Hartmut Bohme A Journey into the Body and Beyond. |
| To Stone: the Ritual of Death and Rebirth |
| One important project in which work with
natural materials and self-explorative Body Art intertwine, is the action
To Stone (1993).
In this project, Alicja Zebrowska created a hollowed-out sandstone block
about two meters long and sixty centimeters high and wide. The block was
divided lengthweise, and the top part was divided into cight horizontal
segments. The stone was left unpolished and relatively rough and was not
cleanly cut into pieces, but cracked and split. In this manner an archaic
sarcophagus was created. As a matter of fact, the stone block fulfed this function in a literal sensc. It ate flesh, namely, the body of the artist. Alicja Zebrowska was bedded down, naked, in the sarcophagus. Then, the strone coffin was covered sucessively with lid segments. The timing of the action was determined by physical processes. The sarcophagus was first warmed to 37o Celsius, the temperature of the human body. When the temperature of the stone had sunk beneath 36o Celsius after about thirly minutes, the action was ended, and the artist was freed from the stone grave. The 'work' is not the stone grave, but the action, during which the artist is intered, lies buried, and is frecd. Alicja Zebrowska exposes herself here to the experience of the "little death". This ritual is practised in many cultures and also plays an important roll in alchemy in the Nigredo - blackness/blackening. Il means not only exposure to the blackness of death, the darkness before birth and before all creation, but also the symbolic transformation back into anorganic material. The flesh-eating stone (gr. Sarcophag) turns flesh to stone. Alicja Zebrowska turns herself, so to speak, into a fossil, into stone. She exposes her organic body, the body of Eros, to what Sigmund Freud calls the death drive - the return to an anorganic state. Stone is the absolute opposite of the human body, but we know myths, in which the human race is created out of stone. In the Greek version of the flood legend, Deucalion and Pyrcha, the only survivors, arc told by the oracle to throw stones backwards over their shoulders in a sacred, sacrifical ritual. The new human race is thus created. Pindar and Ovid, for example, call humans for this reason the "hard race" (genus durum). And stories of people with "a heart of stone", which stands for their coldness and lack of pity, can be found almost all over the world. Many myths revolve around stone statues come to life. Since Pygmalion, the dream of art is to create a living work out of stone. The ritual Alicja Zebrowska executes here knows, that animation is always reanimation. This means, that it must be preceded by a mortification (like the deluge). In daily life, we would call it experiencing and surviving a crisis. Art is both. It is an animation, that must be preceded by a mortification. This means that only one who is willing to go through death (the Nigredo) can experience the wonder brought about by art, when it places producers or recipients into the manifestness of the living. The return to the state of stone and rigidity, thy symbolic mortification, is the prerequiste for an animation, that reconnects us to the anima mundi, the breath of life. Two moments in this installation maintain connections to life. The first is breath, the anima, the second, warmth. Enclosed by the sone uterus, the artist lies naked and bare as an unborn child surrounded by human warmth. Cut off from all sensorimotor stimulation, she feels the fundamental rhythms of life, systole and diastole, inhaling and exhaling, the rhythm recognized by Goethe to be the elemental polarity of organic life. These two moments, which I call the symbolic umbilical cord, turn the action in its entirety into a ritual of death and rebirth. What we call life is a conglomeration of both. Thus, the ritual death of the artist is an atempt to reconnect to the fundaments of life. Sigmund Freud called this return to an anorganic state the death drive. The death drive is perhaps the most mysterious and objectionable aspect of his work. This idea probably did not arise out of insight into the rhythm of animation and mortification. Most likely, it was influenced from afar by the law of entropy, of heat death, which in the latter part of the nineteenth century was found more and more fascinating. Alicja Zebrowska's aesthetic experiment refers to this law. The process of warming the sarcophagus to the temperature of the human body, through which it becomes a uterus instead of a flesh-eater, and its cooling down show, that all material and symbolic procedures we undertake, and, especially, the rhythm of life, of animation and mortification, are tied to a circulation of energy, which creates the basis for the warmth necessary for life. When the level of warmth falls naturally in the installation, this not only leads to the 'end' of the action. It is also a symbolic reminder of the entropic end, in which all energy is locked in an irreversible state - heat death. It is characteristic for Alicja Zebrowska, that she combines Body Art with cosmological dimensions and with the experience of antropological extremes. In much the same manner, Trans-Fero confronted the dimensions of human semiosis with the chronologically unfathomable dimensions of carth history. One is reminded of Novalis, whose romantic art consisted of carth history. One is reminded of Novalis, whosc romantic art consisted of an exploration of the correspondances between the physical space of the body and cosmic space, between minute human dimensions of time and the time of the world. Through this, Novalis could formulate his peculiar dictum, that the body is also a "Cosmometer". This could be the caption of many of Alicja Zebrowska' s installations, as well. |