Reconstruction 10.2 (2010)
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Artificial Life: Bruce Nauman's Topological Gardens
International Art Exhibition at the La Biennale di VeneziaBy Lori Martindale
Figure 1: Nauman's installation, Heads and Hands.[1]
<1> Modern technology is the Dr. Frankenstein lab of suspended heads and wires in the artificial existence of humanity. The "topological garden" -- is artificially and continuously stretching in rearrangement.[2] In other words, the "topological garden" is one arranged in radical translation and uncertainty -- an artificial life.
<2> What philosopher Wolfgang Schirmacher calls "homo generator" as "a Dasein beyond metaphysics, a human being which needs no Being, no certainty, no truth" is illustrated visually through Bruce Nauman's installation Topological Gardens, the official U.S. entry at the 53rd International Art Exhibition at the La Biennale di Venezia of 2009. Nauman (born 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) is regarded as one of the most innovative artists of his generation, and is often noted for his abstract and performative uses of language and the body -- and in this case, the topology of abjection. Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art -- Nauman's piece presents a thematic, provocative work in three exhibition sites this past year: the United States Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and the Exhibition Spaces at Università Ca' Foscari.
<3> Nauman's Heads and Hands, an installation in Topological Gardens, consists of wires which hang like steel boughs from a white ceiling at the 2009 La Biennale di Venezia. Large human heads, cast in wax are radically suspended in air on one steel mobile. One can be reminded of Gilles Deleuze's descriptions of portraitist Francis Bacon's heads with no faces in Deleuze's essay "The Body, the Meat, and The Spirit: Becoming Animal." Deleuze illuminates how "the deformations which bodies undergo are also the animal features of the head" (19). The head as animal feature is unidentifiable in Nauman's work, at once an artifact of technological death, with the wires and connecting cables as evidence.
<4> A large carousel made from steel with four unidentifiable skinned animals hang suspended in air in the next room of the Nauman exhibition. A hideous lantern, or television, hangs from the ceiling, poised off center, where a film of a fox being slowly sheered and slaughtered then display the many bloody carcasses of previous animals. The animals hang as tortured carcasses on display, circling round the television turned: ON. The monstrous mobile adds an abject and macabre natality theme to the wire and artificial flesh installation. Composed carefully in conjunction with the suspension of dismembered bodies, artificial life is at its highest form: between gnarling steel teeth of wire, Electronic Television, and abstract death itself -- in the murder of the animal by human hands, and the human murdering animal murdering human: the bodiless head.
<5> A Kafkaesque a-teleological universe reels in this installation of bodiless corpses and animal death in the adjacent room. [3] The heads become animal and the animal metamorphoses human. Reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic reading of Kafka's Gregor in abject metamorphosis, a "becoming animal" before death echoes a topological threshold of suffering:
To become animal is to participate in movement [. . .] to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterittorialized flux of non-signifying signs. (Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature 13).
Rather, becoming animal is in part a state of alterity, a topology of abjection which results in the inevitable death of the body. This death occurs under the subjection of technological wires. Is it animal which hangs the heads? Or is it human which hangs behind the steel?
<6> This installation is "artificial life" in its modern plea to the mythologies of humans as the superior beings. Derrida's writings on The Animal That Therefore I Am illustrate the idea -- "Ecce animot" -- the idea of following. Rather, humans are really "animals" following one another, [wielding our own catastrophic demise much like the hanging heads in ripe ecocide].[4]
<7> The heads and animal bodies claim extinction in the absence of the live garden. In an essay by Schirmacher, "The End of Metaphysics -- What Does This Mean?" he addresses Heidegger's diminution of the quandary of modernity to the notion of the ending of metaphysics, claiming humans are the accurate evidence of this end. Schirmacher explains the generator as having to face with audacity our own mortality [foiled by natality] in the ripe environment of ecocide. Indeed, he explains this degree of modernity as a "first-degree murder of the body." In the journal Poesis, Schirmacher's essay, "Eco-Sophia," illuminates technological slaughter: "Technology is our mode of living, yet today we are living, against our will, a death-carrying technology, one whose decisive characteristic is that it is theoretically flawless as it is comprehensive" (76). Schirmacher considers the body as a place of resistance, and its intensifying influence coincides with the technological to the bodily sphere. In other words, he explains: "we must "learn a "bodily" language which precedes the division into subject and object, and admit the individual to a successful enterprise which needs no planning" (Schirmacher). Nauman's installation is a picture of the body as object in the suicidal enterprise of technological ignorance.
<8> Bruce Nauman's ecological catastrophe, Topological Gardens, exposes the artificial existence of humanity, while taking the form of the media artist: a suicide of the body -- wires hanging from ceilings, heads dismembered and suspended delicately by steel. The animal body as site for resistance, Nauman's Topological Gardens is composed of heads and hands, simulated animal carcasses, sound (of the mechanical sheers) and space, as recurring over and over, like a technological, topological mobile of death itself. It is Schirmacher who said:"We're the artificial beings among all others, our bodies are artifacts by nature." It is this death of the body which nature will fulfill, in this animal creation of technological death which is: artificial life.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. "Le corps, la viande et l'espirit, le devenir-animal" in Francis Bacon. Paris: editions de la difference, 1981. 19-22.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. L'Animal que donc Je Suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006.
Nauman, Bruce. Topological Gardens. The Official U.S. Representation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition -- La Biennale di Venezia, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and presented in collaboration with the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Università Ca' Foscari.
Topography. Oxford English Dictionary, Compact edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Schirmacher, Wolfgang. "The End of Metaphysics: What Does This Mean?" Paper presented at a special section of the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy in Montreal 1983, and printed in SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION 23.3.
---. Research in Philosophy and Technology 9: Ethics and Technology. Ed. Carl Mitcham, Greenwhich/London: JAI Press, 1989. 125-34.
---. HOMO GENERATOR: Militant Media & Postmodern Technology. N.D. 15 Sept. 2009.
---. Homo Generator: Media and Postmodern Technology. G. Bender, T. Duckrey (eds). Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. The New Press. New York, 1994/1999, 361 pages.
---. "Eco-Sophia." Poiesis. Journal of Arts and Communication 11 (2009): 76-81.
Notes
[1] Photograph taken at Bruce Nauman's Topological Gardens: La Biennale di Venezia of 2009. [^]
[2] The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines topology as noun 1 Mathematics the study of geometrical properties and spatial relations which remain unaffected by smooth changes in shape or size of figures. 2 the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged (1093). [^]
[3] The adjacent room is a mobile of animal carcasses hanging from wires, by Bruce Nauman. [^]
[4] L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). Derrida's book is a philosophical investigation critique of the demotion of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction between man as thinking animal and every other living species (dating back to Descartes). [^]
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