E X H I B I T I O N -E S S A Y S

In 1994 the US government's National Library of Medicine (run by the National Institute of Health) famously produced the first installment of the "Visible Human Project," documenting the body of Joseph Paul Jernigan. The corpse of this 39 year old convicted murderer was frozen and sliced to produce thin slabs of flesh that were then scanned using CT and MRI technologies to produce an array of visual imagery (with the actual body disintegrating into mush once scanned).  A woman's body was later subjected to similar treatment.  The official website for the project notes:

The Visible Human Project^® is an outgrowth of the NLM's 1986 Long-Range Plan. It is the creation of complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies. Acquisition of transverse CT, MR and cryosection images of representative male and female cadavers has been completed. ....

The long-term goal of the Visible Human Project^® is to produce a system of knowledge structures that will transparently link visual knowledge forms to symbolic knowledge formats such as the names of body parts. [1]

The fantasy of "transparent" links between visual and cognitive knowledge -that seeing is knowing, that by taking the proper vantage point and using tools to enhance visual acuity so as to bring huge things closer or make microscopic things visible and so knowable-- has a long history in European culture, finding its apogee in the theories of the Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers.  In his 1435 "Treatise on Painting," Leon Battista Alberti thus theorized knowledge through the act of vision, which was to be concretized by the painter or architect in visual and/or spatial form: "The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.... [Painters should] know that they circumscribe the plane with their lines.  When they fill the circumscribed places with colours, they should only seek to present the forms of things seen on this plane as if it were of transparent glass." [2]

Western representation itself thus hinges on this belief system, which posits seeing as knowing--a belief system pivoting around the observer as physical body in space (as is clear through Alberti's description) and as subject mentally capable of transcribing the sensual knowledge of the world, gathered via the senses of the physical body, into intellectual and emotional knowledge. In fact, it has long been one of the fundamental goals of knowledge in Euro-American culture to come to an understanding of the human body- whether this understanding is visual, psychoanalytical, anatomical, biological, genetic, and/or chemical. 

Marilène Oliver's project is to use the tools developed through the "Visible Human Project" as well as those tools afforded by recently refined MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imagery) and CT (X-Ray based computerized tomography) scanning processes to explore the aesthetic, political, philosophical and conceptual issues posed by both the belief in seeing as knowing and the desire to comprehend the human body through visual knowledge. Oliver herself has argued that such digital imaging biotechnologies produce a new relation of vision that she calls "pivotoptic," noting that this new relation "allows us to enter the information/world at ground level and spin around inside it." Oliver continues to note that pivotoptic vision replaces Albertian laws of perspective with "density of information around the axis," such that the "more we pivot, the faster we spin, the more information we acquire.... and it is impossible to get an overview of data." For Oliver, given this new system, "the only way to find the information we want is to go inside it." [3]

Oliver's project richly explores the permutations and implications of pivotoptic vision, a thoughtful new concept of how visual knowledges accrue and come to mean in contemporary culture. I would suggest, however, that, rather than replacing perspectival vision, these technologies extend it into virtual space. In fact, the pivoting around an axis is, precisely, a reenactment through the terms of internet and computer imaging of the subject centered in vision  (albeit often, as in the case of internet gaming, via an avatar rather than an "actual" body).  So much is explored in physical and visual form in her new works Heart Axis and Womb Axis, two installation pieces that deploy the multiplanar reconstruction tool, which allows the user to set an axis point in the body (the heart and womb respectively in this case) and then pivot visual information around it, to refigure the dataset of "MELANIX," an anonymous female body CT scanned and available to download as a 3D dataset. Approaching these "bodies," we become acutely aware of the centres - or, in Eastern terms, Chakras--of our own bodies (women in particular will respond to Womb Axis, of course).  The fourth (heart) chakra and the second (naval/sacral) chakra are pivotal seats of bodily and emotional health, linked respectively to love and compassion and to desire, sexuality, and procreation. Even if the viewer is not aware of the theory of charkas, she would tend to respond viscerally to the layered body shifting in space via the part of her own body referenced by its axis.

Too the bodies thus abstracted might also remind a seasoned yogi of stretching and exerting her body in various yoga poses. At the same time, they decompose in space, their layers never adding up to the firm, heavy flesh we expect a "real" body to inhabit and enact. The decomposition shatters any holistic sense of the body particularly on close-up view at which point these arrays of transparent polycarbonate sheets covered with vibrant greens and reds are revealed to be composed of tiny squiggles.  Approximating the doodles of a bored or psychopathic draughtsman (filling in an existing contour with obsessive and repetitive swirls), the squiggles of course "represent" the intricate layers of flesh that comprise the organs of the human body.  But the mode of representation has complex implications. The lines and shapes are a digital reconstitution of the X-Ray, a pattern of 0's and 1's arranged via digital imaging to indicate the exact original composition of the various parts of the body. 

By re-working such representational systems in her work Oliver explores the shifting relationship between bodies (the body photographed; the body of the artist; the body of the viewers), visual imagery, and knowledge.   While most theorists of digital imaging have tended to argue that it is not indexical, that the digital relation breaks the material connection between (in this case) the body and the image, art historian Laura Marks argues for a more complex understanding.  As Marks notes, digital technologies are not exactly indexical but they do maintain a material relationship to the things they document or encode:   "within digital circuits, electrons continue to exert themselves in analog ways.... Although it no longer bears an analog relationship to its initial object, the digital image relies for its existence on analog processes [such as photography] and on the fundamental interconnectedness of subatomic particles," which convey the signals that comprise the image and enable it to resemble with precision the "original." [4]

Oliver's description of the relationship between this vision and the information it provides- the necessity of going inside information--defines something radically new about how we approach the world now that such precise imaging technologies seem to promise an infinite array of information about (in this case) the body.  Heart Axis and Womb Axis seem both to put us "inside" the body and to defer the possibility of our ever attaining a holistic rendering that makes full sense of it. The question that is productively begged by Oliver's work is whether this seemingly infinite array actually brings us any closer to "knowing" the body (as a specific subject or a universal sign, as promised by the Visible Human Project) than Alberti was through his model of painting.

What Oliver's project ends up suggesting, in fact, is that the multiplication of images, and the fact that they are (in one form or another) "photographic," digitally accurate and precise, " rather than painterly brings us no closer to "knowing" what constitutes the human than did Alberti's "cone of vision" model (the claims of the Visible Human Project, noted above, notwithstanding).   Her project also points to the limits even of the concept of visual knowledge itself: for what exactly is it that we seek to know from looking at the body?   Simply its mechanical secrets (as in physiological branches of biology)? Its chemical workings (chemistry)? Or, more likely, its role as a substantiation of the "subject" of the body herself (as in psychoanalytic models, the "identity" and "selfhood" of, in this case, MELANIX - paradoxically, an anonymous female).

Oliver's 2001 I Know You Inside Out, which made use of the "Visible Human" data printed onto sheets of acrylic in order to (in her words) "put him [Jernigan] back together" again, [5] both mimics and mocks the pretensions of the project's official website - the aesthetic rendering of Jernigan's body is no more or less "truthful" than the 1871 cross-section CT images available (for a fee) through the website.  Her Family Portrait, 2003, in which she had herself and three additional family members MRI scanned (at 90 scans per body) and then printed life-sized onto acrylic sheets, reconstructing these in layers to approximate the bodies in space, also intervenes in these structures of knowledge and belief. Family Portrait reconstructs bodies out of the multiple scans; rather than delivering each family member to us in some "truthful" form, the piece renders instead ghostly traces of presence.

Even more than the melancholic effect of analogue photography (noted with such eloquence by photography theorists such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag), Oliver's Family Portrait points to the inevitable failure of representation to secure the immortal existence of the "real" subject (its tendency, instead, to mark inexorably the retreat of the person always already into the past, her date with death always imminent if apparently deferred momentarily through the image). [6]   Oliver herself has noted the melancholic personal dimension of this project for her. The four bodies hovering like ghosts in the space of the gallery and their contingency on perception and the engagement of others is made evident through the fact that they shift in space, disappearing from some angles while looking almost  "complete" from others. This contingency marks the impossibility of their actual togetherness as a family: her parents divorced long ago, and all of them live across the globe at this point. [7]

In her new work Oliver takes the relationship between the body and technological imaging processes and animates it even further. Through the use of a Macintosh-friendly freeware DICOM viewer system called OsiriX (which includes the multiplanar reconstruction tool noted above), she takes existing CT-based information and cuts through it along multiple axes, exploding its static informational status as horizontal slices and making it (in her words) "pirouette around internal or external axes," thus animating it in three dimensional space. [8]   In Dervish she makes use of the MELANIX CT dataset. Evoking the "pivotoptic" gaze noted above, she animates the body of MELANIX in three dimensions--and each of the five reconfigured MELANIXes pivots around a different axis (centre, spine, belly button, left side, right side). The resulting installation is again a ghostly refiguring of a body in space in multiple forms (each of which, as she notes, offers a "differing encounter... with the body" [9] ), one that begins with purely virtual digital code, reconstituted and manipulated through the OsiriX software, materializing it in physical form.

But what, in 2007, does "purely virtual" mean?  Can we assume that there is a distinction between a "real" or "material" body and a "virtual" one? As Marks's theory suggests, there is not so clear an opposition between the virtual (or digital) and the analog--both enfold information, and rely for their appearance and form on "the fundamental interconnectedness of subatomic particles." [10]

In fact, the most important insight afforded through an encounter with Oliver's work, I want to argue, is that there is no clear distinction between the virtual and the real, between the coded and the analog, between the body and representation (clearly, in terms of the latter, the very existence of these datasets, based as they are in the case of the Visible Human Project on documenting micro-slices of human flesh now dissolved, begs the question of how different these latter two are).  First of all, on an experiential level and in phenomenological terms, as Oliver notes, scanning and manipulating images that emanated originally from a fleshed body (or corpse), in itself affords an exchange that redefines her relationship to the bodies of others and thus to herself ("I have been able to invest myself and my ideas into it.... I wanted to create a sculpture that ... exposed not the body itself but that exposed the vision that is seeing that body." [11]

Secondly, in terms of theories of representation, we have come far from the Platonic and modernist belief in that there is a "real" body that is then secondarily (and in an inferior way) rendered through representational means.  As Judith Butler notes, bodies "matter," but their matter does not secure their meaning or truth; nor is the "material" body somehow more "real" than the representational one. Both are equally discursive, and reciprocally determined in relation to the world:  "As a projected phenomenon, the body is not merely the source from which projection issues, but is also always a phenomenon in the world, an estrangement from the very 'I' who claims it." [12]

The bodies in Oliver's works are "projected phenomena," and aggressively so. They are clearly representational and yet also vaguely "material" (they exist in space; they are recreated from photographically precise images of sections of bodies).   By concretizing aspects of MELANIX's body through the maquettes in her new Grand Finale project, for example, Oliver further explores the tension between the "real" or "material" and the "virtual." What does it mean to make solid objects - tiny colored transparent "bodies"-- out of informational animations based themselves on an anonymised body of a woman we can never "know" (either as a person or as a biological entity, in spite of the detailed photographic information available)? 

Oliver's new work points to the tension between knowing and not knowing, between seeing and knowing; it also ultimately exposes the tension between our desire to know the other and our desire to have him (the beloved, in particular), which in turn links up to our desire to know (ourselves) and to be in some stable way, usually defined in our culture through a relationship to a body that secures us.  By wanting to know the body of the other we hope to reveal something fundamentally true about ourselves, just as by wanting to have, to love, the other we yearn to know ourselves.

While other artists and entrepreneurs have explored these tensions to different effects--from Orlan's public plastic surgery events from the past decade, in which she has her body flayed and reconstructed with scalpel and stitches, and Mona Hatoum in her brilliant 1994 Corps Étranger, in which the viewer is confronted with video footage of Hatoum's interior body taken through a anthroscopic video camera, to the ridiculous but also menacing plastinated human corpses in Gunter von Hagens' recent Body Worlds exhibitions--Oliver takes this exploration further and subjects it to a more extreme interrogation, addressing it on the level of the signifier itself.

While Orlan brilliantly questions our desire to remake our bodies medically in order to match internal or external ideals, and Hatoum questions the boundaries between the inside and outside of the body (and suggests that we cannot "know" a subject through such photographic explorations), [13] and while von Hagen is happy to suggest that his plastinated corpses render the truth of the human body, Oliver continually questions her own motivations and pushes the technologies to their limits ethically and philosophically. [14]   Ultimately, by querying the link between vision and knowledge at the levels of the body and the signifier, Oliver produces works that activate the viewer and encourage her to acknowledge the limits of the fantasy that seeing is knowing. 

As noted, our new regimes of digital imaging and globalised circuits of information exchange exacerbate the tendency in the West to disembody vision, adequating it with knowledge itself. Laura Marks notes that a haptic approach to vision "might rematerialize our objects of perception," leading us to an awareness of how we "change in the process of interacting" and thus reembodying vision. [15]   Oliver's project engages us in what Marks calls a haptic visuality, evoking an erotic relation that returns us to the politics of an embodied relation to the world:

By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of myself..., losing myself in the intensified relation with an other that cannot be known. ... I lose myself as a subject (of consciousness) to the degree that I allow myself to be susceptible to contact with the other.... What is erotic about haptic visuality, then, may be described as respect for otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other. [16]

This "respect for otherness" is completely lost in van Hagens' Body Worlds and the Visible Human Project - both of which purport to deliver the "truth" of the other by rendering his body in explicit (and excruciatingly precise) detail, while in fact evacuating the bodies of whatever (unknowable) experiences and emotions  made them human while they were animated in and alive. [17] But the respect for otherness is precisely what  Oliver expresses both in her written descriptions of these new works in "Le Grande Jeu" and in the projects themselves. Explicitly acknowledging the impossibility of knowing the other through visual (or bio-technological) means, no matter how "advanced," the works in "Le Grand Jeu" render these mostly anonymous bodies in tender and (in Marks's terms) erotic ways. Noting herself that she gives as much as she takes with these works ("[t]he more time I spend working with and through computers the more I feel I they way I interact with others and even myself is changing. I definitely have both a physical and a virtual reality but I am still not confident about who I am in the virtual reality - am I a digitised version of who I am in physical reality or someone very different?,") [18] Oliver's project sparks us to an awareness of both the limits and the infinite possibilities of our connection to other bodies in the world.

 

 

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