Installed in pieces, Julie Clarke’s
Aut(o)ptics(o)ma operates like a museual body: a collection of objects, body-parts, and faculties arranged in a whole that playfully challenges the spectator to find and create edifices of meaning over a ruinous fragmentation. The title of the work is an assemblage of words:
autoptic, referring to evidence ‘seen with one’s own eyes’, a kind of personal, self-surveillance or testimony;
soma, or body; and parentheses which perhaps refer to the fragmentary and experimental nature of a work that draws on the shapes and forms of orifices and uncanny gaps in knowledge. With its multiple orifices, sensuous curves, bruises and still-life colours,
Aut(o)ptics(o)ma portrays a femininised sphere of meaning in which the body is consumed before the mirror by both spectators and the feminine self. It reshapes and dehumanises the reclining nude, an art genre that is at least as old as Giorgione's
The Sleeping Venus (1510), in order to present a collage-like assemblage of the feminine body rocked by the horror and criminality of selection and normativity. In such a subversion of artistic codes, the work draws on the aesthetics of horror most memorably explored by Mary Shelley in
Frankenstein (1818). In this novel, the eponymous scientist intends to fashion a ‘beautiful’ life out of a ‘thing’, but in drearily beholding his reclined creation, he is startled to discover a ‘catastrophe’, a nameless, posthuman monster, a feminized revenant or body-in-parts with its ‘dull yellow eye’ and a ‘proportion’ that only makes a mockery of normativity. Julie Clarke’s creation harks back to Frankenstein’s monster. Rather than fleshy body-parts surgically stitched together, in
Aut(o)ptics(o)ma we find a number of digital photographs held together by a series of translucent, diode-like pins. Somehow, in the midst of this assemblage, Clarke finds a convincing way to mirror herself that defies univocal desires and confronts digital technology with the sheer natural and visual plasticity of the feminine body that appears to resist normativity wherever and however it appears.
As such, this artwork may remind us of Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (The Body is a Battleground) (1989). Intellectually and artistically, this work can be located with the writings of feminist theorists like Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Julia Kristeva, whose understanding of the abject is clearly evidenced in this work. In Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of “sex” (1993), Judith Butler presents a critical analysis of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical notion of the phallus and of his understanding of the mirror stage in which the child seizes an imaginary phallus to become a subject, ‘an inchoate collection of desires’. In this interesting reading of Lacan, Butler insists on the imaginary reality of the body missing in Lacan’s account, and argues that because power is itself plastic we should alert ourselves to an understanding of body-and-language-in-pieces that 'opens up anatomy—and sexual difference itself—as a site of proliferative resignifications'. In her own body-in-pieces, Clarke also appears to be confronting what the Slovenian philosopher Bojana Kunst calls ‘a world without secrets, bodies without organs, naked flesh and its fragile potentiality crushed by commercial, popular, scientific and aesthetic pressures’ (1999). Aut(o)ptics(o)ma is a forensic and autoptic presentation of a body—the artist’s own body—crushed and bruised and fragmented with the duration and force of these very pressures, ‘commercial, popular, scientific and aesthetic’. The evidence for this attack is clear in the artist’s own personal testimony. At the same time, the body in this art and the art in this body are finding a way to overcome or outplay these pressures, to win back critically and artistically a kind of proliferative power. Aut(o)ptics(o)ma appears to locate a resistance to the pressures of the outside in the sexual difference of anatomy, in a fleshy subversion that can never be completely reduced to a digital or material machine, and finally in the thinking of outsides undertaken by eco-feminists who have welcomed a new understanding of what Clarke considers an ‘alien landscape’, a kind of posthuman body which has never been human.
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Beornn McCarthy is a PhD student and Masters Graduate at the University of Melbourne. He has lectured and tutored in many subjects in English literature. His PhD is about the life and writings of Isaac D’Israeli: “Curiosities of Romanticism: Isaac D’Israeli's Literary Collections and the Political Unconscious of Emancipation". Writing on Romanticism, he remains a ragpicker at heart. Interested in politics and contemporary theory and criticism, he is currently working on theories of parasites, collection and Gothic literature, Romanticism and Jewish identity, and animal studies. In his spare time he is the manager and curator of the GSA Printroom Gallery at the University of Melbourne, a space for solo-exhibitions of the artworks of current and recent graduate students who work with digital media.
