making myself a monster: self-portraiture as teratological specimen

8/2/2019 Making Myself a Monster: self-portraiture as teratological specimen

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Making myself a Monster: Self-portraiture as teratological

specimen.

Lisa Temple-Cox

Abstract:This paper will broadly describe the processes, both material and

philosophical, behind my recent experiments in self-portraiture, and make the link

between the anatomical medical specimen and my practice as an artist. I began

with the question: what is the attraction and repulsion engendered by these pickled

monsters, and what continues to draw people to see them? Through the rise of

anatomical science, and surgeons such as John Hunter, there came about a notion

of the proper body, which by definition then presupposes a monstrous other, the

body that is not proper is aberrant, repulsive but nonetheless human, and ofourselves. It may be this connection to ourselves, recognisable through the

distorting curve of the specimen jar, which draws us to peer and flinch at theteratological specimen. My interest in this material led to visual research in

museums such as the Hunterian in London, renowned for its wet specimens, andthe pathological collections of deformed faces and pickled babies in the Muse

Dupuytren, Muse des Moulages, and the Muse Fragonard in Paris.

There is a continued fascination for both the accidents of nature, and the way

in which they are preserved and displayed: originally intended for didactic

purposes, interest in the medical specimen swings like a pendulum between thegutter of morbid fascination and the ponderings of pure knowledge. (Asma

2001) This paper describes how I used this aesthetic - and this compulsion - to

make work that references otherness, the uncanny, and abjection; and what effectthis has had on the viewer. During this process I had the uncanny experience of

coming face to face, so to speak, with my own head: and I was eventually able topresent myself to the viewer as an object, a specimen; to put my own head in a jar.

Key words: Medical gaze, medical museum, teratology, self-portrait, abject, other,

uncanny, self, wet specimen, moulage.

*****

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,


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Making Myself a Monster

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irreducible to the "proper body" in their singular, sometimes

startling difference1

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 Iconsidered 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 enormoussnake. 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

Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition in Brussels. It wasnt, 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 asvisitors clustered around the teratological specimens. This in stark

contrast to the rest of the exhibition where, by the end, most people


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felt an emotional anaesthesia3

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 Honor Fragonard (1732-99), whose Anatomised

Cavalier and dancing foetuses draw the gaze where Von Hagen'spreparations do not. Fragonard himself was denounced as a madman

for his pursuit of preservation. His ecorch 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 weretwo 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 asense that they were 'real'. Larger models warranted their own glass

bier. There is a part-body in the Deutsches-Hygiene Museumin

Dresden of a woman giving birth. It uses as its armature,

disturbingly, the deceased womans own pelvic bones. A number ofdisembodied 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 cherubsaround 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, removedfrom 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 thisintimate portion of disease or deformity.


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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 preservingjar 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 ofthe 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 Muse

Fragonard, the foetus is held

in position by a cord tied,

disturbingly, around its neck.

Image 2Sirenome, Lisa Temple-Cox 2010

I had this idea of toying with the purpose of the wet collection,namely that it should preserveI wanted to make work in which the


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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, however, 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 Imanaged 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.

Image 3Head Cast 1/Linconnue de la Seine, Lisa Temple-Cox 2010


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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 Mtter Museum, a noted

medical museum in Philadelphia, has daily visits from eagerschoolchildren 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 partfor me at leastfrom

the unique and recognisablehumanity 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.

Image 4sketch from the Muse Dupuytren, Lisa Temple-Cox 2010


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Peter the Great (1672-1725) was famously the possessor of a

notable wunderkammer. 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

Mtter Museum. It is not

on general display, but isdown 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 throughthe 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 pimpleson the colourless, sallow

cheek.

Image 5sketch from the Mtter Museum, Lisa Temple-Cox 2011

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


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nose straws and earplugs in place my face. Word had travelledaround 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 talkaboutme, 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' syndromefor 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 usingexpanded 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 myown 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.

Image 5head baby, Lisa Temple-Cox 2010


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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) alternativeversions 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

doppelgnger. Everyone felt that seeing me, for example, kiss myown 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 lifeand 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 anodyneas aspirin: it was the liquid that they were immersed in that should

reference this contrast between purity and abjection.Even the flat

back of my Asiatic head seemed less obvious in the plaster.

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 inwith lightsand proceeded tofill each jar up to the nose with fluidsmilk, wine, water and urine.


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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 inexplicabilityone could

envisage, it seemed, a head in a container that is head-sized, but thelack of head seemed to raise a deep feeling of unease.

Image 6Cabinet, Lisa Temple-Cox 2011


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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.

Notes:

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

3Taken from the chapter 'The limits of empathy' in Linke, Uli Touching theCorpse: the unmaking of memory in the body museum in Anthropology Today

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

4Taken 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.

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

Sophie. Lone Star Films, 2006


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Bibliography:

Asma, Stephen T. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: the Culture and Evolution

of Natural History Museums Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001

Benjamin Buchloch The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the

"Informe" and the AbjectOctober, Vol. 67, Winter 1994

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and other Tales Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008

Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katherine Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750

New York: Zone Books 2001Daukes, S. H. The Medical Museum London: The Wellcome Foundation, 1929

Foucaud de L'Espagnery, F. 'Trait du visage et de ses maladies cutanes:

considerations generale sur la face humaine'. Paris, 1855

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

Foucault, Michel The Order of Things London: Routledge, 2001

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

Jay, Martin Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in 20C French ThoughtBerkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994

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, 1982Linke, Uli Touching the Corpse: the unmaking of memory in the body museumin Anthropology Today Vol.21 No.5, October 2005: 13-19

Longacre, Jeffrey. Review ofMonstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, byPaul Youngquist. College Literature, 22 September 2005, University of Tulsa

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

Sawday, Jonathan The Body EmblazonedLondon: Routledge, 1996

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


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Serra, Richard Art and Censorship in Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed) Art and the Public

Sphere 1992

Zizek, Slavoj The Perverts Guide to the Cinema filmed by Fiennes, Sophie.

Lone Star Films, 2006

Lisa Temple-Cox is an independent researcher and artist based at Cuckoo FarmStudios in Essex. Current interests combine research and practice, in seeking to

explore the interstices of art and medicine through image and text.

making myself a monster: self-portraiture as teratological specimen

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