An awkward toy? Stelarc's Third Hand

I was doing a search on 'Google Books' yesterday for something on Stelarc's work that I hadn't read (and I'm sure that there is an abundance of material). It was primarily because I had been sent an email from an overseas student doing a PhD on Stelarc, who enquired whether she could ask me questions about his work from time to time.

I came across Petra Kuppers book The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. She mentions Stelarc's works several times, but concentrates primarily on his prosthetic third hand (she makes the mistake that many do, by calling it a third arm) and his 1993 performance Stomach Sculpture. I found it intriguing that of all the things she might have said, she made the following statements:

The hand goes where it will, touching what it wants, groping, inelegant, an awkward toy. Stelarc bring this hand into class-room workshops as well and lets others play, and inevitably genitalia are touched, inadvertently or not, mates grin at one another, and slightly forced as well as open audience laughter characterized every time that I have seen him perform, teach, or lecture (Kuppers p.117)

And further on:

Stelarc's carnival laugh makes possible the risque nature of many of his third arm presentations and the grotesque balletic movements that might be uncomfortable if they weren't funny - all this play with body extensions and with taboo zones (Kuppers p.117).

I decided to look again at my Masters thesis (Transhuman Aesthetics: Performance Artists and Cyberculture, 1997), because it was there that my first impressions of Stelarc's Third Hand were written. I quote:
The third hand, developed in 1975 prior to his first suspension event, is a transparent attachment to Stelarc's right arm. It is a machine composed of two distinct parts: the arm , which contains the mechanics to operate the hand and the hand itself, which has Grasp/Pinch, Wrist Rotation, Release and Tactile Feedback functions. The third hand is the double and phantom of both the left arm in involuntary movement and the right arm to which the prosthesis is attached. It replaces neither but serves as a bridge between the human and the cybernetic. It makes a division, but invites connections between the hand of the person who creates (teckne) and the tool created (technology). The Third Hand is a mechanism exposed, and although the boundary between exterior and interior appears thin and impenetrable, its perspex casing is the transparent skin that protects the mechanism allowing easy access for the eye to view the components. The machine has been humanised to a certain extent - it has touch-sensitive finger pads. The Third Hand closes around an object (or other hand) gently, but firmly. The gesture/action mirrors a human hand that grasps for survival - food gathering, tool usage, intimacy. The prosthesis does not augment Stelarc's body, because he has no biological need for a third hand. It is a conceptual and aesthetic attachment which allows Stelarc to raise questions about technology and the human. The prosthesis is a bridge, an idea, and so the third hand as imagined dismemberment is the path to memory. As augmentation it is a link between human and machine. As recently as 1990, Helen Thomson said of Stelarc's performance at La Mama; that he makes his body a technological construct alien to our notions of nature, and yet medical prosthetics have been used by amputees for the past 30 years. Whilst there has been no amputation, Stelarc's re-membering and addendum to his body, silences the arm to which it is attached. The Third Hand although originally covered with a skin-like synthetic substance, is always left uncovered. The boundary between the interior and exterior has been removed allowing easy penetration. As Didier Anzieu as said: 'Since the Renaissance, Western thought has been obsessed with a particular epistemological conception, whereby the acquisition of knowledge is seen as a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core or nuclei'. (The Skin Ego, Translated Chris Turner, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989, p.9 ). Stelarc creates through this third hand construction, a vehicle for rendering everything as pure surface. What is revealed in the looking at this mechanism is machine components instead of human bone and viscera; and the third hand, with very minimal reflex action does not in fact mirror the human hand in motion. The casing is an aesthetic element and protection for the machine components. It is a prototype. In contrast to the human body, the prosthetic third hand, although elegant and sophisticated is an inferior simulacrum, a sculptural element. Its seductive nature is in its apparent transparency which invites contemplation. (Julie Clarke, 2007)

I find it fascinating, given Petra Kuppers is a disability activist that she didn't make more of Stelarc's prosthetic Third Hand and the significant influence it may have had on perceptions of those with prosthetic limbs - cyberbodies as sexy bodies - cyber chic - look at the press given to model, athlete, actress, double amputee Aimee Mullins. Film theorist and amputee Vivien Sobchack (1995:213) cautions against the sexiness of the cyborg identity, instead, stressing the vulnerability of flesh, and rightly so, for there are about a quarter of a million amputees worldwide who experience poverty, discrimination, pain and trauma because of the loss of a limb. I'm certainly not saying that Stelarc's intention was to draw attention to the plight of those with amputated limbs, but much of his project is about how we are augmented or improved by medical and communications technologies.