BARE LIFE
(stripped of the barbed wire, even)
Since so many of us are talking, reading, thinking about ‘bare life’, I will not waste time in getting to the heart of the matter—or, should I say, to finding a heart in it, since beating hearts, vitality or any sense of eros are not easy to spot in this conversation about life. Some will say it is inappropriate. For them, graver subjects are at the heart of the bare life debate—the miserable life of refugees, the indigestible memory of the Holocaust, and the more mundane, if no less menacing, phenomenon of people subjected to what Foucault called biopolitics appear to take up the center of many a conversation. Taking their cue from Giorgio Agamben (and Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt before him) the organizers of the upcoming Documenta have thus set bare life as one key question or point of departure for their thinking on contemporary art and culture. Agamben will tell us that the institution (or reduction) of experience to bare life is precisely how power maintains itself—it strips life of ‘bios’ or human, political power and reduces it to animality. Yet in tandem with confronting these sorry states, it is imperative to reclaim bare life for thoughts and sensations that would re-orient experience in a yet-to-be-named direction. What I am proposing is a thinking of bare life without the resort of fast-forming theoretical habits. To think bare life in terms of biopolitics may inadvertently strengthen the swelling ranks of automatons (professional critics being in gravest danger of this designation). In all our analysis of the pernicious workings of biopower, are we not ultimately in search of (and affirming a belief in) the good life—a better, fuller, more humane and harmonious, active and enlightened existence? Is this not the heart of the matter?
If Agamben addresses the dynamics of the Nazi death camps, not as an inhumane anomaly, but as the founding metaphor for the modern tendencies of democratic society—fundamentally, an institutionalization of a life void of bios or any degree of the autonomy that ensures political life—then it is not to arrest this sad state and fetishize it, but always to point beyond its contradictions.[1] “Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life,” he states, “and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism—which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle—will remain stubbornly with us.”[2] Evidence of this movement beyond and even hints of a direction may be found in Agamben’s later study, The Open: Man and Animal (translated in 2004), wherein zoé—the ‘basic life’ that man shares with animals—is seen, not as an utterly de-humanized state, but as a happy ending (namely, Ezekiel’s vision of the end of humanity as recorded in a thirteenth century Hebrew Bible found at the Ambrosian Library in Milan).[3] To think of bare life without the barbed wires—without equating it to the inhumane conditions of the Camps—to consider bare life as vitality, something that expresses the fundamental dimension of life that is shared with animals, plants, geological forms and monsters continues to be the challenge of Agamben’s thinking.
While they may act as inspiration, the strength and strange ambiguity of philosophical terms tend to present a trap for discussions of contemporary art. Especially when confronted with works that hint at something very basic, primal and unspoken in life—as is the case with the direct, though unpredictable, and (most often) organic forms of Valérie Mannaerts, which I will be attending to here—there is a strong temptation not only to use, but to solidify the vertiginous terminology of philosophers like Agamben, so as to fill the psychosomatic void that initially attends the artwork. Agamben will not be the helpful guide in situating the central thrust of Mannaerts work (i.e. the question of life and vitality). While I will attempt to keep with the contradictory rhythms and rhymes of his thinking, which always tend towards a void and an openness, it would be pretentious to align Mannaerts and Agamben’s particular political thrust and metaphoric universes. Mannaerts’ work offers its own forms of basic/bare life, vitality and eros. Indeed, it prompts a consideration of life as something beyond or before the political terms set out by Agamben. No, we are not back to universal claims here, but approaching a universe of rare organs where life cannot be politically instrumentalized.
RARE ORGANS
To begin then, some food for thought: a quote from Sylvia Plath’s Three Women (a poem for three voices), scribbled under an accumulation/collage by Mannaerts, peeking through from underneath a characteristic accretion of mustard coloured latex interspersed with magazine cutouts of lips, eyes, fiery tongues (never a full body). It reads: “I have stitched life into me like a rare organ.” This notion of life as something that is somewhat alienated from human experience, something strange or rare, strikes me as a type of key to Mannaerts’ formal logic. Her work remains all about life, but life that is rare-ified or not taken for granted.
Now, to quote Sylvia Plath in a work of art is a loaded gesture. And the above passage is not the only time that Mannaerts has invoked the poet—another collage has the following lines from Plath’s Mirror:
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful— [4]
To trust that Mannaerts, in invoking the personified mirror, is confronting herself as a ‘woman’, presenting a highly subjective, introspective view of a private life, is to avoid the strangeness of the poem. It is all about an object that is not a person but talks, thinks and sees, has a conscious life. Indeed, the last lines could have been taken out of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal: “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman/Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”[5]
Given the emphasis on this rare type of life, it seems imperative to question a frequent misreading of Mannaerts work as a sign of the fraught femininity that has also, perhaps all too hastily, been ascribed to Plath. Read against each other, the artist and the poet provide an open conception of life, where gender—and especially the overdetermination of femininity as a structuring principle of life—is a detour, a distraction and a limitation rather than the clue. To be sure, ubiquitous female forms or the occasional panty-shot are there in Mannaerts’ work, but does this need to occasion musings of a particularly female freedom? Why not consider her work as a working on eros in the most open sense of the term—open up the female’s form to something other than feminist iconography? For all his generosity of engagement and play with identity, this is my one objection to the approach to Mannaerts’ and Sylvie Eyberg’s work by Thierry De Duve, the chief essayist and commissioner of their exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion in the 2003 Venice Biennale. De Duve opens his catalogue essay (which, ironically, is entitled “Silver and Exact”) with a kind of novelistic set up for the project in the form of a recounted conversation between curator and artists, wherein they ask, “And what will it be about?” And then,“He hears himself answering: about the feminine in art making. They are perplexed.” I am too. De Duve rehearses a well-worn concept further on:
The masculine is neutral and universal, the feminine is the other and singular. That’s not what he thinks. He upholds a gendered vision of art making, whether by men or by women. [op cit.] He is interested in the feminine and masculine shares in the genesis of the image, and in their distribution according to the sex and gender of the artist. It’s a long-term historical matter, he thinks, which is in the course of changing. [6]
And for all of his subsequent attempts to reconsider gendered subjectivity, De Duve does not step away from this fundamental question of the feminine and therefore misses the opportunity to follow the artist he is working with towards an exploration of an altogether rare conception of life (one that cannot be so easily grounded in a historical canon).
If it is not a feminism, femininity or other types of gender-trouble that seem to attract Mannaerts to Plath, or to making art for that matter, the poet’s articulate discomfort with her culture’s (and to a large extent our) thinking of existence does seem to offer more food for thought. Plath’s misandry is always matched by her misogyny. With less venom, perhaps, but never an absence of violence (more on this shortly), Mannaerts has pursued Plath’s confrontations of gender division and confusion of subject/object. The actual forms that the artist produces seem to swallow this discomfort, and sometimes they swell with it. Received notions of existence as a gendered and otherwise historically determined concept are difficult to detect; though images from popular media are present, they are imbedded in primordial looking matter or transformed into out-of-this-world mixed or monstrous forms.Familiar forms are not so much opposed head on or deconstructed, but melted, reformed or totally exchanged for something that often looks…well downright difficult to find words for. There is a persistence of piles, stacks, accretions, mounds, heaps, rounded masses, constructions of uncertain dimension, at once flat and bulbous, resembling nothing we really know—in short, rare organs.
Mannaerts forms are somewhat ‘wild’ looking stuff, quickly executed and void of sentimentality. Although the argument here is that there is a kind of bare life imbedded in the work, discovering life here does not start with stripping ourselves to our bare essentials, but with a search for something that eludes us. Life as this ‘rare organ’ may be thought of as a kind of appendix to everyday existence that needs to be continually sought after and grasped. And so many times Mannaerts has shown us this act of grasping, especially with her disembodied hands—be it a mirror (the “silver and exact” reflection of life), a vigorously bouncing tennis ball (the embodiment of energy transfer), paper punctured to form a galaxy (the two-dimensionality of paper as the plane of projection par excellence is here deformed), geological finds (more on this shortly) or, last but not least, thin air. The presence of a kind of basic life force is affirmed, but never pinned down. It remains a kind of blank.
BLANK STARES, HUNGRY EYES AND OTHER APORIAS OF CRITICAL DISTANCE
To speak clearly of this ‘blank’, without necessarily filling it, is perhaps the most critical task of anyone trying to think through the kind of knowledge that can be made available to us through artworks.[7] This blankness, as I can best term it, signals—and is a catalyst for—a distinct type of knowledge that can only take form in the uncertain dimension of the artwork. (Of course, although its primary form is not language, this should not stop us from writing/reading about it. Indeed, attempts to confront the fundamental blankness of art verbally may open up the limits of language and of knowledge in the most productive ways.) Theodore Adorno finds a strong articulation of this dialectical potential, when he writes of ‘the truth in enigmaticalness’ of artworks—a phrase that keeps coming to my mind on many an occasion in front of Valérie Mannaerts’ art.
Take, for instance, the 2004 installation Shady Me Shady You, Sculptures with Sunglasses. As its title suggests, the work is all ‘shadiness’, concealment and enigma. First presented at the Galerie Drantmann in Brussels, five larger than life-size, curvy plywood cutouts covered with photographs of Mannaerts’ collages, were loosely configured into a circular screen for as many organically shaped sculptures, each positioned on a rectilinear plinth. The de-forming of dimension I spoke of is in full force here, something that Mannaerts is particularly deft at. Despite the shadiness of her forms, the sculptures were not initially concealed—upon entering the gallery the sculptures on plinths were in fact the first objects to be seen from the entrance so that they fronted their proverbial ‘shades’. To get the full shady effect, a viewer had to step inside the enclosure formed by the plywood side of the sculptures and get immersed in the work. It is only then that the cutouts truly obscured the sculptures and became shades. The forms simultaneously distanced the viewers (from the three dimensional sculptures) and enveloped them.
The resulting space became an aporia of the knowing stance of critical distance—it could not be said that the viewer was ever completely absorbed and forgot herself, nor could it be asserted that he could feel totally in control of this somatic environment. There was a sense (at once cosmic and comical) of the works looking back at you. This is largely because, within the re-photographed collages that simultaneously reinforce and spoil the flatness of the plywood cut-outs, the viewer was faced with a medley of blank stares and hungry eyes: some eyes were disembodied, peering out from a similar type of mass that may have been found to make up the shaded sculptures beyond; others ogled the viewer in cartoony eagerness; still others—one pair visibly belonging to Juliette Binoche—met the viewer squarely, eye to eye. Binoche provided a familiar and ultra modern stance; its degree zero may be found in the measured gaze of the girl in Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergères (1881-1882), which is totally available yet totally blank. This type of blank look paradoxically contains all the gravitas that advertising agencies depend on for stopping consumer traffic—perhaps this is because buried inside the blank look is life in its barest form, a reminder that the question of our nature always eludes us even as it forms our innermost drive.[8]
It should be increasingly clear that by blankness I do not mean minimal white surfaces or other types of diminished visual returns, but rather a transformation on the part of the viewer. This is why, it is perhaps best to clarify ‘blankness’, by considering how, in looking at Mannaerts’ sculptures, collages, films or installations, it is common to draw a complete blank. There is a sense of loosing control over cognition through vision and of this control being replaced with a sense of the work looking at us—a sense of it stripping us bare. That is to say, we can no longer rely on the regular ‘crutches’ we might bring to the viewing experience—ironic, allegorical, historical, political or popular references are not there to guide us through a knowledge of the work. Even when these references supposedly occur (as in the case of the famous face of Binoche) it seems that the image is presented in order to challenge us to look more blankly. The task is to remove habits and quick conclusions and to confront the actress’ face, stripped of its fame.
A shade, in whatever form it comes, is first and foremost an obstacle to vision. If Mannaerts’ multidimensional, layered work is readily perceived as ‘shady’—that is, if it clearly conceals parts of itself and present blanks—what is perhaps more slowly discovered is that we the viewers are as shady as the work. When walking around and into Shady Me Shady You and navigating these somewhat bizarre entities that are ‘sculptures with sunglasses’, our own viewing habits and expectations may form the darkest shades to vision in the room. This, I think, is aggravated in part by the hyper-referential machine (to pop, esoterica or—most often—a devilish combination of the two)found in so many contemporary art works. Art is indeed increasingly understood as a means of dealing with that illusive currency: Information (which, like money, we never have enough of in our daily lives or, if we have huge stores, we have difficulty converting this into capital, i.e. the illusive power of ‘power-knowledge’, because when the pressure is on, our memory fails us).[8] So many art works operating as quotes, reenactments, or inside jokes, rely on and create ‘a community of the informed’. Even when Information is critically presented as a beautiful cryptic mass, as in the work of Hanne Darboven, or as an oxymoron, as in the all too frustrating filing schemas of Art & Language (to name two projects that may be seen as emblematic of the conceptual strain of art making, which lest we forget, was once more commonly referred to as Information Art), it remains a fundamental point of reference, a kind of given of art making nowadays. If the great aesthetic shift of the last thirty years has been the move from an expectation of beauty to an expectation of information, then walking into a gallery today, it cannot be said that we have taken off the rosy-coloured glasses, but simply that we have switched them for another pair of shades. It is this habit of the information machine of art that Valérie Mannaerts’ work seems to be willfully forgetful of. Something else, another type of aesthetic, is at stake.
Even the mention of shadiness in her works’ title should not be taken as gospel—the clue, the alpha and omega. The ‘fact’ of shades is not the end of the story, but just the beginning. Shady Me Shady You: in most of Mannaerts’ work, a binary tension is established between two terms (the artwork and the viewer). Another example of this is the earlier Hit Me With Your Colour Stick (2000), a book of ink and pencil drawings and collages—not untypical girly doodles of the angst-ridden scatological variety—are re-photographed and presented, not as an emotive diary, or a feminist exegesis, but as a ‘colouring book’. We are invited to hit the page—and here, I read the ‘me’ of the work, rather than of the artist qua some psychological case. In other words, we are meant to interfere, transform, invest in the visual material and, most importantly, to put some energy behind it. Violence (like the monstrosity I will elaborate on shortly) is not a pure negative in Mannaerts’ work, but an undecided, undeciphered and necessary ‘life force’. Hit Me With Your Colour Stick is a blank for us to contend with. Whatever shade or hue we choose (or if we choose not to mark up our precious new artist’s book) will reveal more about ourselves than the particular emotive register of the enigmatic drawings.
Mannaerts seems concerned with presenting work that is a living entity of sorts, not some corny version of interactivity that will predictably ‘talk back’ in a given script and make us feel all the more present (but a bit stupider than before), but something that will remain blank and almost breathing, thus fundamentally challenging the ‘liveliness’ in the viewer. A peculiar anthropomorphism pervades much of what the artist presents; even things that don’t look anthropomorphized, such as a book, have this quality of being somehow alive. Rather than revering the images and forms as the sanctified and oh so ‘personal’ marks of an emotive artist to be deciphered and translated—though this is, of course, so often how her works seems to be misinterpreted and further turned into information with which to build a profile of the prototypical ‘young female’—the challenge of the work lies in stripping bare those preconceptions and confronting an artwork as if it was a life, like us. There is a type of reciprocity at work. Or, put in a different way, it seems that the artist wants us to have the proverbial cake and be eaten by it too.[10] (Is this not what a work of art would do if it were a monster?)
MONSTERS, ANTHROPOMORPHY AND THE MORPHING OF KNOWLEDGE
Perhaps the most anthropomorphic of all her works and the ones which most promise (or threaten) to talk back to us (or wink), are the white plaster forms with thumb-prints cum eyes that Mannaerts has deployed since 2005 as sculptures within installations (such as Untitled I, 2005) where the ‘Ghosts’, as she then called them, were distributed across the floor of a gallery with paper ‘Airplanes’ painted black. These enigmatic white forms made for very lively Ghosts indeed—presented, not as singular, still (and dead) subjects of contemplation, but spaced in relation to rudimentary vehicles that lent dynamism to the entire scene. The Ghosts have since become formal muses of sorts for further research into unknown and basic life—in the desert, in the studio/home of the artist and finally now, in the pages of A Prior, as the Strangers in the Night of her project A Monster of Loch Ness Feeling. The Strangers are truly unknowable, blanks for us and for the artist. Their identity and deployment is forever evolving, but in each instance it is close to impossible not to ascribe an anthropomorphic, living, almost human quality, to these simple forms (and perhaps by extension, to the other works, which they are cast against, in these pages).[11] Mannaerts’ works assert a presence that is animate, unpredictable and not as far from the presence of humans as is expected of art. To know what to do with the strangely diminishing distinctions between these various (often monstrous) forms and us, humans, would require a completely different type of knowledge.
Upon review, all the images assembled by Mannaerts for A Prior present themselves as a survey of the artist’s work over the last two years—the messy, layered, globular masses on stools (Pedestals and Rooms, 2006) recall the treatment of very early collage/drawings ca. 1996-2000; the punctured and sewn ‘galaxies’ (Stars and Sky, 2005) have their genesis in Mannaerts’ Untitled (B&W), 2002 , a video presented at the 50th Biennale di Venezia; the Strangers, of course are first found in the already discussed exhibition of Untitled I(Ghosts and Airplanes) (2005); finally her latest sculptural forays are juxtaposed with recently photographed geological anomalies in the White Desert, Egypt (Desert and Bookshelves, 2007). Placing all these works together under the guise of a feeling, and of a ‘monstrous’ feeling no less, lends them an ominous air of mystery. But it is also a generous clue, a way to clarify, the artist’s preoccupation with the nature of monstrosity. On the one hand, presented as they are in a series, with ample evidence of a domestic setting and constructed through the accessible materials of paper, plaster, photos, pastels etc., the forms gain a familiarity that makes it easier to accept the monster’s presence in our midst, however undefined he, she or it remains. On the other hand, despite this familiarity and despite the rational serial format that a book or a journal so often demands, reason is a limited tool for considering the work.
The images of bookshelves—western culture’s primary cipher of Knowledge—seen with the books pushed aside to make room for unnameable figures that are themselves juxtaposed with images of similar nameless forms in the Desert—that mythical and all too real site (which can never be read like a book) where western culture seems to meet its most confounding trials—took me back somehow to the Ambrosian Library in Milan where Giorgio Agamben begins his aforementioned text The Open. In the beginning of the book, Agamben writes of finding, within a certain Hebrew Bible, the drawings of animal headed humans that confound the founding distinction between man and animal which he then goes on to explore throughout the book. I must admit that, from the outset, Mannaerts’ perplexing organic forms gave me that ‘open feeling’, which is difficult to define, despite having read Agamben, as he keeps most definitions strategically suspended. But then again, so does Mannaerts, with A Monster of LochNess Feeling and most of her other work. Yet, in perhaps the most succinct chapter in the book, ‘Cogito experimentalis’, the reader is handed a biblical-type mystery that gets us closer to this ‘open feeling’ and its potential.Agamben quotes St. Thomas Acquinas, which I in turn quote here:
In the state of innocence [he writes] men did not have any bodily need of animals. Neither for clothing, since they were naked and not ashamed, there being no motions of inordinate concupiscence; nor for food, since they fed on the trees of Paradise; nor for means of transport, their bodies being strong enough for that purpose. Yet they needed them in order to draw from their nature an experimental knowledge [Indigebant tamen eis, ad experimentalen cognitionem sumendam de naturis eorum]. This is signified by the fact that God led the animals before man, that he might give them a name that designated their nature.[12]
Can we draw an experimental knowledge from the forms Mannaerts presents? It seems to me that this is their intention as well as the artisti’s. (Separating her works’ from the artist’s intentions is necessary, I think, as much of the works’ quick, intuitive and improvisational execution allows them to have a life of their own). If the work presents blanks, bewilders, perplexes and confounds us with juxtapositions and zones of indistinction between human and some other life—more monster, rare organ and ghost than animal in this case—it is not so that we can relish in oblivion and stop at the mystery of it all, but rather so that the limit of our knowledge and perhaps even more importantly the very perception of what knowledge entails are expanded.
As much as her quick, decisive and intuitive making of her work, the perception of Mannaerts’ practice must be approached as an experiment in the most radical sense of the word.[13] If art can in fact lend us some insight into life, then it is not only by decoding artworks—by reading into the scatological drawings, by identifying the ‘strangers’, by naming the forms in the desert within a comforting taxonomy—but by confronting the monstrosity of their fundamental blankness and the open form of the monstrous that, it increasingly transpires, is what Mannaerts’ understands as the core of life. The artist offers us a graspable, open, sometimes even friendly or beautiful monstrosity as an aid to an experimental knowledge. Here monstrosity is never singular.Each time we think we know it, we must return to the bookshelf and see a desert.
Notes:
1 In his discussion of bare life, Agamben begins with the division that is at least as ancient as the Greece of Plato and Aristotle; namely, the parceling of life between bios and zoë – political life and bare, naked life.In Aristotle’s Nichomedean Ethics, Agamben notes a further splitting of bios into “the contemplative life of the philosopher”, “the life of pleasure” and “the political life”. See Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1.
2 Ibid., 10.
3 See Agamben, G. 2004. ‘Theriomorphus’ in The Open: Man and Animal, Werner Hamacher (ed.)Kevin Attell (trans.) Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 1-3.
4 Sylvia Plath’s Mirror was originally published in the 3 August 1963 issue of The New Yorker.
5 Agamben starts his book with a quote about Leviathan—a terrible fish if there ever was one—which reads: “In the last three hours of the day, God sits and plays with the Leviathan, as is written: “you made the Leviathan in order to play with it.” See Agamben, The Open, 1. As will be elaborated shortly, this playful treatment of a creation is precisely how Mannaerts treats her artwork.
6 This and previous two quotes, see de Duve, Thierry. 2003. ‘Silver and Exact’ in Sylvie Eyberg and Valérie Mannaerts (exhibition catalogue) Brussels: Yves Gevaert & Communauté Francaise de Belgique, 106-109.
7 I was interested to find that my colleague in this issue of A Prior, Hilde Van Gelder, also zeroes in and finds great potential in the blank spaces, mostly characterized as monochrome fields or empty zones for the mind to project into, in the work of the subject of her impressively thorough analysis: Allan Sekula. It may be interesting here to consider that, while Sekula (and many other artists) imbeds blanks in his work,Mannaerts tends to foreground ‘the blank’, laying it bare for us to contend with. Having said this, the Sculptures with Sunglasses do not support a dichotomy between bare and imbedded blanks: it cannot be said that blanks are not imbedded in Mannaerts’ work. Rather, what emerges is a link between expressions of radical blankness and the basic or bare form of life at stake here—a link that keeps both terms open.
8 If Agamben speaks of a biopolitics as bare life that is mobilized by state control, it may be interesting to consider how it also founds a kind of metaphysics of commerce, in a more glamorous but, in the end, no less bare variant.
9 One artist whose work presents a fascinating example of this wheeling and dealing of information is Sven Augustijnen, who was the focus of A Prior #14. The extensive archival research involved in his Congo project, as in many of his previous works, produced an excess of journalistic ‘facts’. But rather than yielding ‘the truth of the matter’ regarding the death of first Prime Minister of independent Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, or his arch-nemesis Moïse Tshombe or any of the other personages that come to a shady kind of light in Augustijnen’s investigative web, the project points to the very dilemmas of dealing with Information.
10 Approximating Mannaerts’ found and invented forms to food gets at how this always organic stuff seems to have energy to give, but also must draw energy from us and wants to be almost smelled and tasted even when it is photo-flat.
11 A friend recently told me that Hello Kitty, the ultra cute cat that is perhaps the most successful marketing phenomenon of Japan, is as successful as it, he or she (?) is because of its minimal facial features—the cat is in fact missing a mouth and it is apparently because of this limit that it becomes susceptible to the projection of all types of emotions. And because any child and many adults are able to transfer all their desires onto this adorably void feline, it sells. With only eyes to clue us into their being someone rather that something, Mannaerts’ ghosts/strangers operate as similar type blanks, albeit without the automatic cuteness that Hello Kitty’s omnipresent bow assures. And if they seem to be able to give us that monstrous feeling, as the title of the A Prior series prompts, this need not be a cliché of monstrosity as the ultimate other, but as something that we may become familiar and friendly with, that may perhaps be an intimate part of us.
12 Quoted in Agamben, G. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Keven Attell (trans.), Werner Hamacher (ed.), Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 22. Agamben quotes: Acquinas, The Summa Theologica vol. 4, Part I QQ. 75-102, 328-329; original in Acquinas. 1963. Somme theologique. Les Origines de l’homme, Albert Patfoort (ed.), Paris and Rome: Desclee, 193. The notion of creating animals to draw from them an experimental knowledge echoes the notion of God creating Leviathan so as to play with him—both instances in turn offer models for the non-instrumentaliseable purpose of artistic creation.
13 For Agamben, who is a consummate dialectitian, the experimental knowledge evoked in the Paradise described by St. Thomas Acquinas, finds a worldly counterpart in the Nazi Death Camps—in the paragraph which follows the quotation, Agamben muses: “Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort [clarified earlier as concerning the very nature of man], an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin.” Ibid. In following Agamben’s logic, it is evident that Mannaerts takes a radically different path, calling up the monstrous as a potential that need not lead to the Camp, but might, when it remains a figment of the imagination that is constantly finding new form in her work—four being presented in the pages of A Prior —lead to another understanding of human nature. While Agamben’s thinking almost always arrives at extermination, ruin and death—trying as it is to contend with the Holocaust—Mannaerts’ process never admits death into the equation, nor for that matter an end. She considers monstrosity not as a path to death but as a part of, and a clue to, life.
