Strangers in a Strange Land: alienation, collaboration, and being Other

A reflection on last year's Outside exhibition at Cuckoo Farm – 'Outside 11: artist as Outsider” - an exercise in both collaborative and curatorial practices.

I came to this project - a cross-mentoring experience between an artist and a curator - as an artist interested in sharing my practice-based skill-set and experience as an exhibitor, and gaining experience of curatorial processes. However, from the very first meeting with curator and collaborator Katia Denysova, I realised that the concept she proposed - that we take the given title of the exhibition, 'Outside' and expand it to suggest the notion of being an outsider - chimed very much with a process that I had been exploring in my own practice: as with the protagonist of the book by Heinlein [1], I was coming to terms with my experience of being a stranger in a country I had previously considered my homeland.

There is a dialectic concerning racial identity, which is that the colonising power creates the native other: this dialectical conception suggests that the white European coloniser does not actually exist before his encounter with the native, and that this invention depends on its negative Other because “only through negation of that Other can it invent and maintain its own identity.”[2] I found this significant because I am not only the product of an expatriate colonial childhood, but the offspring of a mixed-race union between white coloniser and native other. The import of this background only became clear after repatriation to the UK: in retrospect, my early experiences at school in Essex can be read as precisely the attempts of my schoolmates to maintain their sense of self through assertion of my otherness. Things change: as a child, I worked hard to subscribe to what I considered the norm; as a young adult at art school, I celebrated my difference. Now, as an artist, I consider the implications of that enforced alterity, and what it might mean in terms of my practice.

Being part of Outside11:Artist as Outsider, I was intrigued by the idea that these effects might differ depending on whether the artist in question was an immigrant, or emigrant. In effect, the exhibition was one of migration, physical movement - migration being the process during which one becomes an outsider. To what extent does movement of physical self impact on one's creative self? I imagine that, during the process of coming to terms with one's new surroundings, a certain amount of collusion, negotiation - collaboration, even - both within one's self, and within one's new social ambit - is required. Collaborations are common among artists: sometimes whole bodies of work - a lifetime's practice - may be built around them. Familial connections are well known - Jake and Dinos Chapman, the Brothers Quay - and lifelong collaborations such as Gilbert and George, or Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt & Stuart Bailey). Upon relocating to Amsterdam in 1976, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic began a collaborative partnership with another immigrant, a West German artist known as Ulay. Both were interested in their individual cultural backgrounds, while becoming a collective being called 'the other'. After several years of collaborative work they decided to end their relationship, and chose, aptly, to do so by means of a journey, both spiritual and literal. Each walked the Great Wall of China, starting from opposite ends. After a migration of approximately 2500 km each, they met in the middle, shook hands, and said goodbye.

At the time of writing, Katia and I are some 2500 km apart, and communicating electronically. It is interesting to note that the reasons for my taking part in the cross-mentoring scheme – or at least, the outcomes that I expected – changed significantly over the course of a collaboration that extended much further than I expected. There was a shift from the overt outcomes, namely a sharing of professional skills, through the shared a common consensus of experience as outsiders ourselves. Both other, as women - Kristeva [3] would posit this merits an automatic cleaving from the invisible norm - both foreigners, geopolitically at a remove from the society of our fellows, be it studio group, university, or indeed continent.

As part of the exhibition programme it was decided to initiate a number of workshops led by participating artists working with marginalised members of the community. This, also, is a collaboration of sorts: that a group identifies itself as outsider enough to form bonds is a collaborative process; also, that they decide as a group to cooperate within the boundaries of a leader-participant dialectic. I went into HMP Chelmsford, running a workshop using a photo transfer process. This takes a fixed, static image – the photograph, which is a souvenir but also a fixer of memory - and reverses the image: additionally, the process of making it being variable, an element of entropy and chance is introduced which affects the outcomes. The irony of working with these inmates was not lost on me: I was there because they were, in the societal terms that we had defined, outsiders, but of course their status as such was defined by their being literally very much 'inside'.

Did the workshops go any way to achieving our putative aims - to educate, to integrate, to explore otherness? Probably not, no more than the exhibition as a whole did. To my mind this is not important: art was not, in this instance, intended as a tool for political or socio-cultural change. Participation may be the key word here, and, to return to my opening line, collaboration: between artist, curator, participant and audience.

The sense of being a stranger abroad was aptly summed up, in several different ways, by the work on show at Cuckoo Farm; not least in the subjective experience of the visitor. The site required that the viewer walk around, attempt to locate the beginning or end of what was effectively an illustrated story of a journey, to decide if these small perambulations had indeed a beginning, or end, or narrative of any kind beyond the simple experience of imagining it during the process of experiencing the work. Hope and faith, optimism, collaboration, and a shared interactive journey: not, perhaps, the themes that one might expect from a show intended to explore otherness and alienation. Rather, the work that emerged, alongside the public engagement process, had a sense of integration: cross-cultural education, without political didactism. In fact, the exhibition reflected, in some measure, the tenets of the cross-mentoring process - shared experiences across cultures, generations, and practices: sameness, not difference.

1:Heinlein, Robert Stranger in a Strange Land New York:Avon 1961

2:Hardt, Michael http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/mp3.htm

3:Kristeva, Julia Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection New York: Columbia University Press, 1982

Doing and Being

 “...the dialectic between surface and depth”

   This is the description, by Glenn Harcourt, of the shared interest between a film maker and the 2-dimensional images that he is attempting to capture in a 3-dimensional visual format. Written as a reflection on Werner Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', it resonated with something I have been thinking about recently: that is, the relationship between doing and being: or, doing or being.

   I had thought that the two were synonymous: that to do art was to be an artist, and that being an artist was all of one's existence and life. I am an artist, I make art: the work that I do is the thing that I am, that is all. But they are not the same, in the way that doing academic research is not the same as being an academic.

   These dualisms describe a cognitive gap between what one thinks of as one's self, and one's practice. Rauschenberg's famous, and oft misquoted (a sin I have been guilty of) comment about working in 'the gap between art and life' is seductive precisely because it describes a place between doing and being. An interstice between marks on a plane and the architecture of the space in which it resides or is created. This is a trope that I have been exploring, clumsily, for the last few years, without any real sense that I am close to succeeding. 

   Maybe that is why, while continuing to consider myself an artist, I have simply stopped making art.

   The difference between making work that occupies these interstices, and work that simply reflects an image or idea – be it figurative or abstract, two-dimensional or sculptural – may reside in this problematic interplay between surface and depth. Interpret this notion literally, or philosophically, as you will.

Making myself a Monster: self-portraiture as teratological specimen

   What is it that makes the objects and specimens of the medical museum so compelling and repelling in equal quantity? What is it about the malformations of the bottled monsters of the teratological specimen that draws our horrified and delighted attention? Since the birth of what is known in the west as modern medicine, the word "monstrosities" has been used to describe physical deformities, ‘irreducible to the "proper body" in their singular, sometimes startling difference’ [1] These accidents of nature suggest something other than the normal self, and yet they are not outside our selves or nature, but recognisably part of it. That sense of alteriety which gives such specimens their fascination and appeal is tied to the uncanniness that is born of strangeness within the familiar.

   I experienced this duality when, as a child, I arrived from an English boarding school in Malaysia to find that everything I had learnt about my 'mother country' was out of kilter. I thought that I was English, but found that I was in fact alien, other, in a country I considered home. Not only that, but I realised that the borders between normality and the monstrous were rigorously delineated here in a way which they had not been in Malaysia. There, in my Malay mother's village, the lines between what was 'real', and normal, and what was bizarre, uncanny, were much blurred. Monsters were all around: in the jungle, or in the corner shop: everybody knew someone who had too many fingers or toes – or someone whose uncle had been eaten by a ghost, or an enormous snake. All these experiences were equally valid. After trying to fit into the dull realism of Essex life, I began, as an artist, to revisit some of these ideas of the strangeness in familiarity, and at the same time began to explore the confusion inherent in my own sense of who I was. Roy Porter suggests that ‘our sense of self presupposes an understanding of our bodies.' [2] There had been a point, at school, when my interests were divided between art and biology: so I began to work from my own fascination for the body, and the medical collection.

   My adult interest in this material began after visiting Gunther Von Hagen’s' “Body Worlds” exhibition in Brussels. It wasn’t, in the end, the plastinated bodies that piqued my interest: rather it was a small display at the end of the exhibition of pre-plastination preservation techniques. In this darkened room there was a horrified fascination as visitors clustered around the teratological specimens. This in stark contrast to the rest of the exhibition where, by the end, most people felt an ‘emotional anaesthesia’ [3] occasioned by yet another bizarrely posed body, become as bland as a mannequin in some netherworld between science and art.   

   Yet his work was inspired by the preparations of Honoré Fragonard (1732-99), whose “Anatomised Cavalier” and dancing foetuses draw the gaze where Von Hagen's preparations do not. Fragonard himself was denounced as a madman for his pursuit of preservation. His ecorché “Man with a Mandible”, with its rolling glass eyes, is both a vision of a man horrified, and quite horrible in itself.

   When I began my research into the medical collection, there were two aesthetic avenues of medical preparation that I was looking at: the wet specimen, and the wax moulage. The use of the moulage came about to serve the needs of dermatological diagnostics, as the wet preparation did not preserve the colours of the skin well. More lifelike, the wax allowed for casts made from living subjects, and gave a three dimensional study which replaced the patient and did not decay. Smaller models were often placed in glass jars like the ones used for wet specimens – to further emphasise in the viewer a sense that they were 'real'. Larger models warranted their own glass bier. 

   There is a part-body in the Deutsches-Hygiene Museum in Dresden of a woman giving birth. It uses as its armature, disturbingly, the deceased woman’s own pelvic bones. A number of disembodied surgical hands float above the partially-dissected womb - all male, and neatly dressed at the wrists with white cuffs and dark suit sleeves, hovering above the anatomical Venus like cherubs around a Madonna.

   These wax moulages have a powerful effect, both when viewed individually and en masse: the largest collection is at the Hospital of St. Louis in Paris, and I defy anyone to remain unmoved by the ‘wall of syphilis’. All these body parts are surreally segregated, removed from the whole so that just the diseased part is on display, surrounded by a neat border of fabric: mounted on a black board like a specimen, one is not meant to imagine the whole, but focus on this intimate portion of disease or deformity.

    
This hyper-surreality of the moulage led me to experiment with casting my own face. The fragility of the mould resulted in my not being able to take many casts from it: however as the mould broke up, the casts began to resemble the deformities of the moulage – in this process I felt that I was taking the life mask through processes that referenced the effects of congenital accident or deformity, removing it from the body, taking it as part-feature, metonomous. I kept the casts of my slowly collapsing face colourless, and mounted them on coloured boards instead.

They made me reconsider myself in terms of that childhood experience of finding that I was an alien as much because of my skin colour as my post-colonial upbringing. How strange to be other in the country one thinks of as home: and an equally curious sensation, to see your own face disembodied. At this point I began to look again at the wet specimen, and specifically examples of heads and faces.

Wet specimens are body parts or a whole foetus preserved in fluid such as formalin or alcohol. They have been described as ‘objects between nature and representation, art and science’[4] The effect of seeing these aberrations, further distorted by the curve of the preserving jar, is truly uncanny. Freud, in his essay on the subject, recalls an occasion where he comes face to face with his own reflection in a train door, and momentarily mistakes it for someone else: not only that, but someone that he found unpleasant to look upon. This sense of something at once sinister but homely echoes in the correlation of preservation in jars; of bodies, or of fruit. This is particularly true of the teratological specimen. Here, the preserving jar acts as a pseudo-womb, the little monsters within floating placidly in the urine-coloured liquid as if awaiting the moment of birth.

Actually, this, while a poetic image, is not true: often the expression on their faces (if they have one) is anything but placid, and the illusion of the amnion is altogether ruined by the evidence of autopsy: the lack of a brain, large stitches across their heads, glass rods keeping them in position. In the case of the specimen known as 'sirenome' in the Musée Fragonard, the foetus is held in position by a cord tied, disturbingly, around its neck.

I had this idea of toying with the purpose of the wet collection, namely that it should preserve – I wanted to make work in which the heads, in their different materials, decayed, changed and altered in the sterile confinement of their container. The artist Marc Quinn made his head out of his own blood, perhaps the ultimate act of self-portraiture: I thought about using materials such as clay, wax, bread, shit, or fat, and then immersing the heads in liquids such as milk, urine, wine - even kombucha, a living liquid. Here I wanted to reverse the notion of the liquid in the jars acting as a preservative, and reference the familiarity of foodstuffs in the un-homelike environs of the laboratory. In order to do this properly, however, I first had to cast my own head.

Much of what we are, as humans, is determined by our appearance, and much of that, as a woman, is determined by hair. In order to truly face my Self, I realised that I had make my head naked. And so I shaved my head, and made my first uncomfortable discovery– that the back of my head was quite flat. This first head-casting was a two-part mould that involved the use of dental alginate, a pink rubbery substance that smelled, bizarrely, of mint. The alginate broke apart while being removed from my face and I managed to get only one cast from this distorted mould. Interestingly, having been researching life and death masks, this cast brought to mind a particularly famous death mask – that of L'inconnue de la Seine.

 At this point I decided to revisit my visual research in the museum.

   Interest in the medical collection, particularly for teratological specimens, straddles a line between science and sideshow. Early collections by surgeons later opened to public, and these displays further blurred borders between the gallery and the teaching museum. During my visits to the Hunterian and Wellcome in London, and the Dupuytren and Fragonard in Paris, I began to wonder - who is going to these collections? Not scientists any longer, but the curious and creative autodidact. The Mütter Museum, a noted medical museum in Philadelphia, has daily visits from eager schoolchildren and their teachers rather than medical professionals.

   In the Dupuytren, the only cabinet with lights is the teratological cabinet, where the double-headed kitten and goat nestle in jars side by side with the thoracopagus foetuses and other monstrosities. Each small corpse exhibits alongside its deformation a particular and individual appearance: their little faces angry, or vacant, indifferent. The Dupuytren also has two faces half eaten by cancers: part of their compulsion comes from the obvious and horrible disease, but part – for me at least – from the unique and recognisable humanity of each face: one with soft, receding hair floating silkily in the preserving fluid: one with dark brows and beard, and an arrogant twist to his lips.

   Peter the Great (1672-1725) was famously the possessor of a notable wunderkammer- after a visit to Leiden, he bought the entirety of Frederik Ruysch's collection  of anatomical preparations. His mania for specimens, among other drives, led him to execute his wife's lover, whose head was then preserved it in a jar; though in the interests of fairness, he did the same to his own lover. These bottled heads were later found by his grandson's wife, who remarked upon their youthful appearance before, sadly, having them buried.

There is a particularly macabre head in the Mütter Museum. It is not on general display, but is down in the cold storage of the wet room, in a jar held upright by a simple metal bookend. It is Negroid, and for some reason the eye has been rather brutally removed. It is cut in half, right through the delicate, pouting lips and weak chin; however, the particular horror and humanity that I found in this specimen was, for me, evinced by the collection of white-headed pimples on the colourless, sallow cheek.

   Armed with a visual cortex full of bottled horrors, I returned to the workshop determined to try again. This time, another colleague was finally intrigued enough by my bald head to make a three part mould, starting with the back of my head, then my chin and neck, and finally – nose straws and earplugs in place – my face. Word had travelled around the college, in light of my earlier attempt, and this casting was observed by a large group of fine art students, all happily making notes and taking photographs of my shiny Vaselined pate. I experienced on this occasion something strange: people were talking to me throughout this process, up until the point at which my face disappeared under the plaster. Suddenly, they ceased talking to me, and began to talk about me, like an object. I lay there, offered up for display like a medical Venus, listening to the chatter around me, as if I were suffering from 'locked-in' syndrome – for the first time I had the experience of moving from person to specimen.

   Apart from a brief moment of fear when the mould was momentarily stuck to my ears, this was a successful mould-making. The first cast I took from this mould was made using expanded latex, which resulted in a rubbery squashy head that I delighted in carrying around like a baby. The happily uncanny experience of coming face to face with my own face resulted in a number of inappropriate behaviours, such as sticking it up my jumper so the features protruded like an alien baby about to explode from my belly.

   Perhaps the Alien analogy is close to the effect I was experiencing: in the film Alien Resurrection, when Ripley enters the room full of rejected or malformed mutants in huge jars, she sees herself, repeated; the monstrous mother worse than the alien mother of earlier films in the horror of their sympathetic humanity. They are her, but they are not: they are further deformed by their failure to live up to their true monstrosity: she is ‘haunted by (these) alternative versions’ of herself. [5]

What interested me in my playing with the latex head was not only my reaction to my double, but others in seeing me with my doppelgänger. Everyone felt that seeing me, for example, kiss my own rubbery head, was wrong and repulsive in ways that they couldn't articulate. This is where I felt I began to tap into those primal reactions that were evoked by the bottled babies, through a reinterpretation of both the aesthetics of the teratological wet specimen and the facial cast or moulage.

Eventually I made a master mould which allowed for casting in a variety of materials. Having been earlier inspired by the plaster life and death masks in the Galton collection, I began to make a series of casts in plaster. By now, I was less interested in making the heads out of the abject materials that I had started with, after observing the uniformity of the plaster. The blank whiteness of it in contrast to my own skin was so 'other' in its lack of colour and featurelessness. So taken was I by the rows of blank white plaster heads that it seemed to me that the heads themselves should remain inert, white and anodyne as aspirin: it was the liquid that they were immersed in that should reference this contrast between purity and abjection. 

There was also something of a compulsion about repetition, similar to what I found when making multiples of my eyes or lips. The decapitation seemed peculiarly uncanny. Having commissioned a number of jars that were watertight and large enough to contain my head, I built a cabinet to put them in – with lights – and proceeded to fill each jar up to the nose with fluids – milk, wine, water and urine.

The cabinet took on a religious aspect as the fluids reflected the light like stained-glass, and seemed to create a space somewhere between museum and gallery, clinic and altar. The fluids themselves took on religious and transformative significances: the blood of Christ, the milk offered to Ganesh, the psychotropic reindeer urine imbibed by the shamen of Lapland. The jar containing water remained empty of a head, as I eventually determined this should be the 'control' jar. It was later remarked to me that the empty jar was more disturbing than the jars with heads in, as the absence seemed frighteningly more uncanny by dint of its inexplicability – one could envisage, it seemed, a head in a container that is head-sized, but the lack of head seemed to raise a deep feeling of unease.

In the end, the casting of my head did not result in work that was compelling in the way that the teratological specimens or moulages were: to my mind they evoked a different kind of horror: the juxtaposition of clean white plaster and rotting, foul liquids had the appearance of some sordid experiment gone awry. The work became instead a visual exploration of the way in which the museum specimen seems to reflect, in some measure, residues of the human: return the gaze of the spectator to create a deeper reflection, from object to abject, self to other, and back. Here, in the rows of heads colouring and dissolving in unnamed liquids, the artist becomes both subject and object.

All this serves, I hope, to connect the contemporary concerns of science with an unconscious atavism - a simultaneity of the pure and the profane, the proper and the monstrous. But to my mind I have only just begun the first step in a body of work which was inspired, originally, by a single desire: to put my own head in a jar.

1: Jeffrey Longacre, Review of Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, by

Paul Youngquist. College Literature, 22 September 2005, University of Tulsa.

2: Roy Porter, Flesh in the age of Reason London: Penguin, 2004:44

3: Taken from the chapter 'The limits of empathy' in Linke, Uli “Touching the

Corpse: the unmaking of memory in the body museum” in Anthropology Today

Vol.21 No.5, October 2005: 13-19

4: Taken from information sheet about the AHRC Research Network "The Culture

of Preservation", a series of workshops and lectures at UCL run by Petra Lange-

Berndt and Mechthild Fend, London May/June 2011.

5: From part 3 of Zizek, Slavoj The Perverts Guide to the Cinema filmed by Fiennes,

Sophie. Lone Star Films, 2006

Images:

1 'Man with a Mandible, Musée Fragonard, Paris

2 'moulage' clay and wood, Lisa Temple-Cox

3 'Sironeme', drawn from specimen in Musée Fragonard, Lisa Temple-Cox

4 face cast and death mask of L'inconnu de la Seine

5 face, drawn from specimen in Musée Dupuytren, Lisa Temple-Cox

6 'face baby'

7 'Cabinet', assemblage/installation, Lisa Temple-Cox


selected bibliograpy:

Alberti, Samuel J.M.M. Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth Century Britain Oxford:OUP 2011

Asma, Stephen T. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: the Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001

Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katherine Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 New York: Zone Books 2001

Daukes, S. H. The Medical Museum London: The Wellcome Foundation, 1929

Foucault, Michel The Birth of the Clinic London: Routledge, 1997

Freud, Sigmund “The uncanny”(1919) in Art and Literature London: Penguin, 1990

Knoppers, Laura L. and Landes, Joan B. (eds) Monstrous Bodies/political monstrosities in early modern Europe Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2004

Kristeva, Julia Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection New York: Columbia University Press, 1982

Linke, Uli “Touching the Corpse: the unmaking of memory in the body museum” in Anthropology Today Vol.21 No.5, October 2005: 13-19

Porter, Roy Flesh in the age of Reason London: Penguin, 2004

Sawday, Jonathan The Body Emblazoned London: Routledge, 1996

Schnalke, Thomas (Author) Spatschek, Kathy (Translator) Diseases in Wax: The History of the Medical Moulage Quintessence 1995

Zizek, Slavoj The Perverts Guide to the Cinema filmed by Fiennes, Sophie. Lone Star Films, 2006

The birth of my clinic - installation, work in progress

“The clinic was … the first attempt to order a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze” - Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic

There is an ‘order of things’ within the conceptual architecture of a space that exists, in potentia, in both clinic and altar. What is the relationship between these systems? Both have relevance to our exploration of self, during which we invariably encounter something primal, unconscious, alongside the scientific - here represented by the supposedly objective medical gaze.

We use art in our search for self, and art uses media that not only signify the body – flesh, blood, faeces -­ but invoke a sense of the abject: a separation of subject from object, a rejection of death. The aesthetic of the medical museum and its exhibits may have similar psychological effects on its visitors, containing specimens that simultaneously attract and repulse. This phobia or horror that, at the same time, exerts a kind of cathartic pleasure in its experience, may cause the viewer to reflect on the materiality of their own body.

Is this art that is merely a “materialist interpretation, infantile celebration of bodily fluids”?[1] Can the philosophy of abjection be applied to the anatomical specimen? Interest in this material “swings like a pendulum between the gutter of morbid fascination and the ponderings of “pure” knowledge.”[2]. The gaze of the viewer within the transformed gallery moves in the same way between science and religion, losing the ability that supposedly defines modern man: to separate and distinguish between these states.

In The Medical Museum, S.H. Daukes states that the eye must take first place: it is “the main avenue for diagnostic information”. Martin Jay notes that, “there can be few human interactions as subtle as the dialectic of the mutual gaze.”[3] In the casting of the face, however, the eyes of necessity remain closed, thus blurring the distinction between life mask and death mask, in much the same way that the preserving fluid and curve of the glass jar further distorts the teratological specimen. We submit ourselves to this medical gaze, reclassified by order of anatomo-clinical perception.

Our relationship with our bodies and selves is reflected in the mirror of the operating theatre. The theatre of medicine becomes the stage, the screen: the speculum becomes spectacle, the looking-glass of self turned outward. This narcissistic obsession with faciality may be a denigration of the knowledge of our mortality - or it may be an attempt to realise it materially.

The work shown is a visual exploration not only of the way in which the museum specimen can seem to reflect, in some measure, residues of the human, but return the gaze of the spectator to create a deeper reflection of self: from object to abject, self to other, and back. Here, the artist becomes both subject and object. Here are faces and eyes, made diseased and necrotic by the rough textures of the materials; rows of heads colouring and dissolving in unnamed liquids. All these serve to connect the contemporary concerns of science with an unconscious atavism - a simultaneity of the pure and the profane.

There must be a point, an interstice, between these modes of seeing, that can be inferred in the artwork, in the heterotopic space of the museum or gallery. If religion “separates… the sublime from the excremental” [4], so does symbolic order, represented by clinical science, also require the expulsion of the abject. There is a realm of sympathetic magic in the territory between form and misform: somewhere in these anachronistic juxtapositions of scientific paraphernalia and animistic object, the clinic and alter are revealed to be synonymous.

[1] Benjamin Buchloch The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the "Informe" and the Abject October, Vol. 67 (Winter, 1994) 

[2] Stephen T. Asma Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: the culture and evolution of natural history museums (2001) Oxford University Press

[3] Martin Jay Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in 20C French thought (1994) University of California Press.

[4] Alphonso Lingis Chichicastenango in Carolyn Gill (ed) Bataille: writing the sacred (1995) Routledge London