Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

constitutionally unable to embrace its bodily
condition, and is thus condemned to existential
ambiguity. What is then central to the writings of
The Visible and the Invisible is the argument, close
to Heidegger’s ontology, that we need to reinterrogate
our visual understanding of the world
on the premise that ambiguity necessarily prevails
in it. The meat visible in the photographs of the
Mammal Thoughts series embeds such questions.
In fact, it literally asks and answers them
chiasmically, in accordance with one’s decision
to read it from the portrayed individual’s
perspective —where the meat manifests the
world and the subject’s invisibility to itself — or on
contrary if one invests the image as a
representation, pounding the indexical weight of
the meat on ambiguous metaphorical meanings.
Even if Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the bodysubject
and his emphasis upon a pre-reflective
body don’t advocate a return to simple and
spontaneous relations with the physical world, or
to put it differently don’t exalt a nostalgic desire to
rejoin some primordial inherence in Being, his
“indirect” ontology of the Self doesn’t resolve the
difficult question of how one needs to interpret his
body’s materiality. If one cannot understand what
roots existence and thus what provides meaning
to it, except through the fundamental
communication — if not stasis — of his body with
the rest of universal concreteness, a non-space of
philosophy may be legitimately called upon to fill
Merleau-Ponty’s gap. In the perspective of freeing
oneself from what he calls “the paradox of
transcendence in immanence”, the temptation to
simply abdicate the seemingly secondary term of
the body-subject — being a subject — and opt
for a radical bodily ontogenesis is not insignificant.
But the resulting existentiality, filled with carnal
meaning and constituted out of intercorporeality
instead of intersubjectivity, would however
presuppose the annihilation of self-reflexivity, and
thus the death of individuality. Such a radical
perspective certainly doesn’t concern my present
work, but its picturing has consistently inspired
controversial works since the very beginning of
photography, mainly in the asubjective directions
of pornography (from Auguste Belloc to Cindy
Sherman’s “Sex Pictures”) and morbidity (from
Weegee to Joel-Peter Witkin).
Historically, the body as either object or subject
of visual interpretation has persistently
foregrounded explorations of the fundamental
relationship between physicality and Self and their
inextricable interdependency. The notions of
‘being’ and the meaning of ‘body’ have only
recently extended into the psychoanalytic and
the linguistic arenas, interrogating unsuspected
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complexities beyond the body-mind dualism
traditionally prevailing in Western culture’s
philosophical and representational definitions.
Even the recent post-structuralist incursions
in photography didn’t fundamentally change our
conception of the body, while nonetheless
acknowledging its deconstructive nature through
the subject’s historicity and the social prism of
sexuality, as in the works of Robert Heinecken or
Richard Hamilton. The ontological wonder at the
body and at its ambiguous belonging to both
subjectivity and the object world hasn’t changed
or been resolved. Aside from early kinesthetic,
anatomical and pseudo-anthropological uses of
photography, and not considering the modernist
lyricism of formal purity and its long lineage of
practitioners (up to Lucien Clerge, Barbara Crane
and Ralph Gibson), body representations often
branched between morbid, sexual or racial
convolutions (Hans Bellmer, Robert Mapplethorpe,
Lynn Davis), social observation or conceptual reappropriation
(Humberto Rivas, Rineke Dijkstra,
Bruce Nauman), a literal adherence to the body’s
material essence of hair, flesh and skin (Robert
Davies, Yves Trémorin, John Coplans, Holly Wright),
and eerie scenarios inherited from the Dada and
Surrealist traditions (from Oscar Gustave Rejlander
to Jerry Uelsmann), the latter group mainly
succumbing to the great temptation of
dematerializing the body toward its identification
with unconscious, soul or mind.
The point of such an analytical — albeit
arbitrary and probably too rigidly categorizing —
account of the photographic body, is that the
fabric of vision still problematically relies on the
mind-body dualism, which in the philosophical
perspective of the Mammal Thoughts doesn’t
coincide with the integrative fabric of the body’s
reality. However, few artists successfully managed
to incorporate in their work the body’s ontological
and ethical ambivalence as both subject and
object of the world, and so not only developed
an entirely different aesthetic of that relationship,
but more importantly inscribed its viewpoint upon
the viewer’s position. Lucas Samaras, who
consistently embedded the body image within
the material texturality of the Polaroid print through
his manipulation of the film’s layers, appears to
me as one of them. The fact that most of his work
consists in self-portraits literally illustrates my
argument for an envisioning of the subject by the
seer as neither simply corporeal nor
transcendental. Photography here embeds the
artist’s impossible vision of a disembodied selfreflection,
what Merleau-Ponty would term a
hyper-reflection, that same existential modality of
perception that the characters of the Mammal