The Internal Feminine
Text by Laurence A. Rickels
In Saturn (2016) Anna Bone reverses the mythological story as seen in Francisco Goya’s early-nineteenth-century painting Saturn Devouring His Son. The artist/performer ingests “Saturn”, in turn. But there’s still a bone to pick with the consuming/consumed father. Before the phrase meant “to quarrel with,” it kept closer to its literal image: “to pass the time like a dog.” A quarrel isn’t all bark (to fend off interruption) but gives more biting time to the process of getting to gnaw something better.
That reversal is akin to internalization can be witnessed in folk festivals signifying death, rebirth, and transformation. Writing of the carnival scenes in the works of Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin explores a “two-bodied world that gives birth in death,” in which the focus is fixed on the moment of the transfer itself, “which contains the two poles.” In the scene of Gargantua’s miraculous birth, Gargamelle, because she has overeaten tripe, loses her own right intestine, which falls out with her baby. “Gargamelle’s labor and the falling out of the right intestine link the devoured tripe with those who devour them. The limits between animal flesh and the consuming human flesh are dimmed, very nearly erased. The bodies are interwoven and begin to be fused in one grotesque image of a devoured and devouring world” (221).
Bone’s first artistic practice was painting, which she studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts as teacher-trainee scheduled to return to the secondary school system she had only recently departed to give rather than take instruction. Rather than yield to the regression lurking within a rapid turnaround in the transference, however, Bone switched to what is called in Germany “free art,” no longer a painter, but a performance and video artist.
The title of the 2014 installation piece with which Bone concluded her studies at the Karlsruhe Academy and set her compass for a new departure expressed the wish that all viewers and visitors participate and perform: Ein TeilNehmen ist erwünscht. The orthography underscores that in taking part one also takes apart and takes a part. From a gum machine the part you could take along for a few cents was a capsule containing ashes of Bone’s burned paintings, mixed up with vitamin B, hair, and air. A glittering display case contained upended aquariums that belonged to her father in which her mother’s shoes, poised like birds about to take fight, appeared trapped. The birds also had nests made out of the feathers of her mother’s pet bird, rhinestones pried loose from costume jewelry, and shards of a red vase. All of the above was illuminated by light shining through holes in the soles. Up above, affixed close to the ceiling, was the portal from one medium to another one. On a square monitor, a souvenir of Malevich’s icon of painting, Bone’s first video was playing: a close-up of her own mouth chewing, drooling, smoking, and ultimately undergoing metamorphic merger with her father’s mouth.
Bakhtin’s affirmation of the collective symbols carried forward in carnival reaches its high point in his depiction of the celebration and representation of the banquet feast: “Eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body. … The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery” (281).
Wish fantasy, as Freud argues in “The Poet and Daydreaming,” can’t delete its trigger in the present, the point in time from which it escapes for the duration of its jump cut from an idealized moment in the past to the future of fulfilment. Dichtung turns the trauma-trigger into the suffering requisite to identification or empathy and gives fantasy the staying power of a corpus. Dichtung therefore presses a link to mourning. Following Faust’s striving for wish fulfilment, which in Goethe’s version goes all the way down to the realm of the mothers and recoils unto the living end of the hero’s inability to mourn, it is up to the eternal or internal feminine of mourning to sign off where the poet signs his name.
Ein TeilNehmen ist erwünscht | 2015 | Videostills
In Bone’s inaugural performance of a transfer as big as her life, Ein TeilNehmen ist erwünscht, the grotesque body she too summoned in word and image, not only kept to the surface of souvenirs, the wraps and props of a person, and of the screen, but even admitted personalized fantasy involving her own parents. In marking the transfer from painting in the alma mater to performance and video art, Bone installed the father as key object of identification: a daughter would have to invent the father if he didn’t already exist. Via his outsider role as the law, ultimately the law of the couple, the father affords a daughter the way out of the pre-Oedipal precincts of the universal and the collective.
In the lexicon of universal symbols, as Bakhtin elaborates, woman is “the bodily grave of man” (240). All she has to do is lift up her dress, like Baubo, and she becomes “in person the undoing of pretentiousness, of all that is finished, completed, and exhausted” (240). Bone takes woman’s significance as womb and tomb on an update as girl psychology, which is for boys, too. The teen girl leads the way out of the regressed precincts of childhood into a new dialectic between the group and the couple. Her head wrapped in a second artificial skin, the artist/performer in Saturn is ready for her close-up. We watch her push with her fingers the play putty “Saturn” into its container and up into her mouth (and head). The plastic container mediates like a screen the contact with her digits, which, by their literalness, allegorize digital mediation. The artificial nails that adorn her pantyhose cap inscribe the medial fingers as reaching up through her head. Under this pressure the head is the displacement upward of lower cavities associated with generation and/or excrement. The hybrid of anal clay and slick globular prettiness recommends the toy as a teen girl’s unconscious souvenir of early childhood.
Bakhtin follows Rabelais in wallowing in what access excremental excess affords. At the same time, he works his way through to the symbols of decline and birth befitting the universal, the utopian, the collective. The grotesque in Rabelais’s language can create words that perform what is to be conveyed. But for Bakhtin the verbal artistry adumbrates the universal and collective significance of birth. Bakhtin plumbs the party fun and mess of the carnival grotesque for symbols that allow him to maintain “the people” as the ultimate protagonist. For example: “Carnival with all its images, indecencies, and curses affirms the people’s immortal, indestructible character” (256). these festivities extends the message of time into the future.
You can’t kill the messenger of time, the people: “The body of the people on carnival square is first of all aware of its unity in time; it is conscious of its uninterrupted continuity within time” (255). The inclusion of games and astrological predictions in these festivities extends the message of time into the future.
We saw that Bakhtin made but did not mark the exception to the collective and universal when he admitted wish fantasy at the banquet table. The future of prediction is a close fit with wish fulfilment. But Bakhtin stays clear of the prospect that the collective might also be a collection of personal souvenirs. Bakhtin uses history like another fantasy to conceal his own present setting, the parallel universal of Soviet communism. “There was in those days a vivid awareness of the universality of this imagery, of its link with time and the future, destiny, and political power” (235).
The collective symbols, even when dripping excrement, are out in the open. Like the fantasy goal of child’s play, the wish to be big, the collective symbols are readily accessible to the public: the people. With adolescence, however, fantasy goes inside psychic reality and tests the limits of personal narcissism between daydreaming and Dichtung.
In contemplating carnival’s modern incarnation Bakhtin bemoans the withdrawal of “almost every free and utopian folk element” (220). Or in response to Goethe’s eighteenth-century appraisal of the Roman carnival, he criticizes the aspect that seems to him based on a narrow, individual conception of life and death (252). But when Bakhtin nominates “merry time” as another carnival hero a contradiction admits group psychology into his universal picture: “time which kills and gives birth allows nothing old to be perpetuated and never ceases to generate the new and the youthful” (211).
The second life that Goethe’s Faust receives from the Devil’s witches is mixed not in the womb/tomb but in the fountain of youth. What rises up in the course of the Enlightenment (at the latest) is the invention of adolescence, not only as a phase or phrase you pass through, but as the ambivalent foundation of group psychology. Whereas before the child was initiated into marriage or heroism without transition, growing up came to be immersed in adolescence, the tension span between the group (including the group-of-one) and the couple (a dyad not restricted to matrimony but basic as well to the session in psychoanalysis and to mourning). Psychoanalysis fits the narrowing of conception Bakhtin ascribes to the Enlightenment. Its range of reference coincides with the span of time in which adolescence came to be invented (between Hamlet and The Sorrows of Young Werther). With the onset of the Teen Age, then, the conception of life and death was indeed narrower, more individual or personalized.
Psychoanalysis adds to ghosts and suicidal ideation the public secret of daydreaming. In his essay on “The Poet and Daydreaming,” Freud gives away the secret of the grown-up who, beginning in adolescence, cherishes his daydreams as his most intimate possessions and as a rule would rather confess criminal misdeeds than tell anyone about his fantasies (145). Cherish is the word because what daydreaming wishes for is omnipotence, basic narcissism, essential to psychic reality. Child’s play is out in the open: a child’s wish to be big cannot be illicit. Once fantasizing takes over where playing goes under the newly adumbrated and expanded lexicon of wishing proves profoundiy private. But ever since neurotic patients in analysis were obliged to tell their fantasies (and their case histories were published) it became apparent that, all told, no one was alone with embarrassing even asocial thoughts and wishes. (146). “This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated” (145).
If the first literature was the hero saga, Freud wagered, then the hero was originally, especially in the estimation of the spoken-word audience, the author himself, who by his storytelling had rescued the omnipotence of wishing from the dire privacy of the daydream. The heroic integration of the consuming and consumed father is the work of the artist:
The first myth was certainly the psychological, the hero myth. … The poet who had taken this step and had in this way set himself free from the group in his imagination, is nevertheless able (as Rank has further observed) to find his way back to it in reality. For he goes and relates to the group his hero’s deeds which he has invented. At bottom this hero is no one but himself. Thus he lowers himself to the level of reality, and raises his hearers to the level of imagination.
Wish fantasy, Freud argued, must undergo change before being made public. Daydream plus its requisite alteration equals Dichtung. It is not only a question of censorship of the inadmissible. Even in the era of the digital relation it is not the case that every thought or wish is public access. The other side of embarrassing is boring. The medium of wish fantasy is fleeting, to be sure. Daydreams have a fixity that bears repeating but not remembering. While you may well know that and what you wished, daydreaming (unlike night dreaming) doesn’t leave an impression that lasts. It isn’t sufficiently accessible or available on its own, not even for repression.
Bone’s reversal of Saturn Eating His Son comes around the bend hugging the curves of second nature. In Bone’s visual language her symbols or props belong to the costume of desire marketed and consumed upon the bodies of women. The return engagement of revenge gave birth to Venus out of the offal of Saturn’s castration. Bone followed suit, next making Venus (2016), a video-homage to Sandro Botticelli’s late-fifteenth-century The Birth of Venus, in which the goddess rises up out of the mix and mess served on a shell not as baby but as teen babe. Bone edits, juxtaposes, overlaps, and layers images selected from her ongoing collection of what strikes her fancy. We see her legs hovering in an aquarium prop that resembles a shell. Descending air bubbles stir up particles in the shell shape, which drift throughout the composite image.
In her 2015 performance piece Wishes Bone made fleeting wishes by blowing upon artificial eyelashes taken from a glittering container. The lashes that flew counted as fulfilled. The artist/performer gave it eight tries, the number of letters in her complete name, which she thus spaced out as an infinite horizon line.
If in the scenes of transfer studied by Bakhtin “every blow dealt to the old helps the new to be born” (206), then the double moment can still be seen to adhere to the linear tendency of inheritance.
What goes once more around the block of becoming to carry out the old and bring in the new amounts to “the universality and sober optimism of this system” (212). The image of the father eating his children would already appear to contradict the optimism of inheritance. But it is a motif that inheres in the Oedipus Complex as its prehistory and unconscious.
According to Otto Rank, the story of Oedipus fits the topos of the birth of the hero. What the hero enacts without knowing it is the “family romance,” the fantasy that you are only biding your time with foster parents until your true-blue birth right can be restored. Oedipus started out a baby left out to die because the father sought to undo what he was foretold, namely that an heir would be his undoing. Oedipus, rescued and entrusted to foster parents, hears the same prophecy in adolescence, whereupon he loves and leaves the only parents he knows.
Grown strong enough to act on his wishes, young Oedipus walks straight into the prophecy’s fulfilment. He kills a belligerent stranger, his father. When he next solves the sphynx’s riddle and is allowed to pass, the local population’s thraldom to the monster also passes. In exchange the hero wins the throne (until recently occupied, in fact by the stranger, whose life he also took) and the hand in marriage of the recently widowed queen, his mother. Ignorance of patricide and incest is bliss.
But then a plague of infertility besets the kingdom and out pops the oracle. Only by solving the mystery of the former ruler’s murder can the generation impasse be overcome. Oedipus volunteers to solve this riddle too but only follows steps taken by father like son to change the course or curse of destiny: he walks right into it, which brings down the house. It is up to Oedipus’s young daughter Antigone, who ends up encrypted outlaw and foreign body, to undo the posttraumatic delay and, like Frankenstein’s monster, forgive the grief that was given. She performs the long-denied rites of mourning.
(1) Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984): 206. This study, which the author concluded in 1940, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1965. Subsequent page references are to the translation (which originally appeared in 1968) and are given in the text.
(2) My translation of the title of Freud’s 1908 essay “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren.” Page references given in the text are to „Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,“ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Volume 9 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959).
(3) See the second Appendix of Freud’s 1921 study, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Quotation is from Strachey’s translation: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (The Standard Edition, vol. 18, 1953: 136-37).
(4) Otto Rank, Der Mythos von der Geburt des Helden. Versuch einer psychologischen Mythendeutung (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2000).
(5) Freud’s brief essay first appeared, untitled, in Rank’s 1909 heroism study. “Family Romances” (The Standard Edition, vol. 9: 237-41).