The following is a short fiction I wrote about a year ago, after finding a spooky + groovy video of a striptease happening at a club in Soho (London) in the 1960s.
The venue where this titillating show took place was called The Gargoyle Club (a neoclassical London townhouse which had been a glittering and sophisticated private members spot for London artists and intellectuals in the ’20s and ’30s). Francis Bacon partially drank himself to death here, alongside Lucien Freud + others. The place was designed by Matisse, and hanging in the dining room was a six foot by seven foot Matisse called ‘The Red Studio’ (1911) (recognized as one of his most “original and daring inventions”). By the ’60s the splendor had dulled and the Gargoyle Club had gone bankrupt, transforming into a lavish if seedy strip club. Later in the eighties the space would host ‘Batcave’ — a weekly club night associated with the birth of English goth subculture (dark cabaret, death-rock). Today the house is filled by the THEDEANSTREETTOWNHOUSE, which is an upscale hotel in Soho that looks very very nice.
The Gargoyle Club
by Hannah Nussbaum
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Placed in a story, a once non-fictitious place can elude death and enjoy reconstruction as literature, writing non-fiction into fiction being something similar to the act of pickling an egg. What you’re left with is similar, but wholly different, something once compostable now sealed off from the grassy elements, for the most part, and of a different flavor and variety.
1.
Holding a stack of paper, the fourth girl leans in and tells a secret: ‘I’ve written a very serious piece of work about a woman with a powerful gut feeling.’ She’s one of the exotic dancers––the fourth–– who’s just performed in the night’s Nell Gwyn Lavish Strip Tease, and she’s got the most incredible vinyl vermilion flower in her hair and white powder on her face that jumps when she speaks. She’s just emerged from the dressing room, and now she’s sharing her manuscript with the muddled crowd of philosophers and political pundits who’ve thrown coins at her all night––they’re friends of hers from many nights of amicable transactions, and she’s hoping one of them will sign on as her patron.
Next, reading aloud in a clear, drunken chime:
Ms. Nobelium was sure that the body was buried in a backyard in the southern-most corner of town, she had never been more certain of anything in her life. When her private eye confirmed that indeed, DNA had been found in the exact location under a patch of cornflowers, Ms. Nobelium’s itchy hunch yet again proved to be a deeply reliable well of knowledge. The chasm between certainty and feeling yawned shut for Ms. N time and time again, for she knew what she knew.
2.
Today, the Gargoyle Club is an unresponsive vegetable in SoHo, and its body is demonically possessed by a hotel called Dean Street Town House––sadly, maybe needlessly, its death came even before the end of its life. In 1956 (long before it closed in 1979) the building was already a palimpsest of glamour and ghosts, and the drinkers found themselves almost compulsively talking about the past––who used to drink there in the forties (Johnny Minton from the RCA): how they swore there were fewer Rolls Royces in London these days: the kinds of sexual acts that were most common in the Edwardian period: agnosticism when the philosophy people from Gordon Square showed up: abjection and poverty. Most nights were punctuated by violent rows and cornball strip teases, which was really just a last-ditch effort on the part of management to generate funds. And add to all this the fact that the premise was literally haunted, making for strange supernatural feelings when you stood near one of the club’s full-length mahogany doors for too long (you could sense spirits coming and going).
All this to say: 1956 to 1979 was tough on The Gargoyle Club, tough here meaning fatal. Its post-war decline was an anticlimactic epilogue to its bright young things phase, which boasted attractions like a still-shining steel and brass staircase designed by Matisse, monographs designed by Matisse, and other works so iconic they can’t be mentioned here. In its heyday, it was filled with cloche hats and suit jackets and other trappings of fashionable society. But once it reached its moth-eaten, post-glorious (po-glo), sticky stage, The Gargoyle Club existed somewhere between the Ritz and the Gutter. This phrase is borrowed from Francis Bacon, who used it to describe the bipolarity of his bohemian London experience.
All of this, writing on the wall for Young Limbs And Numb Hymns, Meat of Youth, The Dance of Death.
3.
And so on and so forth.
The philosophers and pundits are all leaning in now, standing in the dead center of the crowded main salon, with its 22-karat gold plated ceiling, and the whole thing is starting to look like a geometric number from a Busby Berkeley musical, because there’s a crowd drawing in around them in the shape of a pentagram, and the stinky red furniture is mostly upturned like showgirls doing high-kicks. A.J ‘Freddie’ Ayer is listening with half-lidded eyes to the girl reading out loud, and his fingers are twitching with excitement. Something has been translated to him, and he’ll write about it later.
‘what a good girl. Let me have a look at the rest of the manuscript. Have a chartreuse lozenge’
4.
Topography in fiction has an uncanny register, J. Hillis Miller would say, because it exists through the looking glass, not quite in the text, not quite in the mind of the author, not quite in the mind of the reader, but in a ghost world created by language that can’t be eroded by time. The task here is to preserve and reconstitute a dead space through launching it into this literary ether, where it becomes plastic, and also necessarily true, according to Hillis, who sees literary worlds as preexistent to their writing.
So what happens when you write a real place into this not quite space that Hillis describes?
The answer, it would seem, is that you function as any historian––writing about the past with a dubious claim to historicity, that you may or may not acknowledge. In fact, history seems to be the windowless room at the center of Hillis’s writing about the geography of fantastical space. Writing fiction is a process of producing a cartography of a pre-existent world (a world that exists in language already, Hillis would say, which sometimes writers pluck up and transplant into text). Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like the job of a historian? To construct something, then once it’s constructed, deem it already. Could there be something to say here about arbitrariness and blind cultural specificity as meters for writing about the past? Is writing about the past always a fantastical act?
5.
A Phd student from UCL who goes by Loger Taylor enters the scene, and everyone is distinctly impressed with his hair style and slouchy pants. wow. The second dancer this time arranges her impossibly flat hat and gold chain, and makes her way over to him. They order a round of fairy oysters and ice cream and ice wine, and under the tinny light their conversation turns to pataphysics, which may well provide them with answers to the question of post-war unemployment. After exhausting the topic, they move on to discuss an alternate taxonomy that Taylor has been developing––one that might help historians better make sense of the war and its ripples over England and Empire. He’s created a list dividing all people into ten categories of ‘post-war subject’.
• Those that are no longer with us
• wives of those deceased
• those that are trained in useful post-war industry
• couriers
• Fabulous people
• public servants
• American entertainment stars
• Americanized Italians
• Defeated Germans
• Those that belong to certain clubs, for example, the Gargoyle Club (a sub-taxonomy)
6.
Last night a man fell down the stairs here, all the way down, having missed entry into the sliding metal gate that leads to the elevator, instead stumbling towards the flight of steps lined with mirrors. Tonight his wife is in mourning, drinking scotch-soda with a black silk scarf knotted around the stem of her glass.
Actually, he hadn’t quite been her husband, but she won’t give us any more information about their status, at present. Picture last night: he’s particularly inebriated, so much so that tonight people can still hear him thudding around on the dance floor and can still smell his lit cigar, and can still hear his voice railing against the remaining older club members––vestiges of pre-war social society whom the newer members refer to as ‘the dentists,’ for reasons unknown. Accounts abound from people who have seen his reflection several times this evening in the mosaics on the walls (also a design of Matisse, an emulation of his favorite eighteenth century chateau). The maître D is keeping a backlog of these supernatural encounters in his diary; what he’s creating is a time-capsule of invaluable import.
The dead tend to linger on in the mosaics here, just flashes, giving a disco gruesomeness to the place that makes it both more and less of a party. Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwyn is one of the ghosts who haunts this place, and it’s on account of her that the strip show is so eponymously named.
7.
Ayer leads the fourth girl through a pair of double doors, past the mourning scotch flute, into a vault where he’ll lift key points from her manuscript and insert them into his latest essay, The Problem of Knowledge. He shuts the doors, clunk, and on cue, the Alec Alexander band launches into a song, and the mirrored tiles begin to break loose from their grout and hang like teeth. A young person clutches his drink, something called a Summer Canal-Side Special, and he weaves towards a velveteen fainting couch, where he’s joined by Lucien Freud.
8.
This, a faithful account of what can only be described as a typical evening at 69 Dean Street. All omissions and inclusions have been intentional, at the humble service of pinning down a fair portrait of the deceased.
♦
Some people lose their sense of timeliness or of time passing, become tied up in the thing they’re doing until a line like ah look at the time or something similar plunks into their mind – some one-liner that describes the glassy-eyed shock that hits when the clock’s tick suddenly becomes once again discernable, re-establishing itself as an irritant tic-tocking towards death and dementia or the Holy Ghost’s tinsel heavens or some other blind trail. With these sorts of people, it turns out they’ve been at the books, cramming more midnight oil into the burner into the small hours of the morning into the white metal dawn of a humming computer screen, for a beaver-industrious age, how’d it get this late, wrote a veritable novel, what meaty scholastic clout these persisters tend to have. These are the sorts of people who get things done, forget about dinner, so attentive to their diagnostics that they leave a dry shave of toast in the toaster, in the morning it’s a dried-up bran: all crumb.
When the smooth, peculiarly instantaneous present catapults itself into relief and the nose takes a sharp draught in and the body un-numbs, several things warm and thaw and make the breathy noise of a mouth before speech: joints suddenly need to be de-scaled, the neck needs attention, the feet undersides require a camphor jelly application, a whole collection of bodily debris, it turns out, have amassed under the desk chair – hairs, filaments, leg dust, shoulder fluff – when all of this is remembered this sort of person finally goes to bed, first attends to all of this body backlogging and then lies flat-back and snoozes.
I imagine that it is a deep snooze without anxiety. Without the frozen-claw fists made weak with nighttime atrophy kind of anxiety that marks my sleep. I imagine it’s just good dreams, sex with a celebrity, a big meal, a million dollars. I’m imagining all of this, but because I’ve no formal training in psychotherapy or anything officially cranial, I cannot say for sure where an attention like this – an attention so rapt that the attender becomes effectively distracted from their own body – emanates from. I’m not quite sure if it’s possible to adopt, to affect like buying a new hat and taking on a new accent that’s windy and important so people freeze and vegetable-patch around you. Is it possible to become a person who’s completely immersed in their work? I want desperately to be the sort of person who is – who forgets to eat and wash and call their parents because they are so concentrated on their task, and if you’re wondering, and just how will you do that? I’ll tell you that the answer is
Nootropics.
The word nootropic was coined in 1972 by a Romanian psychologist and chemist, Cornelius E. Giurgea, from the Greek words νοῦς (nous), or “mind”, and τρέπειν (trepein), meaning to bend or turn. Nootropics are astrology for men, they’re a new industry of so-called cognitive enhancers that promise in particular to sharpen executive functions: memory, motivation, concentration – and they grandfather clock your central nervous system, which becomes regular, respectable, useful. Me, I bought a skid online, every flavor, not sure if they are even legal in the UK, online shopping, incredible. They arrived in an oblong container, and writing about them now, their fish oil-dense horse-pill taste is rising in the back of my throat: their flavor is robust, doggy. Wrapped in weird white label with text grafted on in red Helvetica, thin, the bottle has the air of bootleg pseudoscience. This impression is inflamed by the label’s graphic. Forking medium-width red lines produce a brain-coiled graph with nodes, which glancingly might imply the World Wide Web or metabolic networks, things backed by the greatest minds, no hoodoo here. This is exactly the sort of thing that I need to transcend my dumb body and focus on Production, I say when I receive them in the mail, and from the other room my blonde friend from Minnesota says, sure they are, good for you.
But I am trapped in my body, aint that the cruelest truth.
There I am, pumped up with warm energy, warm blood, it’s the feeling I get before I make a lifestyle change that I am certain will amend certain problems I have, like ten thousand unread email messages, forgot how to drive, no external hard drive, accidental tax evader, things aren’t as in order as I’d like them to be. I take my first pill with a spoonful of oil, crystalline and rancid, because an ardent nameless on Reddit said something about fat soluble. Beaming, already reaching for the eucalyptus essential oil I use for indigestion, I sit with my notebook and my Cherry Cola vape, wait for some unparaphrasable focus or some tuning of the world – I’m expecting something like when you smoke hash, maybe mixed with a certain seeing-red amphetamine athleticism. These pills are fancy, I say to myself.
What I ended up producing was a short essay about production.
My first line began:
Some people lose their sense of timeliness or of time passing –
Following this first bit, something strange happened, and I wonder if here commenting on it might change the truthiness of the thing I’m recounting. Following the first bit, I launched into an essay about production, productivity, attentiveness – about my quest to become the sort of person who is so focused that they forget about their body, that they might literally rise outside of their body, that they may eschew things like every half-hour milky tea, listless walking around the house touching things, vaguely, lightly, a phone call to someone you do not want to speak to and the impression left is a light-heeled grease on the phone’s glass from your cheek, an hour spent then probing a cheek, a spot beginning to swell on the cheek, suddenly things like pores, hairs, strange shadows – the most microscopic intimacies of the skin’s geography – becoming bound up in the productive task. A relay race with arbitrary pit-stops. The more the mind activates an idea, the louder the body becomes, and the thrill of a good idea becomes a spiky and radiating thing, and with every living sentence crafted, there is a necessity to take a turn around the room, to press the pointer into the crease of another nail bed, to produce a pressure in the body that rhymes with the thrill of the thing written and also begins to generate a feedback, a heightening of the mind and of the body together, they are the top and bottom of a spinning wheel. Said another way, an intensity on the page incites a hyper awareness (in me, of my) body, which in turn inscribes itself into my text, my body and its fidgets and winces and twiddles, all of its spotty bits, pain, poking, hunger, all of it, sunk into the deepest stratum of my text’s subcutaneous layers.
And who, and what, is the loudest and most gruesome character here, in spite of my best efforts? It has arms, legs, warm-blooded wiring, hothouse brain particles.
Because I am trapped in my body, aint that the cruelest truth.
To experience Tricia Middleton’s wax beasts in The Nature of the Unchanging Skeleton is an active exercise, a vigorous exercise, active and vigorous because of the way in which the gaze directed at it is required to oscillate. Her work compels its spectator first to telescope in on the kitsch and refuse and string and clay hunks that make up the installation’s human-size forms. This first gaze is a voyeuristic gaze, the kind that notices the specificity of gore with clinical curiosity at the bubonic scene. What are those innards I’m seeing, could they really be that, innards? Next, the spectator’s gaze is required to zoom out: the detritus becomes anthropomorphic now, or else mummified in quadruped shapes. The individual specimens of garbage pixelate together into a theatrical spectacle of the grotesque and deranged, a medieval sci-fi escape room shot with pre-Victorian horror, Bell-époque indigestion, a maggot-skittish installation of wax and trash forms that requires effort, nausea even, to witness. Middleton’s is a scene of a future geography that’s naturally grown out of and over our modern industrial and contemporary digital detritus. A new techno-animist species wrought from junk runs the earth in Middleton’s sealed universe – one that recasts boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical. There’s a certain sympathy between her work and Bruno Latour’s concept of multi-naturalism – his notion of a future landscape in which the animate and inanimate, organic and synthetic coalesce, where nature, the pastoral construct, admits its bastard synthetic lineage . This imagined multi-natural geography spills onto the floor, onto the walls, and Middleton’s pink and blue glazes and thick waxy lacquers coat the setting in generous run-off, and the whole thing is a throatily over-iced cake, a feminine gesture turned gross: a woman’s abjection . To witness it, the brain feels fogged, ecstatic, aware of something stinky in the installation – a Marie Antoinette meets JG Ballard post-apocalyptic decadence – a specifically awful blend of the gothic and something we might think of as foul perfection. Already we sense two things happening, holding hands like undead twin daughters: something about feminine excess, something about a post-natural landscape, together, a gesture towards sublime post-Anthropocene epochs.
Two, or more, things happening here, as The Nature of the Unchanging Skeleton functions as a spectroscope, producing and recording and reassembling waste, decay and trash, in the language of ornate body-horror. Middleton, the Canadian-based artist whose career has spanned 15 years, has been working in this vocabulary – of rococo cataclysm as styled by a female hysteric – since 2005, when she made the jump from painting to sculpture, though let it be said that her sculptures are painted, quite literally. Her process builds up the materiality of her forms in layers, using wax mostly, also hydrostone and plaster, sometimes, spray foam. The layering produces bound-together assemblages with an organic sense of sinew, guts, innards, also earth stratum and sedimentary rock. The Greek primordial deity Gaia welds together these images – the
female body as Earth, hardly a new idea. The waxy layers engorge – re-womb – the
junk and trash and semi-precious stones and stalagmites Middleton collects, leaving trails of things that look like calcium salt deposits. Her work deals in future fossils, in questions of what the future fossils will bring to bear on a landscape scraped of the human species in the wake of ecological disaster. Future Fossils, referring to earth’s future geography, which will be comprised of civilization’s vestiges; creatures shaped by waste and a landscape shaped by waste, and the dissolution of boundaries between natural and unnatural, between human and landscape.
Bound up within these dissolutions, we find gender-emancipatory potential, Russian dolled within the promise of a soothing euthanization of every social construct, as subject and object are eaten away and fused together under corrosive environmental conditions. Here, Bruno Latour’s conception of post-natural ecology gets freighted through Dona Haraway’s de-stabilized nature/culture dualism, her projection of a future comprised of both organic and technological humans and non-humans, among them the post-natural woman . The anthropomorphic-trash-people in Middleton’s future may embody this woman, may promise gender emancipation of a sort, the kind that comes when civilization crumbles and human, earth and technology cannibalize themselves into new forms. What Middleton lands on is an innovative form of waste management: a post-apocalyptic future of a ruinous landscape occupied by techno-animist waste-womxn, and it is exquisite.
If something in Middleton’s forms link the register of feminine abjection to broader ecological conceptions, surely it’s the cracking of boundaries between clean, human edges, and the myth of primitive animalism and naturalism. Abjection, so defined by Julia Kristeva in the 1980s, describes the horror – often directed at femme bodies – of the impure, visceral, corpus. The abject is the moment in which uncontained bodily excess threatens and transgresses our sense of cleanliness and propriety and bodily suppression – as Middleton’s forms do. In the tradition of performance and installation art that activates a politic of feminine immoderation as an adversarial aesthetic, Middleton’s sculptures recuperate their implicit abjection through running towards it, amplifying it, and multiplying it. She aestheticizes waste and junk as feminine through her formal palate – baby pinks, blues, purples – her Victorian gothic ambiance, her inclusion of trinkets that allude to Paganism and female fertility rituals, the latent sense of decadent sexuality and vulgarity conveyed through her overflowing and wet fabrics. The cluster of anthropomorphic figures in Justine’s woods, searching for a place that you can never return to again(at your peril!!), is staged as an ominous collective of witch haruspices postured like women’s bodies ravaged by age. The wax treated fabric falls in strips that obscure – something like the white male fear of the niqāb is activated, a fear of the woman who can’t be seen, a revulsion matched only by the women seen in too much detail. Middleton’s viscous wax forms are both simultaneously: threateningly obscured and yet grotesquely revealed, as inside out.
Again the excess of surface and the earthiness of fluidal wax signals this harnessing and recuperation of abjection, a trifle spilled on the floor when it becomes too inflated with week-old microbiome, too engorged to any longer sit in a crystal.
Threaded through all of this, all the while, there’s a tête-à-tête with the waste itself. Sure, it constitutes a metaphor for woman’s fleshly salad oils, but also, it produces a conversation about itself, about trash, as in the castoff limbs and lobes of capitalism, that which we put underground, subaquatic sewage, inverted built-in aluminum steel garburators with exterior wood detailing. Middleton’s waste reveals its birthday suit, something like a woman who dares have a body, and through this we’re confronted with an installation that approaches the mined earth through the body of a woman. Need it be said, both are split into pieces, degraded in specific ways, quarried, privatized. Middleton’s work looks at the moment of eruption – ecologically speaking that would be apocalypse – for woman, it’s the throe of hysteria. All this said another way: her theatricalizing of waste and detritus as a feminine spilling-over of environmentally degraded forms is such that her celebration of the abject maps onto both the feminine and the ecological. Trash and femininity are forms meant to cow underground, but which threaten to split seams and surge up from ocean floors imminently, creating three armed swimmers, fish made of bottles, women with enormous bodies wrought out of blood fragrant iron, blimping around in smog, un-licked by the question, are you an animal or are you a man or are you a woman or are you a vegetable? And so we can encounter Middleton’s forms as negations of the boundary between nature and culture: “animals, which [are] imagined as representative of sex and murder,” fuse with signs of the human – civilized expression explodes into biological glut. We’re led by the hand of an abject monsterous-feminine into post-anthropocene ecological territory. There we find ourselves when we step into Middleton’s installation Form Is the Destroyer of Force, Without Severity There Can Be No Mercy. A fine sea-marine fungus trawls the walls here, and a floor thick with branches and candles and old ceramic vessels, green goo, pink fluff, sludge as a rioting peasantry, yokes, bogs made out of bits of ribbon, skipjacks, nobody one knows, flat trembling discs made out of wafer, that sort of thing, spooned around in a folksy mass, the shoes of the old world entombed somewhere inside, future fossils.
Here we confront something like an object-oriented ontology, an ontology that treats all objects in the same way, that strikes away hierarchical taxonomies between “Sherlock Holmes, real humans and animals, chemicals, hallucinations ” – the opposite pole of orientation being Descartes decidedly non-flat ontology, which assumes puritanical division between human and non-human. The Middle Ages were marked by religious and metaphysical philosophies that saw a divide between Creator and what is Created; next thought moved into rationalist modernity, which employed an equally slapdash dualism between humans and everything else in the universe. This modern taxonomy, need it be said which remains hegemonic, brackets the amphibian, the crustacean, the tuna, the yak, vegetable physiology, kitchen gardens, cash machines, heart and lung machines, digital clocks, away from the exceptional human being, whose ontology is considered of foremost weight for questions of philosophy, and also conceptions of the way we organize the world and imagine desire, architecture and landscape. Middleton’s forms resist this anthropocentric taxonomy: her sculptural installations “engage with the possibilities of things as beings and the processes through which living beings are rendered as things.” Her smallest, most diffuse pieces – collections of stand-alone crafted and found objects comprising uncanny tableauxs – bring to mind the sort of techno-animist co-habitation threaded through Japanese anime narratives, which routinely cross wires between spirits, robots, humans and animals. Middleton’s forms gesture at this crossing of wires, creating intellectual space to consider the animism of objects, and more concretely, the many examples of already-existing nature-culture-technology hybrids around us: the so-called “internet of things,” being one prescient “current event” leap to make from Middleton’s concepts, the biome developing in the Great Pacific Garbage patch another one, where, we might consider, 34,000 pieces of hockey gear lost in a ship accident in 1994 may literally already constitute a new crustaceous chest protector species. These are contemporary examples of the way in which object-oriented ontology and a breached nature-culture duality may already be active. But what of a future post-Anthropocene? Middleton’s forms gesture at a future, and thus Bruno Latour’s theorizing becomes active in her piles of trash – theorizing that looks towards new inter-species futures and multi-organismal cooperation. He defines modernity as the view that there are two hermetic kingdoms – nature and culture – and proposes a new era which sees human and non-human actors forge links to function in productive and consensual networks – his attempt to answer perhaps the only question left, how can a livable and breathable “home” be built for the errant animal and ecological masses?
Latour’s matrix of human-animal-vegetable co-agency is an imagined space, a new mind-scape and land-scape also travelled through by Donna Haraway in her theoretical topography of a post-natural ecology, in which nature, culture and technology transmute into assemblages. Haraway’s theory aims “to orient, to provide the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature, to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere.” This elsewhere, comprised of deviating forms and subjectivities that transcend anthropocentric thought, is rooted in the premise – termed by Haraway as self evident – that science is culture, and equally that nature is a constructed political contraption, taken even further, that nature the pastoral myth does not exist. Where Latour uses the term multi-naturalism, Harroway lights on commonplace nature. “The commonplace nature I seek,” she writes, is “a public culture, has many houses with many inhabitants which/who can refigure the earth. Perhaps those other actors/actants, the ones who are not human, are our topick gods, organic and inorganic.” Haraway’s many houses with many inhabitants feel present in The Nature of the Unchanging Skeleton, which positions Middleton’s towering anthropomorphic forms alongside collections of craft objects and trash placed in clusters like small ashrams whose constituent pieces are speaking to one another. Dried leaves and branches are Teepee-ed over broken limbs of sun-stroked patio furniture, small ceramic bottles, maybe the remains of some sepulchral garden party that smelled like frangipani, where someone was groped in a deciduous shrub, the pudding had a single fly. Middleton’s wunderkammer is alive, and the curiosities within are whispering to one another. It’s a de-stabilizing oscillation, between very human relics worm-wrapped in nostalgia for some prior more-civilized moment – the garden party or the Edwardian powder puff – and inhuman, post-corporeal horizons and yearnings. Two oppositional vectors stretching in opposing directions, a simultaneous looking backwards and smelting forwards, like the sensory manifestation of her destabilizing visuality, already mentioned, at once sinisterly obscured and obscenely revealed.
Faced with her assemblage, Embracing ruin and oblivion is the only way to live now, one is given the option to actually enter into Donna Haraway’s elsewhere – Does one dare? A sea blue house bric-bracked with papier-mache tiles offers to re-womb its spectators: walking inside, past flapping ventriloquist apertures, suddenly you’re in the gut of a beast filled with undigested tokens. And so the exhibition engorges its spectators, the human art onlookers who will invariably one day constitute the dust and patina of the future geography Middleton imagines. All of us, implicated in this future of waste and bulbs that speak, chairs that crawl, human jaws mousetrapped onto protease animals that play host to a number of small micro-biotic milky ways – each species eventually, each brand of detergent, each cartridge, to be invited to that sort of party. The immersion of Middleton’s forms is significant, important for conveying the personal nature of this theory making – as in – each person has everything at stake in questions of ecology.
And all of this is written in the language of the abject feminine, the woman as a prism to talk about the earth, and also to talk about “woman” – a prism to help us un-learn what the earth looks like, and also what a woman looks like. Indeed, civilized human borders and visceral animal/natural/bodily rub up against one another in a way that extends beyond woman and nature, to implicate man, woman and turtle. Middleton has shaped a landscape where human has fused with trash has fused with technology, and her gesture towards a new polyvalent species collapses not just the feminine mystique, but also the myth of Gaia. But Middleton’s images, like Latour and Harroway’s theoretical futures, embrace this futurity, don’t engage in a nostalgic re-wilding project, but rather look towards new ontologies. Kristeva wind-ups her theory of abjection with a discussion of the sublime: she closes in on a “version of the apocalypse that seems…rooted, not matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so–double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” This is what The Nature of the Unchanging Skeleton leaves us with: what Donna Haraway would call The Promises of Monsters, a transcendent apocalypse where frontiers between natural and unnatural have been eaten away by the acridity of pollution, a land in which technology has been de-natured and re-natured, hypertrophied into a new brail of the planet’s surface.
References:
- Latour, Bruno, 2004. Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/AbstractView/S9780674039964.
-In reference to Julia Kristeva’s abjection, meaning “the
state of being cast off” in her work 1982 Powers of horror: an essay
on abjection
- Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others’ in Cybersexualities : a reader on feminist
theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace, ed.
By Jenny Wolmark, (Edenborough: Edenborough University Press 1999).
-Julia Kristeva and Leon S. Roudiez. Powers of horror: an essay on abjection.
New York: Columbia University Press. 1982. p 13.
-Using Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Barbara
Creed’s monstrous feminine examines
the way femininity is feared and objected in contemporary horror film
-Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018).
