Bodies Meat Objects

Posted by admin on December 2nd, 2006 filed in art

Dave and I had a gig in London a couple of months ago, we killed some time in the Tate Modern where we came across the work of Inka Essenhigh.

Long ago these bodies lost their spatial structures and became meat, the bodily material of Essenhigh’s Figures. Each image or field presents a series of bodies, collections of deformed and contorted individuals. These fleshy agglomerates display an inhuman athleticism, elasticity, and overtly permeable flesh.

Born Again (2000)

Kate Dancing (2002) presents the morphological athletics characteristic of Essenhigh’s work; we see an ass detach, autonomous anus and cheeks roam freely throughout the field. Canibalism in Wrestlers (2005) is also an autophagic act, the wrestler’s foot is both entering and becoming the mouth. Throughout her work, (Born Again being a personal favourite) each individual’s charge can be seen to be dependent upon a spatialization of intensity that originates in the burst or pop from which each field spills. This intensity goes both ways, bursting outwards and back in again, a rupture in the material structure of each field feeds the sucking and excretion of each fleshy individual. An initial explosive gesture surges through the material structure of each field, a source of movement that charges each Figure, activating drive, inflating and making firm the otherwise lumpen flesh.

These are bodies that are escaping themselves, at the same time feeding and regurgitating each other. Bodies surge forth through the nearest available hole, a mouth that is as much a part of its surroundings as its own immediate, embodied locality. It is in this sense, in the inseparability of individuals and the wider material structure, that these fields are distinctly virtual, depicting endless becoming amongst a distribution of potentialities. What this obscures, or completely discards, is any gap or minimal difference between Figure and background, any ontological cut that constitutes an individual as such.

Each body passes through one hole or another to become a body ‘born again’. The cannibalized wrestler’s body escapes itself through the mouth of it’s opponent as much as it is the victim of an obscene violence. It is in this escape through violence that Essenhigh’s work is rid of the guilt or pity that such flesh or meat might evoke; there is no responsibility before these bodies. For Deleuze, such responsibility before the scene of violence, bares the mark of the revolutionary-antagonist. It is only in her later work that such a question of violence is raised, as her work becomes increasingly figurative and brings personality into question.

Mob and Minotaur (2002)

Mob and Minotaur (2002) seems to mark a point at which the playful brutality of her earlier work becomes personalised, objects are weaponized and things get vicious. The violence of Born Again (and other works of the 90s) is of a different kind; this is more a scene of becoming, individuation on the far side of a dissolving Self. However, Born Again, more than any other of her works asks the question of whether these are bodies or organs, and which without the other? Here individuation takes place in the transmission of pre-individual singularities and any violence is peculiar to a creative poesis. 2002 appears to be the year in which the object enters the field: not only the weapons of Mob and Minotaur but perhaps more interestingly Kate’s autonomous anus and buttocks or the flying breasts of Arrows Of Fear. There is something in these later Figures that is not strictly of, within or throughout the material structure of each field, an excessive object that operates within yet continues to elude the control of each individual: Essenhigh’s desire takes a turn.