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

My photographic project Mammal Thoughts
strives to represent the human body and
individuality according to Merleau-Ponty’s
corporeal phenomenology where the subject’s
ability to envision the world, and to be of it, is
recomposed in corporeality itself. The raw meat
laid out in the narrative spaces of each
photograph unveils Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the
world, and questions traditional discrimination
between the subjects’ materiality and that of the
world.
It has often been argued that the
introduction of arte povera in the gallery space
was a symptomatic consequence of the
broadening importance of artistic methodologies
concerned with feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism
and psychoanalytic theory.
Regardless of that statement’s supposed truth,
the use of soft, poor, and mundane materials has
been promoted since the sixties as an original
medium able to assemble the new abjected and
degraded identities circulating in modern society.
But the “poorness’ revolution” of the arts didn’t rise
without effectively transgressing the traditions of
purity and prudery of the institution by
foregrounding issues of gender and sexuality in
the art exhibited. More importantly, inasmuch as it
symbolically proposed to violate the hermetic
purity of the laboratory of institutional values, it
signaled the inauguration of an essential counter
movement from within the instances of social
control toward the superficial homogeneity and
continuity of global consumerism and the aseptic
aesthetic of the ever-fashionable self that it
subjugates. To that extent, the use of raw meat in
the Mammal Thoughts photographs certainly
satisfies a will to distance individual representation
from portraying an integrated Self within social
spaces of profuse materiality. Rather contrarily, it
aims at detaching that mythological narrative of
consumptive happiness from the body’s
constitutive relationship with the subject, while
glimpsing at the even greater deficit of meaning
existing today between the two. Thus the lack of
understanding of one’s own materiality occupies
a central role in the representation of each
character in the series, allegedly performing a
paradoxical cogito: to think that one merely is his
own body. The Mammal Thoughts photographs
suggest dialectical possibilities to attempt to
overcome the metaphysical aporia that occupies
the subject’s relationship with his own materiality.
The mutual exclusion of bodily reality and
self-perception actualized in my work recalls the
ever problematic nature of any relational
displacement from presentation to representation,
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as a testimony to Western culture’s mind-body
dualism originated in the 16 th and 17 th century
philosophy of mind. More specifically, I would like
to briefly refer here to René Descartes’ Meditations
on First Philosophy, whose cogito we already
referred to in the present discourse. It is to that
seminal work that we owe the first systematic
account of the mind-body relationship, historically
emblematized in its cornerstone formulae cogito
ergo sum. In the larger metaphysical context of
this writing, Descartes was to ultimately
demonstrate the existence of God after
establishing certain foundations for scientific
knowledge, and jointly to fight the obscurantism
and the skepticism of the minds of his time. As the
founder of rationalist thinking, his demonstration
relied on a particular intellectual process that
Descartes himself coined “methodical doubt”,
which consisted in posing more and more
powerful skeptical hypotheses in order to call into
doubt entire classes of knowledge. Having
eliminated all truths derived from the senses, from
the imagination and many of those which come
from reason, Descartes finally concluded that
there was one thing he would never be deceived
into doubting: the certainty of his own existence,
for something has to necessarily exist that thinks
and doubts in order to be deceived. Thus,
according to Descartes, even the most skeptical
person would have to admit that he is at least a
res cogitans (a thinking thing). But interestingly and
retrospectively then, all that on which our basic
cognitive Western culture is based would
structurally be our own self-consciousness. As in
the perspective of Descartes’ cogito, all realities
would then indeed unmistakably happen to be
just representations. But thinking about vision’s
material nature, the fact that the Cartesian mind
introspects the entire world and its sensible
information through its omnipotent reflection,
eventually synthesizing not only the body but the
Self, provides his philosophy with a problematic,
de-substantiated vision. For it would then
presuppose a mind without eyes or body, namely
a disembodied vision, which in return should be
able to consider one’s own body just as another’s.
If the body resists the mind’s absolute horizon, it
may well be on the contrary because the latter
originates within corporeality, as a physical
understanding of material visibility. However,
refuting Descartes’ idealism leaves one with no
other choice than reversing the terms of his
equation. Therefore, anchoring vision and selfreflection
back into the perceptive materiality of
one’s body appears necessary. But reencapsulating
vision in the body fundamentally
characterizes it as situational and perspectival,