Performing More-Than-Human Corporeal Connections in Kiki Smith’s Sculpture

• Authors: Justyna Stępień

Abstracts

EN

The article examines work by contemporary American artist Kiki Smith, who proposes a future in which human and nonhuman bodily borders merge. The artist’s contribution to the more-than-human artistic entanglements is juxtaposed with Joseph Beuys’s artistic manifesto from 1974 which proposes, among other things, an attempt to get outside of the represented human towards the asignified ahuman. In Kiki’s sculpture, both human and nonhuman animals undergo constant morphogenesis, becoming hybrid forms far beyond the human-social paradigm, implying that the human and nonhuman binary, due to the exchange of affective entanglements, is no longer valid in the heyday of techno-scientific development. The analyzed work shows that both human and nonhuman bodies are raw materials not separated from one another but always interconnected with the world and its ongoing material processes. Thus, the article emphasizes that it is only through the transgression of the human and nonhuman border that one can acknowledge the more ethical and political ways of cooperation needed for the appreciation of the multispecies dimension of our world and its survival.

Keywords

EN

performative arts; more-than-human entanglements; American art; Kiki Smith; Joseph Beuys

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
• Year: 2021
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 225-239

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Justyna Stępień

• University of Lodz

• https://orcid.org/0000000328933593

References

• Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen, editors. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388128
• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391623
• Braidotti, Rosi. “Feminist Philosophies.” A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, edited by Mary Eagleton, Blackwell, 2003, pp. 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/b.9780631224037.2003.00012.x
• Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia UP, 2011.
• Broglio, Ron. Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art. U of Minnesota P, 2011.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• De Miranda, Luis. “Is a New Life Possible? Deleuze and the Lines.” Deleuze Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, pp. 106–52. https://doi.org/10.3366/dls.2013.0096
• Despret, Vinciane. “The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society SAGE Publications, vol. 10, no. 2–3, 2004, pp. 111–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X04042938
• Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780
• Haraway, Donna J. “Training in the Contact Zone: Power, Play, and Invention in the Sport of Agility.” Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, The MIT P, 2008, pp. 445–65. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262042499.003.0026
• Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
• Jones, Amelia. Body Art. Performing the Subject. U of Minnesota P, 1998.
• MacCormack, Patricia. “Art, Nature, Ethics: Nonhuman Queerings.” Somatechnics, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, pp. 120–34. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2015.0157
• MacCormack, Patricia, and Colin Gardner. Deleuze and the Animal. Edinburgh UP, 2017.
• Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Duke UP, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376057
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Intertwining-The Chiasm.” The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern UP, 1968, pp. 130–55.
• Smith, Kiki. Rapture. 2001, Pace Gallery, New York.
• Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Abbeville, 1987.
• Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys. Thames and Hudson, 1979.
• Warner, Marina. “Metamorphoses of the Monstrous.” Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, edited by Mark W. Scala, First Centre for the Visual Arts Vanderbilt UP, 2012, pp. 24–37.
• Warner, Marina. “Wolf-girl, Soul-bird: The Mortal Art of Kiki Smith.” Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005, edited by Siri Engberg, Walker Art Centre, 2005, pp. 42–54.
• Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. U of Chicago P, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226922423.001.0001
• Zipes, Jack. “Fairy-tale Collisions.” Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, edited by Mark W. Scala, First Centre for the Visual Arts Vanderbilt UP, 2012, pp. 13–24.

Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/2083-2931.11.15

Biblioteka Nauki

2032729