Pig people occur in Homer’s Odyssey. In the tenth book, when Odysseus’s men are transformed by the sorceress Circe. “Grunting, their bodies covered with bristles, they looked just like pigs,” we are told, “but their minds were intact.” This episode, one of the most famous in the Odyssey, is embedded in a layer of other episodes with fairy-tale qualities – Odysseus is given a bag full of blustering winds for his passage home, which the crew, thinking it contains a treasure, refrain from opening until their home harbor is in sight, thereby blowing them back where they came from – and which moreover seem to stem from some precivilizational era of history, the six sons of the king, for instance, marrying their six sisters, and some of the crew not only being killed but eaten too. Such transgressive behavior, quite unthinkable in our day and age, where incest and the consumption of human flesh are among our strongest taboos, encounters another kind of transgressive behavior at Circe’s house in the woods, where lions and wolves behave against their nature, as civilized creatures: “These beasts did not attack my men, but stood on their hind legs and wagged their long tails.” The men are enticed into the house and turned into pigs, they look like swine, nine or ten years old, we are told. Odysseus rescues them, they become men again, but when they gather at the ship they undergo yet another metamorphosis, another bestial transformation, this time in language, in the form of a metaphor:
I went to the shore and found my crew there
Wailing and crying beside our sailing ship.
When they saw me they were like farmyard calves
Around a herd of cows returning to the yard.
The calves bolt from their pens and run friskily
Around their mothers, lowing and mooing.
That’s how my men thronged around me
When they saw me coming.
The Odyssey is a book of transformations, and the impression it leaves is of an unfinished world, a world in the making, fluid and open, interfacing with the animal kingdom but also the kingdom of death and the kingdom of the gods, and the humans in that world seem unfinished too, as when Odysseus speaks to his heart and asks it to beat more slowly, as if the heart were not an intimate part of him but something inhabiting his body, with its own separate will and life. The great contrast to the Odyssey, its antithesis, has to be the Book of Leviticus, a text quite as archaic and which has to do solely with laying down boundaries, establishing categories, defining and identifying the relationship of culture to nature, telling us what things belong together and what things absolutely do not. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, says the Lord, and thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed, neither shall a garment mingled of linen and wool come upon thee. It’s all about what may be put into the body –
And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls, they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the osprey, and the vulture and the kite after his kind; every raven after his kind; and the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, and the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you. Yet these may ye eat of every creeping flying thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth
– and what comes out of the body, the semen of the man, the menstrual blood of the woman, these things are unclean and are to be dealt with by measures accounted for in detail. And it’s about who we can have sex with and who we can’t. If the first two books of the Pentateuch, Genesis and Exodus, tell us how the material world was created, Leviticus tells us how the social world was created, a world in which transgression of the categories is no longer possible, or at least is deemed to be undesirable. The boundaries of man interface on the one hand with the holy and the spiritual, on the other with nature, which man may access only by way of certain relatively simple systems, everything which falls outside those systems being a threat. Any transformation, any trangression is not only undesirable, not only a source of horror, but of evil; hence the devil figure of folk mythology with the bestial attributes of horns and hooves, hence the witches who turned into cats, men who turned into wolves, men who drank blood like the animals and did not die. Popular culture still revels in these archaic transgressions, which in our totally rationalized universe, where everything down to the smallest atom has been mapped and thereby conquered, no longer present any serious threat and yet remain associated with primeval horror, in that we make use of them for our entertainment – entertainment being nothing but a space in which we can allow ourselves to feel the strongest emotions without obligation. Love, excitement, fright – pretend emotions in a pretend world. As true of fairy tales as of films and computer games. Art belongs in the same realm, it too setting up a pretend world – a painting is not the real world, a photograph is not the real world, a poem is not the real world, all are representations only – its trangressions are not real either, but representations of transgression; nevertheless, art imposes its own obligations, at least if it’s worthy of the name, because what art can do is to enter into the space where the world, our world of categories, is established, the very space where its creation occurs, again and again, for every one of us creates our own world and our own identity, however obscurely, this being our task, given to us at birth, from the moment we leave the biological darkness and enter the light of the social world we take it upon ourselves and pursue it, applying ourselves throughout our lives, and then in death we depart, and only the body remains, until it too, devoured by worms and insects, pervaded by bacteria and gasses, decomposes and is transformed into soil.
Cindy Sherman’s mid-80s series of photographs identifies with the fairy tale and its singular tone, its theme being transformation and the human shadowland. Whether her pig person is a nod toward the human swine in the Odyssey, or perhaps is to be taken as an American Pan, are matters open to conjecture and essentially of no importance; what is important is that the image touches on both these notions in our culture, blowing their dust into the air, posing their questions anew, for us. That Sherman presents those questions to us in our modern age is meaningful, because forms become obscured when we have looked at them long enough; habit, the great obscurer, is the enemy of insight. Yet the fairy tale is not dangerous, it too is a form of control, and if the pig’s snout in the human face is a monstrosity, it does not repel us, for fairy tales do not repel, they draw us toward them. The same is true of the giant woman with her monstrous tongue, and the woman with blood in her mouth. In the same series, however, one picture sticks out from the rest. Untitled #155 depicts a female figure lying prone on a forest floor, upper body covered by green foliage, lower body, the focal point of the picture, naked. The face, of which only the upper part is visible, is red, and the figure’s gaze is directed out of the frame. Autumnal leaves are scattered about the ground, and in the lower frame, at the figure’s grubby feet, is a snake. The most striking part of the picture, the part the viewer sees first, is the woman’s backside, which is made of plastic, an artificial body part, a prosthesis of a kind, or a mask, and then the figure’s hair, which is clearly a wig, whereas the rest of the body seems to be of flesh and blood. The snake is barely visible at first sight, merging with the earth on which it is placed, exisiting only at the periphery of what is happening in the picture as a whole. The motif, a female backside and a snake, is reminiscent of Francesca Woodman’s photograph in which she presents herself naked on her stomach next to a bowl with an eel in it, and since this explicit motif is so unusual it seems plausible that Cindy Sherman was inspired by Woodman’s photograph, though without this being significant in any other way, for the tension in her own picture is radically different, primarily because of the figure being put together from plastic, which is nonhuman (but
rendered human-like), and human flesh, thereby bringing in and juxtaposing elements belonging to quite different realms of association. Both the pose itself, a woman lying on her stomach with her backside in the air, her face turned toward the photographer, and the angle, slightly from above, are standard in pornography. But the object of lust, this female backside, is made of plastic, and what effect does that have on the viewer’s desire? And why is the woman’s upper body covered in green foliage? Has she covered herself up? Why then not the rest of her body too? Or has the foliage grown over her, the way it would in the case of a corpse? The soil, the red and green leaves, this is nature, into which the body eventually will dissolve. And the snake, is this the biblical serpent from the fall of man, or is it simply a snake, a creature of the forest, nature as nature? Or does it point to penetration and thereby transgression of the boundary between human and animal? And what is the human, is it the artificial, present in the pose and the plastic, which is to say in the superficial transformation, or is it the flesh that shall be soil?
The image is a world away from fairy tale, for what we see is no mythological transformation, into an animal or an ogre, there is no mysterious other world, no, what we see is a human being transformed into a human being, a body part transformed into the same body part. From the organic to the nonorganic, from the natural to the artificial, from the living to the dead, but within the realm of likeness, the almost identical, this is the line of transformation and it leads straight into our present-day world that so cultivates the superficial.
Right from her breakthrough work Untitled Film Stills, a series of more than seventy photographs produced between 1977 and 1980, the visible part of our identity, its surface, has been Sherman’s theme. Her film stills are remarkably alike, showing a single female figure alone in a room or a public space, pictured in the midst of some action whose more specific nature is indicated by her pose or a few props, and yet they are all distinctly different: the woman is dark haired, fair haired, long haired, short haired; she is wearing a dress, a skirt, trousers, panties, a blouse, a T-shirt, a shirt, a robe, a sweater, a nightdress, a swimsuit; she has on a hat, sunglasses, glasses, goggles, low-heeled shoes, high-heeled shoes, pumps, boots; she is smoking, resting, weeping; she is standing in a kitchen, on a veranda, in front of the mirror in a bathroom, on a sandy plain, in a garden, outside a church, at a railway station, in a doorway, in front of a skyscraper; she is in bed, at the library, by the sea, in a gateway, a corridor, a window, a bedroom, a living room; she is wading in a stream, sitting on a bench in the woods, standing alone in the dark with a suitcase next to her at the side of a road. Looking at all these pictures one after another is like stepping into another world; something about them makes them connected, despite the settings being as varied as an American city and a clearing in a forest, an ocean and a living room. What kind of a world is it? Although everything about the photos is realistic in the sense that the women are clearly women of flesh and blood, and the surroundings are real places in the world, there is something unreal about them all, as if the women they depict and the places in which they are depicted do not in fact exist but are fictional.
What makes them seem fictional? Or, put differently, what separates these situations from “real” situations, these women from “real” women? If we look at the work of one of the last century’s greatest photographers, August Sander, and in particular his series Antlitz der Zeit, which translates as Face of our Time, or perhaps Faces in Time, comprising portraits of nameless people from the first decades of the twentieth century, the difference to Sherman’s pictures is striking. Although these people stand and pose for the photographer, thereby inviting a variety of cultural assumptions, and although they are unnamed, simply faces and bodies, there is never any doubt that what we see is real and authentic, the people in the photographs and the world in which they are depicted existed at that point in time. Even the girl looking out the window of a fairground caravan, perhaps the photo that comes closest to Sherman’s universe, even she is definitely real: a real girl in the real world, as opposed to the imaginary world of Sherman’s pictures.
In Sander’s photographs the camera suspends time, and what we see is the suspended moment. That moment does not exist for us, it is in a certain sense artificial, reachable only by mechanical means, but these mechanical means do not interact with reality, the only thing they do is capture light as it was in a certain place at a certain moment in time. In most of Sherman’s film stills, time looks like it was suspended even before the camera suspended it again; the women are fixed in time and space, the reality they inhabit is a photographic reality only, a separate world in which they exist and whose logic they follow, a place where no movement is possible other than frozen imitations of movement. And whereas the people in Sander’s pictures are types belonging to various classes of society at that time, and dress and behave accordingly, Sherman’s types are of a different order, not real types but types as they are depicted in films. In other words, everything in Sander’s photographs traces back to reality, whereas everything in Sherman’s photographs traces back to representations of reality. Film mimics reality, Sherman’s images mimic the mimicking and are thereby a third-order representation. It is as if all names, even the possibility of names, names of places and names of people, have been polished away in the transformation: we are in Anonymia, not far from the Republic of Dreams. The world in which we spend increasingly large portions of our time did not exist, or was only in the making when Sander took his photographs.
If we suppose that the formation of the self takes place at the intersection of the biological and social spheres, the latter was quite differently constrained a hundred years ago when Sander produced his photographs than it is today. The social roles into which people were born were fewer, the choices between them practically nonexistent. My own grandparents from Norway’s rural Vestlandet did not choose the lives they led, they were smallholders and looked and behaved like their parents and their parents’ parents before them; in day-to-day life they went about in work clothes, on Sundays and public holidays they wore the best they had, and the life they led etched itself into their faces and took its toll on their bodies. Not until my mother’s generation, those who were born around the time of the Second World War, did the great world of images begin to open, albeit only slightly, as American film stars and pop idols of the 1950s began to appear in magazines, after which a tidal wave of public education brought with it a quite unprecedented spectrum of possibilities for the kind of life that might be available to a young person regardless of background. The shift that occurred was radical, its nature can be glimpsed if we compare Sander’s portraits with Sherman’s, where the same figure in Sherman’s photos seems to slide in and out of different identities, as if the connection between identity and the self suddenly was severed and both set free. Untitled Film Stills is steeped in the new postwar reality, the “I” no longer struggling to keep itself afloat, but submitting and drowning in the flow of nondescript personality prototypes. In Untitled Film Stills, the one does not exist, only the other exists, the ties with reality have been cut, the women are nameless – if they resemble anyone, they resemble women with fictional names, in films we remember only vaguely – the places are nameless, and the images themselves have only a number. Everything is recognizable, but impossible to date, impossible to locate, impossible to identify.
If Sherman’s film stills plot the surface of the anonymous and her fairy-tale photos plumb its depths, the repertoires evident in both series captured by trawling our collective flow of images, the work that followed in the late 80s and early 90s saw Sherman take the theme up a notch, creating a nightmarish space entirely devoid of life, populated only by human-like dolls and grotesquely put-together body parts of plastic, as well as images of human waste such as vomit. It is impossible to look at these photographs without being filled with a sense of disgust, they are repulsive and foul, Untitled #263 for instance, from 1992
, depicting the lower part of a female body, genitals covered by a thick mat of pubic hair, legs severed at the thigh, joined together with the lower part of a male body, genitals likewise exposed, legs likewise severed, in such a way that the female stumps point down, the male up. It looks like they have grown together and are one and the same part – but of what? Next to the female section lies a female doll’s head, next to the male section a male doll’s head. A string that looks like it belongs to a tampon hangs from the female vagina, and the head of the male penis is adorned with a metal ring.
Why is this repulsive? A human being with the snout of a pig is in some way alluring, whereas the female and male genitals joined together in Sherman’s photograph are almost impossible to look at, even though both elements are familiar and human, all of us have them, and they are brought together in the image as they are also brought together in sexual intercourse, something the vast majority of us find pleasurable. Nevertheless, breaking down the boundary between female and male in this way seems to involve more resistance than it does between humans and animals. But what Sherman’s image brings together is not the female and the male as such, the cultural conceptions all of us recognize, but the concrete, physical, and bodily aspects of gender, and it is these two levels – the sexes as social reality, able to be brought together, blended, and altered, and the sexes as physical reality, unable to be brought together – that meet in this photograph in a simple and yet highly complex way, for the image is itself a picture, a flat surface, and what it depicts is not human, does not belong to the living, but is an inorganic imitation of it. What we have then is a kind of triple fiction, firstly in the body parts and the way they imitate reality, secondly in their juxtaposition, thirdly in the depiction. The odd thing is that these layers of artificiality do not create distance, which would exclude our emotional reaction, but rather intensify it.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 3