Certain
things which lie within the class of what is frightening
Michalis Pichler
‘There was
something called democracy.
As though
men were more than physico-chemically equal.’
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
The
question of postmortal dignity is directly related to that of prenatal dignity.
This
becomes increasingly important as the objectification of our bodies progresses
and traditional philosophical and epistemological notions of self and identity
are challenged.
In
the project kuh I mounted the
preserved skin, claws and horns of a cow, which had been slaughtered for meat
consumption, onto a frame-
in other words, a semi-real corpse/artifact.
t.
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Later
on experiments in public space were carried out.
Myso
Human resources and other operating
consumables
According
to Nietzsche it is much better to have good enemies than to have bad friends.
In that
spirit I t I may introduce
my frame of reference,
which is, on the one hand, the image- and reality-production of Natural History
Museums in general and of ‘Von Hagens Plastination Ltd in particular and, on
the other hand, the reality- (and also image-) production of a meat-consuming
society.
Before going on we should
clarify the term ‘representation’; I do not agree with the notion that
representation represents a reality existing independently from the representation.
There is always a gap between reality and its representation; images are set up
as reality ,so they can convey and produce reality; representation as such is
not in contradiction with construction, it goes hand in hand, it is
construction as such — or destruction, which is a negative kind of
construction. Being engaged in image production I join the ‘politics of
representation’
In
Berlin in 2000-01 there took place a show that displayed preserved human
corpses. Human These
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Some
of the preserved corpses were presented in poses which carried art-historical
references. The conserved body of a pregnant mother was presented like a
reclining odalisque by Manet. Her belly was cut open to expose the baby inside
— a foetus in
the 8th month. Another ‘figure’ resembled a Hellenistic Hercules, with his own skin instead of a
lions’ skin over his shoulder. At the same time it was pretended these poses were pretended
to be ‘close to life’.
n
some way this exhibition stands in the tradition of the image-production of
Natural History Museums, applying it now to the human as its object.
“Just
like the idler, and more than thatonly more so, the
dying person is amoral; the former is a subject that doesn’t work; the latter
is an object that isn’t even available for treatment. (…) One needed nazism,
logical within its technocratic totalitarianism, to treat the dead and with the
help of rentability-considerations measurementsborder barrier,
which
was put up throughresented by the
inert corpse.”[2]
If we replace
totalitarianism with neoliberalism, this statement could refer to very recent
tendencies. I would locate Dr. Hagens within a discourse of Menschenmaterial[3]
(human material) and
with certain parallels to Third Reich medicine the German tradition
of Dr. Mengele and other Nazi Doctors.[4] Even
though
does not does it
participates in
any sort of killing. Nevertheless one can draw a trace regarding the attempt to
utilize human corpses materially and economically in a
very materialistic and also economic way from a
medical perspective
The
industrialized treatment of human corpses takes them literally as material for
a product, which is explicitly de-individualized and subject to economical
considerations. What’s new here since 1939, is that these ‘“human
resources’”
participate in the production-cycle postmortally .
And
Dr. Hagens does it bigtime. His so-called Bodyworlds
show has travelled globally since 1995 and is listed in the current Guiness Book of Records as the most
visited exhibition ever. It took place in lots of different cities around the
world: now it is in Singapore, before it was in Japan and London, and, with an
average entrance fee of US$12 and subsequent sales, it is big business.
Von
Hagens Plastination Ltd buys the raw material, preferably in China (about $250
for the corpse of an adult there) or Kirgisia (among them people whothat
died in prison camps and psychiatric institutions or who were otherwise
executed). It creates surplus value by means of about 170 Chinese anatomists
working in the headquarters of the corporation in Dalian — and then markets
them profitably through exhibitions and sales (a plastinated ‘full body’ goes
for about $ 75,000). The profit is processed
through a discrete financial holding in the tax-paradise of Gibraltar and a
little stock company in Basel, Switzerland.[5]
In
the meantime Von Hagens Plastination Ltd has considerable means to promote its
activities, and von Hagens is publishing, hand in hand with theorists and
scientists, to advertise their product. It is a very one-sided discourse, consisting of affirmative polls carried out among those
visitors to his shows willing to be interviewed, and statistical evaluations
executed by scientists and authors paid, edited and published by von Hagens.
Most
people who disagree have tried to ignore him. Recently many negative articles
have been published in the corporate media, some of them with investigative
value. But negative media attention is always a two-sided sword. I am caught in
the dilemma of deeply disagreeing on the one hand, and on the other hand, of
not wanting to promote it, not even negatively.
Taxidermy and
slaughterhouse
At
some point I decided to produce another conception of death. The main
difference is that I did use a cow. The other main differences in this
alternative conception are, that the mortal remains remain
individually identifiable and that the representation does not pretend to be
lifelike.
To do
this I used the means which were accessible to me,
Today taxidermy is also applied in the private realm,
mostly for the preparation of pets (starting from birds, cats, dogs, up to horses) or
to produce trophies of hunted animals (either domesticnative, such as
foxes, deer, hogs etc., or, again, exotic animals such as sharks, leopards,
tigers, or even buffalo and rhinoceroses).
There
are over one billion cattle alive today, grazing on approximately 24 percent of
the landmass of the planet.[9]
In Australia, the number of cattle exceeds the number of people by 40 percent.[10]
On the other hand, cattle are the most slaughtered animals throughout human
history. In the US there are 100,000 cows slaughtered every day. Followed at a
short distance by the Australian peoples,,
thean
average North American, during the course of his/her life, e eats,
the meat of seven cows [11].
As
a mediated reality we are presented with either images of lucky cows provided
by advertising (LaVacheQueRie, milka, Müllermilch, emzett and so on) or we have
something which is totally deprived of the visual identity of a cow:
clean-plastic-packed meat, or just leather, which is also parts of a dead cow.
Despite
our general perception of death, which as
either a religious thing, or a personal thing which also has religious
connotations, we are accustomed to deal with animals and their bodies as
products and commodities. “At this level of detachment,” says James Serpell, “the animal
becomes a mere cipher, a unit of production, abstracted out of existence in the
pursuit of higher yields.”[12]
During
the process of realizing this work I visited a slaughterhouse, made
photographs, sketches and measurements there.
picture 1: heads
“Usually
the cows enter the slaughterhouse single-file. Immediately upon entry they are
stunned by a pneumatic gun. As each animal sinks to its knees, a worker quickly
hooks a chain onto a rear hoof, and the animal is mechanically hoisted from the
platform and hung upside down over the slaughterhouse floor.”[13]
While some slaughterhouses still kill with knives, usually a cow gets killed by
a shot in the head or in the neck.
“The
animal moves along the main disassembly line. (...) the hide is cut open at the
midline of the stomach and a skinning machine strips the animal of its hide,
leaving the skin in one piece. The carcass is decapitated, the tongue is split
and removed (...) After the viscera are removed, the body is hurried along to
the next station, where the carcass is cut down the center of the backbone with
motorized saws and the tail is pulled off the animal”.[14] In some
slaughterhouses the skin is removed first, in others the head, the feet and the
tail get chopped off first. In just one respecpoint they
are all the same: the carcass doesn’t get to touch the ground, not before it is
sliced into small pieces and packed into plastic.
Should
one take as a starting point a situation which one considers ethically
unjustifiable? Can you criticize objectification in general and cow-slaughter
in particular while using the mortal remains of a slaughtered cow?
Yes
and No.
If
this cow had not been slaughtered for meat consumption, the project would not
have been possible — and it would not have been necessary, either.
The
cow
es
through sickness or old age.
I
proceeded to carve the model out of Styrofoam using anatomical proportion plans[15],
and self-made
wooden and plastic skeletons and starting
with a clay model in scale 1:10.
picture 2: kuh, studio
situation, 2001
The
skin, which was sewn over the core, was conserved by a taxidermist.
The cow was
a milk cow that got slaughtered close to Berlin for meat consumption because it
had a bad leg — athis
decision was taken by the farmer and based on
economic considerations.
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We
are accustomed to experiencing cowskin as raw material for shoes or jackets or
furniture; sometimes it is conserved and utilized as a carpet on the floor or
on the wall.
There
is always a gap between reality and its representation; images are set up as
reality — tthey
convey and produce reality; representation as such is not in contradiction with
construction, it goes hand in hand, it is construction/destruction of ‘“reality’” .
Being
engaged in image production one can join the ‘politics of representation’[16].
With
sculptural and taxidermic methods the visual identity of a cow — a dead cow — was
reinstated, and displaced and detached reality-perceptions reconnected.
Subsequently the semi-real corpse/artifact was placed in public space.
Max Ernst
wouldn’t have wanted this
Rather
then being a statement or a theatrical performance kuh is an experiment. Or, if it is to be seen as theatrical, it
could regarded as an application of Brechtian Verfremdung (estrangement), or, reciprocally, of the Freudian Unheimlich (the uncanny): “The uncanny
is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of the
The
first experiment took place on January 15, 2002, at Berlin Alexanderstrasse.
Since there was no permission given, it didn’t take long (about 90 minutes) for
the police to come and confiscate the ‘cow’, which had been outlined with chalk
and fixed to the ground with metal chains, while no author or evildoer was
identifiable . After ten minutes of investigations (touching, footkicks and
soundcheck by fingertips) )the police
ripped it off, and, considering it ‘special garbage’, wanted to
discard it. That is when I intervenfered to make
them give it back to me, making it possible to execute an experiment in another
district next day.
At
the same time in Berlin the Internationale Gruene Woche took place, just as
it does every
year in January. The Gruene Woche is an international trade show for the food,
agricultural and horticultural industries; it is an image opportunity,
organized and visited by food industry representatives and targeting a mass
audience of “consumers from Germany and neighbouring countries”, wholesalers,
retailers and “4000 trade and popular media journalists from 70 countries”.[18] When I was a child
growing up in West Berlin, this was one of my favourite events. I
loved to go there and see all those happy animals.
picture
3: kuh, experiment in public space #3, January 17 2002, Breitscheidplatz Berlin
On
January 16th kuh was placed in front
of the main entrance to the Internationale Gruene Woche at Masurenallee Berlin
— it was able to stay about 20 minutes there, the biggest interest undoubtedly
being expressed by the police.
The
third experiment took place on the Breitscheidplatz, a central square in Berlin
West on January 17th. Being located once more in another district, ,this
time a permission to temporarily exhibit a sculpture for two hours was issued.
Two
weeks later a competition for the the Max-Ernst-Preis was announced in Bruehl,
a small town south of Cologne, and there was an open call for entries. All the
artwork had to be submitted to the local town hall, so the kuh was entitled to stay one week there.
In
Bruehl the conservative party wrote a press release to immediately remove the
‘cow’ from ‘their’ town hall, while on the other hand the politician who was
responsible for the art prize backed it up and explicitly refused to execute
censorship on any submitted piece. Triggered by this the local newspapers began
hyping it up and asked their readers to write their opinions, which led to some
dozens of letters to the editors. Alexander Kluge has rightly adjudged the
domain of ‘letters to the editors’ as not being an oppositional public sphere[19],
since it is placed and framed within, and controlled by, corporate media
organs. Still, these letters provided some insight into how people thought about
it.
Opinion
mostly polarized.
There were into dismissive letters that accused
kuh of being disgusting, tasteless or degenerate or which thought it should be
forbidden. On the other side people addressed societal questions such as that
of the double standard and displacement mechanisms in contemporary society.
Some saw references to DADA. One question that was repeated by both groups was
“Is it Art?”, the first group being entirely sure that it was not, the second
group being more divided.
Eduard
Trier, a member of the jury, was cited in the Koelner Stadtanzeiger[20] to the
effect that “Max Ernst would probably not have liked it” (commenting on a similar “Max
Ernst wouldn’t have wanted this”- headline published two
days earlierago
in the same newspaper). A doctor invited anyone who liked this kind of ‘art’ to
buy it and place it in the bedroom instead of an artwork by Max Ernst.
Another
reaction was that of an anonymous person, or group of persons, labelling
themselves “citizens of Bruehl”, who brought charges against me and accused me
of
“arousal
of public nuisance; endangering the health of citizens of Bruehl, employees
working in the town hall of Bruehl, as well as all persons brought into
‘contact’ — through a bacterially contaminated animal cadaver; alienating and
misusing public buildings and institutions; disregarding enforced hygienic
statutory orders; violation of ethical principles and injury to the related
feelings of the citizens through the placement of a cadaver.”[21]
Of
particular interest is that the charges spoke of a ‘cadaver’, thereby
demonstrating an unbroken faith in the transparency of the relationship between
a realistic representation and the empirical phenomenon to which it refers. “As
we have learnt, that feeling [of uncanniness] can not arise unless there is a
conflict of judgement as to whether things that have been ‘surmounted’, and are
regarded as incredible, may not, after all, be possible.”[22] But as here the
referent and the signifier overlap, the confusion was intended. On the one hand, the referent — : a
real dead cow, and,
on the other hand,
the signifier —:
the utilized materials.
. — Partly Bbeing partly the mortal
remains of a dead cow, kuhit is a
hybrid.
One
can locate this hybrid on the edge of the objectification of bodies, be they
animal or human. If we start from nature and extend it on to artificial life[23]
we also progress to artificial death: the concept of partial life [24]
implies partial death as its counterpart. If you stuff parts of your body with
plastic — usually the penis, the breasts or the lips — these inanimate
body-extensions are what I would refer to as areas of partial death.
Our nation’s spirit
Recently
George W. Bush announced that “As we face the challenges and opportunities of
this new era, the arts help reaffirm our nation’s spirit”[25] I’m not sure if he
read Herbert Marcuse[26]
in
infor saying this, maybe one of his advisors did — however
he did explicitly acknowledge the political nature of cultural production. We
agree on that, even if I like to think that cultural production is not just
aporetic[27]
but has also the potential to contribute to the ‘consciousness industry’[28]
as a critical and disaffirmative agent.
As
an ‘artist’, or as a self-employed politician or as an individual person, I one
cannot fix society, that is way beyond my reach. At
best I one can function as an observer,
working on having as clear as possible a consciousness and awareness of what is
going on around me, so as to eventually function as a filter or
catalyst, producing tangible objects provokcingative of
cultural debate.
Now
what about the spectacle — is it OK to stage a media extravaganza? Is it right
to utilize sensational methods at all? Is it possible to appropriate
‘spectacle’ as a valid means of social intervention?
“For
Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization, it is a
‘permanent opium war’(#44)[29]
which stupefies social subjects. (...) Debord’s concept of the spectacle is
integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in
submissively consuming spectacles, one is estranged from actively producing
one’s life.”[30]
After Debord, a DIY spectacle is a contradiction in itself, a logical
impossibility. Still, what is considered spectacular in common sense is not
necessarily congruent with the theorized notion of spectacle. Maybe it is
legitimate to rethink the legitimacy and operative value of apparently
spectacular political strategies and to scrutinize their content and
motivation. It is problematic anyway. “For an example of the reversal of the
spectacle, or at least its contradictions and contestation take McDonald’s.”[31]
The stakes are high in the field of Biotech, be it
tissue culture or genetical engineering with its market application of
genetically modified organisms (GMO) in the field of food production (the
agricultural applications of GMO amount to 85% of the biotech market share
today). What makes cautious critical examination particularly necessary is the
irreversibility of genetical manipulation, once there is any gene flow from the
GM crop to the natural ecosystem — upononce released
into the environment, a GMO will reproduce and can never
be taken back. To prevent this, a distinct clear zone of a certain distance
must be established around broad acre cropping systems with a GM crop.[32]
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Being
public figures, artists carry a particular responsibility, and the adaptation —
either naïve or disingenuous — of ‘no harm’ -claims,
paired with a critical posture (a prominent example is the Alba project by
Eduardo Kac[33]),
are as dangerous as projects that shift the focus by romanticizing the problem
or merely aestheticizing the subject matter.
Although
at the current historical moment Biotech companies prefer to operate rather
discreetly and employ very defensive media strategies, these strategies might
change with the political/psychological climate. As has been investigated and
demonstrated in the work of Hans Haacke and others: “Many public relations
opportunities are available through the sponsorship of programs, special
exhibitions and services. These can often provide a creative and cost-effective
answer to a specific marketing objective, where international, governmental or
consumer relations may be a fundamental concern.”[34] This I would regard Cultural production as a
smokescreen of the first grade.
We
have no reason to believe that the role and significance of corporate
sponsorship and structural censorship within the field of ‘high culture’ will
decrease in coming years — but this is not just about its quantitative
occurrence.
One
could argue that it has reached a new qualitative level with indirectly
celebrative shows like Ars Electronica being a prestigious showcase for high
technology (or, in the field of biotech, the show Paradise Now) and directly
celebrative shows like Armani and Motorbikes at the Guggenheim.
Moreover,
there are new marketing methods and government techniques emerging: beyond
being a smokescreen or indirectly or directly celebrative, it is difficult to
avoid (is it even possible?) being staged or staging ourselves
oneself within pseudocritical debates, able ready to
be utilized as a very welcome alibi, smokescreens of the second grade.
There were people who supported
this project substantially.
I want to thank my father Gerhard
Pichler.
I want to thank Pedro Garcia Nogales. I also want to
thank Thomas Bratzke, Jose Martin Garcia de la Torre, Stefan Klaue, Felix
Klein, Buero Neulant, Karin Noack, Klaus Staeck, Thomas Stuessi and Gulsah
Unal.
This essay is deriven from talks
given at the Museum of Contemporary
Art Skopje (December 16 2002), the Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute,Troy NY (October 2 2003), the
Lion Arts Center, Adelaide
(February 27 2004).
It will be published in an
exhibition catalogue (working title: “Art, Culture and Biotechnology”) by the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide
in late 2004.