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

Justyna Stępień

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.11.15

Authors

Justyna Stępień University of Lodz https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2893-3593

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.15

Keywords:

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

Abstract

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human-social paradigm, implying that the human and nonhuman binary, due to the exchange of affective entanglements, is no longer valid in the heyday of techno-scientific development.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.

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Author Biography

Justyna Stępień, University of Lodz

Justyna Stępień is Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies in the Department of British Literature and Culture, where she received her doctorate in 2012. She is an author of British Pop Art and Postmodernism (2015), an editor of Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture (2014) and co-editor of a special issue of Open Cultural Studies journal (Transmediating Culture(s)?, 2017). She is currently working on her book devoted to posthumanist artistic practices. She belongs to an international research group/collective The Posthuman Art and Research Group (a.k.a. Dori O.) that consists of artists and researchers from all over Europe.

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