The Empathetic Move: The Spirit of the Carnivalesque
by Caitlyn Burford
Originally published in Issue 07 of Manor House Quarterly: MYTH.
A frock of red hair falls across the forehead of an infant in Patricia Piccinini’s sculpture “Newborn” (2010). She lies on a possum pelt, quietly sleeping with her flipper hands wrapped tightly around her body. What is she? Is she human? The peaceful creature exists in an in-between space, in between gender, in between human and non-human, in between the mythical and the real, the magical and the actual. What is she?
She is a queer creature.
I first encountered the artwork of Patricia Piccinini at The Frist Center in Nashville, Tennessee in the art installation “Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination” (2012). I was immediately taken by her work, recognizing the tumultuous and fragmented emotions that I wrestled with when I was confronted with her characters. They were alarming, just as they were comforting. What was initially ugly, grotesque, and unfamiliar was also a kind and gentle beauty spun with an element of magical realism. Her pieces are hyper-real creations that question the expansion of technology, the influence on birth and reproduction, and human evolution.
Within each of her sculptures, the audience must continually ask, “What is human and what is creature?” The deliberate line between the two fades into obscurity.
I am drawn to her work to explore human interactions with the creature, or the Other, and find hope in Piccinini’s portrayal of the gentle embrace between humans and/or creatures. To delve into her sculptures, I want to first examine the creation of the “normal” and “abnormal” body through Foucault’s (1975) lens of socialized institutional power. Next, I will look into Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1941) analysis of the grotesque body and the carnivalesque celebration to understand how Piccinini’s creations offer an escape from normative aesthetics. Finally, to conclude with how Piccinini’s scenes can redeem the abject body through the hopeful embrace of human and creature.
The Non-Monster and the Mother
“The Long Awaited” (2008) is one piece that I have thought on for quite some time. In this sculpture, a creature rests her head atop a well-dressed young boy that lies beside him. The creature smiles just slightly and her round belly protrudes over the bench. From her head, long silver grey curls fall over the boys lap and he runs his fingers through her hair. His right arm is draped over her arm, which extends into a webbed hand full of fingers. Below her waist, her body becomes almost mermaid-like and her toes merge into an elongated flipper that hangs over the edge of the bench. What is striking about the image is not the webbed fingers or toes, nor the large head of the creature. She is not a monster. What is striking is the embrace between her and the young boy. Portrayed as a monster, the creature would have little influence on the spectator, but would fall into the ranks of magical beasts, ogres, or other supernatural or prehistoric beings. Monsters are not unfamiliar artistic terrain and we are allowed to confront them because we have constructed a space for them to inhabit; they are allowed because they are evil, they are dumb, the heroine defeats them and they exist in a realm that is not human. They are other-than-human, just as they are less-than-human and they are acceptable only because it is acceptable to treat them with disgust. This is how the audience has been conditioned to treat the monster.
But Piccinini’s creatures are not monsters, and it becomes unacceptable to treat them with disgust when a young boy cradles the creature’s head on his lap. Many stories could grow out of the scene but my own guess (as good as any) is that the creature is a beloved elder and caretaker of the boy. As she gets older, she grows wearier and her death is nearby. Though it is not the victorious death of the conqueror over the monster. Rather, it is the tragic death of the lost mother. It is a death that is an intrusion into the peaceful quiet embrace of the scene. Here, the creature cannot be a monster, and cannot inhabit the space of the monster archetype. So, the audience experiences an abrupt reaction, a feeling that cannot be easily described and an emotion that you cannot easily pin down. The creature exists in a strange space, between monster and mother, between natural and unnatural, between real and imaginary, and between the other binaries that we use to create and expose “appropriate” reactions. The creature in “The Long Awaited” (2008) hides in the middle. She is the spirit of the carnivalesque.
Foucault and the Aesthetic Regime
In her work, Piccinini’s central focus is not on the creation of the creatures themselves, but in the embrace between them. In an interview (Fernandez Orgaz, 2007), Piccinini describes her intention stating, “Empathy is the heart of my practice.” She calls out a behavioral response that may be unfamiliar when encountering the Other. Through social structures and cultural habits, we humans are raised to act predictably. Through growth we learn how to perform our lives, how to determine emotions, and how to behave properly to fit within social institutions. When we walk into a church, we realize there is a set of rituals to abide by and we learn to order our body appropriately. Even without a connection or understanding of the religion itself, walking into a cathedral, your voice will grow quieter. You will move slower. These restrictions of bodily control change when our environment changes. In a restroom, in a bedroom, in a restaurant, we have learned how to participate in a ritualistic dance that comes as easily as a second nature and therefore goes unnoticed. When a police officer instructs us to raise our hands above our heads we do so immediately, because this is what we’ve been taught to do. Freud calls this the ego, influenced by the super-ego that regulates our chaotic natural state. Foucault calls this the body, disciplined by structural powers that command us into docile creatures, eager to obey authority.
By effect, we also learn how to identify those who behave “improperly.” (I use quotations to make the distinction that what is “proper” and what is “improper” is a product of social constructions and relative to an environment.) There are those that do not abide by the structural order of how to behave “properly.” If a person enters a church and shouts at the top of her lungs, that body becomes abnormal and improper. The person that does not submit to police authority becomes a criminal. These “improper” bodies become the faceless body of the Other and we relegate them to state authority. To again use Foucault’s critique, set up in Discipline and Punish (1975), unnatural bodies are given to state institutions where they lose their own autonomy: to prisons, to hospitals, to schools, to military barracks, and to other structural institutions who hold the privilege of controlling these abnormal, unnatural bodies that break outside of social norms. To lock up a “normal” body would be an absurdity and the people would revolt. To lock up an “abnormal” body is justified, and business as usual. So, the role of the state becomes much easier. It does not have to convince the people that it’s abuse of power is warranted, it simply has to convince the people that certain bodies are “abnormal.”
This construction of the abnormal body is why we had insane asylums filled with women diagnosed with hysteria because the diagnosis allowed the state to lock them up, rather than confront its own misogyny. This is why we currently fill private prisons and detention centers with people denied food, water, and health services because the state has labeled them “illegal” and “undocumented workers” and they become abnormal, criminal bodies removed of their personhood.
The aesthetic of normalcy creates the abnormal body wrongly accused, the immigrant body, the criminalized body, and the queer body.
We have seen this in the twentieth century medical trend in removing the intersex body from society without consent, surgically altering reproductive organs to fit into a binary of male or female, as anything other is seen as “abnormal.” Disabled bodies lose their rights and are subject to hospitalized institutions; in the same way prisoners lose rights over their own bodies. The queer body, existing in spaces between these binaries has little space for freedom.
I want to use this brief commentary of Foucault to expand on the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” bodies. The aesthetic creation of what is normal (and by extension, free), and what is abnormal (and by extension, an object of state authority) cannot be ignored. The distinction between the two is not simply based on action, but is an aesthetic portrayal. The monstrous body is often the abnormal body. Cultural critic and philosopher Jacque Rancière lays a foundation for critical visual studies in his work The Politics of Aesthetics (2004). In this book, Rancière discusses social constructions and how they come to appear “natural.” As mentioned earlier, our behavior in a church becomes naturalized behavior and there is a distinction between a natural body and an unnatural body. This distinction is communicated through aesthetics, or the study of what becomes the preferable visual aesthetic and how it is received. As Franz Fanon (1963) so aptly states, a naturalized image creates “aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo…which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order” (pp. 3–4). Again, we are drawn back to the Foucault critique of power and Fanon and Rancière take us into the aesthetic regime of that power.
However, Piccinini’s work radically challenges these distinctions between the “normal” and the “abnormal” body. She uses creatures that would typically be understood as monstrous, grotesque, or unnatural bodies and places them in normal spaces. By effect, the abnormal body cannot be understood as monstrous, but as beloved. Piccinini’s work displays many of the private spaces that we have learned to inhabit appropriately but fills them with an empathy that is societally in-appropriate.
The Grotesque Body and the Celebration of Carnival
In an interview with Laura Fernandez Orgaz, Piccinini describes her work as a commentary on the rapid growth of technology and its consequences, intentional or otherwise. In her own words, her work “follows the increasingly permeable border between the artificial and the natural.” Many see it as a cautionary tale about the not-so-distant future and the potential consequences of technology and evolution. Piccinini claims that her sculptures are neither futuristic nor cautionary. Rather, the artist claims she loves it when people realize that her work is actually about today. The depiction of the creatures is not a science fiction future, but a material picture of what happens now. While her specific sculptures may be imagined, the evolution of human beings and the influence of technology on human development is happening and we are already beginning to question the essence of humanness and break down the distinctions between human and creature, normal and abnormal.
Piccinini’s work is most certainly about today. Specifically, I am taken to the places around the world where women give birth to still born fetuses or children without facial features and treat them with love. In their eyes, there may be an empathy similar to the maternal care that Piccinini portrays. Women in Guiyu, China face the consequences of US consumption of electronic products when electronic garbage is sent to the city where it has begun to leak toxins into the especially vulnerable wombs of the women that live there. Mothers in Vietnam have been giving birth to children without fingers since the 1970s as an after effect of the US use of Agent Orange, just as Iraqi women currently face similar consequences as the US occupation of the country has left the area wrought with uranium-tipped bullets and the pollution infiltrates women’s reproductive organs. Piccinini’s works are certainly illustrative of today and the rising concerns of birth abnormalities and global pollution (along with technological evolution). But, to go further, they are also about the past. While much of the artists work focuses on technology and evolution in the 21st century, the images brought up in “The Long Awaited” are parallel to an old narrative of how humanity treats the Other. It reveals the maternal character as a loving, albeit monstrous, creature. Certainly, Piccinini’s work is about the present, pulling threads of tragic stories of the past.
While much of Piccinini’s work deals with bioethics and the discussion of human responsibility amidst rapid technological growth, I want to view her work differently, through the literary lens of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and critic of the mid-twentieth century, used literature to examine patterns in the human reality. For Bakhtin, our material existences are largely created through the myths of the stories we tell, and each work of fiction forms our world. One of Bakhtin’s main theories is that of the grotesque body and the carnivalesque.
The grotesque body is a character archetype present in many narratives. In the Tarot, it is the Fool card. It is the Jester in the medieval epics, or the gargoyles built into the architecture of gothic buildings.
The grotesque character is strange, fantastic, and distorted. The grotesque is the abnormal body. But the grotesque is certainly no monster, and in fiction, the monstrous character draws only disgust from the audience. The grotesque draws disgust, as well as empathy and these two emotions juxtaposed together create the grotesque. In opposition to the monster, the grotesque creature is often the most worthy character of story, wrapped up in misfortune. It is Shakespeare’s Caliban, Tolkien’s Gollum, and Sloth from the film The Goonies (1985). The primary element of the grotesque character is the juxtaposition of emotions, as this character, like the “abnormal,” exists in a space between cultural binaries. It exists between male and female, masculine and feminine, natural and unnatural, magical and the real, and is an in-between metamorphosis, existing between life and death, between birth and rebirth. The grotesque character is interesting in that it calls out the flaws in other characters or the problems with established social order. Kind and gentle-hearted Quasimodo becomes the Hunchback of Notre-Dame because he is relegated to solitude due to society’s insincere standards of appearance. Piccinini’s creatures, too, play the role of the grotesque character. Simultaneously frightening and comforting, it is easy to initially view them with revolt, before realizing their gentle nature, turning the thought process back to our human practices and how we treat the Other. As seen in her piece “Eulogy” (2011), a man on his knees holds a creature in his hands and the creature plays the role of the grotesque, riding the line between life and death, disgust and sympathy, ultimately calling the audience to mourn with the man over the potential loss of the creature. Again, Piccinini’s work begins to challenge and question human responsibility and the future of evolution.
Bakhtin claims that the grotesque character is often the most important character in the story because of the escape it allows for the audience, allowing them to exist in a contradictory space outside of social constructions and view them objectively. The character allows us to question aesthetic norms. This outside space is what Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque, an event that overthrows social regulation and restrictions. It is a liberatory celebration that reclaims the power of the people. In carnival, the grotesque character becomes the hero, as the social restrictions of what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” fall away. In this limbo space, there is no police, no military, no government, and no education system and debauchery and revelry reign, and the chaos reveals the underside of society, rampant with social taboos and play. But in this chaos there is a redemption and celebration. Carnival is an imaginary world that temporarily abandons the real world in exchange for a temporary utopia, which is lost when the carnival ends and the people re-enter the “real” world. The creature is marginalized in the real world, but embraced in carnival. The easiest connection to make to the spirit of this celebration today would be in the celebration of Mardi Gras, where the Jester becomes a hero and the grotesque is celebrated (although Bakhtin notes that Mardi Gras is still very different from the carnivalesque because it is largely a spectacle viewed from the outside, where everyone is a participant in the carnival celebration).
Piccinini’s work is not a traditional depiction of the carnivalesque, as her scenes are a private and peaceful space, certainly not a debaucherous celebration. Yet, these scenes still fulfill the role of the carnival. Her sculptures are a temporary escape from the “real” world, which treats the abnormal body with disgust and is a brief hiatus into a hyper-real (yet imaginary) world that allows for grace and empathy and celebration of the grotesque and its quiet and gentle spirit. In her work, the creatures become heroic. In these scenes that take place in an outside space, we are given the chance to experience a brief utopia of harmony between humans and creatures and when we leave Piccinini’s world and re-enter our own, we encounter very real “creatures” and abnormal bodies who are removed from society. Drawing on the empathy represented in Piccinini’s work, we can hopefully reverse this social order and embrace the Other.
To bring Marx into the fold of discussion, humanness is wrapped up in our social-ness; we become human in relationship with one another. Marx’s critique of late consumer capitalism is that our labor alienates us from what we produce and alienates us from connection with other humans, leading to a demise in the human spirit. In carnival, we labor together in creating a celebratory space, despite class, race, and difference. This connection allows for a revival of the human (and the evolutionary creature of Piccinini’s work) spirit. For Bakhtin, Carnival is a temporary utopia and escape from societal structures. For Marx, it could perhaps be a glimpse into a utopian possibility of a world where we remain connected to one another.
A Final Word
“Like most myths, they are often cautionary tales, but they are also often celebrations of these extraordinary beasts” (quoted from Piccinini in Fernandez Orgaz, 2007). The cautionary tales are learned from the extraordinary beast, as the grotesque character becomes the transformative beauty, encouraging us to encounter the Other with grace and find redemption in our own human condition. While I am engrossed with Piccinini’s work and affected by her creations, I question her limited portrayal of race and ethnicity within her work. Most of her sculptures are of white people and similarly aesthetic creatures, as though whiteness is a prerequisite for technologically influenced evolution. I think there is an important element of race that is missing from the discussion. Specifically in light of technology and reproduction where women of color are specifically affected globally (due to pollution, electronic waste, uniformed medical control of their wombs, etc.), their portrayals in the discussion of reproduction and technology are uniquely important and often overlooked. Still, Piccinini’s work remains an important and influential glimpse into the not-so-distant future, the hyper-real present, and the narrative stories of the past. Her creatures invoke the spirit of the carnivalesque and allow us to enter into a hopeful utopia of peaceful existence between humans and creatures, and humans with each other.
References
Bakhtin, M. (1965). Rabelais and His World.
Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge MIT Press, 1968. Reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth.
Translated by Richard Philcox. Reprint, New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.
Rancière, J. (1977). The Politics of Aesthetics.
London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
