For the annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA), held in Toronto in November 2018, art historian Hannah Higgins organized a two-panel session, titled “Fluxed Body Parts in 6’40”.
Each of us 21 panelists were asked to prepare a presentation on a particular body part of our choosing. However, we were all limited to twenty slides, and our accompanying comments were limited to twenty seconds. 20 slides @ 20 seconds each = a six-minute and 40-second presentation.
Inspired by the practices of Fluxus, but extending to a wide variety of other performative and conceptual models and modes, the presentations were some of the most animated that I have ever encountered at an academic conference. Participants and audience members agreed that the session was one of the most exciting, generative and memorable they had ever experienced.
Below is my presentation on “Anus.” It consists of 20 images, with each image accompanied by a short text that I read in 20 seconds, before the next slide image was automatically advanced. I had never used this format before, but I am now convinced that it deserves to be transported into any number of other settings, including the classroom, perhaps as a way for students to structure their in-class art history or visual culture presentations.
1. The anus is the most sovereign part of the body. The conviction of this insight belongs—first and foremost—to Georges Bataille who, in various publications from the late-1920s and early-1930s, including “The Solar Anus”of 1927, defined the butthole’s sovereignty in terms of it being a site of erotic, excessive, and useless expenditure. In other words, for Bataille, it was part of a general, as opposed to a restricted, economy.
Etymology of SOVEREIGN
Adjective
*superānus (feminine *superāna, neuter *superānum); first/second declension (Vulgar Latin) sovereign, chief
2. Etymologically, anus as the Latin word for “ring” is present in the word sovereign, as the latter word also traces the resonance of ring and reign, such that, that which is sovereign is that which bears the ring or crown—the one who therefore reigns supreme. By the way, it is from super-anus that we also derive the word “soprano.”
3. Bataille is widely known as the philosopher of hyperbolic transgression, and in the context of my presentation, of an especially flaming excremental explosiveness, in which the volcano-ass/ass-volcano, that is: the volcanus, is one vision of excess that at this time, he names the Jesuve (a portmanteau that has been understood to be a combination of Je + Jesus + Vesuvius).
4. But I am interested in a quieter, slower and more subtle Bataille, while still remaining right at and around the ring or rim of the anus. This is the Bataille who regularly resorts to the language of slippage (glissement), and thus suggests the movement of an inadvertent sliding or slipping in, as opposed to a violent penetrating or thrusting.
5. This is what the ring of bodies perform in Veloso, Caio and Dallas’ Macaquinhos (little monkeys). Their asses? Yes, but this word is also the slang for a woman who prefers anal over vaginal sex. For the Brazilian artists, the anus is the southern hemisphere of the body, and has the potential to function as its own democratic and collectivizing site, and as the opening of de-colonizing explorations of bodies, desires, anxieties, privacy and exposure.
glisser
glissant
glissement
glissade
glissando
glisten
6. Glisser (French: to slip) is one of a number of gl- words: glissant (French: slippery), glissement (slippage), glissade (a joining step in ballet), glissando (slide upwards or downward between musical notes), glisten (wet shine).
7. Such glottal resonances were mined by Jacques Derrida in his book, Glas: the title of which refers to the knell or ring of the bell. As Naomi Waltham-Smith has recently theorized, this might be heard as the rhythmic sounds of the bio-political, and its own sovereign exceptions over bodies and pleasures; over the decision as to who lives and who dies.
8. Gl- is also the sound that we repeatedly hear and utter in Dick Higgins’ poem, Glass Lass, in which, in the iterative enunciation of those two words, we continuously hear and speak, as though from the depths of the text, the echo of ass—its own anal glossolalia.
9. Of course, it was Freud, in “Character and Anal Eroticism,” who drew a distinction between “anal” as character trait and what we can understand as the regimented ordering of obsessive-compulsive anality, as opposed to the de-sublimating libidinal energy of anal eroticism.
10. What I want to suggest is that in the particular ordering produced by its partitioned (Year= Annus) boxes, and in the de-limited uses of the objects contained therein, Fluxus uniquely combined these two seemingly opposed traits, so as to achieve an aesthetic that is structure and play, at once.
11. For the topic of anus, Larry MIller’s Orifice Flux Plugs (from 1974) is a quintessential example of this remarkable tension, in which a variety of a body’s orifices are all understood to be anatomical structures of flux, and no one plug is necessarily prescribed to fit into only one corporeal opening. As Leo Bersani notes: Freud implicitly argues that anal eroticism is indifferent to objects and the activities by which it is satisfied. Fluxus provides us with an artistic corollary of this object-based indifference, yet one that does not necessarily result in aesthetic—or erotic—dissatisfaction with non-completion.
12. The label for Miller’s box features an illustration of a forefinger slipping into an anus, and thereby might be understood as the provided instructions for how to use the box, in which one slips a finger or two into any one of its compartments, as though each were its own anal cavity, and there find a plug and a means to play.
13. As a portrait of George Maciunas, Miller’s box seems more than an appropriate object, not only because it is meant to correspond to Maciunas’ obsessions with the body’s erotogenic zones, but also because, on second glance (another gl- word), one notices that the last four letters of Maciunas’ last name, anagrammatically read as “anus.”
14. Maciunas drew this chart or table for Miller’s Orifice Flux Plugs, and in the three-columned row at the bottom labelled “ass,” listed: tampons, syringe, candle (repeated twice), rubber tube, suppository (mis-spelled) and condom. I have yet to decipher the logic that underlies this three-part division of the table.
15. With Ben Vautier’s Flux Holes, we are led to understand that flux equates with holes and holes with flux. Hence if any anus hole can be the site of flux, then there is an inextricable between flux and anus, and hence between anus and Fluxus. For Fluxus, the anus is sovereign, because the sovereignty of the anal drive lies in its mobility, its instability, its promiscuity—including its deviation from this drive as source and anus as site.
16. This is even the case for gay men, yet importantly in ways that, as Leo Bersani argued in his classic essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” the anus is the site of a divestment of self and the burial of ego-investments. Those investments include identity, yet perhaps not necessarily naming, as evidenced in Matts Leiderstam’s series of ceramic vases with anal puckers where there otherwise would be openings. A range of colours indexing different skin tones, the vases, in their respective titles, bear the first-name anonymity of cruising.
17. This, opposite the recent trend in porno-cosmetic-aesthetics of anal bleaching, in which the skin around the ring of the anus is lightened in colour. How racist are you, when even your butthole must be white?
18. With Larry Johnson’s Donkey, we have an image of how the anus can be the site of pleasurable erasure or, returning to Bataille, of useless erotic expenditure and the sovereign dissolution and passionate abandonment of self, subject, and the more familiar sovereignty of his majesty the ego. Of course with that, I arrive at the issue of our current political Annus Mirabilis—actually the past two years—and that relentlessly inescapable image of autocratic sovereignty. Not the sweet little pucker that I have been toying with, but the lips of this big asshole motherfucker.
19. The ironic twist: Trump is the incarnation of anality that, in its combination of unrestrained sexuality and its brutal repression, operates as the mythical promotion (i.e. sublimation in the form of populist nationalism) of a fantasy of massive destruction in the form of radical reparation (“make America great again”). As Bersani concludes: “The anal character trait is anal sexuality negativized, a negativizing that—as in the case of individual and social compulsions of order—can present itself as a reparation, indeed almost as an atonement for a defiling explosiveness” (“Erotic Assumptions,” in Culture of Redemption, 46).
20. With his series of Anal Kiss prints from 2011, it is as though artist Wim Delvoye, had a premonition of the rise of these lipstick traces smacked in hotel rooms across the country as this asshole goes from rally and rally, and around the world as he kisses the asses of tyrants and dictators. It is our own Rorschach, testing our ability to perceive the subtle as well as the more bombastic forms and forces of sovereignty. For as Bataille noted immediately after WWII: “From the outset, the sovereign operation presents a difficulty so great, that one has to look for it in a slipping” (“Method of Meditation,” 1947).
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