The Monstrous and the Grotesque:

On the Politics of Excess in Women's Self Portraiture

by Marsha Meskimmon
(published in "Make: the Magazine of Women's Art", Oct/Nov 1996, pp.6-11) Exiled and Excess During 1989, Jo Spence collaborated with the doctor Tim Sheard producing a series of phototherapy works entitled Narratives of Dis-Ease . These five photographs trace the experiences of a cancer patient undergoing medical treatment; the third photograph, Exiled, shows Spence's exposed torso with the word 'monster' scrawled across it. As she put it: I have a hospital gown which I stole from hospital because I needed it as a prop. I have used it in this piece of work. I then opened the gown and wrote 'monster' across my chest, because that's how I experienced myself as a cancer patient: monstrous to other people: 'How dare you talk about it. I can't bear to hear your pain. I might get cancer.' 1 The phototherapy works produced by Jo Spence and Rosy Martin often included small pieces of text which were chosen carefully for their personal resonance and their wider, social significance. For example, the words written on the bandages in Martin's Unwind the Ties That Bind of 1988 (with Spence) such as 'pervert', 'dyke' and 'predator' have both to do with the personal experiences of coming out as a lesbian in a homophobic society and are the words which were used in the House of Commons debate on Clause 28, the contentious and, arguably, anti-gay legislation of the same year. How then does the work Exiled figure in the process of phototherapy and what is the significance of associating the word 'monster' with the woman artist and the ageing, injured body of Spence? On one hand, the terminology simply indicates our culture's oppressive body politics and the emphasis upon young, fit female bodies as a social ideal. On the other, it links critically the contemporary representations of 'woman' with the clinical gaze of the medical establishment. Working in tandem, these institutions define a rigid norm and create 'monsters' from all those who do not fit the pattern. But there is even more to the power of this image including potentially novel models for the articulation of female subjectivity outside the binary tradition which defines woman solely in relation to man. The word 'monster', and the associated terms 'grotesque' and 'freak', have a special relationship to notions of representation, rational, scientific knowledge (upon which the structure of oppressive binarism is founded) and the body of woman. Therein lays the potential empowerment of the monstrous and the grotesque for women's self portraiture. Dictionary and encyclopaedia definitions of 'monster', 'grotesque' and 'freak' emphasise the lack of clear limits or boundaries to these forms; they are multiple and huge or mixed and inbetween. For example, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a 'monster' as 'compounded from elements of two or more animal forms' or as an 'animal of huge size'.2 Significantly, in terms of linking these forms with art and representation, a 'grotesque' is defined as a 'decorative painting or sculpture in which portions of human and animal forms 1

are fantastically interwoven with foliage and flowers'.3 The 'freak', in dictionary terms, is a 'monstrosity of any species'.4 The Encyclopaedia Britannica elaborates upon this concept of monster with: 'Two types of monster are recognized: those with defective or excessive growth of the body and those with partial or complete doubling of the body on one of its axes.'5 Or, as Rosi Braidotti put it in 'Mothers, Monsters and Machines': 'Since the nineteenth century, following the classification system of monstrosity by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, bodily malformations have been defined in terms of excess, lack, or displacement of organs.'6 (her italics). There is also a verb form of 'monster', listed in the dictionary as 'rare', defined thus: 'To exhibit as a monster.'7 This form brings to mind the crucial link between monsters and display, both etymologically and historically. The grotesque, as described above, was linked to forms of visual representation and the 'recent use' of the word 'freak' (by dictionary definition again) was as 'a living curiosity exhibited in a show.'8 More interestingly, derived from the same root as 'monster', is the word 'demonstrate': 'To manifest, show, display... To describe and explain by help of specimens or by experiment.'9 'Demonstrate' is defined further by the appeal to rational knowledge: 'To show or make evident by reasoning.'10 Experiments, specimens and reasoning connote the natural sciences and these are indeed made manifest by other definitional associations such as 'monstrous' as 'deviating from the natural order'11 and 'freak' being 'more fully freak of nature = lusus naturae'.12 As both Rosi Braidotti and Mary Russo have detailed in their work on monsters and grotesques respectively, the history of these concepts is inextricably linked to the philosophical and historical development of the natural sciences, particularly biology and medicine.13 The identification of certain animal forms as deviant was imperative to the activities of rational scientific discourses which sought to describe the norm. The definition of 'nature' through science is a cultural project which cannot be separated from the societies it sustains.14 'Monsters' and 'freaks of nature' provided science with an 'other' by which to define 'healthy', 'normal' animals, most significantly being, of course, 'normal' human specimens. So-called monsters and freaks were identified, used for experiments, explained and controlled through forms of knowledge which normalised 'correct' or 'proper' bodies. We should not underestimate the knowledge gained through examining monsters or the significance of the visual paradigm in rational scientific discourses. To see clearly was to know; these monsters were specimens to be seen (inside and outside) in order to be understood and kept distanced from 'normal' humans. We are but one short step from the Victorian freak show. That natural science defined monsters in this waysuggests the final critical link to the construction of the category of woman in traditional western knowledge systems operating through binary divisions of 'self' from 'other'. Woman has been connected to the monster, the grotesque and the freak through biology, rationalism and aesthetics at least since Aristotle sought to describe the development of the (male) foetus and argued that the development of female forms was deviant.15 Monsters are all about maternity: 'a misshapen birth, an abortion'16, the result of bestiality or a woman's union with a demon17, the product of some trauma delivered to a pregnant woman.18 Maternity itself is monstrous as it confounds carefully produced boundaries between the mother and child and indeed life and death. The pregnant woman is a shape-shifter whose body itself defies limits and borders throughout the period of gestation. Barbara Creed, writing about the 'monstrous feminine' delineated two forms of the phenomenon, one connected with maternity and the other with the vagina dentata, or the castrating woman. Creed's argument was that the whole notion of the monster 2

was constructed in and through gender difference and female sexuality.19 But probably the most striking evocation of the monstrous maternal function of woman comes through Mikhail Bakhtin's trope for the grotesque as a pregnant, senile, laughing hag.20 In that figure coalesce all the boundary-breaking features of woman which make her the ultimate 'monster' to man. Aesthetically, the feminine is also connected to the grotesque and the freak. The grotesque was pictorially defined in terms of the particular rather than the heroic and general, or universal. These features of painting and sculpture speak to negated traditions within the western, academic canon such as the gothic, the fantastic work of Bosch or the low arts of decorative border illustration. The low and grotesque was 'other' to the western fine art tradition which centred upon the monumental, beautiful and universal. Clearly, both in theory and practice, the grotesque was feminine and marginal while the universal was masculine and central. Imagination and rationality play key roles in these definitions. The rational is read as that which can transcend the particular into the universal; masculine rationality is capable of this while feminine intuition and emotion remain fixed to the body and the particular. Thus, masculine thought and imagination become the neutral, transcendent 'one' to notions of feminine intuition as 'other'. Female imagination is always, already monstrous. Significantly, if the grotesque is particular, so the freak is 'a product of irregular fancy'21, or, therefore, associated with deviant femininity. Moreover, one of the models of monstrous conception, as described above, relies upon thought traumas enacted upon pregnant/conceiving women. Braidotti described the presumed process: The mother was said to have the actual power of producing a monstrous baby simply by: (a) thinking about awful things during intercourse...; (b) dreaming very intensely about something or somebody; or (c) looking at animals or evil-looking creatures (this is the Xeroxmachine complex: if a woman looked at a dog, for instance, with a certain look in her eyes, then she would have the power of transmitting that image to the fetus and reproducing it exactly, thus creating a dog-faced baby).22 What is implied by all of these associations but never made explicit, is that the work of a woman artist, and indeed the woman as artist, is inherently monstrous and grotesque. Women cannot but imagine in ways which are deviant. As Sidonie Smith said simply with regard to women autobiographers, 'the intellectual woman is grotesque.'23 Tracing these connections brings us full-circle and back to re-consider Exiled by Spence. The word 'monster' written across her body is precise. The representational strategy makes specific interconnections between art, medicine, science, rationality, display, and the body of this woman artist apparent. The ageing body with its simultaneous lack (partial removal of the breast) and excess (fat) overspills the boundaries and becomes monstrous. It is necessary to begin the phototherapy process with just such a staging of the constructions of the 'self' which are oppressive to then be able to transcend these. In no way are these representations meant to secure a fixed, immutable identity; rather, as Spence argued: As we view the images and witness their mutability it becomes apparent that 'truth' is a construct, and that identity is fragmented across many 'truths'. An understanding of this frees up the individual from the constant search for the fixity of an 'ideal self' and allows an enjoyment of the self as process and becoming.24

Thus, the monster could become an empowering trope for women artists precisely because it cannot be fixed but is always 'becoming'; it is poised on the borders which define female subjectivity negatively in terms of male subjectivity. It permits a space to open up which is neither one nor other, but always participating in both. This is the lost essence of the word 'monster' and the place to begin to reconstruct potential new identifications. The archaic definition of 'monster' is 'a divine portent or warning... a prodigy, a marvel'25 and the associated word 'terata' which in biology and pathology signifies 'monstrous formations or births', originally meant 'marvel, prodigy, monster'.26 The Greek root of these words, 'teras' was both horrible and wonderful, it suggested the power of the divine and described what is known as the abject. Following the lead of such theorists as Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz, it is clear that the abject is both a powerful concept in terms of embodied subjectivity and critically linked to woman.27 The abject is that which is neither wholly inside nor outside of the body but participates in both states. It is therefore the marker of the very boundary of the body with society and, as such, is carefully controlled. The abject produces both fear and desire which provides a clear analogy with the monster as both terrible and wonderful. The monster, as a compounded, in-between form defies distinct definition and perpetually threatens to overwhelm its careful policing. A number of women artists over the last two decades have begun to use forms of monstrous or grotesque imagery in their self portraiture. Unlike Spence's Exiled, the works have not been concerned particularly with exposing institutions like the medical establishment, but they have been trying to find new means to articulate the positions of women artists without fixing falsely unified subjects. As I have argued elsewhere, the self portrait form is notoriously difficult to use for subjects who have been marginalised through its traditions and those of post-Enlightenment rationalism such as women and artists of colour.28 The tropes of traditional self portraiture posit exactly that universal and unified subject which it is necessary to challenge in order to come into voice through difference, rather than through a dominating economy of the same. Given the significance of the trope of the monster to concepts of woman, specularity and knowledge, the self portraiture of artists such as Anne Noggle, Jenny Saville, Diana Thorneycroft and Esther Sayers encourages a dialogue between theories of what Donna Haraway has called 'the promises of monsters' and the visual strategies these artists have employed. These artists deal with excessive, borderless bodies, material re-combinations and potentially novel, process-based reconfigurations of 'themselves'. These works provide moments of what Haraway calls 'artifactualism', acknowledged constructions of subjects which cannot be fit neatly into either of the categories of 'self' and 'other'; like monsters, they are always both and neither. As argued in the next two sections, they remind us of the crucial insight of Haraway into the corporeality of theory: This sketch of the artifactuality of nature and the apparatus of bodily production helps us toward another important point: the corporeality of theory. ... Theory is anything but disembodied. The fanciest statements about radical decontextualization as the historical form of nature in late capitalism are tropes for the embodiment, the production, the literalization of experience in that specific mode.29 Hence this work makes manifest the corporeality of theory itself by challenging modes of pure, objective seeing and knowing and by confounding definitive distinctions between subjects and objects. They are, as we shall see, dangerous strategies and open to 4

reappropriation, but they are also moves which can provide modes by which marginalised groups can come into voice. Border Crossings Both Anne Noggle and Jenny Saville have used tropes associated with the excessive, borderless, grotesque body in their self representations. In Saville's recent self portrait photographs (with Glen Luchford, 1994-5) for example, the artist pressed her nude body on glass, destroying definitive outlines and contours and producing a mutable image which overspills the frame. The way the body seems too large for definition and refuses any closure or symmetry marks this as 'monstrous' and the visceral nature of the image links it again to the feminine and the grotesque. Within the context of Saville's oeuvre, these works are interesting self representations. In works such as Strategy (1993-4) and Plan (1993), Saville painted huge, nude or semi-nude female figures which also overwhelm the spectator and threaten fixed body boundaries. With explicit references to the writing of Irigaray in these works, Saville has placed traditions of mimesis and mirroring into contention. As Irigaray has discussed in her work, traditions of masculine viewing/knowing are the paradigms which have marginalised women and techniques of 'speaking' or 'representing' are necessary which 'jam the machinery'.31 The call to monsters (or, in Irigaray's own work, 'angels') is just such a mechanism. Saville's move to 'self' portraiture is thus even more challenging for the boundaries crossed than her representation of 'others'. The photographic self representations of American artist Anne Noggle look very different than the work of Saville, yet they play out similar themes. The excessive or socially-grotesque body, lack of closure and the relationship between the body and technology in plastic surgery (Saville also recently worked with plastic surgeons in the United States) are all themes in Noggle's work. Having come to photography late in life, Noggle began her first well-known self portrait series (The Face-Lift Series) in 1975. These works documented the artist's facelift without sentimentality. Face-Lift number 3, for example, shows a close-up of the stitches and bruising on Noggle's face, but the rose in her mouth and her sober expression belie melodrama; the work is about ageing, cultural norms of female beauty and the construction of the body, surgically, socially and visually. There is no natural body and no essential woman in the work, the body is in flux, being altered from the outside and thereby changing and shifting the definitions of 'woman' from within. If such imagery challenges the 'natural' body and its impermeability, the emphasis in Noggle's work on the conjunction between ageing and sexuality reasserts the grotesque trope of the senile, pregnant, hag discussed above. Self Portrait with Pepe (1970), Myself, 7 am, (1977) and One of Us (from the series Recent Follies, 1985) play on the sexual older woman, an excessive image in itself in our culture which fixes female sexuality firmly to the body of young women. Noggle's frank imagery challenges the exclusive association of female sexuality with youth in ways which remind the viewer that the body, sexuality and gender cannot be fixed and defined as natural; rather, these concepts are cultural codings. It is no coincidence that Noggle was influenced as a student by the work of then-contemporary Diane Arbus, whose representational strategies focused on 'freaks' and the politics of freaks in the 60s and 70s. The attempts made at that time to reinvent the freak and remove the negative connotations associated with 'freakishness' were moves to permit inclusive societies to come into being. If the works of Saville and Noggle offer any critical revision it is through the mode of carnival and freak politics, the politics of difference in community.

Mary Russo was explicit on the different politics implied by the terms 'grotesque' and 'freak': the grotesque offers inclusion through a surrender of boundaries where the freak has become a distanced spectacle. Drawing on theories of carnival, she wrote: The grotesque body of carnival festivity was not distanced or objectified in relation to an audience. Audiences and performers were the interchangeable parts of an incomplete but imaginable wholeness. The grotesque body was exuberantly and democratically open and inclusive of all possibilities. ...Within the confines of spectacle, the freak appears only as a particular image which may appear, reproduce, or simulate the earlier carnivalesque body described and idealized by Bakhtin, but also and more importantly as a bodily construct produced within different social relations. ...Produced historically in the same field of vision, freaks shared the same distancing, scrutiny, classification and exchange value as other colonial and domestic booty as the discourses of medicine, criminology, tourism, advertising and entertainment converged.32 Hence the dangerous strategies of Saville and Noggle are related to the risks of carnival itself; the images may act as truly grotesque and bring an articulation of difference in which subject and object are dissolved or they may be reappropriated historically, as was the freak, and become yet more objects of repulsive attraction to the jaded spectator who remains fully separate. If the latter is the case, then there are merely temporary gains in the display of different possible images of women and a certain literal illustration of theory. If, however, these cannot simply be reappropriated and commodified as spectacle, then they permit a glimpse of places where multiplicity and difference can be the order rather than the other. They embody theory and create new relationships between viewers and makers. They do not merely bring women artists into a form of normalizing self representation but suggest that to articulate female identities requires new forms. Re(con)figurations The work of Esther Sayers and Diana Thorneycroft can be linked with these more subtle notions of the monstrous and the grotesque as conceptions of articulation rather than representation. The risks and the potential of the grotesque body described above are derived from their ability to do more than just find a normalizing representation for marginalised 'others'. These strategies offer the possibility of finding forms of representation and articulation which do not simply reproduce the existent structures of knowledge, viewing and imaging but fundamentally confound the boundaries which uphold those forms. Sayers and Thorneycroft not only play on representational tropes associated with the monster and the grotesque, they invoke a sense of process itself which defies fixity and ushers in potential combinations and recombinations of meanings and images. One key feature in the definition of 'monster' was the emphasis upon mixed bodies; monsters were formed from parts of humans, animals, demons and, arguably at present, machines. Their 'unnatural' status comes from these combinations which defy attempts to identify a pure and whole human being. Sayers and Thorneycroft both use these sorts of multiple, mixed images and processes in their self representations which become refigurations of the body and 'reconfigurations', strategies which seek to redefine the very model through which one finds a form of representation. Contemporary British artist Esther Sayers looked to Bakhtin and Haraway in order to consider the construction of the body through social interaction. In works such as A Picture of Me (1995) and Constructed Figure IV (1995) the final life-size photographic images present combinations of images drawn from her own body and objects around her such as coat 6

hangers and electrical equipment. The works emphasise the permeability and artificiality of the body and refute calls to essential womanhood or, as 'self' portraits, to essential selfhood. They remind us that 'artifactual' organisms emerge through discourse and process. Most significantly, perhaps, is this staged encounter between image and process which goes beyond the point of simply illustrating a theory. Sayers produced these photographs by first taking body casts, a tactile and more feminine, craft-based activity than photography. After producing body casts, these were manipulated and photographed along with a number of other objects; the final works show the multiple layers of imagery and indicate the complex construction involved. There are fine art, craft and technical skills implied in the work as well as simultaneous nearness and distance from the objects; the process itself is implicated in the effect of confounding clear subject/object divisions. The process is a re(con)figuration, an embodiment of theory and it is impossible to engage with these works without dealing with the subtle traces of the making itself. The works combine process and image in ways which defy simple divisions between form and content. Canadian photographer Diana Thorneycroft also enacts this dialogue between process and image in her self representations. Thorneycroft's works play with the tropes of mixed, inbetween bodies where her own female body is merged with prosthetic body parts (male and female) animal parts and other objects. Again, multiple layering refutes any fixity or any sense of an essential woman underneath the constructions. There are classic tropes of monsters and the grotesque in the works: Untitled (Brother Mask with Toy Gun ) (1990) and Untitled (Bird Boy) (1992) both mix male and female bodies, animate and inanimate objects and animals with humans; Untitled (Twin) (2 parts, 1993), suggests the doubling or twinning considered monstrous in biology. The works have caused quite strong reactions when they have been shown, not least because they seem to make that other link to the monster, that of female sexuality and imagination. In works such as Untitled (Dream) (1990), the 'female' dreamer seems to be masturbating and lending credence to the idea that she will inevitably dream of monstrous mixes and formations. Thorneycroft has been working through psychoanalytic theory to investigate the acquisition of gender identity and the partial and imperfect formation of any fixed subjectivity is clearly described by the works. They are perpetually becoming, there is no definitive male/female, subject/object or even human/non-human in these works. The process which Thorneycroft uses to produce the works further indicates that these are a continuing part in some dynamic act. Placing herself in elaborate 'sets' with prostheses, masks, dolls and other props, Thorneycroft opens the shutter of the camera in utter darkness. She then exposes the image in a series of near-random layers by playing light over the scene in a number of different strokes. The resulting image is thus like the simultaneous veiling and unveiling of meaning and knowledge. There is and can be no claim to objective truth and whole, unobscured sight/understanding. The process and the image embody the monstrous, the abject, the both and the neither at once. The works of Sayers and Thorneycroft both operate on the dual levels of image and process and interrogate the very possibility of fixing borders. So too do monsters. Monsters exceed boundaries, reconfigure forms and are always horrible and wonderful. They exist as a state of becoming, rather than as a false marker of fixity. In this way, works which can use this form as both image and process participate in embodied theory, the corporeality of knowledge and the promises of monsters for the articulation of identities outside the norm. Haraway suggested that the promises of monsters lay precisely in the perpetual becoming. Their

continual recombination was articulation of outsider identities, rather than representation from the centre: Theory here is exceedingly corporeal, and the body is a collective; it is an historical artifact constituted by human as well as organic and technological unhuman actors. ... Social nature is the nexus I have called artifactual nature. ...it is within such a nexus that I and people like me narrate a possible politics of articulation rather than representation.33 Re(con)figurations in the visual sphere are part of the project of what Braidotti described as 'figurations' in theory: 'The quest for multiple connections... ways of expressing feminist forms of knowledge that are not caught in a mimetic relationship to dominant scientific discourse.'34 To challenge the dominant discourses which created 'monsters' in and through science, philosophy, aesthetics and history requires a revision of the monstrous in its original, wonderful form. 1. Jo Spence, 'Cultural Sniper: Passing/Out' inCultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression, London, Routledge, 1995, p.211 2. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol.2, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p.1351 3. ibid., vol. 1, p.894 4. ibid., p.802 5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, micropedia vol. 6, London, 1979, p.1008 6. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, ch.3, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, pp.77-8 7. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, op.cit., vol.2, p.1351 8. ibid., vol.1, p.802 9. ibid., p.517 10. ibid. 11. ibid., vol.2, p.1351 12. ibid., vol.1, p.802 13. Braidotti, op.cit., pp.75-94 and Mary Russo,'Freaks, Freak Orlando, Orlando' The Female Grotesque, ch. 3, London, Routledge, 1995, pp.75-106 14. Donna Haraway, 'The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others' in Lawrence Grossberg, et.al. eds, Cultural Studies, London, Routledge, 1994, pp.295337, pp.296-7 15. Braidotti, op.cit., p.79 8

16. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, op.cit., vol.2, p.1351 17. Encyclopaedia Britannica, op.cit., macropedia vol.11, p.379 18. ibid., micropedia, p.1008 and Braidotti, op.cit., pp.85-6 19. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge, 1993, pp.2-3 20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp.25-6 21. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, op.cit., vol.1, p.802 22. Braidotti, op.cit., pp.85-6 23. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, p.15 24. Spence, 'Phototherapy: Psychic Realism as Healing Art?' (with Rosy Martin) in Cultural Sniping, op.cit., p.177 25. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, op.cit., vol.2, p.1351 26. ibid., p.2264 27. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S Roudiez, New York, 1982 and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994 28. Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artisis' Self Portraiture in the Twentieth Century, London and NY, Scarlet Press and Columbia University Press, 1996 29. Haraway, op.cit., p.299 30. Grosz, op.cit., p.188 31. Luce Irigaray, 'The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine', in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), translated C. Porter and C. Burke, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985 32. Russo, op.cit., pp.79-80 33. Haraway, op.cit., p.311 34. Braidotti, op.cit., p.75