Three steps of inspiration: philosophy, or rather intellectual history - ethnology - art. Trying to connect and interrelate apparently distant spheres of problems and cultural phenomena, I will progress towards a commentary concerning the works by a contemporary British artist, Jenny Saville. The starting point is established by Giorgio Agamben in his essay L’Aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (2002), bringing into consideration a medieval image: a 13th-century illumination of the Hebraic Bible conserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The miniature illustration, of mystical and messianic inspiration, refers to the vision of Ezekiel. Among the representations of cosmic elements such as the seven skies, the sun, the moon, and the stars, we can see four animals endowed with special meanings in eschatology: the cock, the eagle, the bull, and the lion. On the opposite page of the same illuminated manuscript, Agamben finds the primordial animals, inscribed in the cosmogony: the bird Ziz, the bull Behemot, and the gigantic fish Leviathan. Crucially, another small scene appears in this context: the messianic feast of the righteous, taking place on the last day of humanity. On the festive table, we can find diverse kinds of meat, including that of Leviathan and Behemoth. The righteous ones, according to the rabbinic tradition, can consume the meat, at this final moment, with no consideration if the food is kosher or not. According to the Apocalypse of Baruch (29, 4), they eat the monsters created on the 5th day of creation and preserved by God, especially for this final, eschatological nourishment. It is to be consumed at the end of the world as if a Judaic equivalent to the Last Supper. But the most striking detail, that becomes the clue for the interpretation that follows, is the fact that all the participants of the feast have animal heads. The fulfilled humanity in its last day becomes an animalized humanity.
In the monotheistic religions, eating meat is subjected to manifold restrictions: in Judaism and Islam, by the kind and the quality of the meat itself; in Christianity, by the time of consumption. Undoubtedly, meat is an ambiguous, allowed/forbidden food, a guilty food. Its acquisition is conditioned by the act of killing the animal, an act that often takes a ritualistic, sacrificial turn. In symbolical terms, meat contains death, is polluted by death, and thus requires to be purified and controlled by a careful execution of a ritual. Its consumption is always conditional; meat can be eaten only if determined prescriptions are respected and fulfilled. But, at the passage from historical humanity to apocalyptic post-humanity, these prescriptions cease to be valid. Everything becomes kosher, as a new relationship between man and the animal is established. If, in the eschatological reality, death ceases to exist, also the pollution of the meat ceases to be dangerous; it does not require those ritualistic precautions any longer.
Nonetheless, this simple conclusion does not close the matter. Why does humanity end by eating? Why this kind of apocalyptic consumption? How does the act of eating enable what really matters here, i.e., the establishment of a new relation between man and the animal? Perhaps at this point the crucial question that should be asked concerns the meaning of the act of eating. Undoubtedly, the intake results in a very special kind of bodily fusion between the eater and the eaten. On one hand, eating is an act of aggression and destruction; on the other hand, there is also a positive aspect of eating: becoming what had been eaten, transmutation, and transubstantiation.
I can see two dimensions that are to be evoked at the same time, superposed one to another. Both come close to the idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community,” overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The first one, presupposed in the aggressive eating or devouring, establishes a kind of commensality between man and the predatory animal. In the second one, the ingested substance contributes to the dissolution of the frontiers of humanity so to speak “from within.” These two directions of reflection point towards different zones of cultural experience of man. While the transubstantiation dissolving the human essence remains inscribed, in a complex and aporetic way, in the context of monotheistic religions, the dimension of human-animal commensality leads into the domain of so-called primitive cultures.
It is time to take up my ethnological inspiration: a Bambara feline mask in provenance from the Ségou region in Mali, belonging to the collections of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon. The size of this modest artifact is such that it could comfortably cover a human face. Its general aspect seems rather joyful, due to a decorative, rhythmic pattern of yellow, orange, white, grey, and black strokes with which the eyes, the nose, and the cheeks of the mask are painted. The upper part of the mask, including the rounded ears of the feline, is covered with fur; the whiskers are imitated with some vegetable fiber. The muzzle, forming a kind of smile that suggests a distant similarity with the Cheshire cat from Tenniel's illustration to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is filled with rather human-looking, rectangular teeth. The lower lip was made more vivid with a regular pattern of white, black, and blue stripes. The abstract character of the decoration seems to exclude any naturalistic connotations and leaves no space for any possible traces of blood. Somehow, the muzzle's devouring aspect is at the same time present and euphemistically effaced.
A representation of a big cat, such as a leopard or a lion, could introduce an ambivalent element of power beyond control, evoking human fear of being eaten. But my Bambara mask corresponds rather to a smaller feline, such as a serval or a similar species. Its pleasing, cheerful aspect evokes a deeply satisfying, happy integration in the animal kingdom, in which the place of man seems to be close to other predators. In this merry company of meat-eaters, man is nothing higher, nothing better, nothing that could not be reduced to an animal. A meat-eating man is not an angel. But at the same time, the transgression of eating meat, presupposing slaughtering and destruction of the eaten creature, ceases to be related to a sense of guilt. Man follows the example of other beasts, reintroduces his act of eating into a legitimizing context, becomes an eater between other eaters. Accentuating his kinship with the felines, he proves himself not guilty.
The primitive man transcends, through mask and ritual dance, the limitations of the human condition. But this act of transcending leads him not outside, but into the animal condition. In a sense, the animal becomes a transhumanistic aspiration of primitive humanity. In rituals through which man symbolically becomes an animal, the meaning of trespassing the frontiers of humanity may consist in claiming certain animal qualities, such as speed, strength, or resistance, but perhaps it also constitutes a first approach to the solution of a basic problem of man, who lacks a proper nature; the essential “manchanza del uomo a se stesso,” as Agamben calls it.1
This essential lack remains deeply inscribed also in the monotheistic vision. The invention of monotheism consists of the emergence of a new concept of divinity, defined by reduction and abstraction. The supreme god standing above the multiplicity of theriomorphic gods would possess no attribute to resume an infinity of attributes. As it is the only one, it needs no identification, no ascribed characteristics that are used to define its polytheistic counterparts. The monotheistic divinity has no sex or any other animal feature. It can be assumed that this concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by a radical exclusion from the universality of life. The monotheistic divinity does not hunt, either. The commensality of man and animal can be no longer evoked as an alibi or justification for the transgression of eating meat. On the contrary, the radical breaking of human-animal commensality leads to the ritualistic elaboration of everything that is related to the physiological necessity of eating. From slaughtering to cooking and table manners, the rituals proliferate.
The essential fissure between man and biological life introduced by monotheism has lasting, paradoxical consequences. It introduces an aporetic element into the monotheistic idea of man and his utmost, eschatological destiny. Agamben, as the visceral medievalist that he is, brings into consideration the question of the blessed physiology, and the bodily functions of the redeemed man that occupied the medieval minds of such quality as Wilhelm of Paris and Thomas Aquinas. Following the path of their reflection, he must reach the conclusion that not all the flesh will be redeemed, that “oikonomia divina della salvezza lascia un resto irredimibile.”2 This irredeemable rest that lies beyond the range of salvation is associated with the nutritive and sexual functions of the body, the dimensions that man shares with the animal kingdom, but not with the monotheistic divinity. The medieval philosophers ask whether in the post-historic reality after the Final Judgement there would still be any place for physiological aspects of man, such as copulation and giving birth, eating, and excretions. Neither Wilhelm of Paris nor Thomas Aquinas seem to be particularly attracted by the perspective of a Paradise full of excrement (maledicta Paradisum in qua tantum cacatur!). The redeemed intestines must thus remain empty. The blessed body is purged and castrated.
The fissure between man and his animal nature, introduced by the advent of the concept of humanity shaped according to the monotheistic paradigm, results in a particular fragility of the human condition. Reading Pico della Mirandola, Agamben remarks that humanity as a concept is weak: man is constitutively non-human; as Pico states it, he has no rank of his own (nec munus ullum peculiare) and no proper place in the world. In consequence, man can approach both the animal and the divine condition (poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare; poteris in superiora quae sunt divina ex tui animi regenerari).3 The temporal organization of the universe is reflexive; different directions seem to lead into the same sphere: back in time, towards the paradisical origins of humanity; forward, towards the paradisical state of redemption. The spatial orientation is nonetheless distinctive: up, towards divinity; down, towards the place occupied by the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, man is not one of the animals; he is the only being created according to the divine model, bearing the likeness of God. In this perspective, the only true return to humanity's beginnings implies a radical denial of animality as something essentially alien to man as the only living being to be redeemed and the only one among the creation to be resurrected, finding the utmost fulfillment of his destiny in an emptied, aphysiological body.
In the meanwhile, Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, speaks for the creation and claims salvation in its name:
“For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now.”4
The whole creation claims for transcendence, creating a dialectic tension between the concepts of “remainder” (leimma) and “totality”, that Agamben analyses in detail elsewhere.5 Thus, redemption should be seen after all in a larger perspective, also as a redemption of animality and the intestinal physiology of man.
For the archaic man, the animality itself was a transcendence; for the post-Christian man, transcending into animality is a challenge that can be taken up in contemporary art, seeking ways of sublimation of the flesh. Such challenge, at the frontier between Christian and post-Christian inspiration, appears in the painting of Jenny Saville. In many of her works, she takes up the logic of martyrdom, seeking the sublime in suffering, rethinking martyrdom that has always been at the centre of Christian iconography. The body is, of course, its essential means. The redemptive sacrifice can be realized only corporaliter, through the body and in the body exposed to some kind of aggression. Also, the sacrificial ingestion, offering the victim to be eaten, even if it is realized only in a highly symbolic form, remains on the horizon of Christianity as the condition of the redemptive transmutation.
Such is the context in which Saville’s monumental Torso II should be interpreted. The large canvas, painted in 2004–5, may be associated with Rembrandt’s work The Slaughtered Ox (1655). A bovine carcass hanging from a horizontal beam in the dim light of this painting, accompanied by a prostrated figure of a servant, evokes the supreme paradigm of the Western iconographic tradition, the crucifixion. Both Rembrandt’s and Saville’s carcasses had been emptied. The lack of intestines marks the passage from the physiology of life to some other kind of aphysiological existence. Saville’s painting, as well as Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, seems to represent the animal killed not only for eating but also for enacting martyrdom and sacrifice. The title of the work, in which a mere carcass becomes a torso, is significant. The bull seems to be humanized post-mortem, redeemed, and offered to redeem the creation. Saville's composition evokes less explicitly the iconographic scheme of crucifixion. The horizontal beam from which the carcass is hanging disappears beyond the upper edge of the canvas. Analogically to Rembrandt’s painting, the legs of the bull stand for the outstretched arms of the crucified, but the lower part of the carcass lies inert on a horizontal surface of the floor. Nonetheless, the gravity of the corpse reveals a relationship with another traditional painterly and sculptural problem: that of pietà. Accentuating the heaviness of the cadaver, pietà represents a body that stands for more than it seems to be as if its increased weight suggested the burden of the redemptive mission. Seville’s ponderous carcass recalls and re-enacts this tradition.
This transgressive painting can be interpreted not only as a tentative of overcoming the frontiers of the human condition to establish a new dimension of solidarity but also as a solution to the problem of the monotheistic divinity standing between man and the animal. The crucified bull might become a symbol of Christ as the Saviour of the animal kingdom in a reformulated theology of redemption. The overwhelming impression of monumentality and the serene seriousness of the whole contradict any suggestion of treating the painting as a blasphemy or a provocation. The carcass of an animal becomes the torso of a martyr. Or maybe the other way around: a human torso reaches the dimension of the sublime becoming an animal carcass. Descending into the animal condition, man finds a way of transcending humanity. The redemption is realized through animals, as the condensed materiality of flesh becomes a gauge of salvation.
Jenny Saville is also well known for depicting, still on a monumental scale, martyred female faces. Such works as Reverse (2003) or Bleach (2008) appeal to the viewer's sensibility by swelling the convex volumes of the face, such as lips, by intense rose-red hues suggesting diluted blood or body fluids, and by a powerful, expressionist brushwork. Nonetheless, the artist painted as well several headless bodies, where the attention of the viewer, with equal empathic involvement, is concentrated on the swollen, protruding bellies. If, as in Host (2000), the head is displaced beyond the edge of the canvas, the distinction between the human and animal body may be partially effaced. On the other hand, the relation between the face, absent from the field of vision, and the belly may be analogous to the relation between a face and a mask. The mask stands for the face, putting the lower parts of the body in its shade. But the belly was somehow implied in the feline self-satisfaction of my Bambara cat. The mask served as an euphemism for a stomach full of meat. Can a full belly become a kind of inverted euphemism for a face?
The female bellies painted by Saville provoke visceral reactions. As Michelle Meagher states,
“These bodies are rendered by way of surprising combinations of colour. A mottled arrangement of mauves, yellows, browns, and blues seems to seep out from underneath the surface of the flesh. The unexpected use of colour and fine brushstrokes compel a spectator to get up close to the paintings. The massive size of the canvases, however, requires the spectator to step back. Stepping back from the canvases means being faced with large expanses of puckered and folded skin, pendulous breasts, and formidable thighs. […] In a cultural climate that encourages women to conceal, if not excise, those parts of their bodies considered fat, jiggly, out of control, and excessive, Saville insists upon revealing precisely these features.”6
The conclusions that Meagher draws contribute to the interpretation of Saville’s painting not only in terms of aesthetics of disgust but also in terms of “experiencing oneself as disgusting.”7 But the transgressive aspect of Saville's work reaches deeper than just criticizing the enforcement of artificial standards of beauty in Western culture. A question the artist asked in an interview may be an important clue: “Why do we find bodies like this difficult to look at?”8 The answer probably goes beyond the standards of female beauty; the protruding belly is “difficult to look at” as it testifies to the presence of irredeemable physiology. Digestion and gestation, two crisscrossing dimensions of these female bodies, contribute to the sensation of uneasiness the viewer may experience in confrontation with these paintings.
In her reading of two of Saville's paintings, Hem (1999) and Branded (1992), Suzanne de Villiers Human stresses the transgressive dimension implied in the particular attitude of bodily excess portrayed by the artist, a double excess of ingestion and secretion:
“From within the body of the represented nude who has apparently outgrown herself through the excessive and indulgent intake of food and liquid, there is an unstoppable eruption of milk. The female character’s abandonment of her lower drives seems irreversible. There is a smoldering sense of ecstasy for having passionately violated the social norms of acceptability. The perverse gesture of indulgently clutching the flabby rolls of skin and fat in Branded underscores the sense of shy celebration which is evident in both paintings.”9
No wonder why Diana Tietjens Meyers dubs Saville “a painter of the not-demure,”10 opposing the “endemic shame” of the female body. The irredeemable physiology is not only accepted as a contained presence but also, somehow lewdly, celebrated as it overflows.
Saville paints both female and male bodies, and the hidden criterion that seems to be superposed to the gender partition deserves our attention. The male body, such as the bull's carcass in Torso II, is emptied of its intestinal content. The female body of a sow, such as it appears in Host (2000), conserves its belly in the state of physiological fullness. The juxtaposition of a bull and a pig recalls once more the monotheistic categories of clean and unclean meat. A sow is improper for sacrifice, her suffering stands away from the martyrdom, evoking and questioning once more the limits of salvation. There is a novelty in Saville’s painting, going beyond Rembrandt's ox. The slaughtered bull was represented as a body without organs, emptied of its physiology, of the uncleanness of its visceral filling. The revolutionary aspect of Seville's art is her obstinate claim for the not-emptied body, the redemption of the filled, pregnant, digesting, transmuting belly, excluded from Paradise by the medieval theologians studied by Agamben.
The protruding belly in Saville’s paintings suggests gestation. What is more, seeing her work as a whole, it’s easy to notice a remarkable polarization in the treatment of maternity as a painterly subject. On one hand, the physiological aspect, a provocative juxtaposition of women and sows depicted in similar poses, and, on the other hand, an explicit interplay with a religious painting of the Renaissance and its concept of sublime maternity. Significantly, in 2012, two parallel expositions of Saville’s works were organized. As an event accompanying the main show at the Modern Art Gallery in Oxford, some of her “Leonardesque” drawings were placed at the Ashmolean Museum, in the Italian Renaissance room, side by side with 15th and 16th-century masterpieces.
The interplay between this traditional imagery of maternity and some other actions of the artist, such as inviting a fellow artist—a photographer—to her own delivery, marks the exploration of another field in which the monotheism introduces a fissure dividing human and animal condition. At the experiential level, undoubtedly there is a gap between the physiology of giving birth and the imagery of sublime maternity of the Blessed Virgin. The female belly remains on the unredeemed side of shameful suffering, conceptualized as a punishment for the original sin and put apart from the glory of martyrdom. At the same time, delivery might be treated as a liminal experience of becoming-animal and as a form of transcendence that can be reached through animality. The claim of Saville is to sublimate the abjection implied in the downgrading experience of the woman-sow, integrated into the animal kingdom by her abject, physiological experience of giving birth. This dimension of sublime flesh is to be read also in her “Leonardesque” drawings, in the crisscrossing lines that, instead of defining a clearly identifiable figure, search for some other, parallel form, superposing dimensions of human, non-human, supra-human.
The consequences of Saville’s painterly exploration reach beyond the feminist contestation of the idealizing and at the same time objectifying tradition of the Western nude. The conclusions of this experiment go as far as the redefinition of the eschatological status of flesh. Acceptance of the liminality of the female body, situated in a twilight zone between what is fully human and the abject, animal condition, may become a key for a redefinition of the status of humanity. Artistic procedures such as those put into practice by Saville may be seen as a quest for a way of access—here and now—into a sphere closely related to the archaic experience of pre-monotheistic humanity, justified by the claim of legitimizing the bodily excess and the bodily plenitude of a “late-20th century Venus of Willendorf.”11 At the same time, it becomes a key to the post-monotheistic experience, a fulfillment, if we want, of Christianity going beyond the limits of redemption it had established. This entrance into the sphere of post-humanity takes an apocatastatic turn, as this post-humanity comes close to the pre-humanity. With Saville, we are eating our animals of the beginnings, realizing the eschatological feast of the time of fulfillment.
1 Agamben, G. 2002. L’Aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 35.
2 Ibid., 27.
3 Ibid., 36.
4 Rom. 8, 19–22
5 Agamben, G. 2000. Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla Lettera ai Romani. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 55–59.
6 Meagher, M. 2003. “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust”. Hypatia, 18(4), 23–24.
7 Ibid., 24.
8 Drohojowska-Philp, H. 2002. “Back to Paint—Thanks to Photos.” Los Angeles Times, January 13, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jan/13/entertainment/ca-hunter13 [17.02.2013].
9 de Villiers Human, S. 2005. “Explosions in Visual Art, Literature and Music.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 36(1), 188.
10 Meyers, D. T. 2013. “Jenny Saville Remakes the Female Nude: Feminist Reflections on the State of the Art.” In: Ed. Zeglin Brand, P. Beauty Unlimited. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 144.
11 Nochlin, L. 2000. “Floating in Gender Nirvana.” Art in America, 88(3), 96.
In the monotheistic religions, eating meat is subjected to manifold restrictions: in Judaism and Islam, by the kind and the quality of the meat itself; in Christianity, by the time of consumption. Undoubtedly, meat is an ambiguous, allowed/forbidden food, a guilty food. Its acquisition is conditioned by the act of killing the animal, an act that often takes a ritualistic, sacrificial turn. In symbolical terms, meat contains death, is polluted by death, and thus requires to be purified and controlled by a careful execution of a ritual. Its consumption is always conditional; meat can be eaten only if determined prescriptions are respected and fulfilled. But, at the passage from historical humanity to apocalyptic post-humanity, these prescriptions cease to be valid. Everything becomes kosher, as a new relationship between man and the animal is established. If, in the eschatological reality, death ceases to exist, also the pollution of the meat ceases to be dangerous; it does not require those ritualistic precautions any longer.
Nonetheless, this simple conclusion does not close the matter. Why does humanity end by eating? Why this kind of apocalyptic consumption? How does the act of eating enable what really matters here, i.e., the establishment of a new relation between man and the animal? Perhaps at this point the crucial question that should be asked concerns the meaning of the act of eating. Undoubtedly, the intake results in a very special kind of bodily fusion between the eater and the eaten. On one hand, eating is an act of aggression and destruction; on the other hand, there is also a positive aspect of eating: becoming what had been eaten, transmutation, and transubstantiation.
I can see two dimensions that are to be evoked at the same time, superposed one to another. Both come close to the idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community,” overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The first one, presupposed in the aggressive eating or devouring, establishes a kind of commensality between man and the predatory animal. In the second one, the ingested substance contributes to the dissolution of the frontiers of humanity so to speak “from within.” These two directions of reflection point towards different zones of cultural experience of man. While the transubstantiation dissolving the human essence remains inscribed, in a complex and aporetic way, in the context of monotheistic religions, the dimension of human-animal commensality leads into the domain of so-called primitive cultures.
It is time to take up my ethnological inspiration: a Bambara feline mask in provenance from the Ségou region in Mali, belonging to the collections of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon. The size of this modest artifact is such that it could comfortably cover a human face. Its general aspect seems rather joyful, due to a decorative, rhythmic pattern of yellow, orange, white, grey, and black strokes with which the eyes, the nose, and the cheeks of the mask are painted. The upper part of the mask, including the rounded ears of the feline, is covered with fur; the whiskers are imitated with some vegetable fiber. The muzzle, forming a kind of smile that suggests a distant similarity with the Cheshire cat from Tenniel's illustration to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is filled with rather human-looking, rectangular teeth. The lower lip was made more vivid with a regular pattern of white, black, and blue stripes. The abstract character of the decoration seems to exclude any naturalistic connotations and leaves no space for any possible traces of blood. Somehow, the muzzle's devouring aspect is at the same time present and euphemistically effaced.
A representation of a big cat, such as a leopard or a lion, could introduce an ambivalent element of power beyond control, evoking human fear of being eaten. But my Bambara mask corresponds rather to a smaller feline, such as a serval or a similar species. Its pleasing, cheerful aspect evokes a deeply satisfying, happy integration in the animal kingdom, in which the place of man seems to be close to other predators. In this merry company of meat-eaters, man is nothing higher, nothing better, nothing that could not be reduced to an animal. A meat-eating man is not an angel. But at the same time, the transgression of eating meat, presupposing slaughtering and destruction of the eaten creature, ceases to be related to a sense of guilt. Man follows the example of other beasts, reintroduces his act of eating into a legitimizing context, becomes an eater between other eaters. Accentuating his kinship with the felines, he proves himself not guilty.
The primitive man transcends, through mask and ritual dance, the limitations of the human condition. But this act of transcending leads him not outside, but into the animal condition. In a sense, the animal becomes a transhumanistic aspiration of primitive humanity. In rituals through which man symbolically becomes an animal, the meaning of trespassing the frontiers of humanity may consist in claiming certain animal qualities, such as speed, strength, or resistance, but perhaps it also constitutes a first approach to the solution of a basic problem of man, who lacks a proper nature; the essential “manchanza del uomo a se stesso,” as Agamben calls it.1
This essential lack remains deeply inscribed also in the monotheistic vision. The invention of monotheism consists of the emergence of a new concept of divinity, defined by reduction and abstraction. The supreme god standing above the multiplicity of theriomorphic gods would possess no attribute to resume an infinity of attributes. As it is the only one, it needs no identification, no ascribed characteristics that are used to define its polytheistic counterparts. The monotheistic divinity has no sex or any other animal feature. It can be assumed that this concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by a radical exclusion from the universality of life. The monotheistic divinity does not hunt, either. The commensality of man and animal can be no longer evoked as an alibi or justification for the transgression of eating meat. On the contrary, the radical breaking of human-animal commensality leads to the ritualistic elaboration of everything that is related to the physiological necessity of eating. From slaughtering to cooking and table manners, the rituals proliferate.
The essential fissure between man and biological life introduced by monotheism has lasting, paradoxical consequences. It introduces an aporetic element into the monotheistic idea of man and his utmost, eschatological destiny. Agamben, as the visceral medievalist that he is, brings into consideration the question of the blessed physiology, and the bodily functions of the redeemed man that occupied the medieval minds of such quality as Wilhelm of Paris and Thomas Aquinas. Following the path of their reflection, he must reach the conclusion that not all the flesh will be redeemed, that “oikonomia divina della salvezza lascia un resto irredimibile.”2 This irredeemable rest that lies beyond the range of salvation is associated with the nutritive and sexual functions of the body, the dimensions that man shares with the animal kingdom, but not with the monotheistic divinity. The medieval philosophers ask whether in the post-historic reality after the Final Judgement there would still be any place for physiological aspects of man, such as copulation and giving birth, eating, and excretions. Neither Wilhelm of Paris nor Thomas Aquinas seem to be particularly attracted by the perspective of a Paradise full of excrement (maledicta Paradisum in qua tantum cacatur!). The redeemed intestines must thus remain empty. The blessed body is purged and castrated.
The fissure between man and his animal nature, introduced by the advent of the concept of humanity shaped according to the monotheistic paradigm, results in a particular fragility of the human condition. Reading Pico della Mirandola, Agamben remarks that humanity as a concept is weak: man is constitutively non-human; as Pico states it, he has no rank of his own (nec munus ullum peculiare) and no proper place in the world. In consequence, man can approach both the animal and the divine condition (poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare; poteris in superiora quae sunt divina ex tui animi regenerari).3 The temporal organization of the universe is reflexive; different directions seem to lead into the same sphere: back in time, towards the paradisical origins of humanity; forward, towards the paradisical state of redemption. The spatial orientation is nonetheless distinctive: up, towards divinity; down, towards the place occupied by the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, man is not one of the animals; he is the only being created according to the divine model, bearing the likeness of God. In this perspective, the only true return to humanity's beginnings implies a radical denial of animality as something essentially alien to man as the only living being to be redeemed and the only one among the creation to be resurrected, finding the utmost fulfillment of his destiny in an emptied, aphysiological body.
In the meanwhile, Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, speaks for the creation and claims salvation in its name:
“For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now.”4
The whole creation claims for transcendence, creating a dialectic tension between the concepts of “remainder” (leimma) and “totality”, that Agamben analyses in detail elsewhere.5 Thus, redemption should be seen after all in a larger perspective, also as a redemption of animality and the intestinal physiology of man.
For the archaic man, the animality itself was a transcendence; for the post-Christian man, transcending into animality is a challenge that can be taken up in contemporary art, seeking ways of sublimation of the flesh. Such challenge, at the frontier between Christian and post-Christian inspiration, appears in the painting of Jenny Saville. In many of her works, she takes up the logic of martyrdom, seeking the sublime in suffering, rethinking martyrdom that has always been at the centre of Christian iconography. The body is, of course, its essential means. The redemptive sacrifice can be realized only corporaliter, through the body and in the body exposed to some kind of aggression. Also, the sacrificial ingestion, offering the victim to be eaten, even if it is realized only in a highly symbolic form, remains on the horizon of Christianity as the condition of the redemptive transmutation.
Such is the context in which Saville’s monumental Torso II should be interpreted. The large canvas, painted in 2004–5, may be associated with Rembrandt’s work The Slaughtered Ox (1655). A bovine carcass hanging from a horizontal beam in the dim light of this painting, accompanied by a prostrated figure of a servant, evokes the supreme paradigm of the Western iconographic tradition, the crucifixion. Both Rembrandt’s and Saville’s carcasses had been emptied. The lack of intestines marks the passage from the physiology of life to some other kind of aphysiological existence. Saville’s painting, as well as Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, seems to represent the animal killed not only for eating but also for enacting martyrdom and sacrifice. The title of the work, in which a mere carcass becomes a torso, is significant. The bull seems to be humanized post-mortem, redeemed, and offered to redeem the creation. Saville's composition evokes less explicitly the iconographic scheme of crucifixion. The horizontal beam from which the carcass is hanging disappears beyond the upper edge of the canvas. Analogically to Rembrandt’s painting, the legs of the bull stand for the outstretched arms of the crucified, but the lower part of the carcass lies inert on a horizontal surface of the floor. Nonetheless, the gravity of the corpse reveals a relationship with another traditional painterly and sculptural problem: that of pietà. Accentuating the heaviness of the cadaver, pietà represents a body that stands for more than it seems to be as if its increased weight suggested the burden of the redemptive mission. Seville’s ponderous carcass recalls and re-enacts this tradition.
This transgressive painting can be interpreted not only as a tentative of overcoming the frontiers of the human condition to establish a new dimension of solidarity but also as a solution to the problem of the monotheistic divinity standing between man and the animal. The crucified bull might become a symbol of Christ as the Saviour of the animal kingdom in a reformulated theology of redemption. The overwhelming impression of monumentality and the serene seriousness of the whole contradict any suggestion of treating the painting as a blasphemy or a provocation. The carcass of an animal becomes the torso of a martyr. Or maybe the other way around: a human torso reaches the dimension of the sublime becoming an animal carcass. Descending into the animal condition, man finds a way of transcending humanity. The redemption is realized through animals, as the condensed materiality of flesh becomes a gauge of salvation.
Jenny Saville is also well known for depicting, still on a monumental scale, martyred female faces. Such works as Reverse (2003) or Bleach (2008) appeal to the viewer's sensibility by swelling the convex volumes of the face, such as lips, by intense rose-red hues suggesting diluted blood or body fluids, and by a powerful, expressionist brushwork. Nonetheless, the artist painted as well several headless bodies, where the attention of the viewer, with equal empathic involvement, is concentrated on the swollen, protruding bellies. If, as in Host (2000), the head is displaced beyond the edge of the canvas, the distinction between the human and animal body may be partially effaced. On the other hand, the relation between the face, absent from the field of vision, and the belly may be analogous to the relation between a face and a mask. The mask stands for the face, putting the lower parts of the body in its shade. But the belly was somehow implied in the feline self-satisfaction of my Bambara cat. The mask served as an euphemism for a stomach full of meat. Can a full belly become a kind of inverted euphemism for a face?
The female bellies painted by Saville provoke visceral reactions. As Michelle Meagher states,
“These bodies are rendered by way of surprising combinations of colour. A mottled arrangement of mauves, yellows, browns, and blues seems to seep out from underneath the surface of the flesh. The unexpected use of colour and fine brushstrokes compel a spectator to get up close to the paintings. The massive size of the canvases, however, requires the spectator to step back. Stepping back from the canvases means being faced with large expanses of puckered and folded skin, pendulous breasts, and formidable thighs. […] In a cultural climate that encourages women to conceal, if not excise, those parts of their bodies considered fat, jiggly, out of control, and excessive, Saville insists upon revealing precisely these features.”6
The conclusions that Meagher draws contribute to the interpretation of Saville’s painting not only in terms of aesthetics of disgust but also in terms of “experiencing oneself as disgusting.”7 But the transgressive aspect of Saville's work reaches deeper than just criticizing the enforcement of artificial standards of beauty in Western culture. A question the artist asked in an interview may be an important clue: “Why do we find bodies like this difficult to look at?”8 The answer probably goes beyond the standards of female beauty; the protruding belly is “difficult to look at” as it testifies to the presence of irredeemable physiology. Digestion and gestation, two crisscrossing dimensions of these female bodies, contribute to the sensation of uneasiness the viewer may experience in confrontation with these paintings.
In her reading of two of Saville's paintings, Hem (1999) and Branded (1992), Suzanne de Villiers Human stresses the transgressive dimension implied in the particular attitude of bodily excess portrayed by the artist, a double excess of ingestion and secretion:
“From within the body of the represented nude who has apparently outgrown herself through the excessive and indulgent intake of food and liquid, there is an unstoppable eruption of milk. The female character’s abandonment of her lower drives seems irreversible. There is a smoldering sense of ecstasy for having passionately violated the social norms of acceptability. The perverse gesture of indulgently clutching the flabby rolls of skin and fat in Branded underscores the sense of shy celebration which is evident in both paintings.”9
No wonder why Diana Tietjens Meyers dubs Saville “a painter of the not-demure,”10 opposing the “endemic shame” of the female body. The irredeemable physiology is not only accepted as a contained presence but also, somehow lewdly, celebrated as it overflows.
Saville paints both female and male bodies, and the hidden criterion that seems to be superposed to the gender partition deserves our attention. The male body, such as the bull's carcass in Torso II, is emptied of its intestinal content. The female body of a sow, such as it appears in Host (2000), conserves its belly in the state of physiological fullness. The juxtaposition of a bull and a pig recalls once more the monotheistic categories of clean and unclean meat. A sow is improper for sacrifice, her suffering stands away from the martyrdom, evoking and questioning once more the limits of salvation. There is a novelty in Saville’s painting, going beyond Rembrandt's ox. The slaughtered bull was represented as a body without organs, emptied of its physiology, of the uncleanness of its visceral filling. The revolutionary aspect of Seville's art is her obstinate claim for the not-emptied body, the redemption of the filled, pregnant, digesting, transmuting belly, excluded from Paradise by the medieval theologians studied by Agamben.
The protruding belly in Saville’s paintings suggests gestation. What is more, seeing her work as a whole, it’s easy to notice a remarkable polarization in the treatment of maternity as a painterly subject. On one hand, the physiological aspect, a provocative juxtaposition of women and sows depicted in similar poses, and, on the other hand, an explicit interplay with a religious painting of the Renaissance and its concept of sublime maternity. Significantly, in 2012, two parallel expositions of Saville’s works were organized. As an event accompanying the main show at the Modern Art Gallery in Oxford, some of her “Leonardesque” drawings were placed at the Ashmolean Museum, in the Italian Renaissance room, side by side with 15th and 16th-century masterpieces.
The interplay between this traditional imagery of maternity and some other actions of the artist, such as inviting a fellow artist—a photographer—to her own delivery, marks the exploration of another field in which the monotheism introduces a fissure dividing human and animal condition. At the experiential level, undoubtedly there is a gap between the physiology of giving birth and the imagery of sublime maternity of the Blessed Virgin. The female belly remains on the unredeemed side of shameful suffering, conceptualized as a punishment for the original sin and put apart from the glory of martyrdom. At the same time, delivery might be treated as a liminal experience of becoming-animal and as a form of transcendence that can be reached through animality. The claim of Saville is to sublimate the abjection implied in the downgrading experience of the woman-sow, integrated into the animal kingdom by her abject, physiological experience of giving birth. This dimension of sublime flesh is to be read also in her “Leonardesque” drawings, in the crisscrossing lines that, instead of defining a clearly identifiable figure, search for some other, parallel form, superposing dimensions of human, non-human, supra-human.
The consequences of Saville’s painterly exploration reach beyond the feminist contestation of the idealizing and at the same time objectifying tradition of the Western nude. The conclusions of this experiment go as far as the redefinition of the eschatological status of flesh. Acceptance of the liminality of the female body, situated in a twilight zone between what is fully human and the abject, animal condition, may become a key for a redefinition of the status of humanity. Artistic procedures such as those put into practice by Saville may be seen as a quest for a way of access—here and now—into a sphere closely related to the archaic experience of pre-monotheistic humanity, justified by the claim of legitimizing the bodily excess and the bodily plenitude of a “late-20th century Venus of Willendorf.”11 At the same time, it becomes a key to the post-monotheistic experience, a fulfillment, if we want, of Christianity going beyond the limits of redemption it had established. This entrance into the sphere of post-humanity takes an apocatastatic turn, as this post-humanity comes close to the pre-humanity. With Saville, we are eating our animals of the beginnings, realizing the eschatological feast of the time of fulfillment.
1 Agamben, G. 2002. L’Aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 35.
2 Ibid., 27.
3 Ibid., 36.
4 Rom. 8, 19–22
5 Agamben, G. 2000. Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla Lettera ai Romani. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 55–59.
6 Meagher, M. 2003. “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust”. Hypatia, 18(4), 23–24.
7 Ibid., 24.
8 Drohojowska-Philp, H. 2002. “Back to Paint—Thanks to Photos.” Los Angeles Times, January 13, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jan/13/entertainment/ca-hunter13 [17.02.2013].
9 de Villiers Human, S. 2005. “Explosions in Visual Art, Literature and Music.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 36(1), 188.
10 Meyers, D. T. 2013. “Jenny Saville Remakes the Female Nude: Feminist Reflections on the State of the Art.” In: Ed. Zeglin Brand, P. Beauty Unlimited. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 144.
11 Nochlin, L. 2000. “Floating in Gender Nirvana.” Art in America, 88(3), 96.
This is a modified version of an essay originally published as “From Agamben to Saville's bellies. Transgression into the animal condition in post-humanity, primitive humanity and contemporary art”, Dialogue & Universalism, vol. XXIV, no 1/2014, p. 121-129. ISSN 1234-5792, and reprinted in: The Animals in Us - We in Animals, Szymon Wróbel (ed.), Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2014, p. 163-172. ISBN 978-3-631-65039-4.
