Corporeal theory with/in practice: Christine Borland's Winter Garden

Art History

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 442-455

  Meskimmon, Marsha ^a  

^a LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249129882     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.2603007     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. Gail Weiss posited this formulation in Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, London and NY, 1999.
2. have developed further this process-based, relational notion of intercorporeality in thinking differently about women's art practices in the fourth chapter of Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, London and NY, 2003.
3. I explored the notion of resonance in 'Jenny Holzer's Lustmord and Resonant Critical Praxis', n.paradoxa, vol. 6, Desire and the Gaze, June 2000, pp. 12-21
4. and, in lengthier form, in 'Practice as Thinking: Toward Feminist Aesthetics', in Breaking the Disciplines: Reconceptions in Knowledge, Art and Culture, co-edited with Martin Davies, forthcoming, Spring 2003.
5. Stephen O'Connell (now Zagaia) used the phrase writing with art in 'Aesthetics: A Place I've Never Seen', in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Gary Genosko, London and NY, 2001, pp. 946-69;
6. Trinh T Minh-ha coined the phrase 'speaking nearby' to denote a similar mode of address. See 'Speaking Nearby', interview with Nancy Chen (1994), reprinted in Cinema/Interval, London and NY, 1999, pp. 209-225.
7. For the pertinent connections between contemporary art in Scotland, the histories of conceptualism and scientific method, I am indebted to Melissa Feldman's excellent article 'Matters of Fact: New Conceptualism in Scotland', Third Text, no. 37, Winter 1996-7, pp. 75-84.
8. There are now many useful sources on the Wunderkammer: one of the best illustrated is still Rosamund Wolff Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors, London, 1993.
9. For a wonderful account of Leibniz's concept of Ars Combinatoria, the Wunderkammer and the power of the visual in connective thinking, see Barbara Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Cambridge, Mass., 1999, esp. pp. 120-31.
10. William T. Stearn documented the citations Linnaeus took from Merian in Maria Sybilla Merian, The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars: Fifty Engravings Selected from Erucarum Ortus (1718), with an introduction by William T. Stearn, London, 1978, p. 18.
11. Thomas Lawson, 'Unrelenting Jet Lag and Iron-Hard Jets', in The British Art Show 4, exhib. cat., London: Hayward Gallery and National Touring Exhibitions, 1995, pp. 88-94, p. 89.
12. While it would be beyond the scope of this brief essay to develop the intimate connections between maternity/woman and the question of the monstrous, this work has been pursued at some length in Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (eds), Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, Zed Books, 1996.
13. considered the question of the monstrous in contemporary women's self-portraits in 'The Monstrous and the Grotesque: On the Politics of Excess in Women's Self Portraiture', in Make: The Magazine of Women's Art, October-November, 1996, pp. 6-11, and have since learned much about the theme from the work of my PhD student: Rachel Gear.
14. See Alan MacFarlane and Gerry Martin, The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World, London, 2002. Interestingly, in relation to the ideas here, the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was a lens grinder.
15. Christine Battersby's book, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, Oxford, 1998, makes a convincing case that natality, not maternity, is the crucial element in thinking productively about corporeality and sexual difference.
16. There is no indigenous name given for the specimen, a fact which might reflect the almost complete loss with colonization in South Eastern Australia of the Eora language groups. For further information on the Eora languages, see Jakelin Troy, The Sydney Language, Canberra, 1993.
17. I am indebted to an essay on this topic by Londa Schiebinger: 'Lost Knowledge, Bodies of Ignorance, and the Poverty of Taxonomy as Illustrated by the Curious Fate of the Flos Pavonis, An Abortifacient', in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, London and NY, 1998, pp. 125-44.
18. For further discussion of these issues and the complex interaction between sexuality, sexual difference and slavery in the Americas, see Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1832, London, 1990 and Geoff Quilley, Dian Kriz (eds), Representations of Slavery, Manchester, forthcoming, 2003.
19. For a review of Humid in Bristol, see Valerie Reardon, 'Humid', Art Monthly, no. 245, April 2001, pp. 36-8.
20. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, London and New York, 2002, p. 7.
21. My formulation of 'theory as a practice' is indebted to Elizabeth Grosz's well-known argument that knowledge is a practice and not a contemplative reflection - see Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London, 1995, p. 37.
22. The shift from identity to difference has also been of critical import to post- and anti-colonial refigurations of 'race' - note, for example, the article by Gerardo Mosquera, 'Good-bye Identity, Welcome Difference: From Latin American Art to Art from Latin America', Third Text, no.55, Summer 2001, pp. 25-32.
23. Elizabeth Grosz, 'In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture', in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2001, pp. 91-105, 92.
24. On dualism, see Grosz, 'In-Between', pp. 93-4; as not a place, p. 91.
25. Stafford, Visual Analogy, p. 9.
26. I am borrowing the term 'differential aesthetics' from the title of a thought-provoking volume edited by Penny Florence and Nicola Foster, Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings, Aldershot, Hants, 2000.
27. Rosi Braidotti, 'Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism', in C.V. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, New York and London, 1994, pp.159-85, p. 177.
28. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 27.
29. Braidotti, 'Toward a New Nomadism', p. 181.
30. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London, 1994, p. 23.
31. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 199.
32. On the problem of such 'contexts' and the infinite regress to which this mode of interpretive justification can lead, see Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago, 1999, pp. 175ff.