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human-social paradigm, implying that the human and nonhuman binary, due to the exchange of affective entanglements, is no longer valid in the heyday of techno-scientific development.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

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

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.

References

Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen, editors. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501388323.0007

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388128
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12101zq

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391623
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w

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
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/b.9780631224037.2003.00012.x

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia UP, 2011.
Google Scholar

Broglio, Ron. Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art. U of Minnesota P, 2011.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816672967.001.0001

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Google Scholar

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Google Scholar

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
Google Scholar DOI: 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
Google Scholar DOI: 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
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780

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
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262042499.003.0026

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
Google Scholar

Jones, Amelia. Body Art. Performing the Subject. U of Minnesota P, 1998.
Google Scholar

MacCormack, Patricia. “Art, Nature, Ethics: Nonhuman Queerings.” Somatechnics, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, pp. 120–34. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2015.0157
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2015.0157

MacCormack, Patricia, and Colin Gardner. Deleuze and the Animal. Edinburgh UP, 2017.
Google Scholar

Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Duke UP, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376057
Google Scholar DOI: 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.
Google Scholar

Smith, Kiki. Rapture. 2001, Pace Gallery, New York.
Google Scholar

Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Abbeville, 1987.
Google Scholar

Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys. Thames and Hudson, 1979.
Google Scholar

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.
Google Scholar

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.
Google Scholar

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
Google Scholar DOI: 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.
Google Scholar