THE POWER OF THE ABJECTan unknowable, unrepresentable resource

Helen Acklam

contents: page

Introduction 2

Chapter 1 Defining the unknowable and unrepresentable 4

Chapter 2 Art and the abject 9

Chapter 3 Take 17 14

Conclusion 17

Plates 19- 24

Plates reference25

Bibliography26 - 27

word count: 4632

1

2

INTRODUCTION

My interest in this research area began with two books on Eva

Hesse. They introduced me to an artist who dug deep in an

attempt to understand herself and her experiences and I

understood something, from the analysis of the work and the

references to the theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva,

which I found exciting and validating. I was aware that my art

practice was an expression of energy that I found difficult to

articulate, and sensed that I might be missing a valuable

element of the process. These books introduced me to ways of

viewing art works that take into account the interrelatedness

of art and life and a language that both shows and tells.

Out of this initial interest came some questions that have

remained at the heart of my practice. My narrow view of the

abject, under the banner of ‘abject art’ was being challenged

by what I was reading and seeing. What exactly was the abject?

Was this just a cathartic exercise? Could Kristeva’s ideas

form a valuable structure and resource for artists? Could art,

as she claimed, purify the abject, and what did that mean?

I begin, in Chapter 1, by attempting to clarify what Kristeva

meant by the term ‘abject’ and how it relates to other concepts

of aesthetic quality developed since the 18th century to

describe what is unknowable and unrepresentable. I will argue

that we should not be limited to a view that the abject is

about the gory and the grotesque, or be under the illusion that

we can define the abject at all.3

In the second part of Chapter 1, I examine Kristeva‘s

development of the concept of the abject alongside its presence

in her work and life. Kristeva has focused mainly on

literature as transgression, but her ideas can be applied

equally to other categories of the arts. I examine how

Kristeva’s theory of revolt can provide a structure for artists

interested in practice as a process of enquiry and how this

might be useful to artists.

In Chapter 2 I look at a selection of artists who use the

abject as a resource in their practice to:

explore personal experiences.

challenge and expose systems, rules, order.

facilitate the possibility of an ‘intimate’ experience of

revolt in others.

In Chapter 3 I report the results of an informal survey of

seventeen artists who are using their art practice to explore

the abject i.e. exploring their own limits, or those of

society. The purpose is to identify:

the consequences for an artist of working with the abject.

if there have been any personal benefits for the artists.

4

whether they relate to Kristeva’s claim that “the artistic

experience is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same

token purifies.”

And finally, in conclusion, I bring together the various issues

considered above and look to a wider way of viewing the abject

as a valuable and powerful resource for artists.

5

CHAPTER 1

DEFINING THE UNKNOWABLE AND UNREPRESENTABLE

“ Neither subject nor object.” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror,

1982, p. 1)

The abject - a reaction

Julia Kristeva developed the term ‘abject’ to describe her

reaction to reading Louis Ferdinand Céline. She was

challenged by “a ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a

thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is

nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.” (Kristeva,

Powers of Horror, 1982, p. 2) During this conversation with

Sylvere Lotringer, she asks, “What is it that pains me and at

the same time appeals to me and that I have such a hard time

conceptualizing?” (Lotringer) Kristeva felt that the weight of

this word, ‘abject’, was right to describe this reaction.

Words, words, words

6

Attempting to understand the unknowable and unrepresentable is

something that great thinkers have always grappled with.

“‘The ‘sublime’ as we know it today, was an invention of the

late eighteenth century.” (Purkis) Edmund Burke began to

relate the sublime to experiences of nature. “Terror” he

claimed “is in all cases …the ruling principle of the

sublime.” (Burke, 1990, p. 53). For Burke, it gave a sense of

limitation, whereas for Immanuel Kant the sublime could expand

self-awareness. Kant was optimistic about what lay beyond the

range of our frustrated minds and wanted to explore what

happened at the border, where reason finds its limits. (Asma,

2009, p. 187) He shifted Burke’s emphasis from the experience

onto the affect on the subject. This impact could be triggered by

nature, but equally, by any experience that was threatening and

unnameable. (Morley, biography)

7

Jean-François Lyotard took the Kantian sublime as an authority

for the existence of the unpresentable. Questioning how

anything could be represented after the horrors of the 20th

century, the sublime, for him, was not something that resides in

nature, but something without form and purpose. An ungraspable

presence “.. like lightning. It short-circuits thinking with

itself.” (Lyotard J.-F. , 1994, p. 54) This sublime promotes

an art, inspired by the unknown, which causes surprise, shock,

pain. (Belsey, 2005, p. 126) Like Kristeva’s abject, it is a

reaction - something without form, that we are attracted to and

repelled by. (Willette) Something that, Jon Thompson tells us,

can be relayed artist to viewer, author to reader. It is not

the works that are ‘sublime’, “but rather that the experience

of the sublime can be re-presented in art works and

consequently the receiver can gain access to the sublime

experience.” (Purkis) Similar, then, to the experience re-

presented in literature that enabled Kristeva to gain access to

what she termed the ‘abject’.

Freud introduced the term ‘the uncanny’ to describe the

experience of being made aware of repressed urges, fears and

traumas. (Morley) This concept is closely related to

Kristeva's concept of abjection where one reacts adversely to

something that has been forcefully cast out of the Symbolic

Order.

These terms – the sublime, the uncanny, the abject – were used

by these philosophers to describe the indescribable and are a

product of each individual thinker and their historical and

cultural context. 8

The abject – a concept

The difference between ‘object’ and ‘abject’ for Kristeva is

linguistic. The abject resides outside language in what

Jacques Lacan terms ‘the Real’, and our sense of it

destabilizes the Symbolic. As John Lechte summarises,

“Language both constitutes subjects, and is also the link

between them… This is the level of Lacan’s Symbolic Order.

Language and thought enable us to produce reality and fantasies

in images; the means for producing the order that Lacan

designated as the Imaginary. The Real, to complete the

triangle, is outside language. It can’t be symbolized,

represented, or expressed in any way.” (Lechte, 2012, p. 26)

Although the abject is located within the Real, something about

it is accessible to us. “What makes something abject and not

simply repressed is that it does not entirely disappear from

consciousness.” (McAfee, 2004, p. 46) It hovers, somewhere on

the border, existing by virtue of what it transgresses in order

to be.

Defining the abject

9

Kelly Oliver examines some of Kristeva’s definitions of the

abject. “It is ambiguous, in-between, composite … It

represents what has been jettisoned out of that boundary … The

abject is what threatens identity. It is neither good nor

evil, subject nor object, ego nor unconscious, but something

that threatens the distinctions themselves. Although every

individual and every group – be it society, institution,

ideology - is founded on the abject, constructing boundaries

and jettisoning the antisocial, every individual and group will

have its own abject. In all cases, the abject threatens the

unity / identity of both society and the subject.” (Oliver,

1993, p. 56)

The abject – defining our borders

The abject, then, not only threatens, but defines all borders

– of the ‘I’ and all groups that the subject is within

(society, culture, ideologies, institutions). For Kristeva it

is not good enough to accept what’s already constituted by

these borders, “but necessary to work towards achieving the

impossible and bringing the Real into the symbolic – or, at any

rate, of enlarging Symbolic and imaginary capacities in the

attempt.” (Lechte, 2012, p. 27) When faced with the abject,

the sublime or the uncanny, our ideas about ourselves and our

world are challenged, highlighting where change is possible.

The abject – defining Kristeva’s border

10

Kristeva arrived in Paris from Bulgaria to study; a woman, an

‘other’ - an exile and a foreigner - abject. It was the mid-

60’s, a time of revolution.

Kristeva recognized the revolutionary power of the poetic

language used by the avant-garde to explore and relay the

abject, thereby challenging the bourgeoisie whilst remaining

accepted by them. In a similar way Kristeva challenged, and

was protected by, the phallocentric world of structuralism and

psychoanalysis, using academic texts to explore her pain and

loss.

In ‘Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection’ we witness

Kristeva as a ‘subject in process’ through her

phenomenological exploration of the abject. Kelly Oliver

finds this an uncomfortable experience. “Like the abject

mother, her writings are both sublime and repulsive. I am drawn

to them in a struggle to control them by interpreting them, by

understanding them, by making sense out of them.” (Oliver,

1993, p. 2) Within Kristeva’s writing she sees “a

melancholy theoretician mourning the loss of her motherland and

maternal language. For Kristeva the maternal becomes a source

of pain and ecstasy. Her fantasies are filled with joyous

reunions with the semiotic, maternal body, whether through

poetry, art or pregnancy. They are also filled with images of

horrifying abject mothers. “ (Oliver, 1993, p. 143) “My pain,”

confirms Kristeva, “is the hidden side of my philosophy, its

mute sister.” (Oliver, 1993, p. 135)

The abject and alterity11

Her particular focus on the mother and woman as abject within

her theorizing of this concept, has won Kristeva much favour,

and much criticism, amongst feminists. The contention has

been further fuelled by her inability to support any ideology

that makes someone else ‘Other’, including feminism. ''What

interests me”, she says, “is not all women, but each woman in

her intimacy.'' (Riding, 2001) As an individualist and a

theorist, Kristeva encourages us to “learn to live within the

flexible, always precarious borders of our subjectivity in

order to learn to live within the flexible, always precarious

borders of human society.” (Oliver, 1993, p. 13)

Revolt, she said

Kristeva returns in her recent work to Freud’s view of

‘revolution,’ as the relationship between process and analysis,

and an understanding of the term ‘revolt’ as a process of

constant questioning and exploration of the space of the

intimate and the abject. In order to resist our increasingly

homogenized world, Kristeva focuses on questions of:

1. identity – ‘who am I?’ “There alone the singularity of

each person (not to be confused with the illusory and

manufactured individualism of a capitalist consumer society)

contributes to our understanding of a life made of challenges

and differences.” (Gri13p. 142)

2. artistic practice as transgression. According to

Kristeva, “it is the artist, the writer and the analyst who 12

embody the therapeutic possibility of speaking the abject.”

(Smith A.-M. , 1998) She suggests that we can do that via the

poetic, a language that can fulfil the ethical function of art

by being a signifying practice. Talking about the various

means of purifying the abject, Kristeva says “the artistic

experience is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same

token purifies.” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 17)

13

CHAPTER 2

ART AND THE ABJECT

Kristeva then is clear that “It is not a lack of cleanliness

or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity,

systems, order. What does not respect borders, positions,

rules.” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1982, p. 4) Yet

institutions often define this genre of art as concerned only

with this, eg, “Abject art - Artworks which explore themes

that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and

propriety particularly referencing the body and bodily

functions.” (Tate)

I’d like to look at a small selection of artists who have

challenged the limits of identity, systems and order through

their practice, using the abject to:

• explore life and art - Eva Hesse

Lucy Lippard, began a text on Hesse with an epigraph from Jean-

Paul Sartre. “Man is nothing else than his life. When we say

‘You are nothing else than your life, that does not imply that

the artist will be judged solely on the basis of his works of

art; a thousand other things will contribute towards summing

him up.” Lippard felt these ‘thousand other things’ were the 14

losses, the anxiety, the extreme difficulties Hesse faced in

her life. (Lippard, 1971) She asked, ‘WHO AM I’?

As well as an existential question, ‘Who am I?’ is “the key

site of resistance to culture’s attempts to confine those it

regards as Other, to limited and partial categories. Julia

Kristeva has recently argued that singularity – who am I – is

the crucial achievement against imposed collective definition:

woman, Jew, gay, Other.” Griselda Pollock understood that

Hesse, exploring a place that language fails to expose,

required “creation not of an image - representation or

expression – but of a form for what Lacan would name the Thing,

the traumatic unknown that presses relentlessly from the no-

place of the most archaic experiences.” (Griselda Pollock,

2006, pp. 52, 53).

The freedom her practice gave Hesse to explore what was abject

and intimate to her, was often difficult for her to put into

words. One example of this is based on a much-quoted comment

about Hesse’s commitment to art as “an essence.. a total image

that has to do with me and life.” This was actually put

together from different things said in an interview with Cindy

Nemser. (Corby, 2010, p. 110) The 90-page transcript of

this interview reveals that she was mumbling and talking in

broken sentences about connections she had to art works, hers

and others. “Carl Andre’s work it was the concentration camp

– it was those showers that put on gas and that’s where to

life.” (Corby, 2010, p. 113)

15

Hesse’s struggle to articulate her experiences could be due to

what Stacey Keltner terms ‘abjection’. Relating ‘abjection’ to

the interiorisation of a social demand on 1st and 2nd generation

German people to integrate intimate suffering and public

horror. (Keltner, 2011, p. 71). Hesse’s practice enabled

her to exteriorize and ‘see her way through’ these experiences.

Plate 1 No title, 1960

Luanne McKinnon presents Hesse’s ‘Spectre’ paintings, as

“abject exercises.. testimonies to a private anxiety...Looking

inwardly and outwardly and with paint as her guide, she began

to paint herself out and away and ahead.” (Hammer Museum,

2010)

Plate 2 No title, 1961

Diary extract, December 12 1961, “I am in a bad way. Things

have come to pass, so disturbing that the shell made of iron

which as refused to be set jar – will – must – at last open…

Problems of my past, of my past sickness, of the scars of my

early beginnings. Only painting can see me through.”

Plate 3 Expanded Expansion, 1969

“These forms await language but are its beginnings.” (Pol131p.

153)

Hesse knew that the materials she used in her sculpture would

eventually crack, age and turn to dust. Each section is

supported by rigid fiber-glass poles which determine how they

will drape and sag. The repetition, of each section and each

pole, creates variation so that this piece itself could never

16

look the same, but would be shaped by the environment it’s

placed in. (Sussman, 2001)

• challenge and expose systems, order, rules - Doris Salcedo

Salcedo’s status as an international artist has enabled her to

form a bridge between the viewer and the lives depicted in her

work and to gain recognition of the abject atrocities

experienced by the Colombian people in the ongoing civil

conflict. Her practice arises from a need to transgress

social impositions of silence in order to ‘tell’. As she

explains, “In art, silence is already a language – a language

prior to language – of the unexpressed and the inexpressible...

The silence of the victim of the violence in Colombia, my

silence as an artist and the silence of the viewer come

together during the precise moment of contemplation.”

(Whitechapel Gallery, 2010, p. 189)

“Art”, Salcedo says, “is the transmission without words of what

is the same in all human beings.” (Barson, 2004) The viewer

recognizes an intimate and familiar strangeness that doesn’t

just belong to some ‘other’. “The image doesn’t resemble a

cadaver, but it could be that the strangeness of the cadaver is

also the strangeness of the image.” (Fusco, Say Who I Am: or a

Broad Private Wink, 2012)

Plate 3 Atrabiliarios, 1992-2003

The materials, Salcedo says, are already charged with meaning.

“The processes go beyond me, beyond my very limited capacity,

whether because one single person couldn’t possibly have made 17

the work… or because of the brutality and massiveness of the

act… or because it is inhuman to handle certain materials…”

(Nancy Princenthal, 2000, p. 14)

As viewers we are both repelled and intrigued; repelled by

other peoples’ old shoes, intrigued because we are viewing them

in an odd place. As we look, we can make out signs of the

wearer. The covering, of animal membrane, mutes the

connection providing a clouding of vision that is necessitated,

according to Nancy Princenthal, by the unspeakability of

trauma. It also represents the repression of identity of the

victim and the crisis left behind. (Gibbons, 2007, p. 59)

Plate 4 A Flor de Piel, 2011 – 2012

“The event is an innovation that opens up consciousness to the

world, and the world to consciousness by means of that which

has been formed by an artist.” (Pollock, 2013, p. 143)

18

A Flor de Piel is a shroud of thousands of rose petals stitched

together, dedicated to a victim of torture. It is an

uncomfortable experience of something visibly dying that evokes

the abject and a sense of temporality. Time with the

sculpture reveals the time taken to sew the petals together,

how torture is endured over time and how time is necessary to

allow the suffering to overcome our averseness to it. To allow

the artistic experience, rooted in the abject it utters, to be

purified.

• facilitate an experience of intimate revolt in others

.Julia Kristeva sees ‘revolt’ as a passage to the outer

boundaries of the subject and society, that can access the

space of the archaic, the intimate, the abject within us.

(Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984, p. 17) The

following artists have set out to facilitate an experience for

the participants in their work which could be seen as an act of

revolt.

Marina Abramović

Abramović’s web-site tells us that “SHE CREATES PERFORMANCES

THAT CHALLENGE, SHOCK, AND MOVE US. THROUGH HER AND WITH HER,

BOUNDARIES ARE CROSSED, CONSCIOUSNESS EXPANDED…. THE ‘ARTIST IS

PRESENT’ HAS THE POWER TO FULFILL MARINA'S OWN DICTUM ABOUT

LONG-DURATIONAL WORK, IN WHICH, SHE SAYS, "PERFORMANCE BECOMES

LIFE ITSELF." (Abramović)

19

Critics, reviewing her performance give examples of what the

combination of Abramovic, time, space, expectations, and very

few words can do. “Plumbing deeper” says Charlie Finch, “one

sees that the Circus Abramović was an expression of deep

humanism… Marina doubly emphasised that the flesh, however

transitory and imperfect, retains the nobility of being all we

have and all we are…. In the kaleidoscope of oil spills, bomb

scares, crushing debt and hooking up, the one fixed point,

Marina reminds us, is you (and me).” (Finch, 2010)

20

Mikhail Karakis

Mikhail Karakis states that his work ”ranges from the poetic

to the theatrical, and activates the potential for ruptures

both in perception and ethical concerns.” (Karakis)

Plate 7 Sounds from Beneath

Miners from Snowdown Colliery recall the subterranean sounds of

their working mine, transforming the site into an amphitheatre

haunted by strange, resonating sounds of explosions and

machines. The piece pulsates with a life that seems to come

from deep inside each man, somewhere in the past and under the

ground.

Karakis has facilitated an experience for these miners to

‘tell’ their story through the body, rhythm and sound, creating

the possibility that they will access and express energies and

drives not available to them through language. As Kristeva

argues, the expression of the semiotic speaks the unconscious

and the abject, and has the ability to rupture the logical

language of the symbolic. (Oliver, 1993, p. 99) This “is a

rupture less in the world than in the subject – between the

perception and the consciousness of a subject.” (Foster, 1996,

p. 132)

But does this purify the abject? Do artists, who explore this

place that language fails to expose, get to a different place,

and do they consider it to be a meaningful experience?

21

CHAPTER 3

TAKE 17

Following my research into the use of the abject as a resource

to challenge identity, systems and order, I decided to carry

out a survey of practising artists in order to establish the

consequences of this work.

Purpose of the survey

The purpose of the survey was to identify:

- the consequences for an artist of working with the abject.

- whether they saw any correlation with Julia Kristeva’s claim

that “the artistic experience is rooted in the abject it

utters and by the same token purifies.” (Kristeva, Powers of

Horror, 1982, p. 17)

The survey22

I conducted a survey of artists who are using their practice to

explore the abject. By this I mean exploring freely, in the

logic of the unconscious and material process, with the

intention of exposing what is not yet known.

The range of art practices included film, digital story-

telling, animation, performance and visual arts. The

paricipants ranged in experience from new and emerging artists

to established artists and university tutors.

The survey consisted of 5 questions:

1. What does the term abject mean to you?

2. Do you think it is relevant to your work?

3. What are the consequences for you of working with the abject?

4. Have there been any benefits, to you or others?

5. Do you see any correlation with Kristeva’s claim that art can

purify the abject and your experience/practice?

The survey was conducted in the following ways:

13 face to face interviews

2 telephone interviews

2 written responses

Findings

Below are my overall findings and two examples to illustrate

each point made.

23

1. The abject is difficult to articulate. Participants often

needed to refer back to Kristeva’s definitions to focus their

answer.

“Murky sense of something that I’m compelled to play with.” Caroline Pick

“..formless… like the dark.. can’t put my finger on it and I can’t plan to put it into

my work.” Ekatarina Golubina

2. All those interviewed thought the abject was relevant to

their work - even if they hadn’t previously, or had

deliberately chosen not to identify with the term prior to the

survey.

“Yes.. it can see it in the layering.. in the process.. I feel it. They are the secrets to

myself” Alan Pierce

“In an indirect way… it’s an important part .. the surprise. I don’t understand it

straight away though… but I know it.” Neal Turner

3. Working with the abject produces feelings of despair,

fear, anxiety, danger, excitement,

release, liberation, expansion. It can lead to greater

understanding, consciousness of

self/society, tolerance, humility and also to darkness and

depression.

“I experienced a breakdown between subjectivity and the abject – I produced dark

work..all felt very dark and negative… I think I washed things out through my

work… I felt compelled...” Gus Cummins, RA

24

“It helps me to release things.. in Korea I couldn’t say these things..it made me in

danger. There are dark memories in a dark corner of my mind.. So making art

work helped. It gives my work strength.” Jihyo Shin

4. This work can make us question things that we take for

granted, reaffirming things as well as gaining new knowledge

and insights into ourselves, our practise and our society. It

can add depth and excitement to the work, but it can also

make it inaccessible to anyone else.

“it adds depth and resonance to the work…by unveiling the abject, it makes it

visible, experienced and able to be dispersed.” Anonymous, Digitales

“I like that I don’t have a complete grasp of it, it’s exciting thinking I can nearly

touch it…. I’m really aware of the way we construct boundaries now and sad that

we’re so brainwashed.“ Kate McCoy

5. The word ‘purify’ can suggest a moral judgment and negative

connotations relating to religion and, also, to Kristeva.

Moving beyond these barriers, ‘to purify’ was interpreted as a

catharsis, revealing things in the work through the

articulation of it. Critical activity and opportunities for

dialogue with peers, tutors, analysts or mentors, was seen as

essential and enriching, leading to greater understanding of

what the work was about and also opening up new directions.

“purify sounds like a kind of expulsion…Art shouldn’t aim to purify but reveal.”

Holly Mulveen

“analyzing the work with others..I get it out..I get to understand more and I can go

back to work I made ages ago, years even, and understand what I was doing… that

drives me to make new work.” Mo Fathollahi25

CONCLUSION

What is the abject?

From my research it has become clear that, in essence, the

abject is our reaction to that which is unknowable and

unrepresentable and which threatens our sense of self. In

addition, it needs to be highlighted that the abject is not

just the gory and the grotesque, but anything that challenges

identity, systems and order from a position outside language.

Can art purify the abject?

An encounter with the abject, and the jouissance we experience,

creates an opportunity for us to question what we are faced

with, how we account for it and how we can give it meaning.

It is one thing, however, for an artist to immerse him/herself

in spontaneous and unpredictable responses, another to purify

the abject by bringing it into language. A structure is

needed that would enable new meanings to come to light, whilst

allowing the experience of practice, and the performative

dimension of signification, to take place first.

Can Kristeva's ideas form a valuable structure and resource for

artists?

26

I would argue that Kristeva’s concept of ‘revolt’, as a process

of questioning and exploring the space of the abject, can

provide this valuable structure, but with one important caveat.

Kristeva proposes an art practice as transgression, followed by

analysis by an art critic or analyst. (Barrett, 2011, p. 121)

However, the critic or analyst, as chief purveyor of analysis,

inevitably creates a hierarchical structure which results in

judgment on the art work and the artist. Consequently, I

propose that the artist, as the subject in process, must be the

‘critic/analyst’.

The findings of my survey of practising artists confirmed the

value of an opportunity to test out ideas and critique work in

dialogue, and in conjunction with, other artists, mentors

and/or tutors. This was seen as essential in order to maximize

the understanding of the process and practice and to inform new

work.

What next?

In order to build on the progress I have made in attempting to

answer the above questions, I now consider there are further

questions that need to be addressed to locate this discussion

in the grass-roots world of artists wishing to engage in

practice-led research in its true sense i.e.

Can a research framework be put together that:

- will enable artists to express the issues they are examining prior to being able

to articulate them? 27

- incorporates a facility to regularly critique work and ideas?

- recognises theory, not as a top-down feed from the power systems of academia

and institutions, but as a useful resource that provokes thought, interest,

passion and helps artists to articulate their practice?

Answering these questions could provide an experiential

framework for a research that would support art practice as an

independent form of knowledge.

Plate 1

Eva Hesse No title, 1960

Oil on canvas, 18 x 15 inches

28

Plate 2

Eva Hesse No title,

1961

Ink on paper, 6 x 4 1/2

inches

29

Plate 3

Eva Hesse Expanded Expansion, 1969.

Fiberglass, polyester resin, latex, and cheesecloth, 10

feet 2 inches × 25 feet overall

30

Plate 4

Doris

Salcedo

Atrabiliarios,

1992-2003

shoes,

animal

fiber,

surgical

thread,

dimensions

variable

31

Plate 5

Doris Salcedo A Flor de Piel, 2011 - 2012

Rose petals and thread, Dimensions variable

32

Plate 6

Marina Abramović The Artist is Present, 2010

33

Plate 7

Mikhail Karakis Sounds from Beneath, 2010

34

PLATES

1

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/34/eva-hesse/images-clips/76/

2 http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2010/eva-hesse-spectres-1960/

35

3 http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection- online/artwork/1648

4 http://www.mcu.es/promoArte/img/Premios/PVelazquez2010_02.jpg

5 http://artnews.org/whitecube/?exi=33108

6 http://jezebel.com/5524682/performance-artist-makes-random- people-cry

7 http://www.mikhailmusic.com/pages_music/music_news.html

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