The array of emotions through the human experience and the depth of those feelings can take a lifetime to process and another to make sense of. Even more ironically, for many of the most profound human emotions, from the unbridled love of youth to the mourning of an untimely death, our words fall flat. In Western society, the phrase “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” reigns oppressively true, and inhibits conversation around unattractively serious human emotions. Modern society is designed to consider anything not regulated and properly idealized to be surreal and in opposition of an efficient society. However, denial of real life atrocities and human rights violations is no longer acceptable in a globalized world, and contemporary art provides an arena for action, a platform for relational art to emerge indiscriminately through political tension and catalyze change, providing new rethorics, and new ways of thinking about socio-political issues. Relational artworks have the participatory and multi sensory elements necessary to fill the voids of inadequate language with a process of emotional realizations from which a momentum of hope can emerge and move toward building an improved rhetoric around pain, suffering, and death.

This essay will argue that relational antagonism, termed by Claire Bishop and developed by Kristeva’s 1982 book Powers of Horror, is the only form of relational aesthetics, and of antagonisms, that can adequately surface the emotions that are beyond language when expressing the surreality of death. It will establish that relational antagonism effectively dissolves the current socially conditioned rhetorics around what is exclusively considered the only possible reality. Kristeva’s defines the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order … what does not respect borders, positions, rules”, a place or power where meaning and borders between subject and object utterly collapse, and where the “eruption of the real” enters into our lives. Kristeva addresses not only the possibility of alternatives to existing experiences and their rhetorics, but the necessity of realizing those new experiences, and naming them, and accepting them as authentic reality. Only after we feel and confront the abject experiences modern life is designed to avoid, can we acknowledge and transcend them. In this realization of a new language, we are transformed by Kristeva’s jouissance, or redemption, in the immersion of the abject.

This essay will focus on participatory elements of Teresa Margolles’s work, and how she enables her viewers to confront the abject emotions around drug cartel violence in Mexico City. Her artworks demonstrate how relational antagonism is the most effective way to generate participation in viewers with the quality of sensory and conceptual engagement required to challenge preconditioned rhetorics and narratives around the horrors of death. Margolles’s work uses aspects of touch to create a specifically sensorial experience that departs from the facade of words, and more easily allows the slip into the surreal reality of “the Other”, that in these works are perceived as the autonomous deaths of murder victims. This argument determines that Margolles’s works provide the democratic, and almost reluctant participation that is necessary to discuss these horrific issues, and rightfully places works like these in institutions.

Teresa Margolles is a Mexican conceptual artist, and this essay will focus on her installation work, and will make references to her sculptural works, mixed media paintings, and performance art. Margolles is a trained forensic pathologist, and communicates observations from her in-morgue-studio in Mexico City. As an artist, her work is inherently political and focuses on the emotional anguish and social havoc that occurs as a consequences of death by murder. Materiality has always been a major part of her work, and has evolved consistent motifs through a range of medium. The Papeles (Papers, 2003)(Fig. 1), appear like painted abstract works, and are composed watercolor paper, washed in morgue run off water and dipped in blood and other organic fluid materials found at the morgue, and emerged as “portraits” of the dead. Margolles explores sculpture portraiture in an earlier work, Catafalco (Catafalque, 1997)(Fig. 2), which uses plaster-soaked sheets to create a negative-relief cast of two corpses. Margolles was raised in a religious context, and her work functions as ode to traditional iconography of Catholicism, often steeped in pain, suffering, guilt, and death. Catafalco (Catafalque, 1997) also seeks to commemorate the lives that might otherwise have been forgotten, a theme Margolles sustains throughout her career.

Margolles moved swiftly into interactive installation art, seeking the relational, and emancipatory art platform to display her inherently political art. Though often compared to the material-centric performance art of the Viennese Actionists, Margolles dismisses the theatricality of these performances and takes a more minimalist approach. Through Margolles’s artistic evolution, her work moves away from reflections on the romantic and the abstract, and towards notions around the uncanniness of the the human body, and more specifically on the absence of life from the human body in the corpse. In the works of En EL Aire (2003)(Fig. 3), Vaporacizion (2004)(Fig. 4), and her iconic installation What else could we talk about? (2009)(Fig. 5), Margolles has taken a Duhampian approach, creating visionary subversions of the inanimate subjects of bubbles, steam, and water, made from abject materials, such as water used for autopsies. These subversions conjure abject art out of matter many are accustomed to, and suddenly the uncanny spirits that discreetly animate our everyday world are revealed. In conclusion, Margolles’s spectrum of works are passionate yet focused, and effectively oscillating between a macro and micro scale of political engagement and deeply personal and emotional works. The result is art that functions between the worlds of art and life, education and activism. Margolles finds the redemption through immersion of the abject, and seeks to teach the world about horrific experiences she does not wish upon them, so that greater coping for all may be possible.

RELATIONAL ANTAGONISM

This essay will analyze Claire Bishop’s 2004 October article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, with an emphasis on “democracy” and the quality of relationships produced by relational art. This section will analyze these concerns and link them into Julia Kristeva’s 1982 book The Powers of Horror, to demonstrate the consistencies of the abject in relational art, and the abject’s potential use of breaking down Bishops concerns with Nicolas Bourriaud’s “structures” of relational art. This section concludes with an analysis of Bishop’s understanding of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, in order to uphold the theory that “a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one …. in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased.” These unstable democracies are necessary in the micro utopias of Margolles’s work to effectively generate the jouissance, or transcendence, that Kristeva states transpires from this state of instability.

Bishop wrestles with Bourriaud’s concept of the “structure” of a relational artwork, which he states is the producer of social relationships. Firstly, Bishop affirms Bourriaud’s idea that artworks produce relationships rather than reflecting relationships. Secondly, she states the interactivity of art is superior to “optical contemplation of an object” because human relationships are produced, the work is inherently “political in implication and emancipatory in effect”. Bishop then evaluates Bourriaud’s rather open ended criteria of participatory works. Bourriaud argues that the true value of relational art lies beyond its aesthetic, political, or ethical value, but rather in the relationships produced by engagement with the work. In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud asks, “Does this work permit me to enter a dialogue?”, and to this Bishop responds critically. She questions whether or not the production of dialogue has a fruitful end, being that not all dialogues are inherently good. Bishop argues that dialogue for dialogue sake can result in relational art that is, “Unhinged both from artistic intentionality and consideration of the broader context in which they operate”, and seeks to differ from its context, yet never examines its imbrication in said context. Bishops affirms that relational artworks produce human connections, and extrapolates this idea further, asking what types of relationships are being produced, for whom, and why.

Bishop is also critical of the “intrinsically democratic” nature of relational art that Bourriaud suggests, stating that this theory “rest[s] too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness”. Bishop continues to examine the viability of true democracy in relational art by referring to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, which affirms that a truly democratic society is where hegemony is rejected and relations of conflict are embraced and sustained. They argue that hegemonic discourses prevent subjectivity, which is the state of a subject with agency, a subject which is not completely unified with collective opinion or a totally rogue outlier. Laclau argues that there is an inherently failed social identity, which results subjects that are fragmented within themselves towards different social groups. Subjects within this fractured social system are dependent on identification in order to proceed actively within society, and that, “subjectivity is the process of identification, and we are necessarily incomplete entities…. and antagonism, therefore, is the relation which emerges between such incomplete entities”. This analysis allows a more critical view of the democratic spaces and relationships relational artworks create and examine the antagonisms produced by these artworks to determine the quality of relationship produced. This analysis concludes that antagonism is a determining factor of artwork whose audience is genuinely participating from a place of individual agency, an audience whose “incompleteness” renders it open to change in conditioned discourses and narratives.

The solution to Bishop’s question of how an audience can be truly democratic can be answered by the abject, as art the forces an unbiased reaction. By Being imposed by “the Other”, shock or revulsion may ensue, and the viewer is certainly shaken from their conditioned state of normalcy. In Bernard alan Miller’s 2015 “Rhetorics of War: Dirty Words and Julia Kristeva’s Statement of the Abject” he analyzes Kristeva’s through “the Other” of death in war. This essay will use Alan Miller’s understanding of Kristeva’s theory of the abject as the basis of this analysis of the abject, however using “the Other” of death, human corpses, and the absence of the human body. The horrors and unspeakability of war death is comparable to silence around death that Teresa Margolles seeks to address, and Kristeva's abject also seeks to let the “Other” speak for itself, another significant aspect of the antagonism of Margolles’s work.

Alan Miller states the reality of war is “surreal”, and it’s horrors are beyond words. He claims the existing rhetoric used around war is not enough, and abjection must “claim us” in a space where existing rhetorics are broken down, and new meanings are created to address the acceptance of new and “surreal” realities as authentic an audience. In his article, he states:

“Reality is surreal by virtue of the fact that we are not simply witness to the violence but are transformed by it, the means to its end, becoming the war itself as we are “experienced” by the violence as much we experience it. It is then that we encounter what Julia Kristeva calls the “abject,” that place or point, she says, where “meaning collapses,” shattering our familiar symbolic world of word and referent. In such cases, we do not speak authentically of the horrors of war, for they are not of our symbolic order, words tending to buckle and break given the strain of that referent. But only as we are immersed in it, in the abject, do these horrors speak for themselves. Or, in essence, speak through us, in that way claiming us”.

Alan Miller uses the breakdown of rhetoric, making the claim that existing rhetorics around war are designed to “subdue the betrayal, to redeem on a symbolic level the horrific damage war does on the physical, psychological, and spiritual level”. Alan Miller embraces the blatant defiance of the abject towards existing rhetorics, concluding that there is no real power in the facade of words, and he remains more interested in alternative methods of thought expansion. He states in the surreal reality of war is “a place of human experience that seems beyond the human”, and the abject is the only place for horrors too surreal for common language.

Alan Miller examines Kristeva’s definition of the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order … what does not respect borders, positions, rules”, a place or power where meaning and borders between subject and object utterly collapse, and where the “eruption of the real” enters into our lives. Alan Miller follows Kristeva’s theory in application to death and human corpses as the ultimate abjection. He follows Kristeva’s idea of the corpse as “life sewage”, and quotes her stating “the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life...corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live”. Kristeva emphasizes bodily fluids as what is “improper” or “unclean” about the corpse, and concludes these body fluids as a defilement, that the “blood and pus . . . the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay… 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”. Kristeva uses the term “border” as defining the difference of life and death, as if both are two sides of the same coin, and as if in the physical sense, there is an arbitrary line of what separates the living from the dead. If by Kristeva’s definition being alive is being on the “clean” and “proper” side of that border, than the corpse is the border upon which death has completely encroached. The work of Margolles also seeks to transgress this border, to reveal its arbitrary nature in practice. Margolles utilizes the abject nature of corpses to reveal these arbitrary borders, in efforts to break down the rhetorics and narratives around death, slamming the gap shut to create an instance of Kristeva’s “eruption of the real” to effectively democratize the discourse and hopefully expand local and public opinion.

The concluding focus on the abject is Kristeva’s use of “jouissance” to describe the cathartic, revolutionary, and somewhat ecstatic reaction to the effective use of the abject. Jouissance follows the “eruption of the real”, the collapse of self and the “Other”, and through this loss of distinction, jouissance then prepares the way to meaning, purpose, intellectual pleasure and ultimately even a sense of delight or pleasure than can often be so overwhelming, it can be felt as suffering. This essay will focus on redemption through jouissance, or the deliverance from the guilt or cognitive dissonance that can emerge from abjection. To delve deeper, we shall refine our definition of jouissance. Jouissance, in French, means enjoyment and pleasure, in a particularly over-the-top sense. It contrasts with 'plaisir', which is a controlled state that happens within cultural norms. Even more, the French origin connotes orgasm as well as pleasure, and can be used to describe breaking down barriers between self and other. Further, Lacan argued that the subject, who is separated from itself by language, feels this separation as absence, and constantly seeks wholeness. He argues the subject endlessly subjugates themselves to languages and cultural norms in futile efforts towards a feeling of wholeness. Thus, we feel jouissance as the pleasure/pain that the subject feels as it tries in vain to recapture the lost connection to self.

Jouissance can indicate a breaking of boundaries, a connection beyond the self. This breaking of boundaries is not so much clean break, as it is the all consuming nature of jouissance, that state of which Kristeva claims, “drops [a frontier] so that "I" does not disappear... but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence”. In this “forfeited existence” the ego can finally dissolve its image, and contemplate itself in “the Other”. Kristeva insists that through jouissance the border that persists the distinction between what is within us and what is before us loses its legitimacy and power. She concludes that “the Other” dwells within the subject, changing the subject, and is not a separate entity with which to incorporate, but an entity that she states “precedes and possesses me, and through such a possession causes me to be”.

In conclusion, abjection provides a transformation of language into the poetic, and thereby establishing a precedence over both subject and object, in a place beyond our own languages’ understanding to where we are “lost” in it. In this state of “lost”, where thoughts and emotions without predetermined language speak for themselves, from the wellspring of the abject. Alan Miller reiterates that, “specifically as the abject is realized in language and, through that realization, a transformation of language that ultimately leads to jouissance. In that jouissance or transformation of language through the abject, along with the acknowledgement of the abject itself, our emphasis shifts, and by creating a new experience, we can eventually “listen to our own words in a sense, but still to the words of [death] as they take us to those areas of human experience and meaning we otherwise might seek to avoid”. Finally it is through this jouissance that we can confront the fine border dividing life from death, blur the border itself, and eventually erase it.

TERESA MARGOLLES ARTWORKS

Margolles’s work En El Aire (2003), encompasses a major theme of her work, the fragility and fleetingness of human life in the form of elusive substances in material transitions. The installation is of an ethereal beauty, situated in a spacious bright room, while delicate glistening bubbles float down from above, crashing onto the floor, walls, and bursting on upon contact of the viewers. The viewer is enchanted, carefree, and suddenly, they come across a strategically positioned, very subtle white plaque almost hidden in the middle of the wall, that reads “Bubbles made from water from the morgue that was used to wash corpses before autopsy”. Pop, the bubble of naive pleasure is burst, and the viewer is harshly confronted, and potentially repulsed, by this antagonist truth. It is unimportant that the water has been disinfected, the viewer has been caught in a bait and switch, the beautiful turned tragic, and tainted with death. Though the bubble is a traditional symbol of Vanitas and pictorial realization of the “homo bulla”, the bubble takes a drastic turn in Margolles’ installation. Like floating ghosts, the bubbles now represent the absent bodies of the dead, and their collusion with skin only confirm the viewers own vitality, and reinforces “the Other” of the autonomous dead. Udo Kittelmann and Klaus Görner in the Muerte sin fin (2004) exhibition catalog describe the contact between viewer and bubble as symbolic of “the life of the cleansed body already “burst” – under violent circumstances... iridescent globes, very similar to one another… like a horrifying return from death, the bubbles serve a reminders of life destroyed; whereas motifs of Vanitas traditionally remind us of our mortality, the work of Teresa Margolles reminds us that we are alive”.

En El Aire, is antagonistic in three ways, in its materiality, in the timing of information shared, and in its physically transgressive nature. It is the volatile discrepancy between mesmerizing, minimal forms in extreme opposition to the repulsive and subversive nature of the material, that renders the work so powerful and moving. The careful timing and positioning of the information revealing the materiality of the work is also inherently antagonist, creating a bait and switch aspect to the work. The abject content is not obvious on first sight, and shock and disgust are intensified as people expose themselves to the material without hesitation, unaware of what their participation truly entails until they are already immersed.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, En El Aire, is physically transgressive by forcing itself upon the audience. By transgressing the physical boundaries of the viewer, forcing direct contact with the material, there is no room for a self-distancing, and the viewer is an non negotiably immersed participant. The bubbles of En El Aire are the manifestation of Kristeva's “border” as the arbitrary line between life and death. By Kristeva’s definition, one is alive by being on the “clean” side of that border, and here the tainted water of the bubbles is representative of the corpse, or the border upon which death has completely encroached. The participation required by En El Aire transgresses this border, and reveals its arbitrary nature. The pop of the bubbles is a Margolles manifestation of the slamming the gap between the viewer and ‘the other”, to create an instance of Kristeva’s “eruption of the real”, and to effectively democratize the discourse and hopefully expand local and public opinion. Further, by showing this work in a large scale European institutional setting, Margolles’s work is successfully transgressive on a macro level. By bringing the work to an international setting, and inviting viewers from all over the world to participate, and come in physical contact with the work, the exhibition can be seen as an act of cultural transgression, and etching of the mourning of Mexico onto the global art scene.

Further, the relational aspects of En El Aire provide a micro utopia of the necessarily unstable democracy of audience to produce quality transcendent relationships through jouissance. In agreement with Laclau and Mouffe’s definition of a fully functional democratic society, En El Aire, compromises identical bubbles popping with absolutely zero discrimination of landing sites for their bursts. The reactions of the viewers are left to their total autonomy, allowing for an environment of conflicting responses to be sustained. Curiously, En El Aire enables the participants with their truest agency possible, as the act is in blissful ignorance before knowing the mariality. When the bubbles burst without fail, they demonstrate the perpetual “incompleteness” of the audience. En El Aire democratizes the audience, and by presenting itself as an “Other”, transgressively moves with no regard to the identity of the viewer, rendering their identity vulnerable. This threat to the identity is where the ego can be broken down and the viewer may reconfigure and reconcile their relationship with “the Other”. While there is never a total reconconcilation, it is in this space where change happens. When there is an “Other” too horrific for words, it is this form of relational antagonism towards a democratic audience that is necessary to uproot existing identity structure and evolve cultural understandings, and finally rendering them open to change in conditioned discourses and narratives.

CONCLUSION

While the abject nature of En El Aire may be obvious, let us examine the works potential to generate the jouissance needed to effectively collapse the surreality of the work, confront the border dividing life from death, blur the border itself, and eventually erase it. Expertly, En El Aire, plays to the immersion of “the Other” in Kristeva’s jouissance both physically and conceptually. The room sized installation is filled with the bubbles, and the viewers are physically immersed in “the Other” as well as conceptually, for once the bubbles pop in an “eruption of the real”, the abject nature of the work is known, and air in the room is filled with the absence of the corpse, but the presence of death and “the Other”. Many viewers of En El Aire, describe a loss for words, and claiming no rhetoric can sufficiently describe their feelings. In this way the cathartic, ecstatic, potentially revolutionary reactions to En El Aire transcend the rhetoric available for it into the poetic, and therein lies the effective use of the abject. Kristeva insists that through jouissance, the distinction between what is within us and what is before us loses its legitimacy and power. When the structured rethorics are abandoned, the work is free to speak for itself in a sense, by claiming the viewer and speaking through the viewer, and “possesses” the viewer through their evolved understanding. Here, we let death have its say, and we shift away from the conditioned state of senses, and gravitate towards that which we might normally avoid. We confront our mortality, our responsibility to others, and transcend our totalitarian fear of death, and rather build a better world for us to live.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alan Miller, Bernard. "Rhetorics of War: Dirty Words and Julia Kristeva’s Statement of the Abject." CEA Critic 77, no. 3 (2015): 320-328.
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110, (Fall 2004): 51-79.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse Du Reel, 1998.
Castro, Elvia Rosa. “Teresa Margolles: Death is Beautiful,” Revistas Excelencias, Accessed on February 28, 2019. http://www.revistasexcelencias.com/en/arte-por-excelencias/editorial-6/resenas/teresa-margolles-death-beautiful.
ChangingMinds.org. “Psychoanalysis: Jouissance.” 2019. http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/concepts/jouissance.htm.
Coulson, Amanda. “Teresa Margolles.” Frieze, September 10, 2004. https://frieze.com/article/teresa-margolles.
Görner, Klaus and Kittelmann, Udo. Teresa Margolles: Muerte sin fin, Frankfurt, 2004.
Kristeva, Julia.The Powers of Horror: Approaching Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Patrizia Dander, 127 cuerpos, Düsseldorf: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, 2006.
MAC Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. “Teresa Margolles: Mundos / En el aire”. Accessed February, 2017. YouTube video, 1:31. Posted Mar 30, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cRR_pgXw1U.

Teresa Margolles: Abjection and the Arbitrary Border of Life and Death

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