| The project focuses on the aesthetically mediated body by exploring the use of medical visualization techniques, such as X-ray, ultrasound, and endoscopy, in contemporary art. It will compare the artistic articulation of experiences of embodiment and subjectivity through medical imagery with general reflections on the body and aesthetics as developed in contemporary French philosophy. The central questions of this project are: What can art works deploying medical imaging technology or imagery teach us about the way we experience subjective embodiment? What do they tell us about the mediation of the body? How should these experiences be conceptualized philosophically? Traditional philosophical conceptions commonly figure the internal body particularly one s own interior body as a dark continent. The body was part of impenetrable Nature resisting the self-clarifying power of Reason; it could be subjectively felt but it could never be subjectively seen. What could be seen was the interior body as an object, because if a body could be internally inspected it was always someone else s body and before X-ray photography this body was usually a corpse. When philosophers, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, began to question the supposed self-transparency of the rational subject, one's own internal body remained an invisible entity. It was a source of abilities and deficiencies, needs and satisfactions, desires and fulfillment, always eluding regimentation because always escaping the Other's gaze. The unseen interior body accounted not only for the subject's finitude and existential Geworfenheit, but also for its capacities to transgress and liberate. Twentieth-century French thought can be seen as a critique of the metaphysical tradition that determines subjectivity according to the privilege of sight, and this critique implies a distrust of visuality (e.g. Jay 1993). An urgent question arising here is whether this kind of critique accounts for the potential of imaging techniques to see one s own interior body. Do new technical possibilities prompt yet another philosophical conception of subjective embodiment, beyond phenomenology and post-structuralism? When for instance Merleau-Ponty in his later work argues that seeing gives us the closest possible insight in the nature of our belonging to the world, he refers to the fact that there is always a remnant of invisibility in the visible. While seeing itself seeing, the body is never transparent to itself. This opacity renders the body a thing among things, caught in the fabric of the world. What would be the consequences for Merleau-Ponty's ontology when, in seeing itself seeing, the body would be or think to be transparent to itself? The same question may be posed with regard to philosophies that hail the body's capacities for resisting he power mechanisms of an overwhelming symbolic order (Oosterling 1989). Following Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon, we may argue that if the disciplining and normalizing function of the gaze depends on the subject's internalization of its surveillance, it will be obstructed by what the subject cannot see himself. But what will happen when medical gazes not only penetrate people s skin but when this gaze into the body can also be shared by the subject of introspection? However, as is pointed out in project 3, it would be a simplification to understand the consequences of body imaging for conceptions of subjective embodiment in terms of opacity vis-a-vis transparency. In the first place, medical images as X-ray or ultra-sound images are hard to read and often ambiguous in what they show: their supposed transparency results from a process of representation, interpretation and negotiation in which doctor, patient, instrument and setting each play a constitutive part. Moreover, we encounter those images only intermittently, in specific circumstances and (commonly medical) settings. Therefore, although they can be understood as visual recordings of what is usually invisible to ourselves, they will not be as easily experienced as continuous with our bodies. On the contrary, modern representational techniques seem to create a discord between what is seen and what is felt, between vision and feeling. Lüdeking (1996) compares the feeling these images evoke with the initial feelings of incoherence and irritation a person experiences when confronted with snap shots or video images of oneself, or tape recordings of one's voice. Incoherence and irritation diminish when one becomes used to these 'duplications', but they return as soon as one encounters new kinds of images derived from feelings rather than observation. The image of our own body, and hence our identity thus changes constantly. This change in the relation to our own body, however, is not purely individual. We have learned to interpret these images because they have been disseminated into other cultural domains than the medical one. These considerations suggest that even what is most intimately and directly experienced--one's own body is thoroughly mediated; medical imaging technologies do not only determine the portrayal of man within medical science, but also have a profound impact on experiences and conceptions of subjective embodiment outside of clinical settings. This impact, however, is hardly accounted for in contemporary philosophy. To investigate the possible consequences of medical visual technology for experiences of subjective embodiment in contemporary culture, it is helpful to look at art. In the context of the renewed interest in the body and its visual representation from the late 1980s on, the artistic exploration of medical visual technology of all kinds and its impact on the experience of embodiment has grown into a modest trend. A number of artists (e.g. Zoe Leonards, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, Ian Breakwell, Mike Kelley, Helen Chadwick, Mona Hatoum, Christine Borland, Stansfield & Hooykaas, or Richard Kriesche) use medical images and visual implements as divers as anatomical dolls, X-rays, CAT scans, electro-encephalograms, and endoscopic video images. There have been exhibitions devoted to the topic of the links between art and medical imagery, such as The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (Hayward Gallery, 1997) and the project Art and Brain, initiated in 1994 in research center Jülich by brain specialist Ernst Pöppel and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Although these artists use medical imagery for various reasons, their works often allude to philosophical questions, such as those concerning the boundaries between subject and object, self and other, organism and technology, vision and the other senses. |
