Simulating death when dead:

The fact is that there are hardly any reactions that it is not also able to perform when decapitated...in this condition, it can walk, regain its balance, move one of its threatened limbs autonomously, assume the spectral position, mate, lay eggs, build an ootheca, and, quite astonishingly, fall down in a false corpse-like immobility when confronted by danger or following a peripheral stimulation. I am deliberately using this indirect means of expressing myself because our language, it seems to me, has so much difficulty expressing, and our reason understanding, the fact that when dead, the mantis can simulate death.

[Roger Caillois on the Praying Mantis, from Space, Time and Perversion by Elizabeth Grosz 1995]

Artwork is by Hany Armanious:

Benjamin Armstrong:

Vision is suggested as the eye's phantom limb, or the compulsive effluence of a beached mollusc clumsily groping in the dark. In certain tableaux visions cut loose from their moorings, glibly pursuing an uncertain trajectory, perhaps with evil intent, ghosts in search of a body once more...perhaps something to eat. Elsewhere visions blindly collide, sag, and bend, becoming deflated...tired.

[George Huon, from Benjamin Armstrong: Gathering Exhibition brochure. Melbourne: Project Space, RMIT University, 2005]

Prosthetics:

Prosthetics: castration complex raised to the level of an art form.

[J.G. Ballard, Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century in A Users Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews 1996]




Artwork by Jana Sterbak:

Aimee Mullins, professional Athlete/actor/model:




Aimee Mullins and Alexander McQueen:





Aimee Mullins and Matthew Barney, Cremaster Cycle:

Horror/Pleasure

Francis Bacon has spoken of the beauty of a diseased mouth or a road accident, but it is more compelling to hear Orshi Drozdik describe her first encounter with an anatomical dissection when she was at art school. After the initial shock of seeing a beautiful woman lying disembowelled she discovered that the lining of her stomach as a gorgeous, lustrous purple material while the texture of the organs provided a wealth of exquisite forms and colours. From horror to aesthetic pleasure is a short loop.

[Excerpt from "Body" by Anthony Bond 1997]

Photographs by Andres Serrano:

Lilith

The first woman of the Judeo-Christian world order, Lilith, was not created out of male substance. God made her, like Adam, from dust. Lilith considered herself to be of equal rank, but Adam disputed her claim to equality. Because of her independent ways, Lilith was eventually replaced by a woman born from Adam. The memory of Lilith, however, was continued through the centuries with a variety of interpretations. In medieval Europe she was pictured as a ‘she-monster’ who averged herself by eating the flesh of children.

[text: unknown source]

Images of Lilith:

Sexualisation of Survival.

Art is, for Deleuze, the extension of the architectural imperative to organise the space of the earth…This roots art not in the creativity of mankind but rather in a superfluousness of nature…It roots art in the natural and in the animal, in the most primitive and sexualised of evolutionary residues in man’s animal heritage. Art is evolutionary, in the sense that it coincides with and harnesses evolutionary accomplishments into avenues of expression that no longer have anything to do with survival. Art hijacks survival impulses and transforms them through the vagaries and intensifications posed by sexuality, deranging them into a new order, a new practice. Art is the sexualisation of survival or, equally, sexuality is the rendering artistic, the exploration of the excessiveness, of nature.

[Excerpt from "Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth" by Elizabeth Grosz, 2008]

Images: by Karl Blossfeldt, courtesy of www.butdoesitfloat.com

Gilles Deleuze:

Crossing through chaos: not to explain or interpret it, but simply to cross it, from one end to the other, in a passage that orders the planes, the landscapes, the localisations, but which leaves the chaos to close back in upon itself, like the sea washing over the wake of a ship.



[image: Tim Hawkinson "Moebius Ship" 2006]

Jeanette Winterson

Let me penetrate you. I am the archaeologist of tombs. I would devote my life to marking your passageways,the entrances and exists of that impressive mausoleum your body.
How tight and secret are the funnels and wells Of youth and health.
A wriggling finger can hardly detect the start of an antechamber,
much less push through to the wide aqueous halls that hide womb, gut and brain.
In the old or ill, the nostrils flare,
the eye sockets make deep pools of request.
The mouth slackens,
the teeth fall from the first line of defence.
Even the ears enlarge like trumpets.
The body is making way for worms.

[Artwork is by Anish Kapoor, image courtesy of http://gaudionbowerbank.wordpress.com]