Mark Jackson
Votive, in its dictionary definition,
refers to something made or offered on the
basis of a vow. In Catholicism, since the
Middle Ages, votive has been associated with
the offering of a simulation of body parts
as intercession for those with an illness
afflicting those body parts. More generally,
votive offerings may relate to the adoration
of body parts as metynomic of the sacred bodies
of saints, martyrs, the Virgin or Jesus Christ.
Votive itself is derived from the now rare
usage of the English "vote" that
means a vow, solemn promise or undertaking.
It was on the basis of this once common usage
that the word "vote" adopted its
more familiar coinage with respect to the
right or privilege to exercise suffrage.
This essay maintains a slippage
between this more archaic reading of the act
constituting a vote and the more familiar
reading associated with the national sovereignty
we associate with the Enlightenment's
social contract. In the principle of universal
suffrage, on the basis of universal reason
and a general will, lies the logical ground
for the death of God. Reason and self-consciousness
transform the condition or possibility of
the promise or vow: from sacred oath to universal
law with its implied disavowal of the sacred
in general.
This double reading of "vote"
is explored within two broad registers: those
of sovereignty and singularity. Sovereignty
is the name given to the concern with legitimate
foundation to law. This foundation may variously
be the belief in a sacred God, allegiance
to a monarch and, in the modern nation state,
individuated and inalienable right. An analysis
which postulates the loss and reinscription
of the sacred in modern forms of sovereignty
can be derived from the writings of both D.A.F.
de Sade and Georges Bataille. De Sade engages
with religion, sexuality and their transgression,
as an attempt to relocate the notion of community
as avowal of the sacred.
If Sadean and Bataillean sovereignty
pose a challenge to the foundation of law,
singularity is the name given to the challenge
they pose to modernity's absolute and
autonomous individual epitomised in a liberal
democratic notion of integral selfhood. Singular
being is the locus for the ecstatic, pivotal
to Bataille's notion of the sacred. For
Bataille, this sacred was an unleashing of
passions, and eroticism was a vehicle that
made visibile this sacred and ecstatic singularity
of being. It is for this reason that Bataille's
erotic tales (as with Story of the Eye, Blue
of Noon) need to be read in conjunction with
his "philosophical" tracts (as with
Inner Experience, Eroticism). Indeed, the
opening sentence to Bataille's discussion
of D.A.F. de Sade in Eroticism brings the
entire series of concerns into relief: "There
is nothing in our world to parallel the capricious
excitement of a crowd obeying impulses of
violence with acute sensitivity and unamenable
to reason." [1]
If sovereignty marks a new relation to law
that invokes the sacred as a violent overturning
of reason by passion, this relation is enacted
by a being whose relations to others is constituted
by bodily excess that defies reason in its
pursuit of intense pleasure.
We see this with Bataille, in
his Documents dictionary under the headings
"Abattoir" and "Museum".
He finds a complex, twisted relation between
them that intimately links religion and the
work of art to violence and sacred horror.
Classical temples were the coincident sites
for both prayer and animal slaughter. As Denis
Hollier suggests, Bataille recognises the
abattoir as a site of sacred horror, an unconscious
religion. [2] This
site is cursed and quarantined. Opposed to
this for Bataille is the museum, that other
site for a Sunday sojourn. In particular,
Bataille is thinking here of the Louvre as
epitomising the fact that at the heart of
beauty is blood and terror. As Hollier suggests
so aptly, "Those who took refuge in their
own unconscious unseemliness when faced with
sacrificial butchering, those who opposed
their own proper ugliness to the expropriating
ugliness of butchering, those who could not
bear the image of decomposition reflected
to them by the slaughterhouses go to museums
to compose themselves again." [3]
The exhibition Votive engages
this slippery territory between promise and
perdition, beauty and violence, religion and
sexuality, the museum and the slaughterhouse,
their stakes and their consequences. Each
of the works in Votive explicitly references
aspects of religion, religious practice or
iconography, and in each work there is some
degree of ambiguity hovering between avowal
and disavowal, between the solemnity of a
promise and an outrage directed at that solemnity.
If our Western tradition has at one time or
another posed religion, art or sex as successive
guarantors of community, we find again something
that touches on the question of votive. As
Bataille suggests concerning Sade, "pleasure
is paradox" which we might begin to understand
in terms of sovereign singularity presenting
a twisting of the movement between avowal
and disavowal. In this text on votive, this
is explored in relation to the art works and
a complex knotting of religion, sexuality
and transgression.
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Pierre
et Gilles Le Jeune Marquis-Salvatore
Caputo, 1994
copy; Pierre et Gilles. Courtesy Galerie
Jerome de Noirmont, Paris
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click on image to enlarge
Disavowal
To sacrifice God for the Nothing
- this paradoxical mystery of the final
cruelty was reserved for the generation that
is now coming up: all of us already know something
of this. [4]
The condition of this exhibition
is then one of sacral ecstasy, an ambiguous
site somewhere between the promise and the
law, between passions and reason, and between
the slaughterhouse and the museum. The challenge
of the work in this exhibition is to establish
some relation between these shifting terms.
The concept of morose delectation, the movement
of the soul by which it turns voluntarily
towards images of forbidden carnal or spiritual
acts in order to linger in contemplation of
them, is one that may provide a connection.
According to Pierre Klossowski, de Sade committed
himself to writing on rather than acting out
perversion. [5]
Writing as the making absent of the act doubles
a scene of delectation in the ambiguity towards
avowal and disavowal. This is the crisis of
morose delectation in its conjuring up of
the illicit: at what precise moment does it
promise to recognise carnality for what it
is or for what it isn't? In this way
it can be connected to the ambiguity and paradox
found in the work of art, the horizon Bataille
circumscribed as the violence that needs to
be recognised in beauty, or carnality repressed
by the fetish of religion.
Equally, morose delectation
marks the ruinous movement of time when the
soul, promised for the time of God, no longer
adheres to the time of maturation in prayer,
but rather fixates on carnal images whenever
they present themselves. This is reverie for
a radical absence, for a prolonged refusal
of the thing itself. Fidelity to the act,
avowal of the thing in its absence, affirms
an act of faith. Mingled with this is a radical
disavowal, exasperating oneself in the prolongation
of absence by approaching the thing's
image. Reverie and exasperation mark the pleasure
and pain of time itself, where time is the
prolongation of the deferral of being with
God. This amounts to an unresolvable ambivalence,
or bind, of accession and refusal in the one
act that would be called faith. And it is,
perhaps, this economy of pleasure and exasperation
that underscores Votive.
Pierre et Gilles establish this
ambivalence directly. They are, perhaps, the
most notorious of the five artists in Votive.
[6] The references
in this series of works are clear: religious
icons, saints, martyrs, wounds, blood and
carnality, mobilised in the mid 1990s as much
for a politics of sexuality as for gallery
voyeurism. We should be aware of a consistency
indicated in the titles of their works: Sainte
Viviane-Mauriel Moreno (1990), Sainte-Lazare-Alexis
Lemoine (1988), Saint-André- Jean-Paul
Izquiero (1988). What equivalence is being
given here to the image as reverie and to
the image as portrait? Two encounters of absence
and ambiguity hover between these positions.
Exposition in the works of Pierre et Gilles
lies between a scene and a name, not in juxtaposition
of a real name to a fictional scene, but the
doubling of an absence: the image of a body
that acts and a reverie that prolongs the
absence of that carnal act. It is not that
the scene is simply a supplement that frames
or supports a carnal reverie taking place
elsewhere with that real body of Mauriel Moreno
or Alexis Lemoine. Rather, it is the movement
between this image and supplemental frame,
which alerts us to the twisting of the slippage
between avowal and disavowal. [7]
In contrast, Megan Jenkinson
is all the more explicit. Her work of seven
sets of bracket-shaped images facing each
other across a space, In Parenthesis (2001),
alerts us more palpably to the Sadean strategy
for composition. If Pierre et Gilles are coy
in their nostalgia for what is absent, Jenkinson
images the excising of passionate acts directly.
Her work demonstrates a radical absenting
of the object. She uses the ritual of the
Catholic Eucharist to establish the scene.
The wafer host, sacred Body of Christ, is
broken in half, symbolic of the breaking of
Christ's body. This break marks a multiplication
that repeats the perplexing conundrum of the
individual and the community. The parenthetical
structure of the artwork exposes this scene.
The images themselves, in as much as one begins
to read between the left hand and the right
hand, are a ruse. Their presentation is made
only in order that we may see and avoid the
nothing that is literally their ground. This
clever arrangement in their fabrication diverts
us from recognising what is truly present:
the excessiveness of whatever is being bracketed
is pure possibility itself. It is as if the
brackets themselves are bracketed (out).
The text that lies below the
brackets is a repetition of this scene of
absence. Here exasperation at the deferment
of the possible is repeated in the misrecognition
of the inscription in New English that can
only be read with difficulty. Thus the parenthesis
is presented as both image and text, to become
a reverie on the act of parenthesis itself.
To place in parentheses is neither to place
aside in order to excise, nor to secrete to
an interior, as the murmur of what should
truly have been said. It is to describe a
hovering between inscription and what one
could call excription, the ecstatic excessiveness
of inscription at its limits. [8]
We are reinforcing here an analysis
made earlier with respect to Pierre et Gilles
concerning the location of that supplement
to a work that finds itself neither wholly
within nor simply on its margin as a frame.
Parenthesis enacts such an ambiguity and thereby
draws around itself the uncertainty we associate
with loss of contextual definition, thereby
contaminating meaning with an excessiveness.
For Jenkinson such excessiveness is the blankness
of the wall traced or marked repeatedly by
the serial parethetical structure.
This structure presents two
lines of force. On the one hand, it engages
the conditions for seeing and speaking, in
as much as image and text are discernible
and related. On the other hand, it engages
us in the limits to seeing and speaking as
we come to resolve the dilemma of the work
as punctuation, and the excesses opened by
a work that dwells on an absence. In the context
of the sacred and the sexual, absence would
point to the recognition of trauma as the
ecstatic which is never in itself representable.
The brackets are the meeting-point of these
two lines of force. They are the excised image
in two halves: the body bifurcated according
to a doubling suggestive of the co-mingling
of the sacred and the profane.
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Pierre
et Gilles Saint-Lazare-Alexis Lemoine,
1988
© Pierre et Gilles. Courtesy Galerie
Jerome de Noirmont, Paris.
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click on image to enlarge
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