Abjection  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Current revision

Noble and Ignoble Grotesque from the The Stones of Venice

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave Doré in 1873

Grotesque Head (c. 1480-1510) by Leonardo da Vinci, clearly the inspiration for The Ugly Duchess

Stryge (1853) is a print by French etcher Charles Méryon depicting one of the chimera of the Galerie des chimères of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral.

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The term abjection literally means "the state of being cast off."

It denotes the act of bringing down or humbling or the state of being rejected or cast out; a low or downcast condition; meanness of spirit; abasement; degradation.

In usage it has connotations of degradation, baseness and meanness of spirit.

Etymology

From abiciō (“throw away or down; abandon”), from ab (“from, away from”) + iaciō (“throw, hurl”).

In critical theory

In critical theory, abjection was introduced by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 work Powers of Horror, which references the ideas of Jacques Lacan and the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Since Kristeva, the term is used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as women, people of color, prostitutes, convicts, poor people, disabled people, and queer or LGBT people. In this context, the concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not.

According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely be repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. We encounter other beings daily, and more often than not they are alive. To confront a corpse of one that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same state, our own mortality. This repulsion from death, excrement and rot constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic order.

This act is done in the light of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: that is, the mother. We must abject the maternal, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity. This is done on the micro level of the speaking being, through her subjective dynamics, as well as on the macro level of society, through "language as a common and universal law." We use rituals, specifically those of defilement, in order to maintain clear boundaries between nature and society, the semiotic and the symbolic. This line of thought begins with Mary Douglas' important book, Purity and Danger.

The concept of abject is often coupled (and sometimes confused with) the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like", or foreign, yet familiar. The abject can be uncanny in the sense that we can recognize aspects in it, despite its being "foreign". An example, continuing on the one used above, is that of a corpse, namely the corpse of a loved one. We will recognize that person as being close to us, but the fact that the person is dead, and "no longer" the familiar loved one, is what creates a sort of cognitive dissonance, leading to abjection of the corpse.

In art

Painters have expressed a moderate fascination for abjection since the earliest of times, see art horror and cult of ugliness.

In the 20th century the fascination with transgression and taboo eventually lead to the 1993 New York Whitney Museum exhibition "Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art", on the catalog of which was Robert Gober's Untitled Leg (1989-90)[2].

Antecedents include the informe of Georges Bataille and his publication of J.-A. Boiffard's photos The Big Toe and papier collant et mouches.

Without using the term, abjection is a major theme of the 1949 work The Thief's Journal (Journal du Voleur) by French author Jean Genet. As a criminal outcast from society, during a fictionalised account of his wanderings through Europe in the 1930s, he claims to actively seek abjections as an existentialist form of 'sainthood.'

Other precedents include the films and performances of the Viennese Actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, who set up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater which involved the use of animal carcasses and blood shed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas Mekas where he organised a series of performances which greatly influenced the radical New York art scene.

Other members of the Viennese Actionists, Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade which had a powerful influence on later 'abject art' from the 1980s and 1990s. Rudolf Schwarzkogler who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1969 is better known for his photos dealing with the abject. The growth of extreme performance art coincided with the radicalisation of politics in the late 1960s.

In the late 1960s performance art took off in New York. For a short period, Carolee Schneeman made performances that led to her inclusion in the 1993 show at the Whitney Museum. In the early 1970s Mary Kelly caused a scandal in 1976 when she exhibited dirty nappies at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This was followed by the concentration on the abject which is implicit in punk rock and, in particular, the performances of Genesis P. Orridge and GG Allin which involved spit, piss, blood, semen and shit.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee and Kira O' Reilly.

In the late 1990s, the abject became an important theme of radical Chinese performance artists Zhu Yu and Yang Zhichao.

The abject also began to influence the work of a number of mainstream artists including Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Gilbert and George, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Jake and Dinos Chapman who were all included in the 1993 Whitney show.

Other important artists working with abjection include New York photographers, Joel Peter Witkin, whose photo series Love and Redemption is made up entirely of photos of corpses and body parts, and Andres Serrano whose piece entitled Piss Christ caused a scandal in 1989 when it received $15,000 dollars of public funding.

Abjection in other works

According to Barbara Creed in Horror and the Monstrous Feminine a male's relationship with the mother and other females is complicated by the use of the feminine in horror and science fiction as we are forced to confront it as horrific and abject. Through an analysis of the film Alien (1979) and the female roles and representations, Creed explains how females are often related to the object of horror, be they as the object of horror or the object of the actual horrors' desire/hatred. The conclusion is that through monstrous representations of the female or the Mother, the audience is drawn into viewing them as abject rather than subject or object. The aliens themselves from the film in question are often described as having phallus-like appendages in the shape of their head and tongue, while maintaining an almost female form. Their interaction with the human crew takes on very abject roles as one crew member, a male, is forcibly impregnated (clearly as a product of rape) with an alien that eventually rips itself from the male 'womb' in a horrific scene of blood and gore. The process of a male being impregnated through the mouth with a creature that gestates -- in a being that has no womb -- and rips itself free in a shower of blood is one way in which this film abjectifies female roles.

Further reading

• Disparites & Deformations: Our Grotesque (2004) by Robert Storr

See also

• Alterity
• Antihumanism
• Body art, Body fluids in art
• Informe
• Other
• Georges Bataille
• Liminality
• Limit-experience
• Queer theory
• Transgressive art