lend me an ear...

Perloff's discussion of collage has interesting resonance for my study of bodies and prosthetics. I see this in a number of places. First, Perloff quotes Boccioni from his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture; he asserts that, in a "sculptural environment,"

"the cogs of a machine might as easily appear out of the armpits of a mechanic, or the lines of a table could cut a reader's head in two, or a book with its fanned-out pages could intersect the reader's stomach (FM 62-63)." (52-53)

Perloff argues that Boccioni's manifesto is not realized in his own work. But perhaps Boccioni was just ahead of his time. The work of the artist Stelarc does precisely what Boccioni calls for, integrating the technological with the physical to create a collage that explodes from the space of the canvas, the pedestal, the separated work of art, becoming a human collage.

Stelarc's projects include attaching an additional robotic arm to his right arm, creating an exoskeleton (within which a person sits), and attaching to/growing an ear on his forearm. This art, much like early experiments in collage, is likely contestable by many, breaking quite definitively from more traditional artistic approaches (like landscape painting). It challenges the boundaries not only of art, but of the human body, calling into question the distinction between human and machine, as well as the ethics of body manipulation. A prosthetic for an amputated limb is not "art" but "medicine", recreating the whole person and restoring function after trauma; breast implants and face lifts enhance beauty, perhaps even restoring (or realizing) prior beauty. Neither of these would be considered collage by general standards, and both are completely acceptable by most of society. Stelarc's work is really and merely an integration of these two perspectives, but taken firmly outside of the medical realm, as well as the realm of that which is considered "normal" for bodies. He performs "unnecessary" operations (certainly not covered by any insurance), taking materials from "other" sources (machinery, electronics, virtual space) and splicing them with the human. His work is temporal, performance pieces that constantly invite revision and revisioning. That is, until he can fully enact his EXTRA EAR project.

Thus far, Stelarc, in collaboration with Tissue Culture & Art, has used human cells to grow a 1/4 scale model of his ear; once this ear can be grown with his own bone marrow cells, he plans to insert it beneath the skin of his forearm, creating a third ear. Stelarc communicates the complications and challenges he proposes with this project:

Tissue Culture & Art are dealing with the ethical and perceptual issues stemming from the realization that living tissue can be sustained, grown and is able to function outside of the body. The prosthesis is now a partial life form - partly constructed and partly alive.

Here the collage becomes self and not self, a potentially permanent collage of outside that is inside placed inside to be seen outside. It is a non-missing part, a non-working part (in our understanding of the job of an ear), a signifier that "refers to a presence that is consistently absent" (63), a sign, in Derrida's words, that "'can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable'" (75).

Perloff turns to Benjamin's concerns for the shift from cult value to exhibition value in art in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; he writes "Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character....at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. (Ill 232; GS 493)" (73). * Stelarc has not only broken the boundaries of art, but of composition, of flesh. If Benjamin is concerned about the loss of aura in mechanically reproduced art, what might he say about Stelarc's work? About the "aura" of flesh, of humanity?

Perloff writes:

Indeed, to collage elements from impersonal, external sources - the newspaper, magazines, television, billboards - is to understand, as it were, that, in a technological age, consciousness itself becomes a process of graft or citation, a process by means of which we make the public world our own. (77)

Does Stelarc then make our public world private? Our private public? Or does he entirely reconfigure these boundaries as well? And, as a final thought for this post: what does this have to do with archives?




*Much could be said about this statement, made around 1936, being discussed in a blog, but I'll leave that for another writer.