Catalogue essay 

The Nature of the Unchanging Skeleton

Tricia Middleton 

Text by Hannah Nussbaum

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).