Hard Core Body Relics
Thomas Jocher's
Schwellkörper

 

 

The present topicality of the body and its representation, which is not just limited to art, is indicative of an ongoing reassessment of the subject in the wake of its modem and, above all, postmodern deconstruction. The return of the body implies, in semiotic terms, the return of the referent in a realm of signs that seems to be dominated by signifiers. Even if it is impossible to reintroduce a inscrutable notion of reality, certain experiences with painful consequences of a physical nature have forced us to once again turn our attention to the differences between discourses and their objects. (Even if it would be fatal to speak of a distinction or to aspire to one. For subjectivity in the sense of an inner retreat, still deemed feasible by large quarters of the painting of the eighties, is nothing but a precise reflection of the socially demanded, controllable privacy of the individual.)

To bring the referent, in this case, the body into play as a counterweight to the self-dynamic of speech and the autonomization of the simulation machinery can only imply an understanding of it as something problematic. This, in turn, points to the impossibility of mimetic models of representation, since the idea of a direct link between significant and signified has long been recognized as something illusionary. Talk of the body and, by extension, of the subject can only be productive to the extent that it takes into account its being conditioned by the political and social givers, which means not understanding it as its other. It is ultimately the interplay of scientific, moral, political and cultural discourses and its real interests to be specified in each instance on which the normative claims directed at the body and its image are based - from Aids to the gender role to plastic surgery and the technical reproduction of human life. Thus each form of essentialism claimed by body art of the sixties and seventies is excluded from the very outset. The reason why the body has still not been fully dissolved in the discourses dealing with it and why it continues to activate potentials of resistance lies in the limitations of its processing capacity. The psycho- physical budget as a temporal reservoir of active and reactive options shaped by the constant input- output processes of the structuring of the body-ego and the social- subject is inconceivable without irreconciliabilites brought on by interferences.

Characteristic of Thomas Jocher's Schwellkörper (cavernous bodies) is the reductionist scaling of corporeality to the purely material hardware of a mass that can be programmed or, inversely, the hard core of corporeal identity after all the social and psychological givens defining it have been pulled away. They also symbolize the multiplication of this hypothetic identity to an essentially uncompleted accumulation of minimally different partial bodies, each of which acts as if it were a complete and unique entity. The phantasm of identity is thus pursued ad absurdum in two senses, albeit with identity always appearing as an idealized image on the horizon. Here not just the fate of the body is at stake in the manipulative structure of control and claims to power of an institutionalized society. At issue is also the subject which sees itself as non-identical, as a place defined in processual terms, where the individual partial subjects or subject-fragments compete with each other over the succession of now vacant space. In this sense the most crucial issue for today in connection with the definition of subjectivity is addressed: How are non-identical subjects capable of action and how can they bear responsibility for their action?

Christian Kravagna
(catalogue Thomas Jocher, Galerie 5020,1994. Translated from german by Camilla Nielsen)