Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2017.1282121 Black organs and optics: gazing at viscera in the work of Doreen Garner Jared Richardson* Department of African American Studies, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, U.S.A. Between Doreen Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies the theatrical and scopophilic framing of black women’s bodies. The author argues that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh. Keywords: black visual culture; critical race theory; art history; black feminism; new materialism; black studies Doreen Garner’s art audaciously disinters the grotesque histories around black women’s bodies. As her use of glitter, prosthetics, and gems demonstrates, Garner handles the accounts and optics surrounding black women’s corporeality with a grisly and glamorous maneuver. Here, Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) concepts of black optics and fungibility array a series of affects and sights/sites that Garner realizes in two artworks: The Observatory (Figure 1), a one-hour performance featuring the artist encased in a vitrine, and Black Ocean/Big Black (Figures 2 and 3), a kinetic installation (both 2014) – both of which the artist has archived in film and photography. While Garner’s vitrined performance in The Observatory evokes a terra firma filled with the interred organs of black women, Black Ocean, an inflated sculpture comprised of over 1000 trash bags, offers the viewer an undulating mass of black flesh that mimics watery billows. Between Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies (Muñoz 1999, 15) the theatrical and scopophilic *Email: Jaredrichardson2017@u.northwestern.edu © 2017 Women & Performance Project Inc. 2 Figure 1. J. Richardson Doreen Garner. The Observatory (2014). framing of black women’s bodies (Foucault 2003, 162–164).1 Here, for instance, Garner creates a scene of subjection whereby the vitrine simultaneously resembles the staging of freak shows, scientific inquiry, and artistic aura. On the other hand, Black Ocean functions purely as an undulating expanse of flesh, which calls to mind an oceanic space that denies any penetrative gaze. In other words, I argue that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh. Across the two artworks, Garner takes us from black organs to black flesh, from ornamented disembowelments to unified sheath. With a slimy, almost surgical hand, Garner’s work abstracts the spectacular displays and medical exploitation of black women, such as Sarah Baartman and Henrietta Lacks, into an amalgamation comprising emetic, ornate chunks of viscera. What follows is work in progress – an unfinished autopsy, an experimental allegory – whose terms are as elusive as the bodily integrity from which black life has been barred. In my analysis of Garner’s work, I contrast flesh and organs. My theorization of this differentiation draws from the work of Nicole Fleetwood (2011), Hortense Spillers (1987), and Hartman. In her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: an American Grammar,” Spillers (1987, 67) makes a critical distinction between flesh and body: the former signals a “zero degree of social conceptualization” producing ungendered viscera; and the latter enjoys legal personhood and full subjectivity. Within the context of the pained black body, this concept of flesh stands central to Hartman’s critique of humanism and conceptualization of injury and legal personhood. As Hartman notes: Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory Figure 2–3. project. 3 Doreen Garner. Big Black/Black Ocean (2014). Interactive sculpture/ collaborative 4 J. Richardson The bestowal that granted the slave a circumscribed and fragmented identity as person in turn shrouded the violence of such a beneficent and human gesture. Bluntly stated, the violence of subjection concealed and extended itself through the outstretched hand of legislated concern. The slave was considered a subject only insofar as he was criminal(ized), wounded body, or mortified flesh. (1997, 94) Hartman’s notion of flesh accounts for the reduction of black bodies that have been rendered raw material and denied legal personhood through the apparatuses of violence. Similarly, Fleetwood (2011) imagines this raw material as excess flesh, which “attend[s] to ways in which black women’s corporeality is rendered as an excessive overdetermination and as overdetermined excess” (9). For my purposes, I maintain flesh as the fungible material of black life, while I frame organs as biological commodities that have been viciously disinterred from the flesh. At a literal level, I am aware that flesh functions as porous organ per se, as it enables perspiration, heat regulation, and absorption. However, this ectodermal sheath, unlike internal organs, immediately incurs multiple gazes and yields a particular potentiality, as demonstrated by Black Ocean. Meanwhile, I designate organs as the decorative, expendable, and decayed condition of viscera found in Garner’s work, with The Observatory standing as the most explicit example. Incidentally, both organs and flesh share a history with offal. In regards to its etymology, the term “offal” originates from the German word Abfall, which means “garbage,” “dross,” and a falling off of decay (Moser 2002, 87). Fittingly, this mode of viscera, which envelops both organs and flesh, harkens back to fungibility.2 With this said, black women’s corporeality has served as offal: a repugnant feast for the medical gaze and a tried-and-true victual for colonial appetites. The organs in Garner’s work bear sutures, jewels, forks, staples, fissures, kinky weaves, and lesions of pearls – all of which racialize this supposedly universal matter. Accordingly, Garner’s Onika (Figure 4) and Pickled Pearl (Figure 5) gruesomely depict a disembowelment of “black female” innards as bejeweled, hairy baroque-like sculptural clusters.3 Besides highlighting what Alexander Weheliye (2014, 41) terms “physiognomic territorialization of anatomic qualities,” Garner’s work demonstrates how certain materials – accessories associated with “recalcitrant” cultures of excess – pathologize black women’s corporeality and innards. In this sense, Garner’s sculptural assemblages double as racial assemblages. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) concept of the body without organs comes to mind in a discussion of Garner’s work. The body without organs (known hereafter as the BwO) enables us to think about somatic capacities that exceed conventional models of social and corporeal organization. Inspired by Antonin Artaud’s radio play To Have Done With the Judgment of God (1947–8) and embryology, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 158) argue that the BwO “is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism […] The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.” The duo (2004) also characterizes the BwO as “the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, [and] the unconsumable” (9). Incidentally, Deleuze and Guattari and Slavoj Žižek (2004) theorize affect as impersonal intensities, feelings that exist within the world and toggle between immanence and transcendence. In his book Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, Žižek inverts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of corporeality (2004). In a maneuver similar to Marshall McLuhan, he argues that technologies such as the Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 5 Figure 4. 2014. Glass, teeth, Swarovski crystals, hair weave, gold chain, polyester fiber, glitter, and petroleum jelly. camera and recorded voice function as disembodied organs with wills of their own (Žižek 2004, 174–175). However, viscera and its “intensities,” while infectious and affective, are anything but impersonal given the story of race – namely, the bloody history around black women’s bodies. Black women have historically been framed both as fertile and (re)productive actors within capitalism and as contaminants to the normative sexuality (Cobb 2015, 209; Morgan 2011, 144; Bush 1996, 194). With an unapologetic spillage of entrails, Garner’s work imaginatively reiterates how black women’s bodies have served as the fleshly desiring-machines, which animate the violent wishes of whiteness and its idealization of corporeal integrity and monopoly on conceptions of the human.4 The absence of sadism from Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the BwO perpetuates a politics of whiteness that absolves such theory from the intellectual and moral labor required by critical conceptions of race and interrogations of colonial violence.5 With that said, there are some possible affinities between black studies’ theorization of corporeality and Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of the somatic. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 9) contend: The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This passage arguably offers connections to Orlando Patterson’s (1982) idea of social death, Spillers’s (1987) differentiation of flesh from body, and Frantz Fanon’s (1952) work on the psychoanalytic and phenomenological stakes of black being. Deleuze and Guattari even 6 J. Richardson Figure 5. 2015. Glass, Swarovski crystals, Swarovski pearls, baking bundts, silicone, brass pipe, plumbing tube, hair weave. imagine the BwO as a form of capital, a view that could certainly call to mind Hartman’s concept of the fungible black body. Nevertheless, the duo’s omission of sadism and emphasis on masochism evacuates race from the theoretical precinct.6 Here, whiteness enjoys the ecstatic capacities of self-inflicted pain (for example, further realized by what Deleuze and Guattari term “pain waves”), schizophrenia, and drug usage – three instantiations of the BwO that heavily rely on pathologized blackness, which resonates as a fearsome infrasound against the ear and body of white liberal being (Gilman 1985). In the vein of Hartman, the retelling of violent scenes from slave narratives and the white subject’s empathetic slippage in the captive body, otherwise known as an object, recasts black sentience as merely suffering (Hartman 1997, 18). Garner’s visceral work complicates this discursive rehearsal of black women’s histories in Western medicine by the very fact that it resituates flesh and organs as things. For instance, Pickled Pearl (Figure 5) – an entity that “functions” as a strange, digestive sack, which bears a plumber’s pipe and clear plastic tubing connected Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 7 by sphincters – conceivably exists as a thing whose many amalgamated mechanical and biological parts thwart a grasp on its explicit, guaranteed purpose. It is an organ that reposes aside from, but is nonetheless the product of, the frenetic corridor relay between object and subject in the sanatorium of intersectional being.7 Like many of Garner’s pieces, the imagined use-value of Pickled Pearl remains a mystery profiteered by violence and scientific inquiry. As a fungible commodity, black corporeality inspires a series of questions: Where do organs fall in relation to flesh and body? How have we constructed the binary between organs and body? If organs are meant to animate the larger corpus and its flesh, what are the implications of organs enjoying or propagating a life of their own? What kinds of fungibility do they suggest? How does the vitality of organs reinvigorate notions of animation, such as liquidity and liquidation, within the presumed stasis of social death? Fungibility, according to Hartman (1997, 21), is “made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity – and by the extensive capacities of property – that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons.” As exemplified by James Marion Sims’s brutal, gynecological experimentation on black women’s bodies during the nineteenth century, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and the unlawful harvesting of Henrietta Lacks’s and John Moore’s respective immortal cell lines, the lengthy history detailing the medical exploits of the black body and its innards, which includes cellular and visceral content, proves that racism is deeper than skin. This visceral archive has become even more relevant in light of present-day factors such as the neoliberal market for biological matter and racial pharmaceuticals, phenomena interrogated by Dorothy Roberts (2001) and Jonathan Xavier Inda (2014). As Alex Weheliye (2014, 80) observes: “It would seem that persistence of the twin phantoms of racialization and property relations unsettle the promise of a subepidermal and cellular humanity as an absolute biological substance.” Doreen Garner renders and then reconstitutes the fat, flesh, and feelings of these histories into a gutsy aesthetic. From an oppositional gaze (hooks 2014), Garner’s work engages visibility, visualization, and hypervisibility, three modes of vision that have historically framed black women. (Incidentally, I collectively refer to these three modes as “the optical regime” throughout this essay). According to Fleetwood (2011, 16), visibility entails “the state of being able to be seen” while visualization involves “the mediation of the field of vision and the production of visual objects.” As for hypervisibility, perhaps the most conspicuous optic brought to bear on black women, Fleetwood defines this mode of vision as a set of “processes that produce the overrepresentation of certain images of blacks and the visual currency of their images public culture” (16). In terms using her artistic practice to develop an oppositional gaze within the optical regime, Garner draws from her family experiences with a now-deceased disabled sister. Garner recalls the looks incurred by her late sister, who suffered a cerebrovascular accident at a young age: […] when she [Garner’s sister] was eight-years-old, she had an AVM rupture that resulted in a stroke, which left her with the inability to walk and talk. Her face was severely distorted, but naturally she wanted to still do all the things she had done before, like going to the zoo. But people stared – children, adults alike – and I felt powerless to stop them. I was only two years 8 J. Richardson older than her. A lot of my work is aimed at getting even and creating a power dynamic critique for her. She died in 2007. (Rafferty 2016) Garner’s desire to requite these unsavory looks that constituted visibilities of her sister translates into her vitrined performance in The Observatory and the opacity of her kinetic, air-filled sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black. From the nineteenth-century archive of atrocities, which includes the medical and theatrical histories ensuing from James Marion Sims’s gynecological experiments on black women and Sarah Baartman’s objectification as freak-show attraction, to the present-day opulence of hip-hop culture, Garner carefully sutures these references into grotesque performances and sculptural assemblages that resemble the racial assemblages, which weigh upon black women’s corporeality (Washington 2008). Her media include synthetic hair, Swarovski crystals, condoms, glitter, and other materials illustrating the amalgam of intersectional identity with non-humanity and thingliness. On the materiality of her work, Garner explains: My materials are all in tune with what I feel the eye is drawn to, we are attracted to wet glossy materials – I use a lot of silicon, which is the closest material to skin. Many of my configurations can be visualized as sex toys, dildos, etc. They somehow conjure up ideas of masturbation and sexual fetishization, maybe because of who I am as an artist or maybe because the viewer wants to see this in my work. However, I often find myself being looked at with the same gaze that’s afforded to my work. The art world and society are making black women into sexualized objects: just look at the media for confirmation. (Rafferty 2016) The carnal specters of race haunt and enable Garner’s uncanny ability to glamorously, yet gruesomely, replicate organs and flesh. As a black woman situated in an art market overwhelmingly dominated by white collectors, curators, and critics, Garner has been expected to perform particular tropes of blackness. However, she does so in way that demonstrates how flesh and organs, which serve as bare-life oblations to science and its irrational spectacles, traverse and subsequently collapse the binaries between the gift and the commodity, the vital and the deathly, and the decorative and the disposable – categories that are eclipsed by the looping twilight and profitability of black life (Bishop 2011, 143).8 From The Observatory to Black Ocean, we transition from spillage of organs to a kinetic sheath of black flesh. Such a passage elicits or, in some cases, obscures, several ways of looking. In her one-hour performance The Observatory, Garner calls attention to how clinical and archeological gazes frame black women’s bodies. Nestled in a glass vitrine sullied by bodily waste and contraceptives, Garner languishes as a specimen surrounded by layers of hair, petroleum jelly, glitter, and stuffed condoms, which emulate engorged intestines and other innards. These objects (for example, contraceptives, lipids, and decorative materials) have uses-values outside of her performance.9 However, Garner manipulates these objects to resemble viscera, which include organs that carry a distinct use-value tethered to medical economies of transplantation.10 This bizarre inversion of fungibility, by way of Garner’s sculptural craft, calls to mind tensions between vitalities and social death, between the organic and the ersatz. The Observatory, arguably, forces the viewer to amalgamate a clinical gaze with an archaeological one, a maneuver that casts the environment as a type of terrarium, a microcosm of land. Here, these biopolitical and geological ways of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 9 seeing encase Garner, representing a heap of earth ripe with organs. In the spirit of Spillers (1987, 68), Garner’s Observatory showcases “notions of captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory.” The deductive, inductive, abductive modes of reasoning deliquesce within this mise-en-scene of viscera.11 Overall, her practice coagulates into a brand of nauseating decadence that questions several gazes and unique vitalities that have shaped ideas around black women’s materialism. The history of the vitrine spans many eras and archives, and acts as an instrument of optical regime in The Observatory. John C. Welchman asserts that “vitrinization” paralleled the enclosure of land during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. This detail coincides with the idea of The Observatory exemplifying a cross-section of organ-filled earth. Welchman subsequently highlights four historical episodes and themes that connected sculpture to the vitrine: first, pre-modern encasements found in Christianity (for example, reliquaries, iconostases, and monstrances); second, the Wunderkammer, or cabinet or curiosities, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; third, the arcades and department stores of the mid-to-late nineteenth century; and, fourth, the self-reflexive practices of display found in modern and contemporary art (for example, the readymade works of Marcel Duchamp, Mike Kelley, and Damien Hirst). Vitrines “withheld things and a certain zone around them from common appropriation while at the same time encouraging viewers privileged to look at them to see according to a disciplined optic ordained by those who control the display” (Welchman 2013, 2). The Observatory simultaneously encapsulates all four of these themes, as Garner’s body (or flesh) and, by extension, black women’s corporeality stand as icons of abusive scientific inquiry (for example, modern gynecology), circulate as objects in capitalism, quiver as aberrations in specular imaginary of Man, and flourish as cultural agents who, according to Uri McMillan (2015), perform objecthood in the manner of avatars. With this said, I argue that the vitrine in The Observatory instantiates what Spillers (1987) terms cultural vestibularity, a space that subjugates the non-human. Spillers explains: [t]hese lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity [emphasis added] and the culture, whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, “owners,” “soul drivers,” “overseers,” and “men of God,” apparently colludes with a protocol of “search and destroy” (67). These violent markings incidentally represent what Spillers calls the “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” which transform raw tissue into a delusive body disbarred from legal personhood (67). Entrapped in this antechamber, Garner deploys an oppositional gaze that disidentifies the optical regime. This system of looking and being looked at has lethally framed black life – in this case, black women.12 In this context, Garner is a lively thing set aside from the object-subject relay, as her scopophilic platform plays into medical inquiry, sideshow oddity, and flashes of zooscopy.13 First exhibited at New York City’s Socrates Sculpture Park in September 2014, Garner’s Black Ocean/Big Black is a looming piece that mimics water and stirs up an image of 10 J. Richardson black flesh. Garner (2015) recalls fabricating and animating this inflatable sculpture, explaining: 1,020 trash bags were conjoined together to form 1 large solid sheet inflated by electric fans. The sculpture expands two stories high and extends the full size of Skowhegan’s Old Dominion Fresco Barn. Black Ocean/Big Black mimics the image of a large body of water at night. The surface of the bags glisten[s] as waves of air pass beneath. The current of air from the fans create large fluctuating mounds that move in slow motion. The very material and color of Black Ocean suggest dispensability and creates an illusion of weighty, fluid mass. However, at the same time, the airy animation of the sculpture alludes to volume and vitality. While Garner’s vitrined performance in The Observatory evokes a terra firma filled with the interred organs of black women, Black Ocean offers the viewer an undulating mass of flesh that mimics watery billows. Although Garner describes the sculpture as a “body of water,” I assert that it can be conceptualized as seaborne flesh, given its lack of extremities or figural qualities, which are so commonly ascribed to Man. The ocular refusal of Black Ocean thwarts what Foucault (2003, 126) calls “white visibility,” a continuation of the medical gaze that frames the corpse. The aquatic-like expanse of Black Ocean glistens but denies the viewer their reflection. Moreover, the clinical gaze, a vision inextricable to black women’s violability and sexuality, privileges geography over history. In other words, this sight/site is built upon the spatialization of the body; it attempts to localize pathology. In all of its aquatic mass, Black Ocean occludes cartographical efforts due to its very undulating form and absorbs the viewer’s gaze in its shiny yet non-reflective surface. Indeed, it “denies the mirror image” of western Man (Weheliye 2014, 43).14 Garner’s billowing sculpture offers a queer spatialization of ungendered black flesh. It is the littoral vista that forecloses reflective likeness and unfurls forms of the para-human. Relatedly, Hartman (1997, 20) reasons: “Indeed the elusiveness of black suffering can be attributed to a racist optics in which black flesh [emphasis added] is itself identified as the source of opacity [emphasis added], the denial of black humanity, and the effacement of sentience integral to wanton use of the captive body.” It is within this optic that black life sounds a new form of living that then clouds the gaze of liberal humanism. The spatial-sonic component of Black Ocean simulates what Hartman calls “the elasticity and capacious affect of blackness,” which enables white flights of empathy. Black Ocean’s flesh embodies “the abstract and empty vessel” of the captive, making it fungible. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s term with caution, the sculpture as an affective entity functions as a type of BwO. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 164) explain that the BwO opposes the arrangement of organs into an organism or body that produces and distributes them [intensities] in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree – to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0 […] Much like Spillers’s concept of flesh, affect wields energy even at the intensity of zero or non-being. In turn, Black Ocean’s flesh stands opposite to legal personhood. Unlike Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 11 Deleuze’s concept of immanence – a quality endemic to the BwO, connected to chaos, and dissimilar from the stagnancy of transcendence – Black Ocean lacks speed (Spindler 2010). At the same time, the sculpture creates a dynamic in its deployment of intensity, or affect, as a liquefied and liquidated aural undulation of viscera. Black Ocean swamps cultural vestibularity that lies between Man and other forms life. The sonic and phonic material that accompanies Black Ocean’s video invokes digestive functions; moreover, these drives figuratively align themselves with queer vibrations. For instance, the dark, loco-motive trudge of rhythmic base alludes to the digestive sounds familiar to monotone digestive processes. The screwed or slowed-down phonic murmuring, which interjects the beat, registers as unintelligible within the register of Western Man and his logos. (Allewaert 2013, 109; Bennett 2010, 112; Wynter 1989, 645; Weheliye 2014, 120, 121, 125) Furthermore, the wavelengths and kinetics of Black Ocean are equally important, as they indicate queer, affect vibes. Weheliye (2014) asserts that queer vibes occur when the flesh makes itself known through other senses and registers. While it may not have the voice of the liberal subjects, Garner’s fleshly piece undulates to the slow, guttural- and bowel-like base. Black Ocean symbolizes the infrasonic quality of black life, a condition that sidesteps understandings of timbre that privilege the human.15 Here, the larynx’s vocal capacities and the gut’s ingestive abilities fuse together. Here, Black Ocean “sounds” a para-human, or not-quite-so human, ontology (Chen 2012, 3– 4). This kind of existence appears on sonic and kinetic ranges that are deeper and more viscous than those commonly associated with the aural scope of liberal Man. If one were to envision the placement of Black Ocean on an audiogram, they would locate it at a pitch and intensity lower than human phonemes; in other words, the movement and sounds of this sculpture and its audiovisual life falls below the threshold of human hearing, into what otolaryngologists consider a zone of profound hearing loss (Horowitz 2014; Daniel and Mason 2015, 156). Here, the infrasonic takes on black flesh. Here, our shovels, our picks, and other archaeological tools, which have been solely wedded to the exhumation of land and its hidden corpses, fail to help us attune our gazes and aural capacities to the forgotten black flesh in and of the sea. Note on contributor Jared Richardson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Richardson’s research interests include art history, visual culture, black popular cultures, and sound studies. He has published material in Art Papers and The Black Scholar. His forthcoming dissertation “The Black Aquatic: Affect, Occiduus, and Temporality Beyond the Atlantic” explores diaspora’s political, cultural, and theoretical engagements with water. He is currently investigating black surfing cultures in the U.S. and Caribbean. Notes 1. José Esteban Muñoz explains disidentification as “recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (1999, 15). 12 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. J. Richardson As Stephen Mennell contends: “Offal is a good example of the changeability [emphasis added] of objects of repugnance, and the interaction of ‘moral’ and social grounds for food avoidance” (1996, 310). This phobia of exteriorized innards echoes Spillers’s ideas of fleshy hieroglyphics. For instance, Spillers asserts: “This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside” (1987, 67). Here, organs bear inscriptions of subjugation and exude liquidation through disembowelment and dissolution of the body. These corporeal ontologies resonate with Garner’s art. With a nod to Fanon and Lacan, Kelly Oliver explains: “Whiteness poses as nature of being, or more precisely as the essence of human being. The paradox is that whiteness both signifies nature or being – the lack of lack – and the lack of being that makes meaning, that is, human existence, possible” (2004, 55). Contrary to philosophical and psychoanalytic models, Deleuze and Guattari characterize desire as a productive force, as opposed to lack. The duo writes: “[…] what is missing is not things a subject feels the lack of somewhere deep down inside himself, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being of man […]” (2004, 205). Judith Butler confirms this aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, explaining that “the ontological condition of a ‘lack’ is revealed as the reification of the economic concept of scarcity, appearing as a necessary condition of material life, impervious to social transformation” (2012, 205). At the risk of making a simplistic or redundant statement (especially within the context of different psychoanalytic theories and mercurial, de jure shifts of whiteness), I suggest that whiteness’s desire to monopolize the ontology of the human produces a violent fantasy that has historically co-constituted, colonized, and killed black and brown subjects. Despite its supposed rejection of the ego, Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004, 88; 112; 264–265; 289) idea of the BwO ultimately remains as a bedfellow to the Freudian family model and arguably perpetuates bodily integrity. The duo conceptualizes the BwO as the ideal impetus for deterritorialized libido, the embodiment of “schizoanalysis” that dissolves Oedipal desire. After the BwO jettisons the ego, it still adheres to the id. Incidentally, the duo also characterizes Oedipal desire as a colonial force that holds societal and familial structures hostage from libidinal freedom. In true “D&G” fashion, this maneuver is executed without any sustained engagement with race and irony. Amber Jamilla Musser (2014, 145) explains the potentially problematic link between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs and masochism. Musser contends that this connection forms “the bedrock of a politics of nonidentity by illuminating a way to be attentive to the flesh while not reifying a connection between experience and subjectivity.” In virtue of this de-racialized schema, Deleuze and Guattari arguably use an intact body as a point of departure for the BwO. After Fanon, Fred Moten (2008) ponders the facticity of blackness, as it relates to the slippages between object, subject, and thing. Moten writes: “What I am after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon recites – namely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out to version a slippage or movement that could be said to animate the history of philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing (a change as strange as that form the possibility of intersubjectivity that attends majority to whatever is relegated to the plane or plain of the minor [emphasis added])? […] What if the thing sustains itself in the absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific honorific of ‘object’?” (2008, 18) Regarding the “plane or plain of the minor,” Garner’s Black Ocean/Big Black challenges this surface-based metaphor as it defies terra firma and horizontality, as it undulates and expands notions around blackness’s figurative animation. In terms of objects, I argue that these entities are indebted to the commodity, while things challenge capitalism either by their singularity or their ambiguity towards a use-value. The industry of organ transplantation complicates ideas of agency and gift-commodity binaries. Regarding agency, Jeffrey P. Bishop argues that death is now measured by brain or neurological activity, a recent phenomenon. As a consequence, organs are drained of subjecthood and given Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 13 autonomy from vitalism at the same time. Transplantation privileges brain death as the ultimate marker of quietus. The wet and oily surface-quality of Garner’s work calls to mind stickiness, a similar sensation that Sara Ahmed (2013, 89) theorizes the medium through which objects stick and affect moves. Amber Jamilla Musser then characterizes this stickiness as a racial affect that epitomizes blackness’s being-biological. Using a kidney as an example, Robert Edward Mitchell and Catherine Waldby (2006, 174) argue: “If, as Marx noted in The German Ideology, use-values and exchange values can only be produced when humans are ‘in a position to live,’ living itself requires the functioning body that supports this labor.” Garner’s interest in organs and display practices, which often rely on the sterility of glass vitrines, call to mind the individual works of Paul Thek and Damien Hirst. Correspondingly, Joseph Pugliese (2003, 45) explains Spillers’s idea of cultural vestibularity as “biopolitical space” in which “Spillers effectively spatializes ‘the distance’ between slave and human, thereby mapping the coordinates of the space that will quarter animal life, in contradistinction to the civic space of the culture.” Yet, pain is not explicitly spectacularized in Garner’s vitrine. To frame Garner’s reciprocating gaze and bejeweled and Vaseline-glazed corporeality in The Observatory as kinds of pleasure welcomingly soils the idea of glamour, which Nigel Thrift characterizes as “secular magic” that comes to light in “an environment that mixes human and nonhuman so as to produce captivation” (2010, 297–299). Given Hartman’s (1997, 51–52) estimation of the black body as “both insensate and content” and Garner’s mix of attractive and repulsive materials, Thrift’s conception of glamour registers as insufficient in this case. The kind of glamour or material pleasures that Garner offers in this performance roots itself in a thingliness that sidesteps the status of object, complicates the audience’s means of easy identification by integrating seduction into repulsion at material level. “The flesh,” Weheliye opines, “is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life as such” (2014, 43). Yvon Bonenfant critiques scholarship around queer performative embodiment for ignoring auditory dimensions of identity. In doing so, Bonenfant characterizes queer timbres as sensual, haptic phenomenon. Bonenfant writes: “When the sound reaches the listener, they must infer, invent an assumed body, linked to the voice. The listener is left to fabricate that body within their own. Maybe there is a visual representation of that body nearby. Maybe not, as in the case of yodeling, radio, or calling from afar. Yet vocal sound necessarily implies the existence of a body. We hear and feel a body: a peculiar sort of body; indeed, an archived body. But it is the vibration itself that touches us. There is the implication of a body and a representation of a body, but no flesh. It is a vocalic body” (2010, 74, 76). Although important, Bonenfant’s theory of timbre does not fit my analysis of Black Ocean since I represent black flesh as infrasonic. References Ahmed, Sara. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York and London: Routledge. Allewaert, Monique. 2013. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bishop, Jeffrey P. 2011. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Dying, and the Care of the Corpse. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 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