the body; the other is “a mere glue” between that lubricates them. But on closer inspection, he says, it proves difficult to tell the “mere glue” from the membranous fibers. Cartilage, for example, appears to be “scarce any thing else than this glue concreted,” and in the end “even the Carl Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo–European Languages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 202. 17 Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), reviewed by Jasper Griffin in The New York Review of Books (24 June, 1993), 45. (The quotation is Griffin’s.) 16 Chapter 3 10 Cut Flesh filamentary fibers are all first formed of such a transfused glue.” Bones are constructed from a “compacted gluten,” a fact demonstrated by diseases in which “the hardest bones, by a liquefaction of their gluten, return into cartilages, flesh, and jelly,” and the opposite happens when the muscles age and dissolve into “mere jelly,” or when bones, skin, and tendons are boiled down to make size (animal glue). The development from fetus to adult is the transformation of fetal “jelly” into the inextricable colloid of membrane and glue, which dissolves again in old age.18 Seen this way, the body’s membranes are nothing but a temporary state, a flux of jellies: It seems, then, that a gelatinous water, like the white of an egg [aqua albuminosa], with a small portion of fine cretaceous earth, first runs together into threads, from some pressure, the causes of which are not our present concern. Such a filament, by the mutual attraction of cohesion, intercepting spaces between itself and others, helps to form a part of the cellular net–like substance [cellulosam telam], after having acquired some toughness from the neighboring earthy particles, which remain after the expulsion of the redundant aqueous glue. And in this net–like substance, wherever a greater pressure is imposed on its scales or sides, they turn into fibers and membranes or tunics; and in the bones, lastly, they concrete with an unorganized glue. Hence, in general, all parts of the body, from the softest to the hardest, seem to differ in no other wise than in this, that the hardest parts have a Albrecht von Haller, First Lines of Physiology, translated by William Cullen (Edinburgh: Charles Elliott, 1786), vol. 1, 9–14. 18 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 11 greater number of earthy particles more closely compacted, with less aqueous glue; whilst in the softest parts, there is less earth and more glue.19 I would like to take this as a way of thinking about flesh that refuses the distinction between skin and viscera, inside and outside, hard and soft, in favor of jellies, oils, “albuminous water,” and viscous matter. This perspective is especially apposite to the visual arts, since there is an affinity between the slurry of fluids in a surgical operation—the saline wash, blood, and cut tissues—and the mix of pigments and oils in a painting. Artists who have tried to depict the body’s insides have often drawn parallels between the body’s thickened liquids and the sticky media of oil painting; among the painters that come to mind are Francis Bacon, the later Ivan Albright, and the early Kokoschka. For him the paper or canvas surface is already a skin, and he worries it, scratching, gouging, and tattooing his figures and backgrounds.20 In 1909 and 1910 his painted or drawn skin sometimes became translucent, revealing vessels underneath, just as it is possible in life to see the network of capillaries by using color infrared film, or discern superficial arteries through light–colored skin (they are not veins, but are made bluish by the intervening yellow fat). Haller, First Lines of Physiology, op. cit., 14–15, translation modified. The original Latin is from Haller, Primæ lineæ physiologiæ (Edinburgh: G. Drummond, 1768), 5–6. For a discussion of Haller’s style, see Bianca Cetti Marinoni, “La Prosa Scientifica,” in Ricerche Halleriane, edited by Bianca Cetti Marinoni et al. (Milan: n.p., 1984) 20 For this portrait and its immediate context, see Johann Winkler and Katherine Erling, Oskar Kokoschka: Die Gemälde 1906-1929 (Salzburg: Galerie Welz, 1995), cat. 44. 19 Chapter 3 12 Cut Flesh Kokoschka describes his vessels as nerves, and one of his biographers thought of écorchés, but they are not anatomically specific; unlike real arteries, nerves, or lymph vessels, Kokoschka’s painted “nerves” are spiky branched things that do not lead anywhere.21 Their bunching makes them more like varicose veins or cleavages in rock. Around the time of Murderer, Hope of Women (where a figure is flayed, revealing the same “nerves”), Kokoschka’s paintings show an intense preoccupation with skin, and in the possibility of scratching it away, tearing it off, or seeing through it. Portraits such as the Boy with a Raised Hand are scraped and abraded, as if seeing itself had to become so violent that it could gouge and rasp at the flesh. I have no simple explanation for his strange fascination (I doubt it is related to his thoughts about tensions between the sexes, or to his poverty).22 Something about the skin seemed wrong to him, and for a while when he was young he invented bodies that are both torn and not torn, or ripped but miraculously alive and whole. Kokoschka worked with a deep and broad awareness of history, and many currents mingle in his work on subcutaneous forms, translucent skin, and themes of flaying or ripping. His preoccupation with innervation can be traced back to the eighteenth century interest in the nervous system and the sense of touch, as it is exemplified for instance in Piranesi’s “flayed” For écorchés, see E. Hoffman, Kokoschka: Life and Work (Boston, 1944), 37–38. Henry I. Schvey, “Mit dem Auge des Dramatikers: Das Visuelle Drama bei Okar Kokoschka,” Oskar Kokoschka, Symposion, edited by Erika Patka (Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1986), 100–113, especially 111–12. 21 22 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 13 ruins, where the architectural forms become metaphors for the opened body.23 Many of Piranesi’s plates are large (one is literally the size of a person’s body), and the buildings they represent are irresistably reminiscent of skulls, arms, and torsos—or of the body’s more abstract “architecture,” its scaffolding, its insulation, its waterproof covering, its often decayed interior. This is a detail of a tiny figure, far up and in the background of a large illustration; he is examining a colossal wall of ancient stonework, called opus incertum. Like a fly caught in a web, his limbs are bent into the angular forms of the stones, and his body is on the point of dissolving into the swirling marks of the etching needle. (His fingers are already hopelessly entangled.) Everything here has to do with the body: its flexible skin, its mechanical skeleton, and its unexpected sympathy with stone. Another source for the awareness of skin’s translucence is the seventeenth–century painters’ discovery that fingers glow when they are held close to a candle flame. Although the more familiar examples of this come from Georges La Tour and Michael Sweerts, Adam Elsheimer is responsible for the strangest image—a scene from Metamorphoses in which Hecate, who is mortified when a young boy laughs at her, prepares to transform him into a lizard. 23 Stafford, Body Criticism, 58–70. Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 14 In Elsheimer’s version the body is already glowing with the heat of metamorphosis, as his bones begin to liquefy into amphibian softness. In the Metamorphoses the boy, Stellio, becomes a gecko; Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 15 in Elsheimer’s picture he is on his way—he’s a wavering, lacertine mixture of a human, a softened candle, and a salamander.24 In the nineteenth century the incandescent flesh of Dutch scenes of sensualism became one of Ingres’s broadening range of historical allusions. His melted-wax fingers, which Robert Rosenblum noted as his special obsession, owe something to the candent fingers and tapers in Michiel Sweerts and Georges de la Tour, and before them to the entire tradition of translucent bodies that began with Caravaggio and Elsheimer.25 Since the laye 1980s there have been various attempts to show the body’s fluids, and the cuts that make them accessible. Sally Mann’s photographs explore the fluids and bodies of children; Kiki Smith juxtaposes photos of the skin with pools of blood; Andres Serrano’s work involves both the fluids themselves (including urine and blood) and their appearance on the body’s cut surface (in the series of morgue photographs).26 “There is this great beauty of the color of meat,” Francis Bacon reminds his interviewer, David Ovid, Metamorphoses 5:437–60. For the identification of the gecko see Carl Gotthold Lenz, Erklärende Anmerkungen zu Ovids Metamorphosen, vol. 1. From the series Erklärende Anmerkungen zu der Encyclopädie der lateinischen Classiker, vol 3, part 1. (Braunschweig: Schul– Buchhandlung, 1792), 349: “Der Stellio… ist eine kleine Eidesche, man glaubt, Lacerta gecko L.” 25 For Ingres’s “obsession” see Robert Rosenblum, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (New York: Abrams, 1967). For other sources of “waxy painted figures,” see Stafford, Body Criticism, 78. For Sweerts see Rolf Klutzen, Michael Sweerts: Brussels 1618-Goa 1664, translated by Diane Webb (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1996). 26 For Sally Mann, see for example Still time: Sally Mann (New York: Aperture, 1994); for Kiki Smith, see her work with David Wojnarowicz, especially Untitled (1982-91), reproduced in Micholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (New York: Routledge, 1995); for Serrano, see Andres Serrano: Works, 1983-1993, edited by Patrick Murphy, with essays by Wendy Steiner and others (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1994); and Andres Serrano: Body and Soul, edited by Brian Wallis, with essays by bel hooks and others (New York: Takarajima, 1995). 24 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 16 Sylvester.27 The early paintings are about cutting, or slaughterhouses, and they display vast monstrous carcasses, strings of vertebrae that could only come from dinosaurs, and Popes whose mouths are bloodied as if they had been assaulted. After the 1960’s, however, Bacon achieved a synthesis of inside and outside, surface and viscera, which is unique in the history of art. One might say Bacon’s later paintings still have a notion of skin, though it is not a surface anymore, but a sense of translucence. The faces appear to be several inches thick, and we are invited to see through to… to what? A concoction of floating veils, oily smears, sodden cloths, greasy spills, damp papers laid one on top of another. The canvas sometimes looks printed, as if Bacon had rubber–stamped and blotted it, and other passages look sharp, like pieces of splintered bone drifting among loosened tissues. When the flesh is deep, it may be a pool of slurred organs, and those organs seem to include scraps of skin, so that the face is effectively left without any covering. In this painting Michel Leiris’s face is mixed with itself: his body’s armor has retreated into his body, and mingled with it. Bacon’s best images are awash in all the body’s parts, private and public, human and mechanical, nameless pieces of anatomy and painful pieces of flesh, autonomous organs and dead bones. Francis Bacon Interviewed, op. cit., 46. Willem de Kooning’s nudes could also be discussed in this context, especially those that are manifestly liquid and without secure boundaries. See for example Janet Hobhouse, The Bride Stripped Bare: The Artist and the Female Nude in the Twentieth Century (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 236-60. 27 Chapter 3 17 Cut Flesh Bacon is almost alone, I think, in wanting to break down the dichotomy, and to see everything by seeing it all at once. Most of the history of pictured and sculpted bodies has to do with skin. Figurative sculptures, for example, tend to identify the skin with the body, in that the texture and density of the bronze or stone is continuous from the skin to the heart of the statue. (Large statues may be hollow, but their thicknesses are not skins. What is missing from a monumental bronze sculpture is the organs: the thickness of skin, fat, muscles and bones remains, but the sculpture has been hollowed like a mummy.) The historical antecedents of Bacon’s disheveled bodies are the Renaissance Venetian experiments with the softness and depth of the skin, especially, I think, some paintings by Titian where the body’s imperfect opacity is represented by translucent layers of paint. Titian’s glazes—some of them rubbed until they are almost invisible—remind a viewer of the process of painting, which builds from the bony white gesso through thickening layers to a final paper-thin membrane. Such paintings make body into a sequence of oiled sheets. In the late paintings, the delicate veils of flesh are also cut by sharp dry impasto, so that the body becomes a mix of hard and soft, very much as it is in Bacon. Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 18 Bacon confuses the body’s layers, just as the patiently built layers of Venetian oil painting were tumbled together in the thick, impetuous alla prima painting that began in the mid-19th century.28 The works I consider in this chapter, which break the decorum that normally hides the body’s layers, are not central to Western art. Instead they help define the mainstream by showing what happens when the rules, like the body’s membranes, are broken. Assignment 2: fluid flesh. Find artworks that show the skin or flesh as fluid, translucent, or bruised. Try analyzing them using the concepts and examples in this section. Resisting seeing the inside I will not begin with the history of fine art images that represent viscera, both because the history has been told, and because it remains marginal to much that is interesting about the body. The exceptions—medical images of unusual power or accomplishment—are rare. Erwin Panofsky has chronicled some in Tomb Sculpture, and isolated artists such as Hans Baldung have On alla prima painting, see Max Doerner, Malmaterial und seine Werwendung im Bilde (1921), translated as The Materials of the Artist (London: Granada, 1973–77). For a recent appreciation of Doerner see Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, translated by Dana Polen and the author. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 51. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 175–85. De Duve is interested in parallels between Duchamp’s readymades and the tradition of painting, and the parallel I am drawing here between Bacon and Titian is not without affinities to Duchamp’s lingering interest in paint, palettes, tubes, and the rudiments of painting. De Duve has rethought these ideas in Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 28 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 19 made persuasive mixtures of nauseating decay and perfect beauty.29 the Japanese Nine Stages of Decomposition are another example. In Europe one of the most extravagant inventions is Juan de Valdés Leal’s pair of paintings titled Los Jeroglíficos de las postrimerías (Hieroglyph of Our Last Days, c. 1672–77), a catalogue of vanitas symbols and corruption.30 The paintings illustrate the 13th century legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, in which three riders come upon three corpses, one freshly dead, another decomposing, and the third a skeleton. One of them says to the three living: “What you are, we were; what we are, you will become.”31 In order to drive home the point Valdés Leal puts the most horrifying figure in the foreground, in the manner of medieval and Renaissance tomb sculpture. The foreground corpse is en transis—in the process of liquefaction—and so he is a stronger reminder of the painting’s moral than the dried skeleton or Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (New York: Abrams, 1992). For Hans Baldung, see Robert Koch, Hans Baldung Grien, Eve, the Serpent, and Death [bilinguial French and English], Masterpieces in the National Gallery of Canada, no. 2 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1974). 30 Duncan Theobald Kinkead, Valdes Leal, His Life and Work (New York: Garland, 1978). 31 Raimund van Marle, Iconographie de l’art profane (La Haye, 1932), vol. 2, 383–84, quoted in Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Valdés Leal, Spanish Baroque Painter (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1960), 57. 29 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 20 the fresh corpse. But even here, in a painting so extreme that it was even disparaged by an historian who wrote a book on Valdés Leal, there is little more than a hint of what lies beneath the skin.32 As Panofsky’s examples show, a corrupted skin is enough to show that the body is decomposing. In Los Jeroglíficos de las postrimerías, worms thread their way through the skin, toads lick at its orifices, and flies settle on its desiccating remains. For Valdés Leal, as for Hans Baldung, the decomposing body is literally only skin and bones. Hans Baldung’s figures of Death are skeletons dripping with skin, rather than organs. Viscera are unrepresented and often unimagined, even where there is evidence that the artists had spent time looking at rotting animal or human bodies. In such cases the repressed inside of the body often returns in the form of metaphor. If we were to look for signs of viscera, one of the best places would be Dutch still life painting, where meat and fruit are commonplace reminders of the body’s ingredients. Pieter Aertsen, Frans Snyders, Willem Kalf, and other painters have an affection for objects that have both skin and “viscera”: In Elizabeth du Gué Trapier’s opinion, “Had the directors of the chairty hospital wished to hasten the end of their impoverished clients they could not have chosen more effective subjects as decorations for the new church than the hieroglyphs.” Valdés Leal (1956), op. cit., 34. 32 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 21 peeled oranges, torn bread, mincemeat pies with flaky crusts, translucent sausages, melons with dried rinds and juicy insides—not to mention freshly butchered joints.33 There are also reminders of the body’s fluid insides: carafes of red wine, pats of butter, tubs and basins of lard, pitchers of milk, bowls swimming with egg yolks. Just as Balthus’s still lifes reveal relationships between Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96–135, reads some of these images as one end of a spectrum from ascetic inhibition to chaotic excess, and in this context I would note that bodily metaphors function most strongly as signifiers of excess. 33 Chapter 3 22 Cut Flesh bodies, any one of the Dutch still-life painters could be studied for their ways of setting out the relationship between elements in the body. In the 17th and 18th centuries, still life may have been the best excuse for artists who wanted to remain in the fine art tradition and still depict the opened body; in contemporary art, a wide range of materials and forms can evoke the body’s insides without needing to allude to the death of any individual person. In that sense, contemporary soft sculptures, especially those made of perishable materials are the descendants of Baroque still life—works like Rachel de Joode’s Soft Inquiry XI or Jessica Drenk’s Soft Cell Tissue. The resins, perfumes, oils, and pelts of fiber art speak about the body’s insides without leaving the field of fine art, just as their painted equivalents did in the seventeenth century. Dissecting To actually depict viscera, it is necessary to partly abandon fine art painting and drawing in favor of medical illustration. Dissection is an especially powerful tool: literally, it is a medical specialty, with its own terms and techniques distinct from surgery; and figuratively, it can stand for any act of systematic analysis, from a tentative “probe” to the “sharpest” critique. It can be argued that pictures of dissections are the clearest examples of the desire to see through or into anything, whether it is a body, or—by metaphorical extension—an idea. A picture of a dissected body can Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 23 also be experienced as a literal version of a common trait of seeing, in that the mind’s desire to analyze and the eye’s desire to pierce and separate are kindred motions, and they are both embodied in cut flesh. Dissection is therefore one of the most apt metaphors for the experience of intense, directed thinking or seeing: the Latin perspicere, from which we have the words “perspicuous” and “perspective,” means seeing through, as in piercing a fog or penetrating a dark night. Analytic thought often borrows those visual metaphors, but ultimately perspective, piercing, and penetrating may all depend on the fundamental desire (or fear) of seeing through the skin.34 The concept of dissection is philosophically versatile. We speak of dissecting, revealing, opening, or cutting through to a problem, and the narrative form known as the anatomy commemorates its bodily origins by avoiding linear or systematic exposition in favor of detailed examination. When critical inquiry approaches dissective methods, it relinquishes optical metaphors in favor of bodily ones. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy exhibits a wry awareness of the somatic model of thought in its subtitle, where Burton declares melancholy will be “philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut Other, rival, interpretations of perspective are given in my Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), chapter 1. 34 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 24 up.”35 Anatomizing has to do with pain, shock, and death: hence, I believe, the “pain” of analytic thought and of intense vision: they devolve from the partial failure of the covering metaphor. When Wittgenstein speaks of the unpleasantness and labor of philosophic thought—its harshness, its closesness, its “slippery” quality—he is not far from speaking openly about its pain. Pictures of dissections are the most intimate and exact record of those motions of the mind, and it helps to look at them with the medical terminology in mind. Medicine dissects dissection into a half–dozen specific procedures, each of which can function as a metaphor for analytic thought. There is the uncovering of a specific organ in situ (known as prosection), as well as its removal (excision or exeresis). (The image of the hand is an expert prosection, a kind of virtuoso sculpture, preserved in the Royal College of Surgeons, London, and reproduced in R.M.H. McMinn’s Color Atlas of Human Anatomy.) A doctor can tie together two separate organs (grafting), divide the healthy from the pathological (diaresis), or implant a foreign body (prosthesis).36 Each of these terms names a way Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is. With all the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Severall Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their Severall Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. By Democritus Junior (Oxford: John Lichfield and James short for Henry Cripps, 1621). 36 E. Chambers, Cyclopædia: Or an Univrrsal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, second edition (London, 1738), 209, and R. J. C. [de] Garengeot, A Treatise of Chirurgical Operations, translated by M. André (London, 1723), 2, both cited in Stafford, Body Criticism, 485 n. 6, 7. 35 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 25 of thinking about a problem: Jacques Derrida’s neologisms, such as “différance,” are prostheses in the text of philosophy—implants, which may or may not be assimilated. (They may “take,” or they may be rejected.) Each term also has its corresponding narrative forms. Montaigne, for example, touches on most of these strategies in the course of failing to speak in a logical fashion about his subjects.37 Given the confluence of words for dissection, seeing, and thought, it is not surprising that these words are also well–fitted to describe the process of depicting bodies. Many of the ways artists build bodies have their parallels in the ways doctors disassemble bodies. An artist might separate one shape from another, in order to make it clearer (thus performing a prosection), or assemble an image by placing disparate forms on top of an existing field, collage– fashion (thus adding prostheses to an organic base, as in this collage by Claudia Huidobro). All imagemaking involves diaresis since it is the act of identifying useless, “pathological” forms and salvaging interesting, “healthy” ones. In both medicine and painting, part of the challenge is to create a structure of clearly articulated forms out of a state of incoherence and confusion. 37 Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, second edition (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), 305–36. Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 26 Assignment 3: dissection. Analyze an artwork in terms of the metaphors of dissection: prosection, exeresis, prosthesis. It doesn’t have to be a medical image, or a naturalistic picture of a body: it can be any artwork that divides and examines its subject. Medical illustration Older medical illustration is a better place to study these ideas than contemporary medical imaging, because the latter has been built, over the last two centuries, on ideals of simplicity and schematization. The kinds of questions asked in the literature on medical imagery have to do with the density and arrangement of information, rather than the meanings of the images as representations of the body. How much of the tangle of tissues should be depicted in a single illustration in order to retain “readability”? To what degree is idealization preferable in order to help the eye “process information”? The ongoing interest in “painless” computer– assisted images, together with these questions of efficient visual communication, can be read as a double resistance: on the one hand, medical imaging represses the complicated and unsettling presence of the opened body, and on the other hand, it resists the potential power of the images themselves by draining their visual interest, leaving a pure and uninteresting residue.38 One Magnetic Resonance Imaging, A Reference Guide and Atlas (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1986); Navin C. Nanda, Atlas of Color Doppler Echocardiography (Philadelphia, 1989); Howard Sochurek, Medicine’s New Vision (Easton, Pennsylvania: Mack Publishing Company, 1988) 38 Chapter 3 27 Cut Flesh might say, for example, that if contemporary digital medical images were to become more intricate (or even if their resolution were to increase) they would become more effective at expressing pain, so that the simpler visual displays commonly in use serve both to repress thoughts of the living body and to avoid being seen as pictures. The former quality has been stressed by E. J. Cassell, who describes the recent history of medical illustration as a matter of “depersonalization,” and connects it to what he sees as the medical profession’s reluctance to come to terms with the suffering of patients.39 In any case a more reflective history of recent medical imaging would have to take into account the lingering feeling of discomfort and pain that accompanies even the most artificial and highly processed images; it might be argued that computer–generated images of the body are likely to cause uneasy twinges of recognition, since the observer is likely to be reminded about what such images exclude.40 Older medical illustration is not different from contemporary imaging in its content so much as in its attention to the body’s more unruly or anatomically meaningless forms, and for that reason it is more often the site of interesting visual thinking about the body’s E. J. Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine (New York and Oxford, 1991), 195 ff. 40 For further examples see my “Art History and the Criticism of Computer–Generated Images,” Leonardo 27 no. 4 (1994): 335–42 and color plate. For a good recent summary of medical imaging, see Robert P. Crease et al., “Biomedicine in the Age of Imaging,” Science 261 (30 July 1993): 554–61. 39 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 28 insides. Cassell distinguishes older from newer medical illustration in part by pointing to the “metaphorical” content of some older illustrations. But when a Renaissance medical text shows a woman with a prosected bladder accompanied by picture of water running under a bridge, or a skeleton contemplating a skull, is it operating so differently from contemporary medical illustrations? More recent medical treatises gain a powerful metaphorical meaning of their own by displaying fragments of bodies rather than whole revivified bodies. A comparison might be drawn between that fragmentarian program and atlases of architectural details, mechanical movements or machine parts. In each case a single illustration will normally show only a part of a larger mechanism, and it will decline to depict the totality of the object or its function in relation to other objects. For these reasons, I would not want to cast the history of medical illustration as an increase of interest in efficient visual communication as opposed to an interest in pure visual incident, nor as the gradual ascendance of a scientific mentality over a “metaphorical” or religious one. Instead, it seems that the question is which meanings are excluded, and which permitted. Andreas Vesalius’s 16th century version of the dissected body, a traditional starting–place for histories of anatomic illustration, is robust and curvilinear (The skeleton contemplating a skull is also from Vesalius).41 Vesalius’s woodcut lines are harsh and strong, and they have spring and tension—what Hogarth later called the Nancy Siriasi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity in ‘De humani corporis fabrica’,” Journal of the Warburg and courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 60-88. 41 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 29 “the inimitable curve or beauty of the S undulating motion line.”42 Another version of the body, best realized by the 18th century anatomist Bernard Siegfried Albinus, is elegant, slim, and perfectly measured.43 Albinus’s figures are engravings rather than woodcuts, and they have some Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 30 the most attenuated and beautifully controlled lines in the history of that medium. (Even, or especially, when the subject is intentionally sublimely horrible, as it is here.) Together, Vesalius and Albinus may be taken as paradigmatic images for the Western history of anatomic illustration; the two choices they represent ruled much of the succeeding history. But at the same time it would not be entirely correct to account for the difference by describing Vesalius as proto–Baroque or Albinus as proto–Neoclassical. The Vesalian body is a rough attempt to describe the opened body itself, to minimize the resistance to representing death. He denies the fact of death outright by representing a living (sometimes a sleeping) figure. A live model, displaying its own viscera, is the paradox of choice in much of older medical illustration as well as medical sculpture. But here we need to be cautious, because few anatomical illustrations present figures as if they were unambiguously alive. How, after all, does an eviscerated figure sleep? How relaxed can a flayed figure hope to be? In medieval anatomic illustration, “Wound Men” show their opened bodies with the indifference of a demonstrator pointing to an actual corpse.44 That tradition is strange enough, but it became openly paradoxical when Renaissance naturalism For example Peter Murray Jones, Medieval Medical Miniatures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), figs. 27 and 51. 44 Chapter 3 31 Cut Flesh made it possible to give the Wound Man an expression, so that he might begin to show some psychological awareness of his position. Charles Estienne’s work contains inappropriately elegant scenes of women lying or sitting in their beds, in exquisite maniera contrapposto, with their skin cut away and their entrails hanging out.45 Some figures in Giovanni Valverde’s Anatomia del corpo humano retain the medieval obliviousness to their own suffering, but others evince an odd sense of discomfort. In one, a figure grasps his skin in his teeth, and he turns aside and winces—partly from the effort of pulling the skin, and partly, it seems, from pain. Valverde’s description echoes that strange possibility without quite saying what is happening: “This figure,” the caption reads, “shows where the intestines are, and demonstrates the net of vessels, and turns backward, and pulls with its teeth.” How are we to read such an image? I would prefer to think there was some 46 awareness on the artist’s part that the Wound Man convention was illogical, and he may have felt some empathy with the figure he was drawing. Earlier, Vesalius had tried to solve the problem by Charles Estienne, La dissection des parties du corps humain divisee en trois livres (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1546); Jean-Claude Margolin, Science, humanisme et société: Le cas de charles Estienne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993). 46 “Questa figura, mostra il sito de gl’Intestini, & la reticella spiegata, & volta verso dietro, & tirata co denti.” Giovanni Valverde, Anatomia del corpo humano (Rome: Antonio Salamanca and Antonio Lafreri, 1560), book III, p. 93. 45 Chapter 3 32 Cut Flesh representing an eviscerated torso as if it were a marble sculpture that had been truncated along the lines of the Farnese torso: where the abdomen is cut it reveals organs, but where the limbs are fractured they show blank marble. The figure even has the kind of “Roman joints” by which sculptures are assembled: one side of a limb is carved into a peg (that is, a bonelike structure), and the other is drilled (so that it resembles a deboned carcass). The inheritors of these wound men are 20th and 21st century depictions of cyborgs with opened or disassembled bodies that they stare at impassively. (As in this cover of Galaxy from 1954.) Or Yue Minjun’s canvas from 2009, in which a grimacing man demonstrates that his insides are from an anatomy textbook (next page). All medical illustration retains these paradoxical features, because it is rarely unambiguously entirely clear if the body is alive and anaesthetized, or a corpse, or a cadaver, or only a schematic or mnemonic for the body. Fundamentally, the situation is irreparable, because the uncanny look of anatomic illustration proceeds directly from the uncanniness of the corpse, which trespasses on the places of the living until it is buried.47 Vesalius’s inhuman robustness denies the body by strengthening it into sculpture, and that denial is even more effective because it led his artists toward the “undulating motion lines” that have often been read as the fruits of close observation even though they have only a fortuitous, intermittent correspondence with the body’s forms. Albinus’s taut linear The “dead body in a room problem” also leads into the history of funerary installations; the subject is explored in my Things and their Places: The Concept of Installation from Prehistoric Tombs to Contemporary Art, work in progress. 47 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 33 manner denies the body by weakening it into a geometric diagram, and his strategy is most persuasive when his exactitude forces the viewer into a false sense that the pictures are close to reality. There is pain in both texts, but it is muted—in the one case by sculpture, and in the other by geometry. Assignment 4: bodies looking at their insides. Find an artwork in which a person or cyborg looks at their own insides, and intepret it in relation to the history givne in this section. Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 34 Chapter 3 35 Cut Flesh Toward pain and incoherence It is nearly impossible to come to terms with the inside of the body. Organs and cut flesh are virtually excluded from fine art in favor of the abstract pairing of skin and skeleton, and in medical illustration they are largely replaced by subtle abstractions that turn the body toward the domains of geometry, architecture, or sculpture—or toward the weightlessness of the screen. Metaphorically, such images elide the real hazards of analytic thought. Yet there are pictures that do justice to the fact that dissective thinking is harsh and uncompromising, and that it takes place in a domain of radical complexity. Among the most accurate representations of the body’s inside before the invention of photography are plaster and bronze écorchés (flayed figures), some of them made directly from wax casts of muscles and bones.48 Lodovico Cardi’s écorché called The Beautiful Anatomy (La bella Notomia), made shortly before 1600, is the usual starting-place for the history of Renaissance anatomical models, but wax models are attested in Pliny, and from 1200 to 1600 many anatomical wax ex-votos, called bóti, were made in honor of the Madonna in Or For écorchés in general, see L. Price Amerson, “The Problem of the Ecorché: A Catalogue Raisonné of Models and Statuettes from the Sixteenth Century and Later Periods,” PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1975, unpublished; also my “Two Conceptions of the Human Form,” op. cit.; and the history in Henry Meige, “Une Révolution anatomique,” Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière 20 (1907): 174-83 (which concerns an écorché made by the French art anatomist Paul richer). 48 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 36 Sanmichele.49 There are major collections of wax models in medical museums in London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and Florence. The Alfort veterinary museum in Paris has preserved flayed bodies by a 19th century anatomist named Fragonard.50 One preserves a girl riding a horse, both flayed. Many of these institutions have objects that are more inventive and less predictable than the popular exhibitions by Günther von Hagens, the “Plastinator.” Some objects have a really unsettling degree of realism—they are fitted with human hair, and arranged on real linen beds.51 (Some of the female figures in the Specola museum in Florence can be disassembled, all the way down to a fetus in a womb.) The Humboldt University in Berlin has an extensive collection, including preparations made by injecting metal Pliny, Historia naturalis 35:6 and 153; the Madonna was said to have miraculous powers, according to Lanza et al., p. 18. On wax models in general, see E. J. Pyke, A Biographical Dictionary of Wax Modellers (Oxford, 1973). A supplement was published in London, 1981. 50 Honoré Fragonard, active c. 1766-1771; the cadavers are kept in the École Vétérinaire d’Alfort, Paris. 51 See J. Adhémar, “Les Musées de cire en France. Curtius, le ‘banquet royal,’ les têtes coupées,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 92 no. 2 (1978): 206–207; M. Lemire, Les Modèles anatomiques en cire colorée du SVIIIe siècle et du XIXe siècle (Paris: Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Laboratoire d’Anatomie Comparée, 1987); Peter Klerner Knoefel, “Florentine Anatomical Models in Wax and Wood,” Medicine nei Secoli 15 (1978): 329–40; Benedetto Lanza et. al., Le Cere Anatomiche della Specola (Florence: Arnaud, 1979) (there is also a second volume on the pathological anatomies); and Michel Lemire, “Fortunes et infortunes de l’anatomie et des préparations anatomiques, naturelles et artificielles,” in L’âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793-1993, exh. cat., edited by Jean Clair (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 70-101. 49 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 37 into the veins, and even preparation of the stretched and preserved face of an infant. (These illustrations are from the excellent catalog Theater der Natur und Kunst.) As I mentioned in chapter 1, The Musée de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis has a large permanent display of dermatological diseases sculpted a mixture of beeswax and resin.52 (And there is now a “virtual museum” version of that onceinaccessible place.) At the limits of this kind of replicative realism are cadavers that have been preserved by injection or varnishing; they are the ancestors of latex body casts by John De Andrea and other contemporary artists. The Renaissance practice was to coat corpses in honey; the eighteenth-century anatomist Frederick Ruysch preserved bodies more permanently in a mixture of talc, wax, cinnabar, wine and black pepper.53 Like De Andrea’s sculptures, the most accurate preserved bodies are astonishing from a distance, and repellent close up: in De Andrea’s case, the For the dermatologic models: Stafford, Body Criticism, 281–83; Georges Solente, “Le Musée de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis,” American Journal of Dermatology 5 (October 1983): 483–89, especially 486 for the identification of the medium; and Ernest Besnier, Alfred Fournier, et al., A Pictorial Atlas of Skin Diseases and Syphilitic Afflictions in Photo-Lithochromes from Models in the Museum of the Saint Louis Hospital, Paris, with Explanatory Woodcuts and Text (London: Rebman Ltd., 1904); and Ernest Besnier, La Pratique dermatologique (Paris: Masson et Cie., 1904) 4 vols., with color reproductions after the casts, keyed to numbers in the collection. Fournier was an authority of syphilis; see his Les Chancres extra-génitaux (Paris: Rueff et Cie, 1897). 53 His dissections served as the models for Füssli’s illustrations to Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer’s monumental Physique sacrée. See Stafford, Body Criticism, 240, and J.-J. Scheuchzer, Physique sacrée, ou histoire naturelle de la Bible (Amsterdam, 1732 - 1737), 8 vols. For Ruysch, see T. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Early Dutch Cabinets of Curiosities,” in O. Impey and A. MacGregor, editors, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Europe (Oxford, 1985), 119–20. 52 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 38 dusty hair and opaque skin seem particularly inhuman, and in the preserved bodies, the alcohol or varnish shines in a way that fresh viscera do not. The wax bodies in the Specola museum in Florence lie on tattered beds, and they are inevitably covered with a film of dust. De Andrea’s immediate sources are performance art, surrealism, and illusionistic sculpture, but his deeper affinities are with polychrome sculptures in Baroque churches, mummies preserved in church crypts, and naturalistic medical sculptures by Ruysch and others.54 Varnished bodies and wax écorchés are among the most unflinching representations of the body, but they belong largely outside the history I am recounting because they are one-to-one reproductions rather than representations. They demonstrate that it is possible to visualize the inside of the body, but that in order to do so it may also be necessary to lay down the tools that Western artists have always employed in favor of the almost mechanical duplication of the body. Church crypts open to the public include the Cimitero dei Cappuccini in Rome, and the Momias de Guanajuato in Guanajuato, Mexico. 54 Chapter 3 39 Cut Flesh The few pictures that come to terms with the viscera tend to be marginal even in the history of medicine. By rescinding the artificially clear shapes and colors of most medical textbooks, they risk becoming pedagogically useless: an inexperienced viewer, such as a first-year medical student, is apt to search in vain for a recognizable landmark in the chaos of fat and poorly dissected tissues. Such pictures can also seem unpleasantly close to their subject, as if they were the products of pathological fascination rather than scientific curiosity. The necrophiliac effect is best seen in works that predate photography, such as Govert Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685).55 The plates in Bidloo’s work were commissioned from a number of artists, and they vary widely in quality (the best are by Gerard de Lairesse); but they share an interest in accurate transcription that can be well described as an offshoot of contemporaneous Dutch realism.56 Parts of dissecting tables, knives, knife–holders, ropes, and swatches of white linen appear alongside the corpses as if they were props in still lifes—or as if bodies had been dumped in the middle of ordinary still lifes. Custom–made blocks of wood, dowels, and metal skewers serve to prop up sprawling organic Govert (or Govard, or Gothfried, or Godefroid) Bidloo (1649-1713), Anatomia humani corporis (Amsterdam: Joannis à Someren et al., 1685). 56 Lairesse’s originals are in the Bibliothèque de l’ancien faculté de médécine de Paris. See Paule Dumaître, Le Curieuse destinée des planches anatomiques de Gerard de Lairesse, peintre en Hollande (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987); David Williams, “Nicholas Bidloo and His Unknown Drawings,” Janus 63 (1976): 195-206. 55 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh forms. In some plates large hunting knives are strewn about or thrust into the tabletop, and bodies are held up with ropes. At first it may seem this is not only necrophilia but 40 Chapter 3 41 Cut Flesh sadomasochism as well, but that would be too harsh a verdict since the knives and ropes are all the stock-in-trade of contemporaneous still life. The muscles are seen with an artist’s eye, which is to say they are seen too well, with a useless precision. Here the trapezius, the large muscle of the upper back, is shown in all its asymmetric detail, with its corrugated insertions into the fascia around the spine—details that are omitted from the great majority of anatomic texts because they are not medically significant. The half–flayed right arm is shown in full its relaxed hand resting on the tabletop—all irrelevant to the subject. In the picture on this page, a neck is dissected back to the spine. The book had less success than Bidloo hoped, largely because of its inappropriate fastidiousness and Bidloo’s habit of doing elaborate prosections that destroy all sense of the relation of anatomic parts.57 If Bidloo’s book is still occasionally perused (as far as I know it is never read), it is on account of its author’s sensuous attachment to flesh. Mario Perniola has said that Bidloo’s work is “one of the high points of Baroque eroticism,” an opinion that can have two very different meanings: one the one hand, it may refer (as Perniola intends it) to a general erotics, which includes other illustrations of the “little death” such as Bernini’s ecstatic St. Teresa; but on the other, it may indicate a displacement of the desire for the skin onto the viscera—a dangerous and illicit attraction, specific to medical illustration.58 A point first made by Ludwig Choulant, Geschichte und Bibliographie des anatomischen Abbildung (Leipzig: Weigel, 1955), 35. 58 Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity,” translated by Roger Friedman, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, op. cit., vol. 2, 236–65, especially 258. 57 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 42 Albrecht von Haller’s Icones anatomicæ, first published in 1743, is another text in this tradition.59 At times his plates can be nearly unrecognizable abstract patterns of tissue. In this instance the subject is the female reproductive system. The only parts that are external are at the bottom, where the labia and clitoris are visible, along with a scattering of pubic hairs.60 Above them hangs the vagina and ovaries, as encrusted with fat and other tissues as a ship with barnacles. In the adhesions—they would be cut, literally and figuratively, in an average anatomical illustration—it is possible to discern vessels, skin flaps, fascial webs, bags of fat, lymph networks, and neighboring organs. Here one of the strains of Western anatomical illustration, the stubborn desire to see everything and to make everything representable, is taken to an extreme that is also close to the pathological. 59 The Icones anatomicae have a difficult publishing history. Later installments appeared in 1745, 1747, 1749, 1752, 1753, 1754, and 1756, and Haller collected them all in 1756. The plate is from Albrecht von Haller, “Icones uteri humani,” in Icones anatomicae (Göttingen: Abram Vandenhoeck, 1761), fig. 2. A later impression, with a softer, more three-dimensional effect, appears in Haller, Iconum anatomicarum quibus aliquae partes corporis humani, fasciculus I (Göttingen: Abram Vandenhoeck, 1781), n.p. 60 For the history of depictions of the female reproductive tract, see Thomas Laqueur, “Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, op. cit., vol. 3, 90– 131. Chapter 3 43 Cut Flesh There are a few even more extreme examples, such as Jan Van Rymsdyk’s elephant-folio mezzotints of a pregnant woman, but the real extent of the body’s strangeness did not become apparent before photography.61 Photographs show the body’s disorder at its most acute: even atlases comprised of stereoscopic slides can fail to bring out salient features, and end up presenting textures rather than namable parts. Photographs cast a cold eye on their subjects, and it can be hard to tell if the photographer is unduly fascinated or just inexperienced—but images like these document the bewildering sight that must have greeted the early anatomists. Nothing is visible but raw tissue, cut, torn, shriveled in preservative—the very stuff of pain and death. Assignment 5. Find a medical illustration, preserved body, or model, and interpret it in relation to these issues. Two plates from Charles Nicolas Jenty, Demostratio uteri praegnantis mulieris cum foetu ad partum maturi (Nuremberg, 1761) are reproduced in my The Object Stares Back, op. cit., figs. 35a and b. (The English edition is Jenty, The Demonstration of a Pregnant Uterus [London, 1757]). Plate 8 in this book is also from Jenty, Demonstratio uteri. Among many related texts see the engravings by Robert Strange for William Hunter, Gravid Uterus (Birmingham, 1774), and William Smellie, A Sett of Anatomical Tables, With Explanations, And an Abridgement, of the Practice of Midwifery (London: n. p., 1754). Jenty’s illustrator Rymsdyk (or Riemsdyck) is discussed in John Thornton and Carole Reeves, Medical Book Illustration (Cambridge, Mass.: Oleander, 1983). 61 Chapter 3 44 Cut Flesh Toward a painless body Albinus’s artist, Jan de Wandelaar (1690–1759), was taught by the Dutch painter Gerard de Lairesse, who had been Bidloo’s illustrator: but the difference could not be more marked. Albinus’s purpose was to pass over “all trifling varieties” in order to make a “general system” of “most perfect” proportions. The schematic ambitions of Neoclassicism, and its interest in linking accuracy and decorum, loom large: “I have not only studied the correctness of the figures,” Albinus remarks, “but also the neatness and elegancy of them.”62 Though there have been innumerable copies of Albinus’s principal plates, few physicians or scholars reproduce the outline schemata that he put on facing pages (a small detail is shown here). Enlightenment diagrammatics and optical veracity reach a high point in these schemata; their lines are so fine they need to be enlarged, as they are here, before they can become visible in reproduction.63 The backdrops, which Albinus tells us were Wandelaar’s contribution, were intended to make the plates easier to comprehend (see page 29 for an example). They are an Albinus, “An Account of the Work,” fol. c recto, cols. a, b. For sources see my “Two Conceptions of the Human Form,” op. cit. 63 Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring’s equally precise Tabula sceleti femini (Frankfurt, 1796) lacks Albinus’s kind of key plates; it is discussed in Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” in Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, The Making of the Modern Body ([ ]), 42-82. 62 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 45 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 46 important early example of the trend toward more efficient communication of visual material, which continues today in the simplified illustrartions in contemporary medical textbooks. But the settings cannot be entirely accounted for in those terms, since they become sinister as the dissections proceed. The first plate is a skeleton, backed by a fluttering cherub holding a swag of drapery. The landscape is not deep, and it is foliated and restful. But as the next plates first restore the flesh and then gradually pare it away, the progressively revealed body is the object of increasing anxiety. The second plate, an elegant écorché, stands in front of a Dutch or English country house. The third, which has lost some superficial muscles, stands in some discomfort in an unaccountable Hell of fire and brimstone (page 29). Its eyelids have been removed, revealing the deep muscles in the eye sockets and giving the figure a wildly staring expression—appropriate both to its surroundings and to the viewer’s growing concern and fascination about what is being shown. The fourth plate (previous page) is an even deeper incursion into the body, with many large muscles missing, and Wandelaar took the initiative of supplying a young rhinoceros as a backdrop, grazing in front of a sepulchral pyramid. It is important to read this correctly: though Wandelaar says it is only to give the eye a refreshing contrast, it is more deeply expressive of the strangeness of the body itself. At this point, when death—in the form of a sepulcher—is beckoning insistently, the viewer’s thoughts are forced onto the inescapable bizarreness of the body. The forms are frightening, alien, and yet they are our own. Wandelaar’s implicit proposition—A human body is like a rhinoceros—can hardly brook contemplation, and his own Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 47 eye runs a little wild in an excruciating comparison between the rhinoceros’s wiry tail, the sectioned penis, and the figure’s lacerated right hand.64 In such ways the themes of death and perversion reappear where they seem most effectively silenced by rigorous geometry. Albinus’s immediate followers sometimes outdid the fineness of his representations, creating pictures of the body that seek to control its horror by concentrating on geometric precision. Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring’s works, such as the Icones oculi humani (1804), are the summit of technical skill in medical printmaking.65 Some copies, like the one in this photograph, are hand colored, and many details are too fine to see without a magnifying glass. The eye is shown life size, like an unmounted jewel. Sömmerring’s work is the apotheosis of the detailed connoisseur’s gaze that was first honed on antiquarian studies of carved gems and ancient coins—as I mean to imply by the coin I have added for scale. At this extreme the body escapes from itself by pretending it is a miniature: a cameo, something seen through a magnifying glass, a flawless jewel.66 Modern and postmodern medicine in art These are some of the ways that the opened body has been portrayed, or that its forms have been avoided. Today the question proliferates in several disciplines. Although most imagery continues to depict the body as a weightless soft cloud—as in positron emission tomography (PET), computerized axial tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—the more elaborately prepared images take on the kind of eerie substance that raises the specter of real pain. When the body is scanned at higher resolution, refined with image processing software, For Wandelaar and Albinus’s drawing procedure, see Linda Wilson-Pauwels, “Jan Wandelaar, Bernard Siegfried Albinus and an Indian Rhinoceros Named Clara Set High Standards as the Process of Anatomical Illustration Entered a New Phase of Precision, Artistic Beauty, and Marketing in the 18th Century,” Journal of Biocommunication, 2009. 65 See also Sömmerring, Abbildungen des menschlichen Hoerorganes (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp und Wenner, 1806). 66 For comparative material see Susan Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 64 Chapter 3 48 Cut Flesh and given artificial colors, images can begin to evoke the body’s textures and weights—and its sensations. An image by Karl–Heinz Hoehne of a cross–section of a mummy’s head shows the current possibilities. Here bone, cartilage, muscle and blood vessels are not given the textures we might expect in a naturalistic depiction; instead they are rough, heavy–looking and a little spiny, like the hide of a lizard. But the odd surfaces are definitely solid objects, and their difference from living tissues only brings real tissues more firmly to mind. The image is color coded in bright yellow, green, blue, and red, and the unnatural colors work the same way—reminding the viewer of the reds and pinks of a healthy muscle, or the grayish–amber of the brain. Hoehne’s image is intended to show how part of a palm frond was driven up the spinal column and wedged under the brain, and his colors and textures bring home the force and hardness of that act. It’s not that far from images like this to the strange textures of current high-resolution tomography and MRIs, phase contrast X-Rays, or the “weird world” of high-resolution fetal portraits.67 Trent Wolbe, “Treasured moments? Inside the Weird World of 4D Prenatal Portraits: How High-resolution Ultrasound is Changing Fetal Portraiture,” The Verge, 2013; or the clammy, steel–blue three–dimensional sonogram of a fetus in situ, in Science 262 (19 November 1993): 1207. 67 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 49 The older tradition of drawn and painted anatomical illustration is also thriving, even though most of its products have descended to an abysmal low of infographic-style simplicity. Introductory medical texts continue to be published with new illustrations, even though many 19th century texts are more accurate than the new work. The 20th century had a few medical illustrators whose skill ranks with the best of the previous centuries; one of the most interesting is Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 50 Erich Lepier, whose plates are reproduced in a number of contemporary texts.68 (I am reproducing two here.) As a modern realist, he deserves a serious study. His mode is architectonic, weighty, and solid, but his forms have tremendous clarity. When he has the chance to illustrate the undissected body (as in the face here), his work recalls the naturalist 68 For Lepier (1900–1974), see J. Thornton and C. Reeves, Medical Book Illustration, op. cit., 119. Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 51 tradition in art and medical illustration whose common origins are in 15th century Flanders and Italy; and when he works with the inside of the body, he balances naturalism with just enough schematization to transform irregular anatomic forms into legible structures. The platysma, part of his subject in the second image, is a disorderly collection of muscle strands (it is the muscle that shows in irregular stripes when the neck is tensed), and Lepier combs it into a roughly collinear set of fibers. He only permits himself a fuller degree of naturalism in marginal forms that do not intrude on the essential anatomic lesson, such as the stubble of the man’s beard. Another twentieth-century medical illustrator, Paul Eisler, is even less known; but his skill was also often astonishing, as in this depiction of the cremaster muscle. The problem with studying Lepier—the reason he is not better known—is that he was one of a small group of illustrators who worked with Eduard Pernkopf to produce an atlas of anatomy. Pernknopf and his illustrators were all members of the Nazi party, and Lepier was so enthusiastic he sometimes put a swastika between the first and last names in his signature. Beginning in 1939, Pernkopf’s laboratory in Vienna had access to the bodies of all executed prisoners for dissection and illustration. The book he produced, known in English as Pernkopf’s Anatomy, is still in print on account of the unsurpassed visual quality of the illustrations (especially Lepier’s), but it has been described as a “moral enigma.” Contemporary fine art often borrows from the history of medical illustration, but it does so in ways that lessen the presence of death and pain. Diagrams are a favorite strategy. The Chilean artist Juana Gomez’s SelfConsciousness (2016) is embroidery and drawing on a photograph. It turns Chapter 3 52 Cut Flesh the uncomfortable forms of the body into beautiful schematics (a detail is at the end of this chapter). Another artist, Luboš Plný, follows the tradition of the surrealist Hans Bellmer and makes the body into a composition of swirling automatons, cross-sections, and XRays. The image is extensively labeled, as if it was an illustration in an anatomic treatise: os sternum (sternum bone), kidney, hard palate, and so on. Plný borrows the complexity of anatomical illustration, and refers to its technologies, but remakes them as collage.69 Another strategy is to abstract the body’s forms. Joan Livingstone’s sculptures and prints are replete with body references, and carefully distanced from any literal representation. She uses organ- and tissue-like media such as felt, and works with the body’s textures, weights, and colors rather than with its literal components. Looking at work like Resistances, a viewer might think of breasts, hanging testicles, bones, lungs, or stomachs—but those thoughts would be softened by the degree of abstraction. This is the body as a collection of sacks—a medieval metaphor for the human condition— and it shows a level of abstraction common in the 21st century art world. As the exploration of abstract elements proceeds, it follows the tradition I have attempted to sketch here: flirting with the opened body itself, then avoiding it by reimagining it as something simpler. There have been so many strategies for not seeing For more on the tradition that began wth Hans Bellmer see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 69 Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 53 the body that the choices can seem to be motivated principally by the desire to escape the body’s harsh reality. The history of medical illustration can be written as a negotiation between different styles of evasion: the body as an abstract morass of tissue, as an encyclopedia of arcane forms, as a geometric schema, as a jewel. In art, the consequences of not avoiding the viscera are often dire: to really see the inside of the body is to risk falling in love with the proximity of death, with the incomprehensible tangle of unnamable vessels and chunks of fat, and with the seductive textures of the smooth, sensitive membranes—more delicate than ordinary skin, more sensitive and vulnerable, and above all more redolent of the most intense pain. Assignment 6: find a contemporary artist who uses images that come from medical illustration, and analyze their strategies for transporting content from medicine into fine art. Chapter 3 Cut Flesh 54