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Porous bodies: contemporary art's use of the osmotic as a means of reconfiguring subjectivity

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Porous Bodies:

Contemporary Art’s Use of the Osmotic as a Means of Reconfiguring Subjectivity

by

Emma Jacqueline Christ

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PACTICES & THE PUBLIC SPHERE)

May 2022

Copyright 2022 Emma Jacqueline Christ
ii
Dedication

For Barbara and Otis.

iii
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Jenny Lin, for all her support and
patience during this entire process. Jenny, you have been truly incredible, and I owe you
immensely.
Many thanks to my readers – Professor Andy Campbell, Professor Amelia Jones, and
Professor Karen Moss – for your feedback and words of encouragement. I would never have
made it this far without all of you!
Most importantly I would like to thank my parents and my sister for the unwavering
support, encouragement, and love.

iv
Table of Contents

Dedication........................................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................iii
List of Figures..................................................................................................................................v
Abstract...........................................................................................................................................vi
Introduction......................................................................................................................................1
Chapter One: Embodiment in the 20
th
Century.................................................................................7
Transgression in Theory.......................................................................................................7
Embracing the Other..........................................................................................................12
Creating Intra-Personal Osmosis........................................................................................17

Chapter Two: Intra-Personal Osmosis in Action............................................................................19
Mona Hatoum.....................................................................................................................19
Anicka Yi and Teresa Margolles........................................................................................23
Breyer P-Orridge................................................................................................................27

Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................30
Figures............................................................................................................................................32
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................44

v
List of Figures

Figure I: Kiki Smith, Tale, 1992.
Figure II: Mona Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994.
Figure III: Mona Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994.
Figure IV: Mona Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994.
Figure V: Anicka Yi, You Can Call Me F*, 2015.
Figure VI: Anicka Yi, You Can Call Me F*, 2015.
Figure VII: Teresa Margolles, Vaporización, 2002.
Figure VIII: Teresa Margolles, Plancha, 2012.
Figure IX: Teresa Margolles, Plancha, 2012.
Figure X: Breyer P-Orridge.
Figure XI: Breyer P-Orridge.
Figure XII: Breyer P-Orridge.

vi
Abstract

My thesis begins by surveying alternative approaches to embodiment and subjectivity in
contemporary art. I provide an overview of theories of embodiment and self-representation and
examine how practices that play on corporeal permeability encourage new forms of subjecthood.
Outgrowths of the broad concept of “abject” art, the works featured in my thesis – Mona
Hatoum’s installation Corps Étranger (1994), Teresa Margolles Vaporización (2002), Anicka
Yi’s You Can Call Me F* (2015), and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye’s “Pandrogeny”
(date not applicable) – expose both artist and viewer’s fragilities and vulnerabilities. I argue that
these projects allow for an osmotic relationship between distinct subjects that creates spaces of
becoming, embodied subjectivity, and transcorporeality.
1

Introduction

Hidden in the midst of her pathbreaking essay “A Manifesto for Cyborg: Science,
Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” – a line so minute that if you skim you may
miss it – Donna Haraway (b. 1944) asks the question “why should our bodies end at the skin?”
1

Haraway’s question is prototypical of those tossed around by scholars of postmodernism and
posthumanism seeking to explore embodiment and subjectivity outside of the normative
European Enlightenment tradition of a contained, autonomous self. Theorists such as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (b. 1908 – 1961) have suggested that the body is not only fragmented and
permeable, but that our concept of identity and subjectivity is contingent upon our osmotic
relationship with other bodies, or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “identity is realised only as the lived
body is immersed in the lived bodies of others.”
2
The theorist of physics Karen Barad (b. 1956) –
to whom my thesis is greatly indebted – expands on this with her theory of “intra-action,” which
recognizes that “bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties; they are material
discursive phenomena.”
3
Barad proposes that bodies are not only malleable, but through their
engagement with other materials they are also “intractive sites of becoming.”
4
She uses the
prefix “intra” as opposed to “inter” because the latter implies a closed, singular unit or “pre-
established bodies,” whereas “intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an

1
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the
1980s,” in Feminism/postmodernism, ed. Linda Nochlin (New York: Routledge, 1990), 220.
2
Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: SAGE
Publications, 2001), 58.
3
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 823.
4
Laura McGavin, “’Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Cancer Pathography, Comics, and
Embodiment,” in Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, ed. Sarah Brophy and Janice Hldacki
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 193.
2
individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’
are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.”
5
Simply put,
Barad believes we – and all else in the world – are inherently inchoate.
The ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Barad, and others have led to a burgeoning trend in which
artists incite a literal or simulated transcorporeal relationship between distinct subjects, a practice
which I refer to as “intra-personal osmosis.” My decision to use “intra-personal” is a clear nod to
Barad, while my use of “osmosis” is inspired by the Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (b.
1952) who, in her 1994 book Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, describes the
human body as “extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges, and contours are ‘osmotic’ –
they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing
interchange.”
6
Combining the terms with one another, “intra-personal osmosis” refers to
practices that use the mutability and permeability of the human body as a means of challenging
individual subjectivity and opening new possibilities of “becoming.” This is not a fully
developed theory, but one in praxis, formed from themes I observed in art practices after the
1980s. Like Barad’s perception of human subjectivity, my theory is inchoate.
This trend – this theory of intra-personal osmosis – is greatly indebted to the concept of
the abject as proposed by French theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) in her 1982 book Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection. I discuss Kristeva’s theory in detail in the first section of my
thesis, but to describe it briefly, part of her book examines the sensation of abjection: a reaction
of “repulsion and horror to the breakdown of meaning caused by the disintegration of

5
Whitney Stark, “Intra-action,” New Materialism, accessed March 2, 2022,
https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/i/intra-action.html
6
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin,
1994), 79.
3
distinctions between subject and other, self and other.”
7
This sensation is often caused by
interactions with abject materials such as bodily waste and other refuse we abject from our
bodies in order to live. These excretions are disconcerting as they retain a sense of the familiar,
the self, yet there they lie outside of the presumed secure boundaries of the body.
8
The subject of
embodiment and the “lived body” became popular in the late 20
th
century and many artists
played on the sensation of abjection and responses to abject materials as a means of exploring the
“relentless materialism and uncontrollability” of the human body.
9
The art historian Rina Arya
describes how abject artists engaged the body in her 2014 book Abjection and Representation:
An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, writing “artists would often employ various
methods to rupture the outer so that the inner would come seeping through, thus blurring the
boundaries and giving rise to an experience of abjection.”
10

The artists examined in this thesis – Mona Hatoum (b. 1952), Anicka Yi (b. 1971),
Teresa Margolles (b. 1963), and Breyer P-Orridge (n/a) – can be considered as working with the
abject as they too employ methods in their art that blurs boundaries, explores the lived body, and
uses visceral, abject materials to evoke questions of embodiment.
11
However, they differ from
traditional abject artists (and thus illustrate the origins of the trend I’m observing) in that they do
not just expose the vulnerability and instability of the self but render those who engage with

7
Jayne Wark, “Queering Abjection: A Lesbian, Feminist, and Canadian Perspective,” in Abject Visions:
Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture, ed. Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2016), 31.
8
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010), 2-3.
9
Rina Arya, Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and
Literature, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 82.
10
Ibid., 86.
11
When describing the collective endeavors of Breyer P-Orridge, I will refer to them as “Breyer P-
Orridge” and use the neutral pronoun “they.” When referring to them as individuals I will refer to them as
“Genesis” and “Lady Jaye.”
4
them vulnerable and unstable, too. Thus, intra-personal osmosis destabilizes the viewer’s
corporeal security, calling into question autonomous embodiment and subjectivity, and creates
space for reconfigurations of what it means to be a subject in the world.
The first section of my thesis surveys how the body has been depicted in in the past
century, from the Cartesian body to the abject body. Coined during the European Enlightenment,
the Cartesian body refers to the belief that the human is self-contained, pure, and subservient to
the transcendent mind. The Cartesian body, and the related theory of mind-body dualism have
dominated not only visual culture, but modern medical practices too. Early twentieth century
studies on the formation of the “body-image” by Paul Schilder (b. 1886 – 1940) laid the
groundwork for future postmodern thinkers like Haraway. Schilder’s studies found that, contrary
to popular belief, the body is in constant flux and our notion of ourselves is influenced by
external factors.
12
Schilder’s studies confirmed how many Surrealists such as the writer Georges
Bataille’s (b. 1897 – 1962) had begun to envision the body. Like Schilder, Bataille embraced the
idea that the body is fluid and mutable and explored so in his essays “The Big Toe” and “The
Informe.”
13
The former is concerned with bodily realism and “reconfiguring the human
body…towards the brute and irreducible materialism of the anarchic body in its baseness.”
14

Bataille’s latter essay advocates for the disruption of hierarchies and the destabilization of form.
Around the same time as Bataille, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (b. 1895 – 1975)
proposed his theory of the grotesque in his 1965 book The Creative Art of François Rabelais and

12
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 79.
13
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
14
Rina Arya, “The Fragmented Body as an Index of Abjection,” in Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in
Art and Visual Culture, ed. Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2016), 110.
5
Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
1516
Introduced in the context of a literary
criticism of François Rabelais’ 16
th
century novel The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the
grotesque is a political and aesthetic theory of the excessive, repulsive body that protrudes and
leaks and evades confinement. Professors Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael expand on
Bakhtin’s grotesque in their 2017 book Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the
Global Grotesque, writing
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is a body of excess, oozing over
and violating the most sacred of borders. In the aesthetics of the
grotesque, the insides of the body and its functioning – all that
proper decorum normally dictates remain hidden – are laid bare.
That which is normally elevated and revered is laid low, and that
which the classical body would debase is crowned king.
17

The similarities between Bataille’s theories and Bakhtin’s grotesque are undeniable, and they
clearly gesture towards Kristeva’s theory which came forty years later. These theories and
interpretations by scholars of postmodernism and posthumanism were perfectly synced to the
growing socio-cultural disenchantment with the Cartesian style of representing bodies. The
Cartesian tradition is not only overly transcendental, but exclusionary, and those made Other by
it have sought alternative means of representing themselves. These practices of alternative
embodiment gained prominence during the 1980s and 1990s, following conversations and
controversy surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis, feminism, and queer rights. The impact of these
interrelated theories on art practice was so strong, that in the 1990s, curators at the Whitney

15
The Creative Art of François Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was
originally completed in 1940 as Bakhtin under the title Rabelais in the History of Realism. The work was
rejected from various institutions, and, in 1946, he presented it during his Doctoral dissertation defense.
When it was translated to English in 1968 it was entitled Rabelais and His World.
16
Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2018), 93-94.
17
Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael, Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global
Grotesque (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017), 4.
6
Museum of American Art coined a new term, “abject art,” to refer to practices that engaged in
the mutability and fluidity of the artist’s body.
18
As the term became ingrained in the
contemporary art lexicon, more and more scholars posturized on alternative forms of
embodiment, ultimately paving the way for intra-personal osmosis.
The second section of my thesis considers the work of Mona Hatoum, Anicka Yi, Teresa
Margolles, and Breyer P-Orridge regarding intra-personal osmosis. Hatoum’s installation Corps
Étranger, Yi’s exhibition You Can Call Me F*, Margolles’ works Plancha and Vaporización,
and Breyer P-Orridge’s “Pandrogeny,” are all artworks that illustrate osmotic relationships and
their effects. Each project engages in the disintegration of bodily and subjective autonomy and
blur the distinctions between self and Other. Hatoum does so in Corps Étranger via audio and
video, while Yi and Margolles both use olfactory senses to destabilize their audience. The
pandrogeny project uses the most literal approach as Breyer P-Orridge surgically alter their flesh
as a means of metaphorically making “two” become “one.”
I conclude by summarizing the aims of my thesis: to provide a survey of how the body
has been imagined in modern Western history, and to shed light on a growing trend in
contemporary art in which artists engage in osmotic and intra-active relationships as a means of
exploring alternative forms of embodiment and subjectivity. I theorize that intra-personal
osmosis is inchoate, and thus my thesis does not provide a tidy conclusion but rather speculates
as to how osmotic relationships and alternative ways of being can be explored in current art
practices.

18
Jack Ben-Levi, Leslie Jones, Simon Taylor, Craig Houser, and the Whitney Museum of American Art,
Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection (New York:
The Museum, 1993), 7.
7
Chapter One: Embodiment in the 20
th
Century

Western society is predicated on well-defined and maintained boundaries. Be they
metaphorical or literal, constructed boundaries function as guides for navigating a complex
social world by demarcating difference. The impetus to create strict boundaries of separation is
illustrative of “dichotomous thinking,” a practice that often results in hierarchy, arbitrarily
assigned value, and exclusions.
19
The European Enlightenment era concept of mind-body
dualism is emblematic of the Western tendency to see the mind and body as “mutually exclusive
and mutually exhaustive” categories in which the former is subservient to the latter.
20
Mind-body
dualism was popularized by the French philosopher René Descartes (b. 1596 – 1650), and
illustrates how dichotomous thinking leads to one term (the mind) being privileged over the other
(the body), resulting in it becoming the “suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart.”
21

Mind-body dualism informed what is known as the “Cartesian body” in which embodiment and
subjectivity are unrelated and the human body is simply a container for the mind. Professor
Margrit Shildrick discusses the Cartesian tradition’s reliance on boundaries in her 2001 book
Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self where she writes “to be a self is
above all to be distinguished from the other, to be ordered and discrete, secure within the well-
defined boundaries of the body rather than actually being the body.”
22

Transgression in Theory
Mind-body dualism and the Cartesian tradition popularized the belief that the human
body was both static and impenetrable. Skin is seen as a visible, impermeable boundary that

19
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 3.
20
Ibid., 6.
21
Ibid., 3.
22
Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, 50.
8
separated the body from the external world. In the visual arts, images of the body were almost
always only external representations in which the body was rendered visibly healthy and
whole.
23
The Cartesian tradition and its reiteration of boundaries persisted throughout the
European Enlightenment and the early years of the 20
th
century, influencing a vast array of fields
from psychology to medicine to the visual arts. However, the horrific aftermath of World War I
(WWI) caused many to question the veracity of a model that was predicated on mind-body
dualism and the belief in a static body. The development of the modern methods of warfare used
in WWI “created an unprecedented range of mutilating and disfiguring wounds internally and
externally.”
24
The bodily carnage of WWI prompted scientists and researchers to experiment
with alternatives to the Cartesian body, particularly the social and psychological effects of
disfigurement in the formation of identity and subjectivity. One such researcher was the Austrian
psychiatrist Paul Schilder, who in 1935 coined the phrase “body-image” to describe “the picture
of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say the way in which the body appears to
ourselves.”
25
According to Schilder, one’s body-image is not given or fixed, but formed from our
interactions with our surroundings and sensorial perceptions. This meant that the body was not
static, as the Cartesian tradition purported, but adaptive and processual, ceaselessly responding to
external and internal influences. Schilder’s studies suggest that not only are one’s mind and body
were interrelated, but actively engaged in an exchange with the external world.
Schilder’s sentiments were echoed by many including the Surrealists, many of whom
were living in Europe during the war and saw the trauma firsthand. In reaction, some Surrealist

23
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 88.
24
Julie Anderson, “Mutilation and Disfiguration,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War
(WWI), 1914-1918 Online, August 3
rd
, 2017, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-
online.net/article/mutilation_and_disfiguration
25
Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (London: Routledge, 2013), 11.
9
artists and writers embraced an ideology in which the body could be manipulated and mutilated,
its fleshy boundaries ripped open. One such Surrealist was the French writer and theorist
Georges Bataille. A self-proclaimed Marxist, Bataille had long been interested in the potential
transgression had for inciting socio-cultural change. Like Schilder, Bataille was disillusioned
with mind-body dualism as it reaffirmed dichotomous social structures that he believed to be
mechanisms for exclusion and suppression. He vocalized his criticism in his 1929 essay “The
Big Toe,” where he describes the lack of value given to one’s big toe, writing
But whatever the role played in the erection by his foot, man, who
has a light head, in other words a head raised to the heavens and
heavenly things, sees it as spit, on the pretext that he has his foot in
the mud.
26

“The Big Toe” illustrates Bataille’s disdain for privileging something (the head) at the expense
of another (the big toe). His essay functions as both a criticism of the tenets of mind-body
dualism and an introduction to his concept of base materialism. This concept encouraged
embracing the material realism of the human body including itstendency to breakdown and
fracture. Base materialism also aimed to eradicate all arbitrarily assigned value by razing all
things to their most base state.
27
Similar in intention is Bataille’s theory of the informe, which he
introduces in an essay of the same name for the Critical Dictionary series of the magazine
Documents. In his brief essay, Bataille advocates for approaching the world through a lens of
transgression, mutability, and ambiguity. The art historian Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941)
summarizes Bataille’s essay in her book L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, writing
Bataille does not give informe a meaning; rather posits for it a job:
to undo formal categories, to deny that each thing has its ‘proper’
form, to imagine meaning as gone shapeless, as though it were a
spider or an earthworm crushed underfoot. The notion of informe
does not propose a higher, more transcendent meaning through a

26
Bataille, Visions of Excess, 20.
27
Arya, “The Fragmented Body as an Index of Abjection,” 110.
10
dialectical movement of thought. The boundaries of terms are not
imagined as transcended, but merely as transgressed or broken,
producing formlessness through deliquescence, putrefaction,
decay.
28

As the excerpt from Krauss makes clear, Bataille conceives of the informe as a method of
rendering all things – be it a material body or written language – formless; like a putty that can
be sculpted to fit any need.
Although Bataille’s theories of base materialism and the informe are not exclusively
applicable to the body, their emphasis on deconstruction and transgression are in keeping with
later post-modern reconfigurations of the body. For example, Michel Foucault (b. 1926 – 1984)
and Jacques Derrida (b. 1930 – 2004) both suggested that the self be represented as “fragmented”
and “unstable,” sentiments that clearly echo the language used by Schilder and Bataille.
29

Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s explorations in the relationship between phenomenology
and subjectivity informed his belief that the human body is “problematic and uncontainable.”
30

Merleau-Ponty’s uncontainable body is mirrored in Russian literary critic Mikhail
Bakhtin’s concept of the “grotesque body” which he introduced in his 1965 book The Creative
Art of François Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Bakhtin’s
book is an analysis of Rabelais’ infamous novel The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which
recounts the adventures of father and son giants who relish in the excesses of life. Gargantua and
Pantagruel embody the grotesque through their ceaseless consumption and excretion, which puts
them in a constant “act of becoming” as they protrude in and out of the body’s confines.
31
As an

28
Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (London: Arts Council, 1986), 64-65.
29
Loren Erdrich, “I Am a Monster: The Indefinite and the Malleable in Contemporary Female Self-
Portraiture,” Circa, no. 121 (2007): 44.
30
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 62.
31
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources,” in The Body: A Reader, ed.
Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (London: Routledge, 2005), 92.
11
aesthetic tool, Arya writes in Abjection and Representation that Rabelais’ grotesque functions as
a method for the body “to be reconfigured in interesting and inventive ways, where the normal
structure of the human form became the site of experimentation and exaggeration, threatening
the stability of form.”
32

All the aforementioned ideas of the body as open to the external world, base,
uncontainable, and excessive are apt descriptors for the abject body of Julia Kristeva’s1982 book
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. The book introduces the dual terms “abjection” and
“abject.” The former refers to “our human responses of repulsion and horror to the breakdown of
meaning caused by the disintegration of distinctions between subject and other, self and other.”
33

The latter term, the abject, is what incites the feeling of abjection. The definition of abject is
complex; in Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes the abject as an ambiguous, inescapable Other.
It cannot be defined as a subject or an object, rather its only quality is “that of being opposed to
I.”
34
It exists in liminal space, haunting the edges of our corporeal self, disturbing our sense of
identity, system, and order.
35
Kristeva’s theory is informed by her background in psychoanalysis
and the formation of identity. Unlike her predecessors Sigmund Freud (b. 1856 – 1939) and
Jacques Lacan (b. 1901 – 1981) who identified the figure of the mother as the first object a child
recognizes, Kristeva argued that infants first identify their maternal figure as the abject. This is
because of the simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the maternal body while weaning, which
causes the infant to finds it necessary to separate itself from what made them – the “maternal
body and everything associated with it” – in order to become an independent individual.
36

32
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 90.
33
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
34
Ibid., 1.
35
Ibid., 4.
36
Ibid., 34.
12
However, detaching from the maternal is never fully realized, instead it is a “violent, clumsy
breaking away” that leaves the child with the constant fear “of falling back under the sway of a
power as securing as it is stifling.”
37
As a result, the child learns to guard the edges of their body
to secure their subjecthood out of the belief that our flesh functions as an impenetrable barrier
that demarcates what is “out” and what is “in.” It is because of our presumption of bodily
security and its influence on our subjectivity that we are so disturbed when confronted with
abject materials like menses or feces. These “detachable parts of the body – urine, feces, saliva,
sperm, blood, vomit, hair, nails, skin” complicate our sense of self as the abject “retains
something of the cathexis and value of a body part even when they are separated from the
body.”
38
We recognize the materials as being of us, but their existence outside the flesh walls of
our bodies destabilizes our secure sense of self as their transgression of our skin renders our
boundaries obsolete.
Embracing the Other
The binarized structure of Western society that enabled the popularity of the Cartesian
body also allowed for arbitrary social exclusions of the those who’s lived experience wasn’t
represented by the dominating normative model.
39
As Shildrick writes in Embodying the
Monster, the supremacy of the normative model can only be maintained through “putative
exclusions” in which what is different is relegated to “outside the boundaries of the proper.”
40

For those excluded from normative social order, the theories proposed by Schilder, Bataille,
Bakhtin, and Kristeva provide a language and strategies for marginalized visual artists seeking a
way to represent embodiment and subjectivity as they experience it. Arya writes in Abjection and

37
Ibid., 13.
38
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 81.
39
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 13.
40
Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, 5.
13
Representation “abjection provided ‘a powerful means of transgression and reinvention’ for
artists who had been denied autonomy to speak for themselves and whose identity had been
construed in terms of otherness.”
41

42
Those considered Other were, by and large, labeled so
because the very material of their being – their “gender, sexuality, race, disability” – made them
inherently transgressive and repulsive to normative society.
43
In response, in the 80s and 90s
many of those artists considered Other turned to the material of their supposedly base, grotesque,
and abject body, using it as a site to reconfigure their subjectivity through alternative modes.
Putting the theories of those like Bataille, Bakhtin, and Kristeva to practice allowed Othered
artists to “explore philosophical and political questions about identity, gender, sexuality and
community, by which they could question social strictures imposed on art and society.”
44

Two communities made Other by society are women and the queer community,
respectively. Western society has long considered women to be an inferior gender; Aristotle
himself famously claimed that women are simply a “deformity” of man.
45
Women’s perceived
inability to adhere to their corporeal boundaries is the primary reason for their Othering as the
oozing of their bodily viscera metaphorically and literally “breaches the boundaries of the
proper.”
46
Shildrick expands on this in her 1997 book Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism,
Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics, writing

41
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 97.
42
Part of this quote includes an excerpt from Frances S. Connelly’s 2003 book Modern Art and the
Grotesque in which she writes “As Christine Ross observes, abjection has become a powerful means of
transgression and reinvention for many feminist and postcolonial artists whose work often fuse the
creative and destructive processes of the body in much the same manner as described by Bakhtin.”
43
Rina Arya, “Taking Apart the Body: Abjection and Body Art,” Performance research 19, no. 1 (2014):
7.
44
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 95.
45
Ibid., 12.
46
Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (bio)ethics (London:
Taylor & Francis Group, 1997), 16.
14
the very sign of fertility, the menses, has been regarded as
evidence of women’s inherent lack of control of the body and, by
extension, of the self. In other words, women, unlike the self-
contained and self-containing men, leaked; or, as Grosz claims:
‘women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage.’
47

Due to their propensity to ooze and leak, women’s bodies are seen as nearly antithetical to the
pure, containable model of the normative Cartesian body. Their bodily functions are seen as
indicators of a failure to be contained, and their spilling of viscera is reminiscent of the processes
that occur when a body begins to decompose and decay. These processes make women’s bodies
appear like threats, as though their seepages are infections. Writer and curator Tess Charnley
elaborates on this in her essay “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene: From HIV to COVID-19
writing about the masculine desire
‘to shore up the female body – to seal orifices and to prevent
marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the
inside of the body from the outside.’ There is a fear that women
will mutate, transgress our boundaries and spill out of our orifices,
infecting those around us with our fall.
48

The visual of “spilling out of our orifices” is literalized in the sculpture Tale by Kiki Smith (b.
1954). The sculpture depicts a woman in a prostrate position as though in the act of crawling
across the gallery floor (see fig. I). Made of a wax and paper-mâché mixture the surface of the
sculpture – the flesh of the woman – appears a sickly, bile-colored hue. The rectum of the
sculpture, however, is a dark brown that radiates outwards across the flesh of the rump in a
circular gradient. Extending out of her anus is a long, brown strand of what can only be read as
feces. Smith created Tale in 1992, during the height of the infamous “Culture Wars,” and it was
described by then Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philippe de Montebello (b. 1936)

47
Ibid., 34.
48
Tess Charnley, “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene: From HIV to COVID-19,” Anthropocenes –
Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 2, no.1 (2021).

15
as an utterly repulsive sculpture. In an interview with Laura Sydell for National Public Radio,
Smith stated
The Tale piece was about kind of shame and humiliation about
something – like that you’re dragging this sort of internal personal
garbage around with you all the time. And also the shame and
humiliation of not being able to hide it, that it’s so apparent in
one’s own being.
49

Smith’s description is emblematic of the experience of being considered Other, and the toll that
comes from having visibly embodying the grotesque. The title plays on the homonyms “tail” and
“tale,” implying that the narratives projected upon those society makes Other are carried with us
– always there, following us as we go. Upon first look, Tale is repulsive, but when considered
further it is clear that Smith does not want her audience to pity the woman of the sculpture but
question our own instincts to react with shame and disgust. Yes, the figure is on naked on her
hands and knees, but she is moving forward unencumbered by the tale that follows her. The
figure is baring her reality, and it is we the audience who turn in disgust only to peek back like
shameful voyeurs scared to get too close.
The fear of being “too close” was a key factor in the cultural tensions that contributed to
the Othering of the LGBTQ community during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The diseased
body was considered a visceral monstrosity, the materiality of which constantly threatened to
spill over in contagion.
50
Bodily fluids such as semen, urine, and blood were already considered
taboo, but during the AIDS crisis they began to embody “notions of contagion and death, of
danger and purity,” and, as a result, greater practices were put in place to expel those who
embodied a “threat.”
51
Charnley writes that during the crisis “there were continuous attempts to

49
NPR Transcript (Find proper citation).
50
Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, 68.
51
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 193.
16
‘seal up’ bodies that existed outside the heteronormative model, building invisible dams against
whatever transgressive matter might ooze out.”
52

The cultural paranoia around the false threat of the queer, HIV+ artist reached a
crescendo in 1994 following Ron Athey’s performance 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life at Patrick’s
Cabaret in Minneapolis.
53
Athey’s oeuvre is heavily influenced by his Pentecostal upbringing
and often incorporates practices from his religious background such as bloodletting and other
acts that test the material of the body. One aspect of 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life involved Athey
(who openly shares that he is HIV+) cutting into the flesh of his fellow performer, Divinity
Fudge, cleaning the blood from his skin with paper towels, and then lifting them over the
audience. Although the blood that was let during the performance was Fudge’s, who is not
HIV+, journalists in the local Minneapolis media falsely published articles claiming that Athey
had intentionally exposed his audience to HIV. Conservative pundits, including United States
Senator Jess Helms, quickly circulated this false narrative as kindling for the then raging Culture
Wars.
54
The controversy around Athey’s performance exemplifies the cultural expulsion of queer
and HIV+ people. Charnley describes this abjection in her essay, writing
The queer person and the PWA (Person with AIDS) were
positioned as the ultimate threatening ‘other’, invading and
endangering the self. The censorship of queer bodies and queer art
during this time was engendered by fear of the porosity of bodies
and the fear of transmission, not only of HIV but also of the
transmission of ideologies that did not align with the homogenized
ideal of the white, heterosexual, middle-class citizen produced by a
conservative right-wing government…
55

52
Charnley, “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene.”
53
Ron Athey’s oeuvre, including the performance referenced, was extensively covered in the exhibition
Queer Communion: Ron Athey curated by Amelia Jones and her book of the same name.
54
Jonathan D. Katz, “Aids, Athey, and Culture War,” in Queer Communion: Ron Athey, ed. Amelia Jones
and Andy Campbell, (Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd., 2020), 270-271.
55
Charnley, “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene.”
17
That the blood was not Athey’s was of little significance to conservative forces who simply saw
him as threat; someone who’s HIV status rendered them not only “expendable,” but also “by
definition, ‘not us.’”
56

Creating Intra-Personal Osmosis
Smith and Athey’s respective oeuvres are indicative of how artists in marginalized
communities embraced the qualities that made them Other, exploiting what the transgressive
qualities they embodied for their own benefit. However, the boundary transgression Smith,
Athey, and other artists engaged in “the abject” is isolated to themselves. Smith’s Tale is visually
unsettling, but viewers can easily assume a voyeuristic position and project that the sculpture is a
representation of Smith’s inner dialogue regarding abject embodiment and identity. Those
viewing Athey’s 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life or other works of his such as Solar Anus (1999) –
which features Athey penetrating himself with dildos affixed to stilettos he is wearing – can also
readily assume the role of a voyeur as the body ruptured is not theirs.
57

58
The ability for a viewer
to be a voyeur is the key distinction between abject art and art engage in intra-personal osmosis.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, in the 1990s curators at the Whitney
Museum of American Art began to use the phrase “abject art” as a catch-all for practices that
involve the body being “taken apart and undone,” and that engage with corporeal transgression
as discussed by Bataille, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and others.
59
However, much of abject art is focused

56
Katz, “Aids, Athey, and Culture War,” 271.
57
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Amelia Jones’ writing on the communal aspect of Athey’s
performances. In her book Queer Communion: Ron Athey, Jones (quoting Ann Cvetkovich) writes “Queer
performance creates publics by bringing together live bodies in space, and the theatrical experience is not
just about what’s on stage but also who’s in the audience creating community.” (Jones, 15). I
wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, but – for the purposes of my thesis– I differentiate between the
creation of community/relationships and the formation of multiple subjectivities that comes from intra-
personal osmosis.
58

59
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 84-85.
18
on the individual artist in their efforts to utilize forms of self-portraiture and body art to vocalize
their own experience of identity, subjectivity, and living both in and with a body.
60
The
boundaries transgressed in these works are those of the creator, who publicizes their corporeal
instability to an external audience. By focusing on the individual’s relationship to embodiment
and subjectivity, abject art practices are still engaged in binaries. Binarism prevents the creation
ways of being that are rooted in multiplicity and mutability, or as Loren Erdrich writes in her
essay “I am a Monster: The Indefinite and Malleable in Contemporary Female Self-Portraiture,”
binaries have “left no room for the symbolization of a self existing via interpenetration with
otherness.…”
61
Intra-personal osmosis does away with binary structures as it is predicated on
exposing the porous bodies of both artist and viewer – each subject is shown to be unstable,
formless and permeable. Engaging in acts of intra-personal osmosis is phenomenological; the
extension of bodies outside of the bounds of the flesh allows for a mutual exchange that opens
new avenues of becoming and for subjectivity to be configured in new ways.

60
Erdrich, “I am a Monster,” 44.
61
Ibid., 45.
19
Chapter Two: Intra-Personal Osmosis in Action

Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum’s 1994 installation for the Georges Pompidou in France entitled Corps
Étranger (which translates to “Foreign Body” or “Strange Body” in English) evokes feelings of
ambiguity and vulnerability and is exemplifies sculptural works that confuse subjectivity and
embodiment. Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents who were forced from their homeland during
the Nakba in 1948, Hatoum’s life has constantly been enmeshed in questions of subjectivity,
identity, and ambiguity. As Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, and despite Mona being born
there herself, Hatoum’s family was denied Lebanese citizenship which placed them in the
shapeless realm of being neither “here” nor allowed back “there.” In a 1998 interview by Janine
Antoni for BOMB Magazine, Hatoum describes their situation in Beirut as being of a family that
“had suffered a tremendous loss and existed with a sense of dislocation.”
62
In 1975, Hatoum
travelled to London for a brief trip; however, during her time away the Lebanese Civil War
began, prohibiting Hatoum from returning to Beirut and, subsequently, making her a pseudo-
exile. The majority of Hatoum’s work have referenced her early life and the destabilizing
sensation of having forces try to strip you of your identity, often incorporating themes of flux,
multiple narratives, and restlessness. Corps Étranger is one of Hatoum’s most evocative – and,
arguably, most visceral – artworks in its ability to simultaneously throw viewers into Hatoum’s
body like invading parasites, as well as shock them into questioning their own subjective
stability.

62
Janine Antoni, “Mona Hatoum,” BOMB Magazine, 1998, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/mona-
hatoum/

20
Installed in a darkened room at Georges Pompidou, Corps Étranger outwardly presents
as a tall (extending well above six feet) cylindrical room with two opposing cut outs for doors
(see figs. II-IV). Viewers are invited to enter the small space, the floor of which is made of a
thick glass and the walls are heavily padded to muffle any outside sounds. Standing with their
backs pressed against the installation’s soft, black, padded walls, spectators stare through the
glass floor at a screen installed a few feet below upon which plays a video projection. The
images that flicker across the screen are hard to discern at first, simply a montage of shiny,
pinkish shapes reminiscent of a maze you would see in a Dr. Seuss book. After a while though,
these clips begin to take shape, becoming discernible shots including, as described by art
historian Ewa Lajer-Burchath (b. 1968):
a glistening surface of an eyeball; a magnified ear cavity yawning
at you; a mouth opening wide into an unappetizing close-up view
of the larynx; a corrugated inside of a stomach; a vein-streaked
tunnel of the intestines; a mucous fold of the vagina; and a knotted
recess of the anus…
63

The eerie, unsettling footage displayed below the floor is from a hermeneutic procedure Hatoum
underwent and from which she retained the footage captured by the endoscopic device. As
viewers, we watch as the camera enters and exists Hatoum’s various orifices becoming privy to
the hidden body that lies beneath our flesh. As the camera careens in and out of Hatoum, her
body becomes a maze of pulsating flesh and mucous, realizing Bataille’s theory of the informe
with each frame as the camera’s movement erases any visual distinction between an organ like
the heart, an eyeball, or a polyp in the intestine.
Within the confines of the installation, we viewers function as “foreign bodies” entering
the body of the labeled “foreigner” – Hatoum. Through our trespassing we become voyeurs

63
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Real Bodies: Video in the 1990s,” Art History 20, no.2 (1997): 195.
21
ogling at the hidden recesses of Hatoum’s corporeal terrain. The camera traces the surface of
Hatoum’s skin before it penetrates her, snaking through the internal contours of her body,
capturing hair, veins, wet viscera, and tissue as it plunges on. Watching, we latch on to these
moments of discernible anatomy as they find comfort in the defined and familiar. However, this
joy is fleeting as recognizing the material of Hatoum’s body reminds us that what we are
witnessing is private; we are voyeurs to the most intimate, yet unknown parts of Hatoum – being
exposed to the parts of the body Freud wants to stay hidden. As we watch the images flutter
across the screen, we viewers experience unease regarding the security of the human body as
Corps Étranger exemplifies Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque as a means of reconfiguring the
body through abject and base aesthetics.
64
The circuitous movement of the camera into Hatoum’s
body through her anus and, eventually, out her mouth reverses the processes of digestion.
65

Accompanied by erratic audio of Hatoum’s breath and heartbeat, the looping footage turns
Hatoum’s body “inside out,” effectively illustrating the precarity of the body and flesh being a
concrete boundary.
66

However, it is not just Hatoum’s body that is rendered permeable – we viewers, too, find
our own corporeal stability called into question. Hatoum’s installation responds to our trespass
into her body by warning that “such voyeurism cannot be gratuitous, and that the cost of
invading another body is the threat of being invaded by one in return.” Corps Étranger forces
Hatoum and the viewer to simultaneously occupy the roles of “invader” and “invaded.”
67
Tamar
Tembeck elaborates on this in her essay “Mona Hatoum’s Corporeal Xenology,” writing
Standing against its padded walls as a spectator is like being inside
Hatoum’s body and sliding downwards through the internal

64
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 90.
65
Tamar Tembeck, “Mona Hatoum’s Corporeal Xenology,” Thresholds 29, (2005): 59 – 60.
66
Lajer-Burcharth, “Real Bodies: Video in the 1990s,” 201.
67
Tembeck, “Mona Hatoum’s Corporeal Xenology,” 59.
22
cavities of her organs. The constant forage in to the cavernous
tunnels of Hatoum’s anatomy ostensibly poses a “threat against the
viewers own sense of corporeal autonomy.” Resisting against
being sucked in by the image amounts to resisting being
assimilated into another being.
68

The movement of the weaving camera penetrating Hatoum entices as it pulls the viewer farther
and farther into her. Christine Ross describes the effect of this visual intrusion as inspiring in the
viewer the feeling that they themselves are being “absorbed by what they are looking at so
intently, as if they themselves were being pulled down into the profound darkness of the body’s
cavities.”
69
The sensation that at any moment the screen may “suck you in” is amplified by the
minimal lighting within the walls of Corps Étranger.
70
The ripples of Hatoum’s fleshy insides
radiate a pink light that seeps out of the confines of the screen and ensconces the installation’s
small interior in a subdued glow, giving the feeling of being submerged within Hatoum herself.
This anxiety is heightened by the location of the video screen which, resting approximately six
feet below the glass floor, can be imagined as a sort of precipice; a hole through which we
viewers are consumed.
In her essay on how the experience of cancer is shown in graphic novels entitled “’Why
Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’ Cancer Pathography, Comics, and Embodiment,” author
Laura McGavin writes that an early scene from David Small’s novel Stitches asks us to
ponder the impossibility of viewing the inside of our own bodies in
real time. The images confound distinctions between subject and
object, interior and exterior: the mouth could be your mouth, or
mine, or David’s; and because we cannot see his face, the boy could
represent you, or David, or me.
71

68
Ibid., 59.
69
Christine Ross, “Redefinitions of Abjection in Contemporary Performances of the Female Body,” RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 31 (1997): 150.
70
Lajer-Burcharth, “Real Bodies: Video in the 1990s,” 200.
71
McGavin, “’Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’” 189.
23
Although the above passage from McGavin is referring to Small’s book, it applies to Corps
Étranger too. While the endoscopic footage is from Hatoum’s body, the experience of being
within the installation – within her – confounds us viewers. In her book Abjection and
Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature, Arya
describes being within the installation and how “facing the screen, head down, enveloped by the
acoustics and relative darkness, we experience disorientation, the pulsating mass simultaneously
constitutes and undoes us, touching us in the fabric of our being.”
72
Because boundaries between
where one subject begins and the other ends are erased within Corps Étranger, the generative
destruction and reconstruction of both Hatoum and us viewers generates a site of becoming –
where autonomous subjecthood is dissolved and transcorporeal or osmotic relations occur.
73

Anicka Yi and Teresa Margolles
Similar sites of becoming are found in Anicka Yi’s exhibition You Can Call Me F*
(2015) and Teresa Margolles’ respective works Plancha and Vaporización. While there are
visual components in both artist’s works, the primary details of You Can Call Me F* and
Vaporización are olfactory. In Yi’s show You Can Call Me F* at The Kitchen in New York, she
utilized the transitory nature of smells to provoke questions about autonomous subjectivity and
those privileged to have it. Similarly, Margolles plays on the invasive capabilities of smells and
the emotional responses they evoke.
Our ability to smell has long been considered a lowly, or secondary, sense. Western
culture’s dismissal of scent as worthy of aesthetic reflection can be traced back to Plato who
wrote in his book Hippias Major that beauty only lies in what can be perceived by sight and

72
Arya, Abjection and Representation, 117.
73
McGavin, “’Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’” 193.
24
sound.
74
Plato’s sentiment was echoed by Hegel who dismissed the benefits of smell claiming
that it was “concerned only with what ‘is in the process of wasting away.’”
75
In their essay “The
Aesthetics of Smelly Art,” authors Yulia Kriskovets and Larry Shiner claim that Hegel’s
aversion to scent is indicative of the general Western cultural perception that “odors are volatile
and evanescent,” meaning uncontainable.
76
Scent acts upon our bodies before we are even
conscious of it – passing through the holes in our flesh as it makes its way in. The pervasiveness
of scent marks it as inherently abject as it seeps in and out of spaces and bodies regardless of
supposed boundaries.
Regardless of how Plato, Hegel and popular Western culture regard smell, olfactory
artists have chosen to use smell as their medium in large part because of its permissive nature.
Much like artists who explore the viscera of their bodies to challenge Cartesian notions of
corporeal normativity, olfactory artists cling to smell because it’s “impermanence and lack of
boundaries” breaks with “traditional expectations about boundedness and permanence.” Entering
the darkened gallery space of Yi’s exhibition, viewers are welcomed by an overwhelming, rancid
cheese scent. The putrid smell is being emitted from a long, rectangular Petri dish lit from below
so it glows a sickly yellow (see figs. V-VI). Written atop the surface of the agar in broad strokes
is the title of the exhibition, You Can Call Me F*, accompanied by dark blotches scattered
around haphazardly. To make the piece, Yi swabbed the orifices of one hundred women –
primarily artists and curators – which she then painted across the agar. The bacteria cultures then
grew across the plane of the Petri dish, merging with one another to create the visual component
as well as the sickly odor. The smell radiates out of the plexiglass Petri dish, filling the air of the

74
Yulia Kriskovets and Larry Shiner, “The Aesthetics of Smelly Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 65, no. 3 (2007): 275.
75
Ibid., 275.
76
Ibid., 275.
25
gallery and leaving visitors with no choice except to breathe in the “feminine microbial
residues.”
77
You Can Call Me F* is disconcerting for viewers not simply because of the
unpleasant putrid stench, but because it destabilizes viewers perception of bodily security. One’s
smell – the odor one emits – is the product of the “volatilization of metabolites produced by
bacteria.”
78
Put simply, our scent is the result of internal processes that exude outwards from our
pores. Thus, body odor exemplifies the porosity of the human body and its capacity to leak
without our awareness or control. To smell another person is to ingest their corporeal detritus and
process it within our own body.
79
You Can Call Me F* incites this process on a grand scale as
visitors take in the combined scent of one hundred women. However, Yi’s exhibition also makes
the viewer complicit in the creation of the scent. The porosity of the body that enables one to
smell another extends both ways, and as we breathe in the residue of the participants, we breathe
out bacterial traces of ourselves. In this way, You Can Call Me F* illustrates what Grosz calls the
“osmotic” nature of the human body and its “power of incorporating and expelling outside and
inside in an ongoing interchange.”
80

Like Yi’s exhibition, osmotic relationships are critical components to Margolles’
immersive installations Plancha and Vaporización. The former was exhibited at DHC/ART in
Montreal in 2012, while the latter was included in P.S. 1’s 2002 exhibition Mexico City: An
Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values.
81
In the exhibition Plancha, a long
steel plate was installed in the center of the room and nothing more (see fig. VIII). Running

77
Rachel Lee, “Metabolic Aesthetics: on the feminist scenstcapes of Anicka Yi,” Food, Culture and
Society 22, no. 5 (2019), 693.
78
Ibid., 697.
79
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), 115.
80
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 79.
81
Daniella E. Sanader, “Clean Air, Clear Water: Vapourization and the Anonymous Corpse in Teresa
Margolles’ Plancha,” Wreck 4, no. 1 (2013): 10.
26
along the ceiling directly above the plate was a small tube out of which fell beads of water that,
when met with the plate below, “vapourized upon contact with a sharp hiss.”
82
The steel plate
was heated which caused both the hissing sound and the blotches of oxidation from where the
water met the skin of the steel. The rest of the exhibition space was empty and were it not for the
small description accompanying her work Plancha could have easily been dismissed as simply a
minimalist sculpture. However, the description reveals the unsettling fact that the water hitting
the steel and diffusing into the air as vapor is the runoff from washing corpses in the morgue in
Mexico City. Daniella E. Sanader describes the experience of being in the exhibition, writing
“the air was saturated with traces of the anonymous dead, and I was breathing them into my
lungs.”
83
This realization transformed the once sterile, pure expanse of the white gallery into a
room that threatened contagion. Crucially, there was nothing discernibly different to the air of
Plancha; no acrid smell or side-effect that would have made obvious the “presence of death or
decay in the air.”
84
While there is no material shift in the content of Plancha, after viewers
realize the origin of the droplets they attribute a grander pervasiveness to it as though, by virtue
of the water’s relationship to the decaying body, the vapor formed when the droplets hit the hot
steel becomes more insidious and permeable. Sanader describes this shift in perception as
recognizing that a “space that once seemed empty and clean” is instead now “bursting at the
seams, overflowing into the surrounding exhibition rooms, the lobby, and the city streets.”
85

In concept, Plancha is reminiscent of Margolles’ 2002 installation Vaporización which
also made the olfactory experience a key detail of the work (see fig. VII). However, Plancha is
more discrete in its use of water – seemingly more focused on the moment of contact between

82
Ibid., 3.
83
Ibid., 3.
84
Ibid., 6.
85
Ibid., 3.
27
the droplet and the plate – while in Vaporización the water vapors are an overwhelming element.
For Vaporización, Margolles scattered fog machines in the empty exhibition space, but instead of
filling them with the traditional mixture of water and a glycerin, Margolles pumped morgue
water through them. Unlike Plancha, the water vapor in Vaporización was heavy and materially
tangible, creating a hazy cloud that filled the expanse of the room with the weight, taste, and
scent of the dead. Cuauhtémoc Medina describes being in the clouded room, writing
…the gallery was bare, or rather it was simply filled with this mist
that had a slightly industrial, bitter flavor. Enveloped in the vapor,
you were alone with your thoughts, fears and breathing, only
hearing the asthmatic wheeze of a smoke machine that, every once
in a while, blew out a thick white puff under the carefully designed
overhead illumination.
86

Enmeshed in the traces of the dead, viewers find themselves in the liminal space where
the subjective boundaries are shown to be obsolete. Regardless of our consent, the vaporized
residue of another enters visitors through their orifices and the porous membrane of their skin.
Sanader describes the osmotic experience of being within Vaporización, stating “the distinctions
between my body and the anonymous corpse dismantle as I breathe in vapourized water. In this
manner, the traces of the dead become implicated within the bodies of the living, whether we like
it or not.”
87

Breyer P-Orridge
The intermingling of bodies and the erasure of distinctions between subjects is arguably
taken to the furthest physical point in the “Pandrogeny” project created by Breyer P-Orridge, the
name used to describe the partnership of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye (see figs. IX-
XI). The aim of pandrogeny was “to decondition the self by cutting up the body, experimenting

86
Ibid., 10.
87
Ibid., 7.
28
with the ‘malleability of physical and behavioral identity’ in order to challenge the binaries of
gender, as well as self/other.”
88
Crucial to Breyer P-Orridge’s endeavor was recognizing and
committing to the malleability of the body, as well as believing that fragmentation and re-
unification is not limited to the individual, but can occur “between the bodies, lives, and
identities of disparate individuals.”
89
Their project began in 1995 when Genesis – a cult icon in
the music scene through h/er band Throbbing Gristle – met artist and dominatrix Lady Jaye at a
BDSM club. Mutually enamored from the start, Genesis and Lady Jaye’s love soon became all
consuming, and they realized they no longer want to be individuals, but merge into one identity,
one subject known as Breyer P-Orridge that was simultaneously “both ‘I’ and ‘we.’”
90

They began by mirroring one’s appearance which requires “dressing alike, buying two of
everything, in order to ‘cut up, erase, jumble, collage, highlight and cross fade every possible
inherited perception’ determined by family, environment, and society in general. However, they
soon moved on to more intense means of becoming one, turning to cosmetic surgery as body
modification allowed for identity (embodiment) to be fluid and mutable.
91
Surgery had already
been adopted by performance artists such as Orlan who found it a medium that permitted one to
“experiment with the body’s impermanence and malleability.”
92
Playing with corporeal material
illustrated the body’s capacity to be reconfigured over and over, supporting the claim that the
body is “dialectic” and continually in a state of “becoming.”
93
During their project, Breyer P-

88
Luna Dolezal and Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, “Cosmetic Surgery as ‘Cut-Up’: The Body and Gender
in Breyer P-Orridge’s Pandrogeny,” Configurations 26, no. 4 (2018): 397.
89
Kirsta Miranda, “DNA AND: A Meditation on Pandrogeny,” Women & Performance 20, no. 3 (2010):
347.
90
Ibid., 351.
91
Dolezal and Hurst, “Cosmetic Surgery as ‘Cut-Up,’” 389.
92
Ibid., 390.
93
Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, 193.
29
Orridge spent over $200,000 on surgical procedures.
94
Lady Jaye had about thirteen surgeries,
including ones that altered her chin and eyes.
95
Genesis had Lady Jaye’s beauty marks tattooed
onto h/er and had h/er cheeks filled and h/er face resculpted. To celebrate Valentine’s Day in
2003 they got breast implants, after which they “woke up next to each other holding hands.”
96

Because many of the surgeries Genesis underwent resulted in h/er appearing more
“feminine” – at least by normative society’s standards – people have often misconstrued
pandrogeny and considered it in keeping with being transgender. However, Genesis has
adamantly denied such connections and maintained that all cosmetic procedures were practices
in “experimentation with identicalness with Lady Jaye and a commitment to malleability.”
97

Pandrogeny has no desire to transition from one body to another, but to instead transition from a
closed body to one that is multiple and open, contingent on intra-action.

94
Hermione Hoby, “The Reinventions of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2016,
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-reinventions-of-genesis-breyer-p-orridge
95
Miranda, “DNA And,” 349.
96
Dolezal and Hurst, “Cosmetic Surgery as ‘Cut-Up,’” 394.
97
Miranda, “DNA And,” 350.
30
Conclusion

In this thesis, I have aimed to illustrate a burgeoning trend in contemporary art in which
artists interrogate the corporeality security of both themselves and their viewer – or in the case of
Breyer P-Orridge, the secured borders of disparate subjects – as a means of creating an osmotic
or intra-active relationship. I argue that doing so allows for subjectivity to be considered fluid
and multiple and for embodiment to be detached from autonomy; simply put, the production of
transcorporeality within subject and object, self and Other, inside and outside, creates generative
spaces that allow for alternative visions of becoming and ways of being. However, as I stated at
the outset, the trend I have observed and exalted upon here is simply a beginning. To contort my
argument so it comes to a neat, tangible conclusion would not only be a farce, but be
paradoxical. Doing so would imply that now, in the year 2022, we have finally settled upon a
universally fitting understanding of identity, subjectivity, and embodiment, when we simply have
not and likely will not. Cultural perceptions of the body have continuously mutated and morphed
in response to socio-political events and moods – and that was just in the past two hundred years
of the Western tradition. I would be remiss to ascribe to the burgeoning development of osmotic
relationships a definitive conclusion, as this would cut off a potential shift in art before it had the
chance to grow.
I would not dare make a grandiose claim that “This Is The Way Art is Moving,” but,
looking to the works of Hatoum, Yi, Margolles, and Bryer P-Orridge we can speculate possible
areas of exploration. These artists employed different methods to raze the distinction between
subjects and interrogate their autonomous subjectivity. In 1992 Hatoum’s Corps Étranger relied
on the visual and auditory immersion of the spectator to incite corporeal destabilization; perhaps
future artists will explore the relationship of virtual reality (V.R.) technology and embodied
31
subjectivity. Both Yi and Margolles subject their visitors to odor and the literal passing of bodily
material between people; in our present pandemic, will there be a future for art that diffuses
viscera without requiring some form of prior sanitization? Breyer P-Orridge became Breyer P-
Orridge through visual mimicry and body modification, which can easily be compared to the
creation of identity through digital trends, avatars and photoshop as we currently see on
platforms like Metaverse, Instagram, and TikTok.
Much like the plethora of possibilities that can come from osmotic relationships, there are
a multitude of paths this early-stage observation can take. While I cannot provide a neat
conclusion to my thesis, it does answer one thing: I introduced this by quoting Donna Haraway’s
question “why should our bodies end at the skin?” If there is one definitive answer this thesis
does provide it is that they should not and they do not.

32
Figures

Figure I: Smith, Tale, 1992.

33

Figure II: Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994.

34

Figure III: Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994.
35

Figure IV: Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994.
36

Figure V: Yi, You Can Call Me F*, 2015.

37

Figure VI: Yi, You Can Call Me F*, 2015.

38

Figure VII: Margolles, Vaporización, 2002.

39

Figure VIII: Margolles, Plancha, 2012.
40

Figure IX: Margolles, Plancha, 2012.
41

Figure X: Breyer P-Orridge, date unknown.

42

Figure XI: Breyer P-Orridge, date unknown.
43

Figure XII: Breyer P-Orridge, date unknown.
44
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Asset Metadata

Creator Christ, Emma Jacqueline (author)

Core Title Porous bodies: contemporary art's use of the osmotic as a means of reconfiguring subjectivity

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 04/20/2022

Defense Date 04/19/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abject,Bakhtin,Barad,Bataille,Body art,corporeal,embodiment,grotesque,informe,installation,intra-action,intra-personal osmosis,Kristeva,OAI-PMH Harvest,Osmosis,Performance,performativity,permeability,posthumanism,postmodernism,queer,subjectivity,transcorporeal

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

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Advisor Lin, Jenny (committee chair), Campbell, Andrew (committee member), Jones, Amelia (committee member)

Creator Email echrist@usc.edu,ejkchrist@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111022418

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