approaching the limits of body and language in Kathy Acker’s “Tarantula” and later writings
“What am I taking care of?
I’m lying in our bed unable to sleep, reaching a state of absolute dependence.
In a restless half-dream, like the jam without a spoon, and I grab my cunt with my hand that isn’t clean.
Am I loving myself now? Am I mothering myself? Am I taking care of myself now?”
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Jenny Hval, “Take Care of Yourself”
Kathy Acker is known for her abrasive, sexually explicit, cut-up, and semi-autobiographical, semi-“plagiarized” works of fiction, often categorized as postmodernist, feminist, and punk (or post-punk). Yet Acker can (and should) also be described as a writer of the body, not merely in the mode of Cixous’s call for écriture feminine around the same time, but as a writer of immediate, at times grotesque corporeal experience. In her nonfiction essays from the late 1980s and early ‘90s, published in the 1997 collection Bodies of Work, Acker articulates what had long been a significant component of her literary project: Developing a “language of the body.” Using weightlifting as a prism through which to explore this language of the body premised not upon transmitting meaning but registering, connecting with the body’s materiality (ultimately, its fallibility), Acker writes in her 1993 essay, “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,”
The physical or material, that which is, is constantly and unpredictably changing: it is chaotic.
This chaos twines around death. For it is death that rejects all of our paths, all of our meanings.
Whenever anyone bodybuilds, he or she is always trying to understand and control the physical in
the face of this death. No wonder bodybuilding is centered around failure. (Bodies of Work 147-148)
Drawing from the Heideggerian conception of Dasein’s “thrownness,” Acker understands the body to be unruly and “ordinary language” insufficient in describing it. Weightlifting, she argues, “rejects ordinary language and yet itself constitutes a language” (Bodies of Work 148). Lifting weights involves its own “language,” that of calculating weight and counting reps and sets, increasing one or more of these variables to approach failure—being unable to do any more reps—at which point the muscle fibers tear, then regrow stronger and larger. We lift weights “to understand and control the physical,” shape our bodies, and attempt to slow the pace at which we approach death, the terminal failure of both body and language. For Acker, failure in weightlifting takes one to the limits of one’s own body, to the limits of the controllable and articulable.
Though Acker wrote this essay on bodybuilding towards the end of her life, the limits of the body and of language had long been preoccupations of her work. As early as 1973 with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Acker’s immediate, sensorially vivid writing of bodily experience contrasted with her other aim of contesting the presumed singular authorial voice in literature and the notion of a unified self. In Tarantula as in her later essays, the body presents a materially stable, though also fundamentally uncontrollable, counterpart to the diffused, multiple narrative voices. For Acker, the body is simultaneously direct and concealed—though we sense and experience through it, the body eludes the discourses with which we attempt to contain and define it. Acker had already begun to develop a “language of the body” in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula through lucid writing of sex, style and clothing, bodily secretions and excretions, and medical encounters, all of which privilege for the reader immediate, present-tense corporeal sensation over narrative or symbolic meaning.
Criticism of Acker’s early novels, including Tarantula, has largely focused on her attempts to destabilize the authorial voice and combine “false” with “true” autobiography—something Acker herself highlights in both interviews and her essays. Referencing a 1991 interview between Acker and literary critic Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace’s review of Portrait of an Eye from the following year locates Acker’s work in reference to material she cited in the interview as influential to her while writing: R.D. Laing’s writings on schizophrenia. Wallace interprets Acker’s early novels, Tarantula in particular, using Laing’s notion of a schizophrenic, decentralized self, arguing that Acker “dramatizes” this schizophrenic (feminine) self at the level of prose by adopting multiple, intersecting narrating personas:
The intellectual twist at Tarantula’s heart is slick. R.D. Laing, back in 1960-something,
developed the thesis that schizophrenia is to be located existentially in the enforced diffraction of
the ego, thus that both true Dasein and social adjustment depend on the development of an
integrated self, a ‘centralized ‘I’.’ Acker, taking as self-evident the fact that phallocentric Society
schizophrenics women by denying them both subjectivity and active sexual expression, seeks to
demonstrate and dramatize a Laingian psychosis by systematically working to decentralize…the
narrative’s subject….The point—exclusively theoretical—is that to be female in a phallocentric
Society is to be existentially vivisected, bodi- and voice-less, with all the rage and anxiety and
free-floating Continental guilt attendant on that state. (Wallace 155)
Though Wallace deftly synthesizes the theoretical movement of Tarantula, he somewhat misrepresents Acker’s treatment of the body in the novel, casting her representation of feminine subjectivity as one in which women are rendered “bodiless.” On the contrary, bodies seem to be what Acker’s feminine protagonists do unequivocally possess, even if these bodies are left vulnerable to patriarchal control, violence, and manipulation. Further, Wallace argues that “in voluntarily sacrificing any univocal representation of character, relation or plot, Acker also sacrifices any quality of story that would allow the pathetic conflicts of the subjects to be felt or even comprehended by the reader” (Wallace 155). This contention relies on the presumption that meaning can only be conveyed through the voice of a coherent, “centralized” subject. Yet Wallace’s critique misses the wager of Acker’s schizophrenic prose: While often flat and sardonic in tone, her writing is more committed to momentary bodily sensation and heightened emotion than plot arc or character development. Acker’s relentless present-tense narration generates emotional-corporeal intensity over psychic or narrative historicity (a feature of the postmodern, according to Fredric Jameson). For Wallace, Acker’s presentism and decentralized narration “inadequately dramatizes” the Laingian concept of schizophrenia as it relates to feminine subjectivity (Wallace 155).
When interviewed by McCaffery in 1991, Acker explicitly characterized her early novels as non-narrative, citing Burroughs as her first reference and influence for non-narrative fiction:
Burroughs was about the only model around at that point as far as a prose writer who was
interested in what I was—which was in writing essentially non-narrative prose….the way I would
have spoken about what I was trying to do at that time was…to make a text that was an
‘environment’ rather than a centralized, meaningful narrative. (McCaffery and Acker 89)
By seeking to produce “environments” over a “meaningful narrative,” Acker evades in advance critiques like Wallace’s that her fiction lacks plot—ultimately, she claims she was not interested in telling a story from the vantage point of a stable self formed and expressed through language, but rather in foregrounding emotional and corporeal experience. Privileging bodily sensation and discontinuity over progression, order, and cohesion, McCaffery argues in a 1989 essay on Acker’s work to date, is also a feature of punk, a movement committed to destabilizing dominant and bourgeois forms of meaning production:
Punk artists of the seventies shared with Rimbaud, Artaud, Burroughs, and the Dadaists a
confidence that the creation of ‘noise’—i.e., any disruption in the usual orderly sequence that
leads from ‘real events’ and phenomena to their representation—has a genuinely revolutionary
potential to disorient (and hence disturb) the consensual social order….Not interested in merely
creating metaphors for potential anarchy and chaos, Acker and punk musicians directly dramatize
and express disorder by producing a kind of antidiscourse of madness and sensual delirium.
(McCaffery 227)
Situating Acker within the context of punk and its literary-artistic forebears, McCaffery articulates themechanism by which Acker’s work operates, namely producing discordance, noise, and immediacy. Cutting-up, juxtaposing “true” and “false” autobiography, and occupying multiple narrative voices, Acker—much like punk and post-punk musicians employing noise and sampling—circumvents the usual circuits through which fiction signifies. Lengthy passages detailing heightened bodily sensations, both pleasurable and painful, also enable Acker to disrupt social discourses and bourgeois morality. Recognizing Acker as part of the punk zeitgeist (which she also admits was meaningful to her, living in London and New York during the ‘70s and ‘80s), McCaffery links Acker’s writing to both the subcultural energies and milieus of her time and the avant-garde precursors of punk, in whose work she glimpsed fragments of her own creative project (McCaffery and Acker 94).
Figure 2. Cover of the first issue of Acephale from 1936, illustrated by André Masson
Georges Bataille, another figure frequently taken up by punk and post-punk artists, was especially of interest to Acker. In a 1990 essay about art criticism, “Critical Languages”—also from the Bodies of Work collection—Acker calls for forms of language capable of conveying the urgency and communicative mechanisms of the body, invoking the (pseudo-religious, perhaps occult) secret society to which Bataille belonged from 1936 to 1939, Acephale. The name Acephale refers to a headless male figure pictured on the cover of the first issue of Acephale from 1936; a symbol of the human being without the mind or psyche as its guiding, privileged organ (Figure 2). Evidently, Acker delved quite deeply into this phase of Bataille’s work:
Acephale’s center is the colon; the colon is labyrinthine. In a labyrinth, reason is useless, lost….When the colon or labyrinth is center, our center, we, human, learn how little, if anything, we know and can know….A colon’s end is shit. Not transcendence, but waste. Beyond meaning. For the head is no longer the head; we live, perceive, and speak, in our bodies and through our bodies. There is no escape from that, us, which is subject to death and will become excrement—this is the Nietzschean ‘Eternal Return’—there is no escape from this labyrinth. The nature, the being of the body….This labyrinth is also the labyrinth of language. It is these languages that I want to begin to find. (Bodies of Work 91)
The figure of Acephale represents a schema of the body in which the mind, Cartesian center of the self, is not the organ of perception and knowledge, but instead the colon—a rather prescient image given recent scientific findings on the so-called “gut-brain axis” and the prominent role of the gut microbiome in human physical and mental health. In this quite free-associative passage, Acker imagines a colon-centered knowledge reliant upon inward, invisible sensory input, rather than the mind’s capacity for self-consciousness—the cyclical, labyrinthine movement of matter through the bowels forms the basis for living, not the mind seeking to transcend material boundedness in a body. Excrement confronts one with a minimal form of death, the routine transformation of matter into waste signifying non-utility (a notion Kristeva theorizes at length in Powers of Horror); a useless, repulsive product of the body directly at odds with the connective, communicative, generative potential of speech and language. What might it mean to center digestion (absorption, breakdown, fermentation, expulsion) over cognition? Acker seems to insist upon the symbolic potentialities of the body’s supposedly passive functions; the way the body can signify through sensation and secretion—non-narrative and transient modalities. She writes a list of these possible “languages of the body,” among them “scatology,” “laughter, silence, screaming,” “the languages of intensity,” “the sexual and emotive languages” (Acker 92). To translate these languages of the body into ordinary language might look something like her experiments with writing sensory experience in Tarantula, in which she generates images of bodies that challenge a Cartesian, Western philosophical conception of the body as a secondary vessel encasing a mind that produces reality through consciousness or self-consciousness. Instead, Acker’s prose seems to envision the body as a decentralized network of perception not reliant upon the agentive mind, but rather providing the immersive physical experience from which writing emerges and with which writing attempts to grapple.
Acker’s writing of the body is confronting, often visceral, and her frequent omission of punctuation creates a sense of both bodily and temporal urgency, especially in the semi-autobiographic, parenthetical sections narrated by Acker’s literary alias, the Black Tarantula. In one of such sections early in the novel, the narrator opens a parenthetical passage by describing the sensation of clothing on her body:
Figure 3. Acker’s list of “The Languages of the Body” from “Critical Languages,” 1990, Bodies of Work, pp. 91-92
(I wear men’s clothes, jeans cut an inch above the hair of my cunt I hold the jeans up with a studded brown leather belt when I sit on my waterbed where I write the material of the crotch of the pants presses against my cunt lips I’m always slightly hot I masturbate often when I write I write a section 15 minutes to an hour when I unbuckle my brown leather belt either unzip my jeans and/or squeeze my hand between the cloth of the jeans and my abdomen the lower palm of my hand masturbating calms me down maintain a level energy I can keep working… (Tarantula 11)
The narrator wears men’s clothes, a semiotic gesture of gender nonconformity. Though in this quotation the true utility of the garment is that it mimics the touch of an other, the thick seam of the jeans pressing against her vulva. Men’s jeans become not only a signifier of defiant, androgynous identity but another way of being touched, the “second skin” of the garment making contact with her genitals like a lover. (Later in the novel, Acker extends the theme of being touched by clothing’s “skin,” as though to ennoble fashion, historically some of the only property women have been permitted: “I dress in velvets, furs, silks: anything that approximates the thick softness of my skin.” (Tarantula 84)). In the above passage, Acker is less interested in producing symbolic or narrative meaning through clothing than invoking a garment as an entry into the realm of sensation. She notes the clothing’s placement on her narrator’s body—“jeans cut an inch above the hair of my cunt”—an irreverent, provocative statement that directly invokes the narrator’s embodiment, measuring a garment’s edge by its proximity to genital hair. Propulsive in its lack of punctuation, this description of clothing against skin rapidly gives way to a sexual impulse: “I’m always slightly hot I masturbate often when I write.” Writing is not the origin point of this passage, but rather a synthesis or translation of bodily experience—even the syntax of this sentence, with “masturbate” preceding “write,” positions the body as primary. For Acker, the body’s sensations can serve as both the source and the content of writing.
Touch recurs throughout Tarantula as a motif—the parenthetical protagonist expresses a near constant need to be touched, all female protagonists have insatiable erotic desires, and sexual encounters seem to dissolve the boundary between self and other. In a passage dated 7/22 within the chapter entitled, “i become helen seferis, and then, alexander trocchi,” an unidentified narrator that appears to be Acker’s semi-autobiographical persona recounts a sexual encounter with a stranger, then ruminates on what touch means to her: “I matter when someone touches me, when I touch someone; the touch matters; so in this way I no longer exist, nor do the men. My body matters to me: the heart next to the lungs, the stomach pressing on the lungs, the lungs thoughtlessly drawing the air in and out, the oxygen out of the air” (Acker 53). Touching, for this protagonist, both dignifies and annihilates the self; the dualism between body and self collapses when touching an other, such that each self “no longer exist[s],” only bodies. Beyond intersubjective erotic encounters, touching encompasses the anatomy of the internal body—organs compacted on top of one another, separated only by tissue, muscle, and veins. Acker imagines a kind of erotics of the internal body: The heart, lungs, and stomach interact, collaborate, touch each other as well as the flows of blood, air, liquid, and matter that move through them. This instance of magnified corporeality invokes viscera yet represents the body as a harmonious whole, contrasting with the frequent moments of violent/violated corporeality in Acker’s novels.
Of course, the body does not always function as a cohesive system, something Acker knew well, having experienced Pelvic Inflammatory Disease in her twenties and receiving a breast cancer diagnosis later in her life. Illness attunes one to the inner workings of her body that had been imperceptible. When an organ or system malfunctions, the body becomes an object, even an adversary; it ceases to feel like the uncomplicated, reliable extension of the self it had once been. Toward the end of the novel, Acker inserts a scene of medical intervention that posits a different kind of corporeality—one involving touching, though only unilateral touch. The ill subject hands their body over for medical treatment; places themselves entirely in the care of the institutional other. Acker writes,
I get Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, walk into Columbia Presbyterian clinic: woman vomits blood
over floor, wood booths with tiny filthy white curtains for doctors’ rooms in front of wood chairs
on wood floor filthy, doctor yells at one man you haven’t taken your medicine now you’re going
to die of T.B….nurse wheels figure wrapped in white mummy cloth blood tube tied to one
mummy cloth arm over floor person vacuuming asks if he should move vacuum ‘no’ bump bump
over vacuum cords mummy jiggles blood and needle in mummy arm jiggles almost out of arm
nurse changes his mind wheels cart back again corpse jumps up and down all this done three
times…Three hours later I’m now in shock slightly hallucinating doctor gives me four shots of
penicillin in ass throws needle into my ass BAM ‘mmm that one got in O.K.’ gives me endless
bottles of synthetic opium and nembutal to shut me up. A month later I’m even sicker. (Acker 81-82)
At once harrowing and comical, this clinic scene highlights the fragility of the ill body in the medical context—its extreme permeability and openness as it ingests, vomits, secretes, bleeds, receives fluid and injections, etc. This quotation is written with Acker’s characteristic lack of punctuation in a few long, run-on sentences, as though to signal time passing rapidly amid sensory overwhelm. The last part, in which the narrator is receiving penicillin shots, is reminiscent of the parodic scenes of medical and psychiatric practice in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. One example Acker herself likely even read: “DR. LIMPF: ‘The incision is ready, doctor.’ Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall…The cup makes a horrible sucking sound. NURSE: ‘I think she’s gone, doctor.’ DR. BENWAY: ‘Well, it’s all in the day’s work’” (Burroughs 51). The doctors in these two sections of fictionalized medical intervention are careless and reckless, disregarding their patients’ comfort in order to treat (or temporarily conceal) the illness and hurry on to the next patient. While the passage from Burroughs turns surgery into an absurd scene of flagrant medical malpractice, Acker’s scene represents a more quotidian form of medical mistreatment particularly recognizable for women, who have historically been dismissed as complaining patients presenting with self-inflicted psychosomatic ailments. Drugs are administered to control Acker’s protagonist, minimize her speech and make her body limp and docile, easier to treat. This excerpt from Acker offers a kind of urgent corporeal realism: It reveals the body’s vulnerability, both to its own disease process and to the medical apparatus which attempts to treat it. Acker was famously skeptical of conventional medicine, attempting to treat her cancer with naturopathic and holistic remedies towards the end of her life. The seeds of this mistrust seem to bleed through here, with her prose implying a critique of the impersonal, hostile, detached—and interestingly, not sterile but “filthy”—medical context to which we’re forced to turn when our bodies fail.
For Acker, the body is a locus of sensation that renders ordinary language inadequate and requires its own languages: “sexual and emotive languages,” “the languages of flux,” “the language of intensity” (Bodies of Work 92). Such languages had already begun to take shape in Acker’s writing by the time of Tarantula, evident in the way she prioritizes narrating corporeal experience over producing a cohesive, forward-moving plot. This sense of bodily immediacy works in tandem with her intention of complicating the authorial voice—as she calls it, the “I” of the text—by attending to present-tense bodily sensations such as sex, internal bodily functions, and medical intervention (McCaffery and Acker 88). The body seems to represent, for Acker, a stable, physical counterpoint to the social constructions of subjectivity and discourse. As she asserts in her interview with McCaffery, the body resists linguistic attributions of meaning: “when you get to something called the actual act of sexuality, or that actual act of disease, there is a kind of undeniable materiality which isn’t up for grabs” (McCaffery and Acker 93). Much like weightlifting, sexuality and disease confound language—confront us with its limit. The body and sensation are incontestably real, and they create the reality we seek to describe in language. Acker’s literary project is not only a postmodernist, feminist, (post-)punk dramatization of unstable, in-construction subjectivity, but an experiment, at the limits of language and intelligibility, in articulating how it is to live in a woman’s body.
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work: Essays by Kathy Acker. Serpent’s Tail, 1997.
Acker, Kathy. The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. 1973. Portrait of an Eye, Grove Press, 2020,
pp. 2-90.
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. 1959. Grove Press, 2001.
Hval, Jenny. “Take Care of Yourself.” Apocalypse, girl, Sacred Bones, 2015. Spotify, https://
open.spotify.com/track/7vVJCnnty7o576znNqPvhX?si=b7383c5c7fc74c05.
McCaffery, Larry, and Kathy Acker. “An Interview with Kathy Acker.” Mississippi Review, vol. 20, no.
1/2, 1991, pp. 83-97. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134512. Accessed 4. Dec. 2025.
McCaffery, Larry. “The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and ‘Punk’ Aesthetics.” Breaking the Sequence:
Women’s Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, Princeton
University Press, 1989, pp. 215-230. JSTOR,https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztv41.18. Accessed
4. Dec. 2025.
Wallace, David Foster. “Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels by Kathy Acker.” Harvard Review, no. 1, 1992,
pp. 154-156. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27559426. Accessed 4. Dec. 2025.
Figures Cited
Figure 1: Photo of Kathy Acker lifting weights. Substack, 2024. https://masoncurrey.substack.com/p/
kathy-acker-was-against-creativity.
Figure 2: Photo of the cover of the first issue of Acephale, 1936. Monoskop, https://monoskop.org/
Ac%C3%A9phale.
Figure 3: Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work: Essays by Kathy Acker. Serpent’s Tail, 1997.
rest, healing, and transformation — medical aesthetics in A.F. Vandevorst, spring/summer 1999
Intuitively, fashion and medicine seem antithetical—the former a practice of beautifying the body or conveying status and the latter of ensuring the body’s survival. Fashion is seen as a kind of adornment for the well body, medicine an antidote or an institution for the sick one. As Hervé Guibert writes in Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary while fatally ill with AIDS-related complications in 1990, hospital garments are even demoralizing and shameful for a sick person:
September 24….The bitch who made me enter the room that hadn’t been disinfected enters
triumphantly at seven-thirty in the morning with a transparent blue gown. She wants me to strip
and wear it, allowing me to keep my underwear. I tell her: ‘You’ll have to wait until I’m a lot
worse off than I am now to get me to walk through a hospital in this thing. The only way you’ll
get me to accept would be to accompany me, hand in hand, in the same outfit, and I’d authorize
you to keep your bra, just as you authorize me to keep my underwear.’ (Guibert 55-56)
The medical garment signifies patient, for Guibert. Patient, stripped of personhood—a medical subject clothed in clinical gear and garb. Hospital clothing represents for him the shrunken and reduced world of the ward, one in which he is entirely dependent upon others, immobile and exposed. Replacing his own clothes with a hospital gown for a procedure is a form of humiliation and subjection the medical apparatus demands of him—looking ill and being constrained by an IV line are not enough to mark him as patient.
For Lady Gaga, the ward is a space to imagine anew and embellish in the mind with fashionable details—pale blue pillowcases with large medical crosses, chic white shift dresses, and mint gauze surgical hairnets (Figure 1). At the beginning of the “Marry the Night” music video, she muses: “…those nurses—they’re wearing next season Calvin Klein. And so am I. And the shoes: custom Giuseppe Zanotti. I tipped their gauze caps to the side—like Parisian berets—because I think it’s romantic, and I also believe that mint will be very big in fashion next spring” (Lady Gaga). The ward in Gaga’s music video is a revised one made beautiful through memory, fashionable through the cool-toned stylization of otherwise sterile, even hostile, medical settings (Figures 1, 2). The music video imagines a romanticized ward, not a traumatic space of idleness but of creative yearning and formative rest. Echoes of sea- and mountainside sanitariums and Kurorte for ailing bourgeois tuberculosis patients of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries certainly underlie the design of this ward-space, reminiscent of old hospitals in both architecture and layout. Though offering quite different interpretations of medical intervention and its institutions, both Guibert’s and Gaga’s texts presume a certain rift between medicine and fashion. In this cleft, an implied opposition between the functional, replicable, muted clothes of the confined sick, on the one hand, and on the other, formalized and personalized fashion designed for pursuits among the “kingdom of the well,” in Sontag’s words.
Figure 1. Lady Gaga in “Marry the Night” music video
Figure 2. Wide shot of ward from “Marry the Night” music video
Belgian fashion design duo An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx, collaborating as A.F. Vandevorst, take up the intersection of fashion and medical aesthetics in perhaps their most well-known runway show from Spring/Summer 1999, contesting the ubiquitous opposition in our cultural imaginary between medicine and fashion. Vandevorst and Arickx first met during fashion school at the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp in 1987, sharing interests in the art of Joseph Beuys, hospital design, and military and medical uniforms (A.F. Vandevorst). Their design sensibility emerged from this shared aesthetic constellation, a way of tracing the relics of medical, equestrian, fetish, and military design through fashion. The hospital bed has been a particularly special motif for A.F Vandevorst’s design and presentation concept since An Vandevorst presented her graduation collection from the Royal Academy on hospital beds (Browne and Schwartz 8). Both Vandevorst and Arickx had collected Red Cross and hospital furniture from a young age, finding disused pieces on the sides of streets when Belgian Red Cross locations or hospitals were renovating (Browne and Schwartz 22) (Figure 3). The symbolism of hospital beds relates to both Joseph Beuys’s sculpture and performance work using found military and medical objects and materials, as does the red cross icon, A.F. Vandevorst’s adopted logo. An Vandevorst recalls, “When we started our collection, the Red Cross was the symbol we wanted to use. It is central in the oeuvre of Joseph Beuys. After being introduced to his works, I fell in love with hospital interiors and started to collect the furniture and paraphernalia that belong there” (Browne and Schwartz 22). Beuys’s visual language served as an opening onto medical imagery for Vandevorst, with the Red Cross serving as a kind of twice-readymade logo signifying at once the Red Cross organization, Beuys’s distinctive style, and the brand’s own signature, stitched into each garment with red thread.
Figure 3. Photo from A.F. Vandevorst S/S 1999 collection
Beyond the Beuysian connotations of the brand’s medical iconography, hospital beds (and beds in general) also carry historical associations with femininity, a connection Hélène Cixous draws poignantly in Sorties:
‘Bridebed, childbed, bed of death’: thus woman’s trajectory is traced as she inscribes herself from
bed to bed in Joyce’s Ulysses. The voyage of Ulysses with Bloom standing constantly at the helm
as he navigates Dublin. Walking, exploring. The voyage of Penelope—Everywoman: a bed of
pain in which the mother is never done with dying, a hospital bed on which there is no end to
Mrs. Purefoy’s labor, the bed framing endless erotic daydreams, where Molly, wife and
adulteress, voyages in her memories. She wanders, but lying down. In dream. Ruminates. Talks to
herself. Woman’s voyage: as a body. (Cixous and Clément 66)
If, as Cixous contends, woman lives her life as a body, lying down, transported to other worlds in the mind via dream, rumination, madness, and physical pain, then we might posit a connection between medicalization and femininity—a bed-ridden illness-subjectivity at the core of the feminine. Women have historically spent their lives in childlike daydreaming, menstrual pain, obligatory childbirth and nursing, sudden or prolonged illness, libido and life-sustaining erotic fantasy. A.F. Vandevorst’s choice of the hospital bed as a recurring stage for the presentation of their women’s fashion collections—both in their Spring/Summer 1999 collection and beyond—indicates a similar vision of femininity, of the bed as a crucial site for the playing-out of women’s embodied and psychic lives. In doing so, they explore femininity through fashion and medicine, since experimentation in fashion is also an exploration of the feminine (fashion and textiles being, after all, historically regarded as feminine artistic and cultural domains).
An Vandevorst even cites women’s beds as the inspiration for A.F. Vandevorst’s second collection, their Spring/Summer 1999 runway show: “Our second collection was inspired by the behaviour of a woman lying on the bed and the integration of that environment into her wardrobe, such as: sheets, pillows, blankets, pleats and wrinkles, white cotton, pyjamas, etc. So not only the bedroom, but also a hospital, a sanitarium, a dormitory, a spa” (Browne and Schwartz 7). The slippage between beds in a hospital, sanitarium, dorm, and spa that Vandevorst notes here demonstrates Cixous’s argument that the bed is a site of feminine life. Beds are places where women find refuge or to which they are confined, whether passing time in longing, healing, resting, or curing (in the case of the sanitarium). The figure of the resting or languishing woman—whether tuberculose, depressive, hysteric, or postpartum—enables the staging of women’s fashion in a medicalized, institutionalized environment. The “integration of that environment into her wardrobe,” as Vandevorst describes, suggests that the resting woman becomes an object both of medical inquiry and of fashion design. In both medicine and fashion design, a woman becomes model, mannequin, embodied vessel for examination and assessment.
The recording of A.F. Vandevorst’s Spring/Summer 1999 runway show resembles a kind of Beuysian social sculpture, a performance in which stasis gives way to movement before becoming again stasis, much like the motif of materials such as wax, fat, and honey recur in solid and liquid states in Beuys’s sculptural work. The A.F. Vandevorst show opens with imagery of women resting in midcentury hospital beds, their garments enfolding with the crisp cotton sheets; hair messy from flipping sides to find a new resting posture and show close-up details of their clothing: corsetry, hems of pleated skirts sewn together in the back, collared jackets with stitched felt crosses on the left breast (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Ensemble with pants, shirt, and jacket, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Timestamps set to the images and music—beginning with Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Stella Maris,” about dreaming—show the models awaking before the runway show begins. The show was set in an old school building in an outer arrondissement of Paris (the space vaguely reminiscent of a ward) with hospital beds set up in rows along the walls, chairs dispersed around them, and an aisle formed between the two rows of beds serving as the runway (Figure 5). One by one, the models rise from their beds and walk down to the end of the runway and back again to present their looks. This use of hospital beds in a ward-like space for a runway show invokes places of feminine domesticity and curing, yet it also conveys a sense of fragility or unease that implicates the audience, who are seated among the beds at eye level of the models, as though they were loved ones visiting the unwell. The models do not wear shoes, only thick cotton socks resembling hospital socks, signifying warmth, comfort, and practicality. The garments themselves are not typical cotton shirts, pants, and skirts—these articles of clothing are folded and draped to form unusual silhouettes, as though they were molded not by stitching and darts, but by the way in which the model had been lying down in bed (Figure 6). Some garments resemble pajamas or nightdresses, others corseted or boxy nurse uniforms—it seems that the figures of both patient and uniformed medical professional served as inspiration for this collection (Figures 4, 6, 7). Several models also wear shawls resembling wool blankets, conveying a weight and sense of warmth unusual for a Spring/Summer collection, though recalling perhaps the felt in which Beuys was supposedly wrapped after his rescue from a plane crash (Figure 7).
Figure 5. Runway space, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Figure 6. Detail of dress and corset ensemble, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Figure 7. Ensemble with skirt and blanket-shawl, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
The relevance of Joseph Beuys’s work to An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx should not be understated—his work had a profound impact on Vandevorst as a teenager and is woven into the brand’s iconography, including their Spring/Summer 1999 collection. Beuys’s artistic philosophy, his origin myth as an artist, and the distinctive style of his sculptures—with his use of certain signature materials (fat, wax, found objects, and importantly, felt fabric)—made a lasting impression on Vandevorst:
My mother was an art teacher….When I was eighteen, she took me on a mother-daughter trip
through Germany to see all of the museums where the works of Joseph Beuys were being
exhibited. By the end of our excursion, I was fully immersed in his visual narrative. I recall
seeing How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare where he covered his face in gold foil, The Pack,
a work of twenty-four sleds pouring in formation out of the back of a VW van, I Like America
and America Likes Me, Infiltration for Piano, his felt suit, his blackboards and his series of bee
studies and sketches. I was completely captivated by his works and the myth he crafted around
his beginnings; suggesting that he was found frozen after a plane crash in the Krim mountains,
rescued by locals who rubbed him in grease and wrapped him in felt, awakening from a coma in a
German field hospital where the fabric and salve would become the staple of his oeuvre. (Browne
and Schwartz 22)
Beuys’s distinctive visual language was deeply engaging for Vandevorst as a teenager and young designer, particularly his (contested, potentially fabricated) story of being rescued by Tatars in the mountains after his fighter plane was shot down during World War II, a myth that informed his use of materials signifying warmth, energy, transition, and flux.
Indeed, Beuys’s style is perhaps the most distinctive element of his oeuvre, comprised of his self-presentation, his origin myth, his materials of choice, and his public persona, all implicated in both his performances and sculptures. As art critic Arthur C. Danto writes of Beuys’s style,
In truth, the style is partially defined by qualities that fit smoothly with the idea of the trace and
the remnant. It is the style of left-over, broken, dated objects, distressed and discarded—objects
which have fallen out of what Heidegger calls the Zeugganzes of the average everydayness of
life, of no use anymore. And Beuys uses them for the expressiveness of their fallen usefulness…
(Mesch and Michely XVI)
Found objects figure heavily in Beuys’s sculptural and performance work, and these carefully chosen objects have become emblematic of his visual style—repurposed sleds and a Volkswagen van in The Pack, layers of felt and found metal tables in Fond III and Fond II (and other pieces in the “Fond” series), and again a large piece of felt and an ambulance in his performance, Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (Figures 8, 9). Felt is a particularly significant material for Beuys, one tied to his personal mythology—to him it signifies warmth and therefore energy, hence his continual use of the fabric throughout his Fond series of symbolic batteries representing energy generation and storage. Art historian Theodora Vischer writes of the Fond works, “The creation of energy means the production of warmth, a central notion in Beuys” (Mesch and Michely 158). She continues, quoting Beuys: ‘The warmth concept extends much further—not even physical warmth is meant…I actually meant a completely different warmth, namely, spiritual or evolutionary warmth or an initiation of evolution.’ The use of materials such as felt and fat are meaningful in connection with this” (Mesch and Michely 158). This notion of warmth as a “spiritual or evolutionary” energy refers back to Beuys’s rescue story, a traumatic though formative moment that demonstrated to him the human capability to create energy, thereby inciting transformation and survival, even evolution. Beuys might also call this human inclination towards energy production creativity, a theme unifying his artistic philosophy and oeuvre.
Figure 8. Joseph Beuys, Poster of Fond II, 1968
Figure 9. Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969. Volkswagen van, 24 sleighs, each with felt blankets, fat, belts, and flashlight
Art critic Donald Kuspit elaborates, suggesting that Beuys's interest in the production of bodily and energetic warmth through art-making was a means of coping with his embodied and psychic trauma from World War II and growing up in Germany under National Socialism: “Ultimately Beuys’ art was inseparable from his body and his body image. Art for him was a means to remake an injured body, and the sense of self that depends on it—and in so doing to remake art, to root it once again in the body. Art was to be a radiating symbol of body heat” (Kuspit 200-201). In Beuys’s work, art and creativity become a method of generating heat, thus energy, which is capable of transforming what is sedimented into something again moldable and full of potential. According to Kuspit’s analysis, the body plays an essential role in Beuys’s process of sculpting—the human body is the inciting warmth capable of producing further warmth by manipulating materials and releasing the energies latent in them. Using fragments of Beuys’s own language, Kuspit provides a clearer explanation of Beuys’s theory of the relationship between materials and warmth:
Beuys’ ‘totalized concept of art’ involved the sense that what had become ‘hardened’ by life
originated ‘out of the fluid process’ and could be returned to it to be re-formed. What had
‘solidified,’ like congealed fat or wax, had only to be softened by artistic warmth to be given a
more human form. Beuys intended this principle to be applied ‘not only to artistic forms, but also
to social forms or legal forms or economic forms, or also agricultural problems…or educational
problems.’ For him, art brought together ‘every man’s possibilities to be a creative being and…
the question of [the form of] the social totality.’ The idea that individual and social health are
inseparable is crucial to this concept. For Beuys, art was a process of simultaneous self- and
social healing. (Kuspit 198)
This notion of healing through generating warmth certainly resonates with A.F. Vandevorst’s interest in the bed as a site of feminine rest and recuperation, and also with the project of fashion more broadly—generating movement, transforming material, and reshaping the body through the weaving, folding, gathering, tailoring, and stitching together of fabrics. Literal bodily warmth, as well as Beuys’s sense of evolutionary warming, are also implicated in clothing design, again recalling Beuys’s project, in which felt conveys the warming of a body from the outside using a supplementary covering.
Though deeply formative for An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx, Beuys’s theory of art-making is certainly quite spiritual, for which he received much criticism both throughout his career and after his death in 1986. Art critic Rosalind Krauss—among the October journal writers who were critical of Beuys’s work and its philosophical implications—writes in 1996 (in Formless: A User’s Guide),
Added to Beuys’ belief in total assimilation (‘Every man is an artist,’; every speech act is a
sculpture) there is his interpretation of the shamanistic figure as the one who reveals the
form always already locked within the chaos of matter, who therefore informs matter.
Speaking of his use of fat as dramatizing this work of form giving, of Gestaltung, Beuys said, ‘In
this way I could transform the character of this fat from a chaotic and unsettled state to a very
solid condition of form… [with] a geometrical context as its end.’ And, indeed, Beuys’
allegorical use of substances, and his constant insinuation of his own body into a network of
myth, was devoted to this idea of breathing logos into his materials, so that by assuming
form they would also be resurrected as meaning. (Mesch and Michely 172)
Krauss’s critique of Beuys relates to the way in which his theory and practice insist upon a “total assimilation” of form and meaning, the transformation of all materials into meaning, which seems to gesture toward a quasi-Hegelian notion of Aufhebung. Krauss critiques Beuys’s belief that matter has an essence awaiting fruition by the “shamanistic” artist—that each material is always already a symbol. It seems that this element of Beuys’s artistic philosophy, following Krauss’s analysis, presumes a unity of form and meaning with which, in the wake of deconstruction in the 1980s and ‘90s (when the cited pieces on Beuys were written), we might take issue.
Yet the use of felt as both fabric and energetic substance in Beuys’s (social) sculpting practice must have struck Vandevorst as significant, as she was also drawn to fabric as a mode of sculptural expression. Felt is an unusual material to use for sculpture, traditionally made from solid or hardened materials, such as marble, bronze, stone, or wood. Instead, felt is soft, woven (containing small gaps), foldable, and easily manipulated by the elements (water, wind) or the human hand, yet it retains its essential quality of providing warmth, even in cold environments. Perhaps Vandevorst recognized in Beuys’s work an element of fashion design, or at least saw a continuity between sculpture and fashion in his use of felt. Similarly, Vandevorst and Arickx’s collection of found hospital and Red Cross furnishings recall Beuys’s own furniture repurposed into installation and sculpture (as in Fond II)—the designers’ Spring/Summer 1999 collection incorporates and expands upon Beuys’s visual language. Similarly, his interest in warmth and the transitioning of solid and static to liquid and moldable states in his sculptures is also evident in the performance of this runway show, in which models move from a resting state to a state of movement and generate energy. In Beuysian terms, we might say of this collection that first the construction of the garments themselves involves a process of “warming” and sculpting the blank fabric into a garment sewn to the shape and proportions of a human body. Once the garment is complete, a model wears it, and lying down on a bed and walking during the runway show performance creates wrinkles in the garment, again “liquifying” the material and sculpting the garment through its interaction with a body and an environment. This process of sculpting fabric onto the form of the body and then the body wearing—and further sculpting—the garment in turn involves a reciprocal interaction that gives new shape to both body and garment. Fashion more broadly, as illustrated in this collection, could even be understood as an interaction between the body and the garment that reshapes and redefines each.
Figure 10. Gray wrap shirt with fold details, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Figure 11. White skirt with fold details, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Figure 12. Ensemble with white coat, A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Yet fashion does not only function as fabric covering; it also functions as sign and is at once material and symbolic. In this collection, A.F. Vandevorst reveal the symbolic rift between fashion and medicine, suggesting that fashion, much like art (drawing from Beuys’s explorations in this realm), can transform medicine’s materials and symbols—including the garments of medical spaces (uniforms, pajamas, hospital gowns)—into aesthetically compelling garments. Materials with medical or professional undertones, such as white cotton, are transformed into deconstructed garments with folds and pleats that create new silhouettes and disrupt the typical appearance of otherwise standard garments, such as a white button-down shirt or pencil skirt (Figures 10, 11). The doctor’s coat is even reimagined as a lightweight, ‘90s minimalist spring coat (Figure 12). Fine mesh fabrics used in many of the looks create additional gauzy layers and folds over garments made of thicker material, as though providing the visual balance and feeling, but not the actual weight, of extra fabric on the body (Figure 13).
Figure 13. Four ensembles (looks one and three with mesh elements), A.F. Vandevorst, S/S 1999
Many of these looks are also androgynous, or at least not overtly feminine, effecting a less performative sense of femininity than much contemporaneous late-‘90s fashion design that revealed the female body to challenge the parameters of fashion and taste or to accentuate its sexual allure for theatrical effect (Olivier Theyskens, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, to name a few). Instead, A.F. Vandevorst seem interested in putting forth a vision of women resting, healing, surviving, working, and dreaming—imagery that corresponds both thematically and symbolically with the medical sphere, in which women have historically worked and lived. It seems that in this collection, A.F. Vandevorst explore fashion that does not sexualize the female body, but rather reveals it as a body simply living in clothing and in space—they create compelling fashion that looks as though it has molded to its wearer’s body and integrated itself into the wearer’s environment. These looks are constructed objects that look as though htey have been worn and experienced in the world—particularly the uniform-inspired garments, reminiscent of labor. This latter effect also recalls Beuys’s philosophy of art; for him, any act of human labor is creative and constitutes art:
…during the last decade of his life and work, Beuys constructed an actual political economy on
which he hoped to found his theory of social sculpture. Its anchor point was, of course, creativity,
which is a universal faculty of man, and even the singular one that makes him man….Like labor
power, but unlike talent—a notion on which classical aesthetics is based—creativity is the
potential of each and every one, and it precedes the division of labor: being the capacity to
produce, in general. From this it follows that everyone is an artist and that art is not a profession.
(de Duve 57)
Beuys’s conception of creativity is very egalitarian; as de Duve argues, Beuys’s theory of art fuses the figures of the proletarian and the bohemian together into the figure of the human being as an artist—art comes from human creativity, and all humans possess creativity. This creative ethic applies particularly well to fashion, the practice of designing clothing for a body, as the first human clothing was practical, though it was still designed and constructed. Fashion is both art object and use object, and A.F. Vandevorst’s collection demonstrates this dual function through their reinterpretation of practical garments—uniforms, pajamas, hospital gowns—redesigned as high fashion garments. In transforming them from their original functionality and design into art objects, Vandevorst and Arickx enact creativity as Beuys envisions it: art as energy production, warming, and evolution.
In both the form of the garments and their presentation, A.F. Vandevorst’s Spring/Summer 1999 runway show explores medical aesthetics through fashion, demonstrating the implied opposition between them in our cultural imaginary. At the level of the garments themselves, hospital and medical garments serve as both formal and aesthetic inspiration—the Red Cross logo is stitched onto jackets, skirts, and corsets, and the shape and design of medical uniforms and hospital gowns provide the basis for modified, high fashion variants of these garments. The very setup of the runway show resembles a hospital ward, and disused hospital beds—reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’s sculptures incorporating found objects—inform the theme of rest that inspired the collection. Even the movement of the show, as the models transition from sleepy stasis to movement, suggests the transition and transformation of both woman and garment, perhaps even a kind of Beuysian warming and healing. Indeed, A.F. Vandevorst’s style and creative preoccupations are indebted to Beuys—their recurrent medical theme and even their logo originate from his artistic oeuvre. The designer duo’s Spring/Summer 1999 show serves as an homage to Beuys and an insistence that the realms of fashion and art overlap, as do fashion and medicine. Fashion is already imbricated in medicine via the design, fabrication, and wearing of medical garments, and A.F. Vandevorst demonstrate that high fashion can take inspiration from medicine in turn.
Works Cited
A.F. Vandevorst, 2025. https://www.afvandevorst.com/about.html. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Browne, Alix, and Michael Schwartz. A.F. Vandevorst: Ende Neu. Hannibal Publishing, 2017.
Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing,
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
de Duve, Thierry. “Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians.” October, vol. 45, Summer 1988, pp.
47-62, MIT Press. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/779043. Accessed 7 Aug. 2025.
Félix R. “A.F. Vandevorst S/S 1999 Collection.” YouTube, 7 Jul. 2022. https://youtu.be/
DXV9B1wMSCA?feature=shared.
Guibert, Hervé. Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary. 1996. Fordham University Press, 2016.
Lady Gaga. “Lady Gaga - Marry the Night (Official Music Video).” YouTube, 2 Dec. 2011. https://
youtu.be/cggNqDAtJYU?feature=shared.
Mesch, Claudia, and Viola Michely, editors. Joseph Beuys: The Reader. MIT Press, 2007.
Kuspit, Donald. “Joseph Beuys: The Body of the Artist.” Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art,
Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 197-204.
1Granary. “They shut their cult Belgian brand. People still want it.” 1Granary, 29 Jul. 2025, https://
1granary.substack.com/p/they-shut-their-cult-belgian-brand?
r=ezniu&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true.
Figures Cited
Figure 1: Lady Gaga. “Lady Gaga - Marry the Night (Official Music Video).” YouTube, 2 Dec. 2011.
https://youtu.be/cggNqDAtJYU?feature=shared.
Figure 2: Lady Gaga. “Lady Gaga - Marry the Night (Official Music Video).” YouTube, 2 Dec. 2011.
https://youtu.be/cggNqDAtJYU?feature=shared.
Figure 3: “SS 1999.” A.F. Vandevorst, https://www.afvandevorst.com/history/history_1999.html.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Figure 4: “SS 1999.” A.F. Vandevorst, https://www.afvandevorst.com/history/history_1999.html.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Figure 5: “A.F. Vandevorst.” MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2005, https://www.momu.be/en/
collection-stories/a-f-vandevorst-2. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Figure 6: “A.F. Vandevorst.” MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2005, https://www.momu.be/en/
collection-stories/a-f-vandevorst-2. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Figure 7: “A.F. Vandevorst.” MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp, 2005, https://www.momu.be/en/
collection-stories/a-f-vandevorst-2. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Figure 8: Beuys, Joseph. Joseph Beuys FOND II. 1968. Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Tate,
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-fond-ii-ar00748. Accessed 28 Aug.
2025.
Figure 9: Beuys, Joseph. The Pack (das Rudel). 1969. Art Resource, New York. Artsy.net, https://
www.artsy.net/artwork/joseph-beuys-the-pack-das-rudel. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Figure 10: Félix R. “A.F. Vandevorst S/S 1999 Collection.” YouTube, 7 Jul. 2022. https://youtu.be/
DXV9B1wMSCA?feature=shared.
Figure 11: Félix R. “A.F. Vandevorst S/S 1999 Collection.” YouTube, 7 Jul. 2022. https://youtu.be/
DXV9B1wMSCA?feature=shared.
Figure 12: Félix R. “A.F. Vandevorst S/S 1999 Collection.” YouTube, 7 Jul. 2022. https://youtu.be/
DXV9B1wMSCA?feature=shared.
Figure 13: “SS 1999.” A.F. Vandevorst, https://www.afvandevorst.com/history/history_1999.html.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
Alexander McQueen’s VOSS — decomposition, drive, deconstruction fashion
Within a mirrored box, a padded cell surrounds a runway, and situated at the center of the enclosed runway lies an opaque metal and glass cube. English fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2001 collection, entitled VOSS, with its high production value and conceptual rigor, marks a turning point both in McQueen’s oeuvre and demonstrates his engagement with the very premises of fashion. Throughout the previous decade, McQueen presented compelling collections which fused impeccable, contemporary tailoring with elements drawn from eclectic (often macabre) historical preoccupations ranging from Victorian-era prostitutes (Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, Central Saint Martins graduation show, 1992) to Dante’s Inferno (Dante, Autumn/Winter 1996), Joan of Arc (Joan, Autumn/Winter 1998), and beyond. The collection that first gained McQueen critical recognition (and made him the object of controversy, even condemnation) in the high fashion world was Autumn/Winter 1995’s Highland Rape, a collection in which McQueen explored the theme of English violence against Scotland during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Highland clearances through imagery of sexual violence against women. Models boldly walked down a bracken-strewn runway in sharply tailored Scottish tartan skirt-suits, torn dresses, and jackets partly exposing their breasts (a signature early McQueen gesture). Although many fashion critics of the time accused McQueen of misogyny for his Highland Rape collection, the entanglement of sex, death, brutality, and importantly, feminine strength continued to be an abiding theme in his subsequent designs. Even in McQueen’s early collections, the garment and the runway show are sites onto which political and social violence can be projected and revealed in a context that normally repels images of brutality.
The 1990s progressed and McQueen quickly received fashion industry acclaim, which led to his appointment as creative director for Givenchy in 1996 (after John Galliano’s move to Dior). A working-class London designer known for his nontraditional garment-making techniques and often theatrical design sensibility, McQueen encountered challenges at Givenchy. Though his first collection for the house was (as seems by now customary) generally not well received, he continued at Givenchy until 2001 while producing increasingly conceptual and high production value runway shows for his own brand. McQueen’s shows from the late 1990s are some of his most theatrical in terms of presentation, and they represent a turning point in his oeuvre. No. 13 (Spring/Summer 1999) culminated in perhaps one of the most iconic moments in fashion history, in which model Shalom Harlow, wearing a voluminous white muslin dress, was sprayed with paint by programmed robots, completing the dress in the real-time of the runway show (Figures 1, 2, 3, 4).
Figure 1. Shalom Harlow in white (unpainted) dress, No. 13, S/S 1999
Figure 2. Shalom Harlow in white dress with yellow and black spray-painted pattern, No. 13, S/S 1999
In a sense, McQueen reveals the dress’s making (or at least its finishing, its printing—even its impression) to viewers both seated at the show and, by means of photography and video recording, in future virtual attendance. The finale of No. 13 acts as a kind of conceptual prelude to McQueen’s collection VOSS, presented just two years later—both reveal fashion as a process shifting and unfolding into the future (in Derrida’s language, “opening toward the future”), resisting a more standard, static presentation of the garment as a reified product detached from its making and ultimate decomposition.
Figure 3. Shalom Harlow and robots before dress is painted, No. 13, S/S 1999
Figure 4. Shalom Harlow and robots after dress is painted, No. 13, S/S 1999
In 1998, the same year that McQueen presented No. 13, fashion studies scholar Alison Gill posited in the essential journal Fashion Theory a mode of thinking about fashion aided by the philosophical-literary theory of deconstruction. Originally, the term deconstruction fashion, used in fashion criticism beginning in the late 1980s, referred to the work of several avant-garde Belgian and Japanese designers, including Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto (Gill 25). These designers revealed the internal structure of the garment through their choice of materials (lining, mesh, bonding, etc. used as complete fabrics, not as disguised components) and their cutting and tailoring techniques—for example, Margiela is most well-known for “inverting” the garment, such that its usually concealed inner construction (seams, darts, bonding) is made into the garment’s outward surface (Gill 27). Margiela and Yamamoto, in particular, also transformed their runway shows into performances by introducing humor, chaos, shock, and confrontation. Reminiscent of modernist art movements such as Dada and Russian Constructivism, which introduced the conceptual precepts of chance and “truth to materials” (respectively) into practices of making and exhibiting art, these deconstruction fashion designers of the 1980s and ‘90s posed both new design techniques and new ways of thinking about the creation, function, and significance of clothing in the postmodern era. Gill writes,
…what is marked about the practices of these designers and represents a “new thinking” in
fashion is an explicit care for the “structur-ing ontology” of the garment. By “structur-ing
ontology” I mean that visibility is given to the simultaneous bidirectionality of the labor that the
garment-maker and clothes perform—i.e., the garment-maker is simultaneously forming and
deforming, constructing and destroying, making and undoing clothes. This bidirectional labor
continues in dressing and wearing clothes, as clothes figure and disfigure the body, compose and
decompose. (Gill 28)
Gill’s formulation of a “structur-ing ontology” of the garment highlights its in-process status, unfolding with and through its engagement with the bodies of wearers and makers. The garment (of deconstruction fashion) is not an object made once and deployed for its use-value or exhibition-value; rather, it is an ongoing encounter occurring between subjects and environments, capable of provoking reflections on and reconfigurations of (for example) how we fashion ourselves, how others fashion us, and how we exist in our finite, fallible bodies wearing—even bounded by—finite, fallible clothing. In deconstructionist mode, Gill prompts us to ask: What are the presuppositions of fashion as a cultural practice and a formalized domain of art? Fashion is embedded in historical and contemporary discourses about beauty, elegance, glamour, transformation, youth, morality, and holiness. Might these presuppositions be reliant upon an inverse of ugliness, abjection, sin, decay, disintegration, aging, and the proximity of these terms to an ultimate negating threat—death?
Derrida’s seminal text from 1995, Archive Fever, offers a useful paradigm for thinking through the enabling conditions of fashion in a Western and globalized postmodern era—enabling conditions which involve the ever present, future-projected threat of both corporeal and material disintegration. In the essay’s Exergue, Derrida introduces the death drive as the animating force of archivization (here, meaning the psychic structure enabling memory, repression, and suppression), first describing Freud’s own initially resistant discovery of the “aggression” or “destruction drive.” Though stated in passing early in the essay, Derrida paraphrases Freud’s formulation of beauty as an “impression” the death drive leaves behind (since it “never leaves any archives of its own” and “operates in silence”). He elaborates:
…the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have
been archive-destroying, by silent vocation. Allowing for exceptions. But what are exceptions in
this case? Even when it takes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception,
to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself,
makes itself up or paints itself (gefärbt ist) in some erotic color. This impression of erogenous
color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in
person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its
own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual
idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin
of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death. (Derrida 14)
The beautiful, for Derrida (following Freud), is that which has been touched, “impressed” upon, by death. Beauty is the outward surface (“a mask right on the skin”) of psychic repression, suppression, memory—and the body is the exteriority on which the process of archivization leaves its illusory inscriptions. As Derrida writes on the same page after the above quotation, “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside” (Derrida 14). A repetition-compulsion, thus the symptom of death drive, produces the impulse to archive. Further, the archive (memory and “inscription” or “impression,” indeed, forms of signification or means by which to concretize psychic phenomena) is dependent upon “a certain exteriority,” an “outside” on which to inscribe—a “meta-textual authority” (Derrida 45). Yet this necessary outside suggests a stable, fixed signifier—could this fixed signifier actually be an awaited signifier “to come,” that of futurity? Returning to the first quotation: If archivization—a compulsion to preserve instantiated by death drive—leaves exterior impressions, and “lovely impressions” on the skin and in art objects constitute the realm of beauty, then death drive itself produces the compulsion to beautify the body through fashion. Such are the stakes of fashion, a practice of enclothement unfurling-unraveling from the threat of future death and decay. This compulsion to decorate and enclothe (literally through the construction of garments to transform, (trans)figure, conceal, and shape the body) is reliant upon a “trace” of death, a threat of annihilation directed at the body from within, its own resources poised against it (aging, illness, corporeal waste).
Though at the time, Alexander McQueen was not considered among the deconstruction fashion designers, his collections from the late 1990s, and particularly VOSS, presented in 2000, thematize the interrelations of bodies and materials (in Gill’s words, “the nexus of making, wearing, thinking, and dwelling that happens in fashion”) explored in deconstruction fashion (Gill 42). McQueen’s VOSS encouraged reflection on the enabling conditions, functions, and structural presuppositions of fashion at the cusp of the new millennium. Derrida’s model of archivization—ultimately a theory of memory, creation, meaning, and being—can give language to the visual, material, performative, and sonic registers through which McQueen’s show interrogates the underlying premises of fashion.
The lights inside the glass box flare then stabilize in a cool, bright tone which reflects off all the white surfaces comprising the runway—nothing is concealed in this clinical light. Kate Moss opens the show, walking around the dark cube towards the audience, pausing to admire her reflection in the mirror, touching the glass. Subsequent models follow suit. Slowly, our role as viewer-voyeurs of the scene begins to dawn on us—fashion scholar Caroline Evans interprets that the models’ “simulation of solitary pleasure was performed, like a sex show, to an audience of voyeurs concealed behind a one-way mirror” (Evans 94). Many of the garments are pale and subdued, tailored McQueen pieces for which he was known (skirt-suits, jackets, trousers) made in this collection from pastel pink, blue, and light gray fabrics. Some are vaguely medical, as though to convey the authority (and latent fantasy) of poised midcentury nurses in stiff cotton shift dresses (Figures 5, 6). Yet these women are authority in dress and patient in body, circling a padded-cell runway with their heads bandaged, and sometimes also their calves. A scene of feminine vanity—us, watching the women watch themselves—turns hysterical as the models begin to act out, swatting at invisible objects, stumbling off-balance, destroying garments made of fragile materials, performing fear of taxidermy birds suspended above a dress (an allusion to Hitchcock’s The Birds?) (Figure 7). The logic of memory, of repetition-compulsion, is already embedded in the models’ performance of their worn garments—clothing here acts as an impression of psychic phenomena.
Figure 5. Dress, VOSS, S/S 2001 | Figure 6. Suit, VOSS, S/S 2001 | Figure 7. Dress with taxidermy birds, VOSS, S/S 2001
A moment of further psychic unravelling takes place when a model walks out onto the runway wearing a floor-length dress made from seashells. The lights dim, and she begins, as though ecstatically, to tear the shells from the dress, allowing them to shatter on the floor (Figure 8). This destruction of a garment in real-time holds symbolic weight—in its destruction, the dress exceeds its status as pristine commodity and becomes instead an object of performance art imbued with conceptual significance. By staging the destruction of his own creation, McQueen on one level critiques the commodity-fetish quality of clothing, and on another, draws our attention to the natural properties and ephemerality of his materials. McQueen has commented on his interest in the organic-inorganic continuum which led him to use shells on a dress:
My friend George and I were walking on the beach in Norfolk and there were thousands of
[razor-clam] shells. They were so beautiful, I thought I had to do something with them. So, we
decided to make [a dress] out of them…The shells had outlived their usefulness on the beach, so
we put them to another use on a dress. Then Erin [O’Conner] came out and trashed the dress, so
their usefulness was over once again. Kind of like fashion, really. (Bolton 146)
Figure 8. Dress made from razor-clam shells, VOSS, S/S 2001
We sense here McQueen’s interest in the cycle of life, living things, the tendency for clothing to decay—for its functionality to end—in much the same way as living beings expire. As Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’” (Freud 613). McQueen sees in the shells an “outlived” natural material which can be channeled into a garment, momentarily reanimated by the model’s performance, only to be made again inanimate, again discarded, this time on the runway. The dismantling of a couture garment in real-time alludes to its making, drawing attention to the interactions between garment-maker and garment normally concealed in the runway show context. This is a reversal of the robotic completion of the white dress that concludes McQueen’s No. 13 show, in which human labor is assigned to machines, conjuring up Marxian imagery of the human as an appendage to the machine in early industrial capitalism, yet this final spectacle demonstrates our postmodern-era progression beyond Marx’s original formulation. While in No. 13, McQueen considers the relations between wearer, maker, and garment through the figure of dress-making in process, in VOSS, he presents us a figure of dress un-making, accelerated though it is by the wearer’s destructive performance. In marking this fragile, organically-composed dress for destruction, McQueen enacts a performance of the organic fallibility upon which fashion is premised—this destruction alludes to the future-oriented animating force of death and decay which instantiates our impulse to clothe and decorate our bodies.
A death drive logic, a compulsion to repeat and to return to inorganic stasis, is also glimpsed in moments throughout VOSS in which models destroy garments or in which the garments themselves seem to be interrupted or intruded upon by a repressed element (taxidermy; castles and other unwieldy forms balancing on slim shoulders). Such minimal gestures and signs of disintegration prefigure the final self-annihilating spectacle that concludes the show and retroactively reframes it. The last model walks out in one of McQueen’s best remembered looks, a blood-red dress with a one-shouldered bodice made from dyed medical slides which transition delicately into a billowing feather skirt (Figures 9, 10, 11).
Figures 9, 10, & 11. Dress made from medical slides and ostrich feathers, VOSS, S/S 2001
She reclines against the cube at the center of the runway—until then untouchable—drawing our attention to the un-signified presence which had structured and at times obstructed our otherwise surveillant view of the white-lit mirrored space. Once she exits the runway, the space goes dark and the audience is left to contemplate their reflection in the mirror, to become again aware of themselves as viewer-voyeurs to the sounds of breathing, heartbeats, and a nasal electrocardiogram beep. A light comes on from within the occluded cube, then the surrounding lights, and a flatline—the sound of death—echoes as the steel panels of the cube come crashing down, dark glass shards propelled into air now infested with live moths. A nude woman (fetish writer Michelle Olley) is revealed, lying on a sofa, covered in moths and attached to a breathing tube reminiscent of a World War I gas mask (Evans 98) (Figure 12). This final image is a reenactment of artist Joel-Peter Witkin’s 1983 photograph, Sanitarium (Figure 13). McQueen has stated that in recreating Witkin’s photograph, he merely intended to reveal the biased notions of beauty held by fashion critics and the industry at large: “These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn’t be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful” (Bolton 142). Though discourses around beauty are certainly critiqued in VOSS’s final détournement, McQueen is clearly preoccupied with latent destruction and the possibility for signification to occur retroactively (nachträglich).
Figure 12. Michelle Olley, VOSS, S/S 2001 | Figure 13. Joel-Peter Witkin, Sanatarium, 1983
The Freudian concept of retroactivity (Nachträglichkeit) denotes the way in which trauma only becomes perceptible as such when a second occurrence causes the repressed to resurface. For Jacques Derrida, Nachträglichkeit is essential to the archive, where documents are “consigned” into a unified corpus, and where meaning is ascribed to them belatedly to secure their supposed future legibility (Derrida 52). The process of archiving is a paradoxical state of future-orientation produced by repetition-compulsion, a symptom of the death drive:
…if there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of
memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that
repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to
Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction. Consequence: right on what
permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to
destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the
archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the ‘by heart’ itself. The archive always works,
and a priori, against itself. (Derrida 14)
In Derrida’s formulation, the sense of “finitude” the death drive imposes institutes archivization—what is not preserved (“consigned”) in an external place (psyche, language, magic mystic pad, garment, or literal archive) risks being lost in the wake of death, annihilation, forgetting, repression, or suppression. Archivization relies on the projection of a future “to come” which promises certain, irretrievable loss.
Turning back to VOSS: When the glass cube smashes on the ground, when the moths (masterful fabric-eaters) are released onto the runway, McQueen symbolically marks his own collection for destruction. He retroactively reveals the negating impulse dormant, though operative, at the center of the show. This latent threat of destruction lying within the opaque cube quite literally structures the path the models take through the runway space and shapes the audience’s visual sightline of the models. The final revelation reframes for us the entire show, reveals the constitutive force of the death drive in our push to ascribe meaning to objects, language, and images. Even as he creates a collection which will be archived in video, photograph, and garment format, McQueen reveals the structuring fragility of fashion, a medium which is prone to being eaten up by the same natural world from which it comes. Derrida suggests a “radical destruction” lies at the core of the archival impulse, while positing a “beyond:”
On the one hand, the archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that
is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. But beyond finitude as limit, there is, as we
said above, this properly in-finite movement of radical destruction without which no archive
desire or fever would happen. All the texts in the family and of the period of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle explain in the end why there is archivization and why anarchiving destruction belongs
to the process of archivization and produces the very thing it reduces, on occasion to ashes, and
beyond. (Derrida 59)
If the drive’s “radical destruction” is not finitude but the infinite, what kind of production or creation takes place in the “beyond” Derrida names? For Freud, the thing “beyond” the pleasure principle was the death drive, though he writes that “inanimate things existed before living ones,” locating a biological origin (Freud 613). Perhaps Derrida intends to suggest, in deconstructive mode, that all terms, such as the notion of an origin, or a “before” and “after,” are fundamentally unstable, undergirded by enabling conditions which link them to other terms. The drive itself extends from the future towards an origin which does not exist—in the drive’s origin “place” lies, perhaps, only infinitely receding destruction, “ashes” or “beyond.” As McQueen posits in VOSS, an unrepresented, destructive, absent (because “not yet”) notion of futurity (the occluded cube with moths) guarantees the indeterminacy of the signifying field—the runway on which fashion is (re)presented. The impulse toward fashion as a cultural practice of beautification, decoration, and transformation of the body is premised upon a suspended-delayed loss, death, and decay to-come.
Works Cited
Bolton, Andrew. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics, vol.
25, no. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 9-63.
Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness. 2003. Yale University
Press, 2023.
fashionvideos. “Alexander McQueen spring summer 2001 VOSS.” YouTube, 12 Feb. 2020. youtube.com/
watch?v=hx0d4TzAtxE. Accessed 25 Oct. 2024.
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Freud Reader. 1989. Edited by Peter Gay, W.W.
Norton, 1995, pp. 594-626.
Gill, Alison. “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-assembled
Clothes.” Fashion Theory, vol. 2, no. 1, 1998, pp. 25-50.
Granata, Francesca. “Deconstruction Fashion: Carnival and the Grotesque.” Journal of Design History,
vol. 26, no. 2, 2013, pp. 182-198.
Figures Cited
Figure 1: Photo of Shalom Harlow in white (unpainted) dress — No. 13 (S/S 1999). “Alexander
McQueen: Spring 1999 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/
spring-1999-ready-to-wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 2: Photo of Shalom Harlow in white dress with yellow and black spray-painted pattern — No. 13
(S/S 1999). “Alexander McQueen: Spring 1999 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://
www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-1999-ready-to-wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 3: Photo of Shalom Harlow and robots before dress is painted — No. 13 (S/S 1999). “Alexander
McQueen: Spring 1999 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/
spring-1999-ready-to-wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 4: Photo of Shalom Harlow and robots after dress is painted — No. 13 (S/S 1999). “Alexander
McQueen: Spring 1999 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/
spring-1999-ready-to-wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 5: Photo of dress from VOSS, S/S 2001. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-Wear - Runway
Collection - Women,” firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?
id=6043&p=0&list=all&jumpto=866468#a866468.
Figure 6: Photo of pant-suit from VOSS, S/S 2001. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-Wear - Runway
Collection - Women,” firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?
id=6043&p=0&list=all&jumpto=866468#a866468.
Figure 7: Photo of dress with taxidermy birds from VOSS, S/S 2001. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-
Wear - Runway Collection - Women,” firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/
collection_images.php?id=6043&p=0&list=all&jumpto=866468#a866468.
Figure 8. Photo of dress made from razor-clam shells, VOSS, S/S 2001. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-
Wear - Runway Collection - Women,” firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/
collection_images.php?id=6043&p=0&list=all&jumpto=866468#a866468.
Figure 9: Sølve Sundsbø / Art + Commerce. Photo of dress, red and black ostrich feathers and glass
medical slides painted red from VOSS, S/S 2001. “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/tag/voss/.
Figure 10: Photo of Michelle Olley for VOSS, S/S 2001. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-Wear -
Runway Collection - Women,” firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?
id=6043&p=0&list=all&jumpto=866468#a866468.
Figure 11. Joel-Peter Witkin. Sanitarium. 1983, Baudoin Lebon Gallery, Paris & New York City, https://
www.artsy.net/artwork/joel-peter-witkin-sanitarium.
Annelyse Gelman & Jenny Hval — explorations in écriture féminine via the vaginal signifier
Working across the long intertwined mediums of poetry and music, Annelyse Gelman and Jenny Hval take the female body, with all its secretions and expulsions, as the poetic fount of feminine signification. Reminiscent of Hèléne Cixous’s notion of écriture féminine, as articulated in her 1975 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Gelman’s and Hval’s poetics explore the contours and dimensions of feminine corporeality through language and sound, in doing so positing a feminine expression by and of the body. For Cixous, feminine writing, drawing from the unconscious resources of the female body, has the potential to liberate woman from the phallocentric symbolic order:
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated
from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display…To write. An act which
will not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality…it will give her back
her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under
seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the
place reserved for the guilty. (Cixous 880)
Referring to a) the psychoanalytic tradition, which positions woman, whether literally or symbolically, as a kind of abjected figure characterized by lack and (penis-)envy (Penisneid), and b) the relationship between femininity and sin in the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall, Cixous suggests that in writing, women can construct an alternate relationship to their bodies not premised upon lack, guilt, or sin. Cixous contends that the act of writing connects woman to her body and thus to her unconscious—the act of signifying her body in her own language can liberate woman from the phallic symbolic order (in Lacan, guaranteed by the Name-of-the-Father) (Cixous 892).
Placing Cixous in dialogue with Lacan: In his 1958 lecture, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan argues that the phallus signifies the Other’s desire. He clarifies that the Other’s desire for the phallus, entangled as it is in the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety, should not be understood as a desire for the actual male genital organ (in the sense of the female penis-envy Freud articulated). Rather, for Lacan, the phallus is a signifier standing in for what the subject (in Lacan’s example, the pre-oedipal infant) imagines it lacks and what belongs to the object of the Other’s desire (the mother being the Other and the father her presumed object of desire). In Lacan’s words,
The fact that the phallus is a signifier requires that it be in the place of the Other that the subject
have access to it. But since this signifier is there only as veiled and as ratio [raison] of the Other’s
desire, it is the Other’s desire as such that the subject is required to recognize—in other words,
the other insofar as he himself is a subject divided by the signifying Spaltung. (Lacan 581-582)
Crucial in this formulation is the phallic signifier’s inaccessibility to the subject, who imagines that the object of the Other’s desire possesses the phallus. By extension, perceiving the Other as a desiring subject necessarily reveals the Other to also be a (phallus-)lacking (symbolically castrated) subject. Using Lacan’s example of the infant-mother relationship, the phallic signifier inaugurates desire by implicating the infant in signification and speech via a tension between maternal presence and absence—a tension unconsciously resolved by imbuing the mother’s imagined object of desire (the father) with a phallus, signifying “that thing I lack which mother wants.” The phallus is thus constitutive of desire and fundamental to signification, representing authority/knowledge/wholeness within the symbolic. For Lacan, we are all (phallus-)lacking, desiring subjects articulating our lack through and because of language.
Cixous’s notion of écriture féminine, then, challenges the centrality of the phallic signifier, proposing instead a constitutive feminine depth and permeability. Aligned with this alternate framing, she argues that feminine writing must defy the rigid causal and hierarchical logic of the phallic symbolic:
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will
wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through,
get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of
pronouncing the word ‘silence,’ the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the
word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end.’ (Cixous 886) [italics mine]
A feminine writing would be permeable, “impregnable,” liable to production and reproduction, capable of exceeding boundaries and amending stultified logics. The desire to advance beyond the “impossible” seems to be a provocation aimed at the symbolic order Lacan posits, governed by the immovable phallic signifier. Cixous seems to ask, what if the phallus does not occupy the central position in our symbolic? what if it does not maintain the consistency of the signifying chain? what might a feminine symbolic look like? She prompts readers to consider the psychoanalytic drives as sites of interpenetration, production, utterance, and expulsion: “Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive—all these drives are our strengths, and among them is the gestation drive—just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood” (Cixous 891). In place of the phallus—the very signifier of desire which ensnares the subject in a search, foreclosed in advance, for the inaccessible object—Cixous offers the vaginal depth as an anchoring signifier of production, flux, potentiality. Cixous’s provocation for women to “live self from within” evokes an inwardness which, in its gaping emptiness, is creative. While the phallic signifier, visible and prominent, holds power in its “veiled” elusivity, the vaginal signifier is radically open, penetrable, a concealed void which secretes and gestates in order to signify. The vaginal signifier would not claim to signify the desire of the Other, nor would it produce a split subject in prolonged search of the symbolic phallus it lacks. Perhaps it would instead, as Cixous suggests, occupy in the imaginary the “gestation drive,” a drive to create, secrete, signify from the very embodied site of our lack. Renouncing the phallus as a protruding, visible, graspable signifier of power and authority, we might adopt the vaginal signifier, insisting that language-as-signification comes from an opening.
Écriture féminine begins from these premises and seeks to destabilize the foundations of the phallic symbolic. Contemporary writers Annelyse Gelman and Jenny Hval extend Cixous’s practice of feminine writing, exploring feminine corporeality through a poetics of permeability and of the void. Their writing invokes both bodily and ecological depths and porosity, suggesting ancient woman-nature paradigms and (perhaps more compelling) the wavering continuum between animate and inanimate. Effluvium, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a flowing out, an issuing forth,” is a central fixture of both Gelman’s and Hval’s poetics, in which secretions, discharges, odors appear as deathly expulsions (along the lines of Julia Kristeva’s conception of the abject) folded into feminine and earthly aliveness. In Gelman and Hval, varied effluvia appear as an outpouring of biological rot gesturing towards a productive void, a vaginal signifier anchoring their poetic écriture féminine.
Annelyse Gelman’s book-length poem Vexations abounds with corporeality, from biomedical imagery to more benign bodily fluids and secretions, notably those involving birth and menstruation. The first page contains a birth scene, establishing the mother-daughter relationship that evolves throughout the poem and often seems to serve as a temporal, even narrative, marker. In this opening moment, Gelman blends birth with the botanical:
I lay down in the flower bed, fresh in the dirt
She pushed out of me, they cut her in cold water
From a rubber hose, red daughter, red birth (Gelman 3)
The speaker gives birth lying not on a sterile medical stretcher but an Eden-like “flower bed” of dirt, stems, and buds. She is cut from her mother’s umbilical cord, figured as “a rubber hose,” evocative again of gardening—hoses carry life-giving water to plants, much like a tubular umbilical cord carries nutrients to the fetus. Gelman merges imagery of human birth with soil and plant life, suggesting a continuity or shared substance between the two ecosystems, uterine and soil. Both are sites of implantation, growth, and nourishment, though each modulates and renews itself with a cycle involving rot and decay. The line, “red daughter, red birth” recalls birth blood and menstrual blood alike, the latter a rot signaling and enabling new life.
Gelman invokes menstruation more prominently towards the middle of the poem, the speaker encountering her blood within an ecosystem mediated (perhaps interrupted) by manmade infrastructure:
At the edge of the regulation football field
I squatted over a drain grate rusted shut
A thick slug of blood slid out of me, then my phone
Slid through the slats and splashed down there
The cracked glass feebly flashed and went dark
Effluvia flew through me unambiguously (Gelman 23)
No longer is there a harmonious or symmetrical relationship between female body and ecosystem—here, menstrual blood is an organic discharge released amid rigid, fragile manufactured surfaces (the football field, the rusty drain grate, the phone). Menstrual blood makes contact with the watery drain-ecosystem only after slipping through a rusted drain grate: Embodied rot meets infrastructural rot. Gelman alludes to the organic in this passage when describing the clot of menstrual blood as a slug, a slimy creature that inhabits damp places full of vegetation. This figuration makes menstruation visceral, perhaps awakening disgust in the reader, yet it is also thoroughly feminine, resisting age-old, utilitarian, phallic perspectives on menstruation (that it enables pregnancy, signals readiness for sex and marriage). In likening menstrual blood to a “thick slug,” Gelman appeals to women’s physical experience of menstruation, transforming the sensation of a blood clump passing through the vagina into a figure. She draws from the embodied sensations of menstruation to produce an image, a metaphor, a poetic moment which could only originate in the vaginal depth. Gelman’s use of “effluvia” in this passage— “effluvia flew through me unambiguously”—also seems to refer to unruly cycles of the female body that create “unambiguous” secretions, whether self-evident in their function or urgent in their passage out of the organ that produced them. Menstrual blood, here, is an effluvial substance, uterine waste falling through a drain intended for rainwater waste—the liquid excesses of both female body and clouds, gravity acting upon them, find a shared, human-mediated receptacle.
Three stanzas later, Gelman names another related vaginal secretion, cervical mucus, this time compared to damp soil, an image that vaguely recalls the flower bed-birth which began the poem:
I dove down and scooped up ageless muck
Sticky and translucent like cervical mucus (Gelman 23)
That the muck is not a murky green-brown but “sticky and translucent” suggests Gelman is merging ecology and body to an effect, probing the textural and associative resonances between the two. The relative linguistic similarity between “muck” and “mucus” aids in this slippage from ecological depth to vaginal depth. Muck and cervical mucus both provoke disgust, though the former may produce a feeling of the natural world’s contamination or encroachment upon the body and the latter perhaps an over-proximity of the human reproductive capacity and the primordial fluids from which we came. The association of feminine sexuality with rot is also an undercurrent in this passage, though explored more thoroughly on the last page of Gelman’s poem via the daughter’s botanical-sexual awakening in a meadow:
She cowered in the grass, she lipped the pistils
The scent of growth was the scent of decay
On the planet’s surface her slender fingers clawed the clay
Their sharp and shiny leaves were slim as wrists
She ran her tongue along the stamen to the tip
A stem bent gently and slid inside, thin and thornless
The blossom made her water, she winked and dripped…
Petals licked at her like flames exchanging softnesses (Gelman 46)
Notable here is the imagery of flowers, usually likened to vulvar forms (á la Georgia O’Keefe), which Gelman renders instead as phallic forms penetrating the girl (“a stem bent gently and slid inside”). A kind of botanical insemination is further implied here in the word “stamen,” the fertilizing (male) organ of a flower. Gelman’s motif of ecological and corporeal merging throughout culminates in the daughter’s (floral?) sexual initiation, which further dissolves the tenuous boundary between the two. The girl’s body and the meadow seem to become completely entwined in the last two lines:
She wrapped her fists in roots, she flowered in its mouth
She sighed, she wilted, she lay down (Gelman 46)
Botanical metaphors—“she flowered,” “she wilted”—advance the literal and figural blending of human and plant life, tendencies, ecosystems in this scene. The last line exudes a permanence, a vanished state, a threshold surpassed into the reversal of life: Decomposition. “She wilted” recalls an earlier line on the same page, “the scent of growth was the scent of decay.” There is a sense in this passage that botanical growth and awakened feminine sexuality alike (literal and figural blossoming) engender irreversible, effluvial disintegration. Or, perhaps the speaker sees danger in her daughter’s emerging sexuality. Indeed, Gelman comes full-circle from the botanical birth with which she first brought us into the threatening, apocalyptic, motherly, recursive, embodied world of Vexations. Gelman’s poetics of permeability and of the void in the above passages, and throughout the poem, invokes the vaginal signifier through effluvial feminine bodily fluids (menstrual blood, birth blood, cervical mucus) and their varied slippages into ecologies and built spaces. Both vaginal secretions and feminine sexuality in Gelman’s poem are related to the phenomenon of rot and figured as organic decomposition that blurs the line between plant and human life. Decomposition—shedding layers to renew—however, is a precondition of life, whether a soil ecosystem, plant, or human body. Gelman’s écriture féminine integrates the intuitive feminine understanding of necessary decay—vaginal effluvia, in Vexations, appear as byproducts of the generative void within.
Menstrual blood is a recurrent theme in Jenny Hval’s musical oeuvre, though it becomes the animating force of her 2016 album, Blood Bitch, a sample-filled rumination on menstruation, female vampires, and feminine desire that sonically oscillates between melancholy and determination. Hval is preoccupied with the deathliness enfolded in feminine subjectivity, expressing itself through bodily secretions and grotesque figurations of human bodies becoming animal or plant life, blending into their environments, rotting in much the same way as fruits left on a kitchen counter too long. Her first novel, entitled Paradise Rot, makes the shared effluvial quality of feminine sexuality and vegetal life, entangled since the Fall, its abiding motif. Conveyed via the medium of music, Hval’s poetics of permeability and of the void employs imagery of menstrual rot and bodily effluvia that gesture towards a capacious vaginal signifier. Hval’s musical variant of écriture féminine, in its own way circling a vaginal signifier, welcomes openness, flow, adaptation, and even failure.
The track “Untamed Region” from Blood Bitch (the album title perhaps an homage to the 1982 Cocteau Twins track of the same name) begins with the sound of a pen scratching on paper—an abstracted though recognizable sonic signifier for writing. Soft electronic sounds frame the punctuating pen abrasions, and Hval’s ethereal voice, siren-like, drifts in and out of the sonic frame. Fragments of BBC documentarian Adam Curtis’s voiceovers, likely sampled from one of his documentaries, introduce speech to the formerly unconscious soundscape. Halfway through the track, Hval begins to muse:
I’m in a big house, having big dreams
Then the next time I wake up, there’s blood on the bed
Didn’t know it was time yet
Or is it not mine?
I feel old in this hotel
As if surprised to find I still have it in me
And yet so young
Hollow
Unsure if I’m young or old
I dip my finger in it
Smells like warm winter
Then I feel the need to touch everything
Everything in this room
Like a dog
I’m marking everything that belongs to no one
Bringing it close to me, or life, or something
I have big dreams
And blood powers
My own art history
My combined failures (Blood Bitch)
Hval’s speaker recounts a familiar feminine moment—emerging from a dream-world to find that your menstrual blood has stained your sheets. Surely we have all once said or thought to ourselves: “Didn’t know it was time yet.” Hval takes an intimate, perhaps even mildly embarrassing, moment when the female bodily seems to interrupt life and makes it the subject of poetic expression. The menstrual cycle, a hormonal force from within that organizes feminine temporality, converges here with the speaker’s uncertainty about her age, inevitably wound up with menstruation: “I feel old in this hotel / as if surprised to find I still have it in me / and yet so young / hollow / unsure if I’m young or old.” Menstrual blood is a corporeal signifier of youth, yet simultaneously also of age. The onset of menstruation signals a beginning, while menopause signals an expiration, and all ages between these two thresholds seem to blend together into temporal uncertainty, a kind of “hollow” agelessness governed by a cyclical logic. It seems that to be woman, for Hval’s speaker, is to be shedding from a hidden cavern within, guided by an intuitive, though mystified, productive inner force—“I dip my finger in it / smells like warm winter / then I feel the need to touch everything / everything in this room.” The line “smells like warm winter” evokes melting snow, slowly revealing the decomposing plant matter and damp soil underneath. Hval collapses an earthly effluvial odor with the scent of menstrual blood, a corporeal effluvium. Much like Gelman’s poetic slippages between vaginal secretions and soil ecologies, Hval invests menstrual blood with the properties of the similarly cyclical organic world—rot, decomposition. The uterine ecosystem this simile implies is renewed, just as soil soon becomes again fertile after thawing. Writing from the inhabited female body (or, in Cixous’s words, “through the body”), Hval captures the banality of menstruation, while simultaneously enchanting it—menstruation affords women visceral “blood powers,” tolerance for the deathliness (even death drive) underlying creative production (“my own art history”).
Hval’s exploration of art and menstrual blood continues in “Period Piece,” a word-play on the genre term and the idea of menstruation as a kind of decay enfolded in feminine artistic drive, or, borrowing Cixous’s term, gestation drive. Threading together the themes of menstruation, femininity, and desire, Hval posits in this track a kind of vaginal signifier undergirding creative production:
Failed every period
Did baroque badly
Afraid of blood
Dream was too lonely
I chose keeping it together
In these IKEA white walls
Of my post-war Nordic silence
But only desire is real
I must find some kind of art form
Where I can call my tongue
Back from the underground
There are multitudes …
In the doctor’s office
Speculum pulls me open
Spacing my space
Accidental sci-fi
Regulating my aperture
Vagin savant
Some people find it painful
But all I feel is connected
All I feel is connected
There must be some kind of art form
Where I can call my blood
There are multitudes …
Don’t be afraid
It’s only blood (Blood Bitch)
With an initial nod to the usage of “period” as a term to specify a historical era, Hval invokes failure alongside the baroque era in art, then quickly destabilizes the term: “afraid of blood.” Is this a reference to the theatrical quality of much baroque art or a reference to the dual meaning of “period?” Art and feminine embodiment seem already entangled in Hval’s imaginary. In subsequent lines, Hval names a kind of buried feminine expression: “I must find some kind of art form / where I can call my tongue back / from the underground.” Though speaking without a tongue may seem impossible, these lines are reminiscent of Philomela’s story in Greek mythology. After Tereus rapes her, then cuts out her tongue, stealing her capacity for speech, Philomela weaves a narrative tapestry using her hands, the embodied-creative resources still available to her, to communicate with her sister and escape captivity. As well as invoking a literary example of physical, sexual, social, and symbolic violence against women, Hval’s prose here seeks to exceed the impossible in much the same way as Cixous’s écriture féminine would “wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes” (Cixous 886). Hval’s lyrics suggest a rewritten Philomelan myth, one in which the violated, paradigmatic woman finds “some kind of art form” through which she can demand her tongue back from loss (“the underground”), thereby reclaiming a voice capable of language and not only of a nightingale’s wordless song. Feminine signification here comes from the mouth as productive opening, source of language and song alike.
Hval pivots to another productive opening, the vaginal signifier, invoked in the context of a gynecology appointment: “In the doctor’s office / speculum pulls me open / spacing my space / accidental sci-fi / regulating my aperture / vagin savant.” As in “Untamed Region,” Hval turns a banal, if not uncomfortable, aspect of female embodiment into a mystical experience (“accidental sci-fi,” “vagin savant”). Referring to “space” and “aperture,” she abstracts the vagina, pulling out of the organ a signifier. This vaginal signifier becomes the track’s quilting point of sorts, momentarily stitching together the literal and figural registers between which her work hovers. Then the quilting point unravels; Hval moves back towards the figural, exploring the speculum-expanded vagina as a site of connection: “Some people find it painful / but all I feel is connected / all I feel is connected.” A vaginal opening (literal and symbolic) is permeable and receptive, though also prone to shedding its contents into the world—it is suspended between internal and external. Both speculum and secretions forge a relation between the internal vaginal space and its surroundings, if only air. This moment Hval imagines also recalls a stanza from Vexations:
—The ceiling is too close, said daughter
It’s not touching you, I said
—But the ceiling is touching the air, said daughter
—And the air is touching me, said daughter
—The air is coming inside me, said daughter
—The ceiling is coming inside me, said daughter (Gelman 17)
Though not precisely a vaginal permeability as in Hval’s “Period Piece,” the daughter in Vexations identifies some kind of extreme, generalized feminine permeability to which she is prone. Degrees of separation between subject and environment, once clear, are collapsed, so that all elements in a given space (air and ceiling) are touching skin and internal body. In this passage from Gelman, the very notion of an environment becomes unstable, and the feminine subject seems precariously encased in a porous membrane. Several pages later, the daughter is described again as such:
It was like she was tuned to every channel at once
Like all her nerve endings were exposed
She glowed like a skinned angel in the bay window (Gelman 21)
Exposed nerve endings and the image of “a skinned angel” indicate a danger in this daughter’s hyper-sensitivity—Gelman’s similes here evoke concern, dread. What if, however, this interpenetration between subject and environment weren’t threatening? What if permeability offered an intense, though meaningful, proximity to the world’s substances; if the feminine void weren’t empty but generative in its ability to absorb, hold, channel, release? The vaginal signifier in Hval’s “Period Piece,” and in her oeuvre more broadly, takes on a signifying role. Towards the end of the track, Hval arrives at her refrain, this time inserting menstrual blood in place of the tongue: “There must be some kind of art form / where I can call my blood.” She reiterates a drive towards feminine creativity, a search for the medium that will enable women to create through and from the body, with menstrual blood hinted here as a kind of pigment; deathly clusters of tissue enlivened and reanimated as paint. Hval concludes with an affective and symbolic opening, reversing the fear which began the track—she reassures the listener (or herself), “don’t be afraid / it’s only blood.” Menstrual blood, in Hval’s music, gestures towards a vaginal signifier promising interconnection, artistic capacity, and signification unconstrained by the phallic law.
Hval released her first solo album, Viscera, in 2011, a confronting, often brutal exploration of themes which have continued to preoccupy her: Bodily fluids, menstruation, feminine sexuality, desire, the collapsing of body and environment. In Viscera, Hval is incredibly proximate to, even immersed in her subject matter, her words at times eroding the body’s edges. Such lyrics include: “And on the edges of the cunt grew little teeth;” “Golden locks dripping, melting out of me / Golden showers, showers…The waste products of the body: Hair and fingernails;” “Is that sweat from my body? / My voice turned to milk in your mouth / I gave you words: The milk was from my breast” (Viscera). Hval’s music on this album must be described as visceral, derived intimately from the female body and channeling its grotesque functions in poetic language. The track “Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist” accesses the vaginal signifier through sexuality and desire, probing the symbolism of inwardness in relation to desire:
Not all limbs have erections
Sometimes, sometimes even you have to decide
Which is up and which is down
Which travels and which is stationary
Which travels to stations and which travels aimlessly
And whether desire can perhaps best be described
As a train running into a tunnel
Take, take, take your platform hands and run, I say
Between train track: thighs…
Isn’t it dark in here? Isn’t it, isn’t it monochromous?
But there’s a light! Do you see it?
It shines from the hole through your palm
And how did I get here? To the hand?
And I say: the body is a one-way street
And the body, like your fingers, bend only inwards
Not all limbs have erections
Some curl inwards
And some have braces!
Those train track braces!
Embraces! (Viscera)
Hval is working through questions of directionality and desire through merged imagery of bodies and transportation. Beginning the track with the elusive, spoken-word line, “Not all limbs have erections,” she calls into question the primacy of the bidirectional phallic signifier in driving (indeed, within a Lacanian framework, instantiating) desire. Hval proposes instead a vaginal signifier that “curls inwards,” “travels aimlessly,” both “has braces” and “embraces.” Hval’s lyrics locate the vaginal signifier as simultaneously expansive and enveloping in nature—she envisions how it might scramble the desiring relationships between subjects premised upon the myth of phallic power. Veiling the vaginal signifier in imagery of train tracks, braces, and tunnels, Hval reimagines feminine desire, suggesting it need not be directional, oriented towards an arrival: “Sometimes, sometimes even you have to decide / Which is up and which is down / Which travels and which is stationary / Which travels to stations and which travels aimlessly.” This vaginal signifier offers space to reinvent the rigid directionality and relations of desire which the phallic signifier imposes. The permeable vaginal signifier spans both internal and external body, and its void (“Isn’t it dark in here?…isn’t it monochromous?”) orients us towards latent potentialities and a feminine desire held and experienced from within.
Though each has a distinct poetic voice, medium, and practice of poeisis, Annelyse Gelman and Jenny Hval share a web of concerns, from organic-corporeal decomposition, effluvia, and feminine sexuality to capitalism and the legacies of feminism. Gelman and Hval similarly develop a poetics of permeability and of the void in their respective works, suggesting a vaginal signifier in place of the centered phallus. In their work, vaginal effluvia illustrate a feminine corporeal-symbolic continuity with ecologies and built spaces, a crucial part of each writer’s poetics. Gelman and Hval also posit the vaginal signifier as the site of a void, simultaneously concealed, empty, cavernous, yet also full, productive, signifying. Interpreting their work in the lineage of Hèléne Cixous’s theory of écriture féminine illuminates its thoroughly embodied quality (both poetic and thematic)—Hval and Gelman write from the female body, from its sensations and corporeal architectures. The vaginal signifier their work evokes is not fixed, definite, or imposed by dynamics of power; it encourages openness, possibility, porosity, continuity, flux. Their poetics in the twenty-first century answers Cixous’s call from the 1970s for a feminine writing, indeed a feminine signification, adequate to challenging and reordering the phallocentric symbolic.
Works Cited
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, vol. 1,
no. 4, Summer 1976, pp. 875-893, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.
Gelman, Annelyse. Vexations. University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Hval, Jenny. Blood Bitch, Sacred Bones Records, 2016. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/album/
3LK4kdq5LpMSzjcCWCCjeK?si=cKt78ojoRXii97HCUgWj6g.
Hval, Jenny. Viscera, Rune Grammofon, 2011. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/album/
4CN2zJ12pzqXb6uUEtkyGJ?si=pLcNQW3eQTqRLvM0zrst9w.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus.” Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton,
2006, pp. 575-584.
The Fall in the Postmodern Era — abjection via feminine post-punk style and 1990s Alexander McQueen
Forms of subcultural refusal in the latter part of the twentieth century notably revolved around practices and stances of shock or subversion, from the Beats’ aesthetic adoption of jazz and urban marginality to the 1960s counterculture’s embrace of psychedelic drugs, and even the punk engagement with radical politics, such as anarchism. Style (and its formalized corollary, fashion) is a particularly communicative mode of subcultural refusal, one dependent upon the presentation of a body in space—crucially, urban space. Far exceeding the kind of psyche-altering metropolis Georg Simmel described in 1903, the late-twentieth-century metropolis facilitated yet more dynamic, rapid exchange and interaction between various groups of people. In such an environment, style provides a means of communicating conformity, individuality, or in-group affiliation at the city’s rapid pace. Clothing thus becomes a potent form of signification for urban subcultures of the postmodern era, particularly punk and post-punk, the latter largely a project of subverting the stagnant, “rockist” popular music culture of the mid-1970s via sonic, aesthetic, and methodological innovation.
In particular, women figures of the post-punk scenes in two paradigmatic metropolises of the twentieth century, New York and Berlin, powerfully demonstrate the centrality of style to urban music subcultures, illuminating several methods of feminine aesthetic refusal that engage the concept of abjection, as theorized by Julia Kristeva. In New York, Patti Smith’s ethos of bohemian self-fashioning in the late-1960s through the ‘70s laid the groundwork for the ethic of feminine antagonism so central to Lydia Lunch’s persona as an icon of the late-1970s to early-‘80s No Wave scene. Meanwhile, in early-‘80s Berlin, collaborators Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster of the bands Mania D and later Malaria! crafted their own severe, harsh, even brutal feminine aesthetics in response to the domineering attitudes of fellow male musicians. Through the embodied medium of style, these women developed an aesthetics of feminine abjection later formalized in experimental fashion of the 1990s via the work of prominent designers of the abject, most notably the late English designer Alexander McQueen.
Julia Kristeva’s seminal book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection provides essential theoretical grounding for the concept of abjection as deployed in both feminine post-punk aesthetics and 1990s experimental fashion. Kristeva’s theory of abjection draws from the psychoanalytic tradition, Judeo-Christian and pagan religions, and literature, though it covers vast thematic terrain and can be difficult to pin down to one coherent definition. Her preliminary description in the introduction posits abjection as a condition arising from the transgression of a corporeal (therefore psychic and significatory) limit or border:
…refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids,
this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.
There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being
alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing
remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. (Kristeva 3)
Kristeva’s understanding of psychoanalytic theory, we grasp here at the very beginning of the text, is thoroughly embodied. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychic life and signification are informed by the subject’s corporeal development, its physical attachments and detachments from objects, and the attendant perception of itself as a body with edges and boundaries. Abjection occurs when bodily fluids are expelled from the body, prompting a confrontation not with death signified, but with the signified by-product of life as a bounded organism—the temporary warding off of death. For Kristeva, abjection is also entangled in primal repression:
The abject is that pseudo-object that is made up before but appears only within the gaps of
secondary repression. The abject would thus be the ‘object’ of primal repression. But what is
primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the
Other, to divide, reject, repeat. Without one division, one separation, one subject/object having
been constituted (not yet, or no longer yet). Why? Perhaps because of maternal anguish, unable to
be satiated within the encompassing symbolic. (Kristeva 12)
In Lacan’s theory, primal repression is the first repression of a signifier at the commencing moment of the Oedipus complex—the mother withdraws the breast, the infant thinks to itself why her love (signified as the breast in the forming unconscious) has been withdrawn, and it unconsciously registers both its own lack of the thing the mother wants (signified as the phallus) and, crucially, the mother’s lack. In this moment, the infant represses a first signifier, that of the phallus, the very signifier of the Other’s desire. Kristeva’s intervention is in positing the abject as a kind of “pseudo-object” emerging prior to signification—prior to primal repression. As the infant separates from the mother (an equation involving both the body and speech), the mother will become abjected, since her modulation between presence and absence creates the occasion for the infant to articulate a demand, thus enabling desire to arise as a kind of difference or excess between spoken demand and bodily need. This moment of primal repression which institutes the Other’s desire (signified in the unconscious as the phallus), Kristeva argues, also establishes the mother as an Oedipally-prohibited non-object of desire, an abjected figure.
She elaborates upon the relationship between abjection, the “maternal authority” (which symbolically, “semiotically” divides the regions of the body between clean-proper and unclean-improper), and language:
The abject confronts us…with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even
before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy
breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it
is stifling…In this struggle, which fashions the human being, the mimesis, by means of which he
becomes homologous to another in order to become himself, is in short logically and
chronologically secondary. Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject”
(Kristeva 13).
Kristeva emphasizes here the dual registers—corporeal and psychic—of the subject’s “splitting” or “separating” from the mother’s body, a process which creates the conditions for language (as pre-verbal demand) to emerge. This initial separation (“ab-jection”) from the mother, according to Kristeva, prefigures the mirror stage, at which time the infant develops an ego through its “misrecognition” of itself as a coherent, “whole” subject. Before the ego forms, the mother is rejected, abjected, in order for the subject to apprehend its corporeal borders—the edges of its “clean and proper body”—thereby becoming a speaking (lacking) being.
Several chapters later, Kristeva discusses abjection within the context of Christianity, which stands in contrast with Judaism’s laws and rituals surrounding filth and defilement—those positioning certain foods, bodily secretions, and the feminine itself as unclean, thus abject and capable of defiling a clean/sacred interior or spiritual body. In Christianity, it is not unclean exterior objects which pollute the pristine interior—rather, abjection “is permanent and comes from within…it is not cut off but is reabsorbed into speech. Unacceptable, it endures through the subjection to God of a speaking being who is innerly divided and, precisely through speech, does not cease purging himself of it” (Kristeva 113). Original sin makes the subject permanently abject, “infinitely lapsing,” distanced from the redemption it seeks through speech in its consistent appeal to, and attempts to identify with, the idealized figure of Christ (Kristeva 120). Though original sin impels careful devotion and participation in the sacraments, Kristeva interprets Christian sin as two-pronged: “sin is also the requisite of the Beautiful. On that plane, through an additional twist, the Law of the Other becomes reconciled with Satan” (Kristeva 122). This coexistence of sin and holiness is embodied in the figure of Mary Magdalene, the sinning woman who washes Jesus’s feet and anoints them with ointment. Kristeva argues this moment in the New Testament (Luke 7:38-7:47) holds an ambiguous meaning charged with a kind of jouissance inherent to Christian sin. Of course, wound up in the Christian conception of sin is the body, the locus of drives and the vehicle through which divine law is transgressed:
…flesh here [in the New Testament] signifies according to two modalities: on the one hand…it
points to the ‘body’ as eager drive confronted with the law’s harshness; on the other, it points to a
subdued ‘body,’ a body…completely submersed into (divine) speech in order to become beauty
and love. These two ‘bodies’ are obviously inseparable, the second (“sublimated”) one unable to
exist without the first (perverse because it challenges Law). One of the insights of Christianity,
and not the least one, is to have gathered in a single move perversion and beauty as the lining and
the cloth of one and the same economy. (Kristeva 124-125)
Kristeva analysis crucially locates sin, the Christian variant of abjection, in the body—it is through the body that we sin, just as it was through Eve’s body that the very first transgression of divine law led to the Fall. Sin is not irrevocably separated from the sacred realm, but instead serves as a path towards devotion, also expressed through the body in the form of speech. As Kristeva argues, the body of sin and the body of devotion are “inseparable,” with devotion dependent upon sin (whether original sin or otherwise) and both dependent upon having a body. Arriving at the powerful image of “perversion and beauty as the lining and the cloth of one and the same economy,” it becomes clear that sin and devotion (abjection and beauty) are enfolded into one another and signified as the flesh or the body, paradigmatically the female body.
Interestingly, Kristeva’s fabric metaphor resonates with the story of the Fall, in which sin constituted the desire for and impulse toward enclothement, a practice ultimately formalized in the domain of fashion. While in the Edenic beginning, skin clothed human flesh, after the Fall (a mirror stage of sorts), bare skin becomes suddenly signifiable—simultaneously abject and beautiful—and in need of clothing to make the body modest, proper, neutral before God. Adapting Kristeva’s formulation: With God as intermediary Other (representing maternal authority and paternal law entwined), Eve’s original sin enacts the Biblical moment of primal repression, a permanent “separating, splitting, ab-jecting” of humanity from divine law into a state of “infinite lapsing” and sin to be habitually absolved. This first repressed signifier in the Christian imaginary is female flesh, ever slipping between sinful and devotional; the primordial site of abjection and beauty incarnated. It is this conception of the feminine and of female flesh, suspended between abjection (sin) and beauty (devotion), that operates as a subtext of feminine post-punk aesthetics and that is more explicitly addressed in ‘90s experimental fashion. Evident in the work of Alexander McQueen, fashion is a form uniquely engaged with the dialectic between revealing and concealing the female body, a project symbolically entangled with Christian abjection.
Taking the do-it-yourself approach and radical energies of punk, yet updating its rather standard rock & roll sound, varied post-punk scenes appeared in the mid 1970s and early ‘80s in various metropolises, most notably New York, London, Manchester, Sheffield, and West Berlin. No Wave, a prominent post-punk subculture originating in the Lower East Side, was an eclectic scene characterized by its “anti-art,” anti-rock approach, according to music journalist Simon Reynolds:
No Wave was defined less by a sound than by this Year Zero approach….Curiously, the No Wave
groups staged their revolt against rock tradition using the standard rock format of guitar, bass, and
drums. Occasionally, they leavened this restricted arsenal with horns or keyboards—always basic,
sixties-style organs, though, rather than synthesizers. It was as if they felt the easy electronic
route to making a post-rock noise was too easy. Instead, they used rock’s tools against itself.
Which is why No Wave music irresistibly invites metaphors of dismemberment, desecration,
‘defiling rock’s corpse.’ (Reynolds 51)
Reynolds’s prose suggests glimmers of the abject—desecration, defilement, corpses of rock—in the No Wave approach to music and aesthetics. Rather than adopting a moody, melancholic electronic sound akin to the New Romantics convened around the Blitz club in London, No Wavers insisted upon an abrasive, confrontational sonic and visual language. No Wave imagery is thoroughly embodied, and Lydia Lunch’s persona epitomizes the scene’s ethos of abjection, bodily expulsion, and refusal. Lunch insists on outdoing her predecessors, crucial among them New York proto-punk legend Patti Smith:
A poet who turned to music as the most readily available means of expression, Lunch was a bit
like the anti-Patti Smith….Lunch conceived Teenage Jesus & The Jerks as an act of cultural
patricide or matricide, in Patti’s case). ‘The whole goal was to kill your idols, as Sonic Youth later
put it. Everything that had influenced me up to that point I found too traditional—whether it was
Patti Smith, The Stooges, Lou Reed’s Berlin. It was fine and good for its moment, but I felt there
had to be something more radical. It’s got to be disembowelled.’ (Reynolds 60)
Lunch’s metaphorical wish to “disembowel” the work of her musical forebears suggests an abject dimension: Insides are being turned outward, the border containing the body (of work) being violently torn asunder, yet it also evokes a splitting/separation/ab-jection from the feminine (maternal) artistic figure who laid the groundwork for Lunch to aspire towards the role of woman poet-musician.
Figure 1. Lydia Lunch
Yet this claim to a split from Lunch’s influences seems to propel her towards new terrain Patti Smith did not explore—feminine antagonism and aesthetic severity. An adamant feminist critique informs her approach to music, aesthetics, and writing. In a 2014 interview, Lunch alluded to the significance of her “brutal,” visceral writing style:
I want the real story, and that’s what I try to tell: the real story, unglamourised, brutalist, with
some poetry involved. …the women writers—although there’s great ones, Violette Leduc, Anaïs
Nin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, etc.—they were never as brutal as I felt my life was, and it was
never as brutal a voice as I felt women deserved to hear—one that speaks to the brutality some of
us experience. And that some of us feel. Those of us that haven’t been sexually segregated into
being nice fucking girls that smile a lot and act pretty. (Butt, Eshun, Fisher 41)
This brutality, for Lunch, stands in opposition to the beauty and gentleness traditionally demanded of women in music. Brutality, brushing up against the realm of the abject, offers an alternate form of aesthetic expression for women—a mode of self-styling premised upon feminine antagonism, shock, and rage, rather than amenability. Though clothing is perhaps not as important to Lunch as it famously is to Smith, we can see the way in which Lunch’s ethic of feminine radicalism, of “disemboweling” her musical forebears, informs her severe, confrontational sense of style, essential to her persona (Figure 1).
Figure 2. Gudrun Gut (left) and Bettina Köster (right) of Malaria!
Similarly antagonistic were the women of West Berlin’s post-punk scene, prominent among them Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster, who formed together the bands Mania D and Malaria! against the backdrop of a divided, economically depressed, and half-deserted Berlin. Gut and Köster also designed clothing together and opened a secondhand clothing store called Eisengrau in 1979, which became a meeting place for members of the eccentric West Berlin post-punk scene (including Einstürzende Neubauten, die Tödliche Doris, and a young Nick Cave) some of whom referred to themselves as “die Geniale Dilletanten” (the ingenious dilettantes) (Reed 91). Abrasive in both sound and image, Gut and Köster’s all-women band Malaria! explored the possibilities of feminine brutality and resisted affiliation with any contemporaneous genres. Interview footage used in the 2015 documentary B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin lends insight into Gut and Köster’s creative intentions—in an interview from the early ‘80s, Gut remarks on the band’s independent trajectory: “We’re not New Wave, and we’re not a punk rock group, and we’re not…What are we? We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves; we play the music that we like, regardless of what’s fashionable. And although Joy Division are really in, we don’t play like them” (B-Movie). Köster chimes in to emphasize that Malaria! plays “brutal” music, despite being a girl band: “We make much harder music than any boy would. Our music is much more brutal—people find it brutal” (B-Movie). The word “brutal” recalls Lunch’s artistic intentions, her wish for her art to reveal, viscerally through lyric and sound, the true harshness of feminine experience. Malaria!, similarly, are invested in the potential for women to unleash a sonic-lyric onslaught that refutes both contemporaneous generic boundaries and traditional forms of feminine expression centered around softness, docility, and beauty. Both Gut and Köster engage, through their musical experimentation and their darkly androgynous sense of style (Figures 2, 3), this flip-side of beauty entangled with aversion, subversion. Their project of feminine brutality insists upon attending to the aesthetic possibilities of what is culturally deemed ugly, repulsive, aggressive—upon playing with aesthetics at the fragile boundary between beautiful and abject. This is perhaps the most important contribution of women in post-punk, and it is the aesthetic mode taken up by designers of the abject in the 1990s, and particularly by Alexander McQueen.
Figure 3. Gudrun Gut
After such music-subcultural experiments in aesthetics of feminine brutality, this mode gained a kind of mainstream appeal in the realm of fashion. Rebecca Arnold, writing in Fashion Theory in 1999, suggests the energies of punk (and, I would add, the varied “brutal” styles of women in post-punk) influenced fashion photography and design in the 1990s: “Stylists have been exploring the boundaries of the artificial for some years, the influence of [Guy] Bourdin being combined with the punk ethos of chaos and destruction, which viewed the brutalized body as an index of inner torment and intensity of feeling” (Arnold 498). Arnold’s notion of “the brutalized body” in ‘90s fashion encompasses at once the “waif” body type (at the pinnacle, Kate Moss’s slender, “heroin chic” figure), styling that evokes noir-ish vamps and femme fatales, and otherwise deathly or self-destructive imagery. She argues that these thematic and aesthetic preoccupations in fashion stage broader cultural anxieties about feminine sexuality, yet they also emphasize the female body’s susceptibility to death, disease, and decay—a reality that exceeds its surface sexual allure. Abjection thus becomes a means to humanize the female body. In her book, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, fashion scholar Caroline Evans even proposes that the resonance of what we might term abject aesthetics in the ‘90s speaks to the conditions of capitalist (post-)modernity:
The fascination with the dark side of life is the other side of the coin of fashion’s emphasis on
idealised bodies. These norms and stereotypes are only half the picture, so we are drawn to the
negated or neglected other side, be it cultural otherness or death. In these images [of “deathly”
‘90s designs] fashion functions as a symptom to evoke its opposite, so that glamour masks decay,
but the latter returns as the repressed of the former. (Evans 227)
Invoking Freudian terminology, Evans suggests the deathly imagery employed in much experimental fashion of the ‘90s was a reaction to high fashion of prior decades, which privileged classical feminine beauty and upheld a “glamour masks decay” ethic of dressing the body. By the end of the millennium, fashion’s role as a culturally-sanctioned space for revealing the idealized female body collapses under its own weight, slipping from pure beauty into the gray area between beauty and abjection. Following Kristeva’s insight that Christian abjection (sin) “gathered in a single move perversion and beauty as the lining and the cloth of one and the same economy,” it is important to restate that ‘90s experimental fashion engaged this abjection/beauty, or sin/devotion, dichotomy-interdependence on the signifying level of feminine flesh itself, often using the very Christian imagery that produced and maintains this distinction.
For Alexander McQueen, death and sexuality were abiding and entwined themes throughout his career, up to his suicide in 2010. A bleak vision of sexuality informs McQueen’s early work: His 1992 Central Saint Martins graduation collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, took inspiration from Victorian-era prostitutes; for his controversial Autumn/Winter 1995 show, Highland Rape, he sent severe, strong, though apparently violated women in Scottish tartans and torn, ragged garments down a bracken-strewn runway (Figures 4, 5, 6, 7). This collection was inspired by English violence towards Scotland during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Highland clearances—a representation, via the medium of fashion (and via the disturbing, taboo metaphor of sexual violence), of a historical event that shaped his family ancestry. McQueen’s shows are performative and political, the garments themselves charged with violence, eroticism, destruction, historicity, and a dark (even gothic) romanticism.
Figure 4. Skirt and jacket ensemble from Highland Rape, A/W 1995
Figure 5. Dress from Highland Rape, A/W 1995
Figure 6. Mesh shirt and “bumster” trouser ensemble from Highland Rape, A/W 1995
Figure 7. Bodice from Highland Rape, A/W 1995
Evans argues that McQueen’s preoccupation with themes of violence—often channelled into the shocking, visceral, material imagery of violence against women—similarly informed his garment-making techniques:
Criticisms of McQueen’s work as misogynist, however, tended to obscure its defining
characteristic, the theatrical staging of cruelty. Although most apparent in the styling of his
collections, his aesthetic of cruelty also extended to his designs where it was not only thematic
but also intrinsic to his cutting techniques and his methods of construction. In the early
collections cloth was usually slashed, stabbed and torn, and each garment was a variation on the
theme of abuse….Apart from the slashed garments, McQueen also developed a distinctive style
of tailoring for which he became famous: razor sharp, its seams traced the body’s contours like
surgical incisions, skimming it to produce pointed lapels and sharp shoulders. (Evans 142)
As Evans notes, McQueen’s ethic of creative brutality is directed not only towards the fashioned image of the woman wearing his clothes, but towards the materials themselves. There is a sense that McQueen, much like our post-punk women, is invested in constructing new aesthetic modes through breaking, splitting, ab-jecting from fashion’s foundations, techniques, and dominant aesthetics, a project he enacts on the very level of fabric and the body. Thematically and materially, McQueen ab-jects from the symbolic laws governing fashion and its treatment of the female body. Evans explicitly identifies such aesthetics of abjection in McQueen’s early designs:
Going beneath the skin of conventional fashion, McQueen’s first collections explored the taboo
area of interiority, breaching the boundaries between inside and out. The fantasy of exploring and
probing the interior of the body, although commonplace in contemporary art, is habitually
disavowed in fashion by its emphasis on surface, perfection and polish. McQueen, by contrast,
actively explored the female body in relation to the tropes of abjection. (Evans 144-145)
Returning to Kristeva, abjection manifests in McQueen’s designs in two ways: Through breaching the boundary between internal and external body (as Evans claims), and through his presentation of female flesh, the signifier of sin which binds beauty and abjection.
While Highland Rape was the collection for which McQueen first gained attention from the fashion industry at large, it was his Autumn/Winter 1996 collection, Dante, that most powerfully demonstrated his design sensibility of deathly feminine sexuality and remains one of his most iconic collections of the decade. Dante took place at Hawksmoor’s Christchurch in Spitalfields, London; an homage to the McQueen family’s Spitalfields Huguenot lineage, which McQueen’s mother had researched while he was a child and which made a lasting impression (Evans 157). The church setting enhanced the grave themes threaded throughout the collection—religious warfare, Dante’s Inferno, martyrdom, sin—though the confronting techno music which began the show signaled McQueen’s temporally eclectic interpretation of these medieval concerns, as well as the inspiration he drew from contemporary London nightlife. The opening look is a sharply tailored, calf-length black dress with a high collar and a mesh chevron cut-out detail partly revealing the model’s breasts (Figure 8). Finished with a pair of earrings made from a bird’s talons and a black mask adorned with a stark, white crucifix, this first look sets the tone for the show, marking the tension between revulsion and allure as its central problematic.
Figure 8. Ensemble with crucifix mask and bird’s talon earrings from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 9. Ensemble with bird headpiece from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 10. Antler headpiece from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 11. Beaded headpiece with human hand bones from Dante, A/W 1996
The chevron mesh detail across the torso soon appears as a motif throughout the collection, as do the fragments of other creatures, whether human or animal, rematerialized as headpieces and jewelry (Figures 8, 9, 10, 11). McQueen selected jeweler Simon Costin to design the accessories for his show after he had made the jewelry for McQueen’s Central Saint Martins graduation show (Evans 145). Costin used taxidermy and dissected animals in his accessories, and for this collection, he even incorporated bones from a human hand into a headpiece that clutches the model’s face, as though covering her mouth in a menacing gesture (Figure 11) (Evans 234). Throughout the Dante collection, pieces of dead beings decorate alive women, introducing an abject element that seems at odds with the models’ ideal bodies, knowingly revealed. This fusion of sexuality and death, signified respectively as the displayed female body and the (partial) corpse, that recalls Kristeva’s theorization of Christian sin, reliant upon the slippage between the unsavory or transgressive and the beautiful, the sacred. McQueen’s designs in this collection present women simultaneously as pallid, deathly, punk-styled, and threatening (he famously said he wants people to be afraid of the women he dresses) and as conventionally beautiful femme fatales for the 1990s.
Figures 12 & 13. Gold braid coat and “bumster” trouser from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 14. Blazer and trouser ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 15. Dress from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 16. Crown of thorns by Shaun Leane from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 17. Ensemble with bird’s feather neckpiece from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 18. Jacket and shorts ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996
Figure 19. Mesh shirt and denim skirt ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996
Alongside the deathly motif presented as taxidermy and corpse fragments, the way in which McQueen’s designs reveal female flesh engages the line where abjection becomes perfection, and vice versa. In a signature McQueen move, one model wears a gold-braid, military-style coat lacking any front closure with a “bumster” trouser (McQueen’s at the time scandalous design debuted several collections prior, trousers which sit so low on the hips that they reveal the wearer’s hip bones, the base of their spine, the very top of their “bum”) (Figures 12, 13). Pairing these two garments together, McQueen almost entirely reveals the model’s torso, if it weren’t for her gesture, clutching the coat’s edges for a semblance of modesty (and to best show the coat’s cut and shape). This deliberate styling decision illustrates the way in which McQueen engages the abject associations of female flesh, revealing the delicate, fluctuating line between the sinful and the beautiful feminine body—even the interdependence of the two, harking back to Kristeva’s contention that the body of sin is a precondition of the devotional body. In McQueen’s Dante, these dueling symbolic dimensions of femininity are brought to the surface: The sinful, deathly, abject conception of female flesh and its devotional, beautiful, perfect corollary are shown to be entwined—as Evans writes, “Transforming life into death, light into darkness and pleasure into trauma, and back again, they [McQueen’s designs] disrupt the idea that these are fixed and stable antitheses” (Evans 243).
As aesthetically demonstrated in the realm of subcultural style and then extended in the art of high fashion, abjection involves a stance of refusal, of splitting off from a dominant symbolic law. In Kristeva’s conception, abjection is a condition of being a split subject of language (thus desire), embedded in a symbolic order—whether Christian, pagan, or nominally secular—that maps the body, its functions, and its needs according to originary myths, stories, founding interpersonal and intra-psychic dynamics. The feminine seems to permanently and irrevocably occupy an abject position in the symbolic, yet women of the post-punk underground and experimental fashion designers of the ‘90s undertook the project of exploring the feminine abject in arenas until then dependent upon fantasies of feminine perfection cleansed of all sinful, deathly, abrasive undertones. While Kristeva theorized the foundations of abjection around the same time, these artists ventured to represent the feminine through sound, attitude, urban performance, and material, revealing it to be dually abject and beautiful, entangled in sin and devotion, birth and death, sexuality and decay—alive and signifiable until it “falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver” (Kristeva 3).
Works Cited
Arnold, Rebecca. “The Brutalized Body.” Fashion Theory, vol. 3, no. 4, 1999, pp. 487-501, https://
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/136270499779476072. Accessed 2 Jan. 2025.
B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West Berlin. Directed by Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck, and Heiko Lange,
performances by Mark Reeder, Gudrun Gut, Bettina Köster, and Malaria!, Edel Germany, 2015.
Butt, Gavin, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher, editors. Post-Punk Then and Now. Repeater Books, 2016.
Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness. Yale University Press,
2003.
fashiongirl22. “Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 1995, ‘Highland Rape.’” YouTube, 6 Aug. 2014. https://
youtu.be/5Fs2nEKCT1o?feature=shared. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.
fashiongirl22. “Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 1996, ‘Dante.’” YouTube, 6 Aug. 2014. https://youtu.be/
m2MIY4i73aA?feature=shared. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia
University Press, 1982.
Reed, S. Alexander. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978-84. Faber and Faber, 2005.
Figures Cited
Figure 1: Richard Kern. Photo of Lydia Lunch. “Lydia Lunch: Post-Punk Queen,” AnOther Magazine,
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/7666/lydia-lunch-post-punk-queen.
Figure 2: Heiko Lange. Photo of Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster in the recording studio. “Gudrun Gut and
Bettina Köster,” Eye for Film, https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/gallery/image/29020.
Figure 3: Photo of Gudrun Gut. “Post Punk Industrial,” Tumblr, https://postpunkindustrial.tumblr.com/
post/648122507962023936/gudrun-gut-malaria.
Figure 4: Photo of tartan skirt and jacket ensemble from Highland Rape, A/W 1995. “Alexander
McQueen: Savage Beauty,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://blog.metmuseum.org/
alexandermcqueen/suit-highland-rape/.
Figure 5: Photo of dress from Highland Rape, A/W 1995. “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/dress-highland-
rape/.
Figure 6: Robert Fairer. Alexander McQueen Bodice and skirt, from the Highland Rape collection,
autumn–winter 1995–96. Natural History Museum, London, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/
media_release/alexander-mcqueen-mind-mythos-muse/.
Figure 7: Photo of ensemble with crucifixion mask and bird’s feet earrings from Dante, A/W 1996.
“Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-Wear - Runway Collection - Women - Fall/Winter 1996,”
firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?
id=6789&p=0&list=all&jumpto=1012222#a1012222.
Figure 8: Photo of ensemble with bird headpiece from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-
to-Wear - Runway Collection - Women - Fall/Winter 1996,” firstVIEW, https://
www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?id=6789&p=0&list=all&jumpto=1012222#a1012222.
Figure 9: Photo of antler headpiece from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen - Ready-to-Wear -
Runway Collection - Women - Fall/Winter 1996,” firstVIEW, https://www.firstview.com/
collection_images.php?id=6789&p=0&list=all&jumpto=1012222#a1012222.
Figure 10: Photo of beaded headpiece with human bones from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen -
Ready-to-Wear - Runway Collection - Women - Fall/Winter 1996,” firstVIEW, https://
www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?id=6789&p=0&list=all&jumpto=1012222#a1012222.
Figure 11: Photo of gold-braid coat and “bumster” trouser from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen:
Fall 1996 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-
ready-to-wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 12: Photo of detail of gold-braid coat from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen: Fall 1996
Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-ready-to-wear/
alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 13: Photo of blazer and trouser ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen: Fall 1996
Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-ready-to-wear/
alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 14: Photo of dress from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen: Fall 1996 Ready-to-Wear,”
Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-ready-to-wear/alexander-
mcqueen.
Figure 15: Photo of crown of thorns by Shaun Leane from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen -
Ready-to-Wear - Runway Collection - Women - Fall/Winter 1996,” firstVIEW, https://
www.firstview.com/collection_images.php?id=6789&p=0&list=all&jumpto=1012222#a1012222.
Figure 16: Photo of ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen: Fall 1996 Ready-to-Wear,”
Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-ready-to-wear/alexander-
mcqueen.
Figure 17: Photo of jacket and denim shorts ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen: Fall
1996 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-ready-to-
wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Figure 18: Photo of mesh shirt and denim skirt ensemble from Dante, A/W 1996. “Alexander McQueen:
Fall 1996 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue Runway, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-1996-
ready-to-wear/alexander-mcqueen.
Autoimmune Subjectivity - a concept in progress
Password: colon
“With the earlier examples of the human body [from Žižek]…the Real becomes the raw flesh of mortality, a corporeality at odds with a subjectivity in denial of its own mortality…” (Sheehan 26).
I created this video work using footage from a 2005 water mane inspection, interspersed with photos from my 2012 colonoscopy, which confirmed my Crohn’s disease diagnosis. In juxtaposing these images, I wanted to evoke the revulsion we feel when we experience the inner workings (or malfunctioning) of our internal bodies in a state of illness. As Slavoj Žižek writes, the demands of daily life require that we suspend the internal body’s functioning in order to relate to it within the symbolic order. In illness, we become aware of the rift between external, symbolic identifiers of self (personality traits, physical appearance, interests) and invisible, internal bodily processes, which we can neither name nor control. Once the body malfunctions, it becomes a sort of machinery, surveyed part by part to identify and repair the broken organ(s). We begin to experience the body as a revolting, diseased object requiring lifelong medical surveillance and intervention. Any prior illusion of bodily control and symbolic coherence in the world is shattered. In illness, we can no longer simply suspend internal bodily processes as usual—we are forced to confront the Real of the body’s mortality. Chronic autoimmune illness, in particular, disrupts the symbolic order both within us (prompting a split in subjectivity, a loss of some perceived former unity between self and body) and around us, rendering the world’s previously coherent scientific-medical discourses and political narratives untrustworthy.
Crohn’s disease is a category of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), an autoimmune gastrointestinal illness caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, of which the most often cited in medical literature is a westernized diet and lifestyle. Frequent antibiotic and NSAID use, along with a diet low in fiber and high in saturated fat, processed foods, and animal products, are now recognized as risk factors for developing IBD and other autoimmune diseases. Such dietary and lifestyle patterns reduce the diversity of gut microbes, which regulate the immune system by breaking down fiber and producing short-chain fatty acids that protect the intestinal barrier. When gut microbiome diversity is compromised, fiber-digesting microbes begin to feed on intestinal mucus instead, causing intestinal permeability (pre-autoimmune “leaky gut”), and trigger the immune system to launch an auto-inflammatory response. In Crohn’s, this produces inflammation and ulceration along the gastrointestinal tract, causing symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, and weight loss (from nutrient malabsorption). Current treatments for IBD include pharmaceutical drugs, such as immunosuppressants, thiopurines (also used in high doses against cancer), and biologics, but surgical removal of inflamed or strictured sections of the gastrointestinal tract is also often necessary. Although particular diets, such as the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, have been proposed as complete treatments on their own, the risk of severe and life-threatening complications of Crohn’s (fistulas, bowel obstructions, colorectal cancer, etc.) leads most patients to opt for traditional pharmaceutical treatments and adopt targeted diets as secondary, preventive measures.
Illness forces us to assume a new role—that of a patient subject to endless medical surveillance. Advanced medical technology makes visible the formerly invisible dimensions of the internal body—in the case of IBD, MR imaging and ultrasounds, surgical intervention, and the dreaded colonoscopy/endoscopy procedure reveal the insides of the gut. Images of my gastrointestinal tract projected on screens and attached to procedure reports fragment me into machine-like parts that no longer resemble the whole, cohesive body that I thought was me. These medicalized images of disparate intestinal segments provoke discomfort, and I immediately feel alienated from my body, as though I were an outsider witnessing something I wasn’t meant to see. And in a way, I wasn’t meant to see my insides at all, because I never should have developed Crohn’s in the first place. Capitalist industrial modernity first engineered my illness, then developed technologies and pharmaceuticals to artificially prolong my life (and extend my years as a patient-consumer). Along the way, I was forced to adopt a new subjectivity: Autoimmune subjectivity. An autoimmune subject is created by environmental externalities of capitalism and becomes fully entangled within it, remaining dependent upon medical infrastructure and a constant stream of new medical-pharmaceutical innovations for survival. There is no opting out of medical surveillance and consumption, no escape from a diseased body designed for profit extraction.
In bouts of illness or amid symptom flares, the autoimmune subject becomes acutely aware of their own mortality. Moments of irrational, invisible pain and traumatic, invasive medical encounters preclude the possibility for the usual internal-body suspension Žižek describes. Every experience of a symptom pulls us out of our symbolic-level endeavors and reminds us of our body’s frequent suicide attempts (or, at least, what appears to be illogical self-destruction). The autoimmune body operates with a mystified cellular logic that defies the subject’s survival instinct—a sort of bodily death drive. Autoimmune disease is even a manifestation of death drive in a corporeal sense—the activated immune system attacks its own organs, launching an inflammatory response that destroys the body from inside-out. If left untreated, the autoimmune body quite literally self-destructs slowly, becomes an unusable lump of tissue and veins, and returns to inorganic matter. This bodily death drive places the autoimmune subject at odds with their own life instinct, at odds with the human need for a stable subjectivity within the symbolic order.
It’s no coincidence that autoimmune diseases of all kinds are on the rise in both affluent Global North countries and those beginning to adopt westernized diets and sedentary lifestyles—the animal agriculture, pesticide, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries fund scientific research, influence policy, and smear opponents for profit. As plenty of others before me have noted, these industries are in the business of prolonging our collective illness. In an environment brimming with carcinogenic agricultural runoff, endocrine disruptors in cosmetics, and “forever chemicals” in tap water and cookware, we have no choice but to suspend the miraculous inner functioning of our bodies, subject them to neglect, poisoning, and decay, and dredge forward as we pursue symbolic-level fulfillment.
Autoimmune disease is no accident, genetic anomaly, or individual misfortune—it is the body’s self-destructive impulse against the barrage of toxins, both literal and metaphorical, which make our contemporary world unlivable. Autoimmunity is not an individual genetic accident—it is a profitable externality of neoliberal capitalism. In our dystopian healthcare landscape, it’s profitable when illnesses cannot (yet) be cured, are caused “primarily” by genetics, and can “only” be treated with costly, long-term pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. It’s a public issue that we all have (or will develop) autoimmune diseases—the conditions of industrial modernity and corporate political control have turned us, unwillingly, into autoimmune subjects, yet we’re meant to believe that “bad genetics” caused our illness and pharmaceuticals are our only remedies. The chemical, agricultural, medical, and pharmaceutical industries (along with the government) are not only invested in creating an autoimmune population, they’re also actively forcing us to inhabit new forms of subjectivity, forcing us to move through the world in increasingly self-destructive, atomized, and demoralizing ways.
I have no political prognoses or solutions, only an intuition that health is increasingly inaccessible, and that autoimmune subjectivity will be a primary subject position of the coming decades. This video work is my effort to accept the Real of my body’s fragility and allow others to bypass, from a distance, the bodily suspension we perform within the symbolic, momentarily experience autoimmune subjectivity, and witness the extent of capitalist intrusion into our bodies.
Works Cited
Sheehan, Sean. Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum, 2012.
Skinny Puppy. “Dig It.” Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, Nettwerk Productions, 1986. Spotify, https://
open.spotify.com/track/5XnOTaIZRMYV8UZzKwa5d5?si=77cdb5bfa7174068.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. Verso, 1994.
Voids: Berlin 1989-2019
I’d like to share a project of mine from the fall semester of my year in Berlin. The end product, as well as my memory of the process itself, epitomize my time in Berlin, one of expansion and exploration. The political, cultural, and historical significance of my surroundings drew something out of me that hadn’t been accessed in months. This project is the result of the vivid inspiration I felt emanating from the city and from myself as our paths crossed for the 30-year anniversary of an epochal event—the Mauerfall, November 9, 1989.
My video captures what I noticed when I walked through the city, what I paid attention to and cared to photograph—those voids and corners that somehow resembled the Berlin I had in my head: post-Mauerfall ‘90s Berlin.
Password: Voids8919
Artist Statement/Written Accompaniment to Video
Berlin’s days as a “poor but sexy” city have largely passed, but remnants of its distinctive post-Mauerfall aesthetic are still visible to those looking for it. Throughout my video piece, I attempt to capture this visual aesthetic, to the degree it still exists in Berlin, by juxtaposing my own footage with existing footage taken from German films of the post-1989 era in Berlin. I included snippets from Die Mauer (1990), Ostkreuz (1991), Berlin Babylon (2001), and, although it was made a few years before the Mauerfall, Der Himmel über Berlin (1987), a quintessential Westberlin film. To set up my own shots, I drew upon the visual style of Dietrich Oltmanns, Harald Hauswald, and Robert Conrad, all former East German photographers who shot black and white photos, most notably (for my purposes) of dilapidated architecture and vacant industrial spaces. These photographs served as inspiration for my own shots, which tend to be quite close-up, in order to focus on the textural quality of remaining old buildings in Berlin and to detach them from their now-gentrified contexts.
© Dietrich Oltmanns
© Dietrich Oltmanns
© Robert Conrad
© Harald Hauswald
Keeping this photographic style in mind, I also tried to mimic the types of recurring shots I noticed throughout the various films—there are static shots of buildings, and there are shots that pan horizontally in order to capture a landscape. Given the unfortunate scarcity of locations in the center of Berlin that offer entire landscapes devoid of both gentrification and blatant signs of 2019, I was confined to filming single buildings or quadrants that retain some unrecognizable quality (or, if recognizable, that are at least reminiscent of the era in question). While capturing my footage, I felt a certain nostalgia for a time so often invoked when people attempt to describe the essence of Berlin—that immediate post-Mauerfall moment in the ‘90s, when techno sprouted up as an instrument for organic reunification of the two Berlins, and when artists squatted for studio space in unclaimed, vacant buildings in the former East.
Ulrich Gutmair’s 2013 book, Die ersten Tage von Berlin: Der Sound der Wende, explores this new scene, which at the time brought desirability to former East Berlin, but which in hindsight has led to the widespread gentrification of former Eastern districts centered around art, such as Mitte, Scheunenviertel, and Prenzlauer Berg. He emphasizes the vastly different views of former East Berlin—that of its pre-Mauerfall inhabitants and that of incoming West German and international youth, who saw creative opportunity in its inexpensive, decaying spaces: “Die Leute aus dem Osten wollten die Mauer hinter sich lassen, Reisefreiheit ist eine ihrer zentralen Forderungen. Dass auch Leute zu ihnen kommen würden, wenn die Mauer weg ist, und zwar nicht nur zu Besuch, daran hatten sie nicht gedacht” [“The people from the East wanted to leave the Wall behind them, freedom of travel is one of their central claims. That people would also come to them when the Wall was gone, and not only to visit, they hadn’t thought of."] (Gutmair 94). This particular Berlin (and its accompanying aesthetic) was formed only by the circumstances put forth by the German division (in particular, the German Democratic Republic as a phenomenon), and before that, by the Europe-wide and also German-specific destruction brought by World War II and National Socialism, and even before that, by the massive currency inflation and general failures of the Weimar Republic in the interwar period. Perhaps we can understand the Mauerfall as more than a singular event, but rather, as the culmination of a nearly century-long chain of destabilizing events in Germany, signaling a new beginning, a “Wende,” as this period is often called.
Today, Berlin (or perhaps not all of Berlin, but certainly its development interests) often markets itself by invoking its ‘90s image—scrappy, free, artistic, and characteristically “poor but sexy,” although the city is no longer quite so poor, and arguably not quite so sexy, either. Berlin as a symbol, however, persists, despite the discrepancy between the Berlin that generated this symbol and the vastly different Berlin of today. Gutmair argues that despite development interests and the lack of open space to create, Berlin, as of 2013, had remained attractive to creatives: “Möglich war das, weil es Platz gab, passiert ist es, weil es genügend Leute gab, die Zeit, Kraft, und Ideen investiert haben. Kreative Leute gibt es immer noch genügend, die Stadt wächst … Die Jungen und Kreativen zieht es vor allem aus dem EU-Ausland nach Berlin” [“It was possible because there was space; it happened because there were enough people who had invested time, power, and ideas. There are still enough creative people—the city is growing … The youth and creatives move primarily from EU countries to Berlin.”] (Gutmair 248). Is this still true in 2019, or is Berlin aging and growing stale after its full-scale reinvention only thirty years ago? Changes to the city’s visual landscape, such as the closure and upcoming development of long-standing artist squat Tacheles, or the sterile, highly commercialized, and frankly, quite depressing Potsdamer Platz development, seem to mark the beginning of the end of Berlin as an affordable, edgy, fringe European city. In terms of mass-gentrification, Budapest, Kraków, or Zagreb may be next in line.
Perhaps this is part of today’s main threat to Berlin—it is so open to fetishization, so easily molded into what the eager, “artistic” international individual, perhaps the largest gentrifying force, envisions it to be. I am aware that my video may exhibit a fetishized, perhaps sickeningly nostalgic version of what I imagine Berlin in the ‘90s to have been like. I accept this as part of my learning process as a foreigner, especially as an American, in Berlin. My choice to use a song by Fischerspooner, an early-2000s New York City-based electroclash duo, as the backdrop for my video, is intended to provide a sense of structure for the images and to evoke the chugging, forward-moving feeling (but not the literal sound) that characterized Berlin techno in the ‘90s. The song, entitled “!@*$%#” (simply titled, “Fucker,” on the original release), comes from an album I grew up listening to, and it reminds me of a stripped-down, New York-ified snippet of the techno I have experienced while here. I felt it was important not to superimpose either a well-known or an obscure early Berlin techno anthem onto already literal images of ‘90s Berlin, as this would add yet another layer of a manufactured nostalgia I’m not in a position to fully contribute to.
Given that the first incarnation of Berlin’s techno scene was a direct result of the abundant industrial and dilapidated architecture in former East Berlin, including some reference to techno seemed appropriate. Unfortunately, this is another cultural sphere often invoked to declare Berlin’s impending “death.” The changing landscape of the city, characterized by widespread occupation and development of previously vacant industrial buildings, poses a certain threat to Berlin nightlife, at least for some who lived through its “high point.” In the exhibition book for No Photos on the Dance Floor! Berlin 1989-Today, recently at C/O Berlin, film director Romuald Karmakar foresees a bleak fate for Berlin techno: “The city’s empty spaces quite literally gave the music a physical space in which it could develop. As these spaces vanish, the significance of the music wanes” (Hoffmann 15). While this may be true, and Berlin techno may be slowly fading out, perhaps we could also interpret the city’s current electronic music scene as a direct link to the immediate post-Mauerfall era, and furthermore, as a sign that at least one of Berlin’s modern characteristic features is not yet lost. It seems that to a degree, Berlin techno as emblem of the city’s post-Mauerfall history preserves its identity and symbolic value, even today.
It was important for me to set the images to various beats in the music (another reason to use electronic music), in order to generate a certain pace throughout the video. To a certain extent, I placed like images together (based on composition, coloring, or movement), while also attempting to disperse my own footage somewhat evenly among the historic footage. When I began making the video, I had no specific image in mind that I thought fitting for the last shot. As I crafted the end of my video and had limited clips leftover, I searched through each of my selected films once more and found this close-up shot of what looks like a GDR-era Plattenbau structure being demolished. I thought it would be visually interesting and suggestive if reversed. For me, this shot at the very end conjures up the obvious questions of low-quality, homogenous commercial developments (and the tear-downs that make space for them), but also more nuanced questions of the city’s changing appearance. Is its character being torn down along with its older buildings, or has Berlin been rebuilt since 1989, albeit in a more intangible sense, into an entirely new city, distinct from each of its previous incarnations? Is Berlin’s spirit linked to its architecture? If so, Berlin must accept its imminent death. If not, can this intangible something innate to Berlin ever be killed?
Works Cited:
Berlin Babylon. Dir. Hubertus Siegert. Perf. Günter Behnisch, Helmut Jahn, und I.M. Pei. S.U.M.O Film, 2001. Film.
Der Himmel über Berlin. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, and Solveig Dommartin. Janus Films, 1987. Film.
Die Mauer. Dir. Jürgen Böttcher. DEFA-Studio für Dokumentarfilme, 1990. Film.
Fischerspooner. “!@*$%#.” #1. Capitol, 2001. Digital file.
Gutmair, Ulrich. Die ersten Tage von Berlin: Der Sound der Wende. Berlin: Ullstein, 2013. Print.
Hoffmann, Heiko and Felix, eds. No Photos on the Dance Floor! Berlin 1989-Today. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2019. Print.
Ostkreuz. Dir. Michael Klier. Perf. Laura Tonke, Miroslaw Baka, and Suzanne von Borsody. Sputnik Film, 1991. Film.
In Transit: London, 1981 to Berlin, 2020
I can’t help but notice similarities between my parents’ photos from their academic year abroad in London from 1980-81 and those I took during my own (shortened) year in Berlin from 2019-20.
While in Berlin, the spaces and architecture that felt most aesthetically rich to me were derelict or decaying buildings and corners of subway stations that, apart from crisp, new signage or the occasional ceiling video camera, somehow recall the mid-20th century.
A noticeably postmodern stylistic quality belongs even to such mundane spaces as subways— whether this particular London Tube station or the Heinrich-Heine-Straße U-Bahn station were constructed in the ‘60s or the ‘80s, I don’t know. It almost doesn't matter. Something about that beige subway tiling, the curved surfaces, and the lurid quality of those fluorescent rectangular lights reveal aesthetic features simultaneously bland and specific enough to evoke an era.
It is this nondescript, indefinable form of the retro shining through Berlin’s corners and cracks that inspired me, every now and then, to imagine myself into the past.
Enough imagination, a bit of Simple Minds, and I could be there in an instant.
London Tube | 1981
Berlin U-Bahn Heinrich-Heine-Straße | 2020
Simple Minds | “New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)” | New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) | 1982
Smashed glass on the street. Blends of nondescript artifacts, soiled or iridescent. An element of Duchampian chance, externally-imposed control.
If I’d had several more weeks or months to observe Berlin, my next undertaking would have been to photograph the mixed piles of miscellaneous junk found around the city. The junk is not foul and cockroach-ridden like New York trash heaps, nor is the junk comprised of discarded plastic squashed into matted brown grass along a suburban American highway. The Berlin junk is original, complex, inspiring, and it speaks to the nature of the city. It begs you to wonder how it got there and where it came from.
I came across this particular junk pile on Weichselstraße, somewhere between Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Its mixture of assorted glass shards, scrunched up cloth, cigarette butts, leaves and sticks, and white paint splatters, all covering a thick foundation of street filth, struck me as the perfect chance assemblage. It looked straight out of Eraserhead. Did someone come along and smash a window on top of the pile? Was the glass smashed already, then placed in a bag, where it ripped through the bag and fell out onto the already existing junk pile? Who left it there and why? I remembered the junk pile I encountered outside of the Groove office building on my first day as an intern—that one contained mainly dirt, a few shattered beer bottles, and soiled clothing. It gradually decomposed as its contents were picked up or washed away by the rain.
What happened to this pile? Did someone clean it up, having decided glass shouldn’t be left on the street for children and dogs to step on? Was it left alone to gradually merge with the streetscape? Did passersby like me take small pleasure in noticing it, in assessing its contents?
Something about these piles feels reminiscent of immediate post-Mauerfall Berlin—its dilapidated buildings with peeling facades and crumbling brick, left to be squatted and salvaged or to decompose like these piles. It’s as though now, amid the city’s thirty-year-long expansion and sterilization, its junk piles have shrunk down to these avoidable, yet persistent reminders of what once was, by chance, Berlin.
And now the city speaks: the piles were never junk, at all.
