There is a minimum to operate properly; Love and Holeness // Michelle Weinstein
An essay response to Christopher Lacroix’s There is a minimum to operate properly
Why are some holes in the body coveted, and some considered shameful? Gazing into another’s eyes is a romantic act of love, while gazing into a butthole, another’s or one’s own, is an awkward proposition. It is safe to assume that the initial reactions to Christopher Lacroix’s artwork, There is a minimum to operate properly will range from disgust, titillation, curiosity, desire and a variety of other states, perturbed and pleasing. This project requires multiple lenses in order to consider its subtle production of meanings, beyond initial visceral responses.
A full engagement with the artwork requires two subjects to voluntarily remove the clothing from the lower half of their bodies, cover their genitals and strap into an uncomfortable contraption. The two art-participants then use mirrors to reflect the butthole of their partner-in- art back to each other; a view that is impossible without the aid of both the artist’s machine, and a partner. It takes strength and concentration to function the machine properly, as well as a leap into ultimate vulnerability with a partner, who has equally chosen this extremity of revelation. An examination of Lacroix’s work in relation to theories of the abject, to philosophies of love, and to the psychology of subject formation, reveal that his intimacy apparatus, this butthole viewing machine, transforms a source of revulsion into tender beauty. It creates a chance at psychic completion through our orifice of waste.
In order to appreciate the transformative properties of Lacroix’s artistic apparatus, it is helpful to examine customary reactions to excrement and its exit point. These reactions can sensibly be categorized as abject. The dictionary has two definitions of the adjective “abject”: 1. (of something bad) experienced or present to a maximum degree. 2. completely without pride or dignity; self-abasing.1 Historically, the word was used to describe something humble, lowly, rejected and expelled. 2 A synonym for “abject” is “base” (e.g. “base cruelty” replaceable by “abject cruelty .“)3 This synonymity is a clue to the foundational (basic) aspect of the abject, including excrement and the butthole. They are incontrovertible aspects of our being that disclose our source and relation to the material world. The anus is the hole of excretion, the earthly hole. It links the human body to soil (an unwelcome reminder that our sustenance flourishes in faeces). Excess earthly matter passes through us, that which is not incorporated into our being. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, the anus is the aperture that completes our terrestrial coil. It is the hole which expels the material that was momentarily part of the self, and is returned to the world outside the self.
According to Julia Kristeva, there is a complex subjectivity at play in our experience of the abject. In her work Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection, she cites physical reactions to abject experiences; revulsion, gagging and retching — reactions of the skin, of the digestive. These are instinctive responses when confronted with evidence of death and decay. Kristeva deems that this physical feedback implies an intricate weaving of self and other, a dissolution of the subject with the object. What is revealed in this merging is meaninglessness. The flimsy state of “self” is exposed when confronted with its biological link to death. Simultaneously, an abject experience creates a situation where the self is remarkably present, in its extreme physical reactions.4
The entanglement between self and other is a descriptor of a different phenomenon, that of love. Plato’s theory of love describes three types, but it is eros or romantic love that is of interest in this case. The account of eros is a claim to beauty; the lover is so moved by the beauty of the beloved, they are transformed. A union takes place that creates completeness; through the beauty of the love-state elicited by the beloved, an understanding of the world of ideas is effectuated. Love is a risk, a sacrifice of the subjective self to ideals which can only be understood through the loving awareness of another.5
In Praise of Love a book in the form of Q&A between Nicolas Truong and philosopher Alain Badiou, interrogates the interplay of self and other altered through the force of love. There is a reinforcement of the self through the intensity of loving another, a highly charged condition where selfhood is acutely felt through an awareness of the beloved. Simultaneously the world is restructured, viewed through a double consciousness of self-and-other united in love. Similar to an experience of the abject, there is a superimposition: an extremity of awareness of self and other (lover and lover) concurrent with the meshing of two into one. Badiou also speaks of the need for commitment, a conscious act through language and action to reconfirm the inexplicable shift into love. He claims that the pursuit of “no-risk” love as advertised through dating sites, equates to no-love-at-all. It is only through risk, through chance, that the surrender of the self necessary for the love experience is possible. In Badiou’s view, it is love that overcomes the inherent awkwardness of the aftermath of sexual consummation. Love is won “point-by-point” in every decision to disregard selfishness and subsume the will for the sake of the beloved, in honour of that initial event. 6
The conditions of love thus defined lead us directly back to Lacroix’s machine. The use of the machine requires a commitment to exposure, a mutual choice of entry that reinforces the subject (the self-consciousness that comes with exposure) and dissolves it through intention; through the common goal of reflection back to the other. It is not the physical beauty of the butthole that reiterates love in this composed situation, rather it is the almost unthinkably beautiful act of intimacy and risk, the discarding of clothing and every safe social convention, which choreographs a love-state. Risk, the choice to enter into awkwardness, and the willingness to trust infuses meaning into the situation, shifting it away from the realm of pointless abjection. The contraption unites the two participants in their focus and effectively blurs subjectivity to the point where it is only the other who can reveal the hidden-self back to the self. Through the creation of meaning and the deliberate choice of discarding one’s own subjectivity, placing it into the care of another, Christopher Lacroix transforms our humble waste hole into a fount of love.
There is an additional consideration in the understanding of Lacroix’s treatment of subjectivity: that of Jacques Lacan’s “mirror phase.” Lacan describes the transition when, as a toddler, a mirror reflection is recognized as the “self”. This reflection of completeness consolidates the toddling subject into an “I.” The mirror image of wholeness conflicts with inner experience, which is a conglomeration of sensory input, a blurring of interior and exterior. According to Lacan, visual apprehension of the individual as a discrete whole, an object in a world of objects, creates a sense of profound absence and a recognition that interior needs can only be met by an exterior world. It is this recognition that produces desire. In Lacan’s theory, all desire is born from an acknowledgement of incompleteness, from the disconnected subject longing to recapture unity with the exterior. It is a yearning to seal the interior lacuna, which was created from the friction between a sensory being and its image. Desire is the source of all action in the world, sprouting from the initial shock into subject-hood, the solidification of a “self”. 7
There is a minimum to operate properly replays this subject-formation, complicates it, and allows the possibility of psychic closure. It is a conjoined “another” who reflects back a partial image of the body, a hole, where once a whole image caused rupture and created an unbridgeable separation between the self and other. The double-subject, linked by their exertion within the art-machine, relive the initial shock of the image that is not equated with their sense of “I,” yet is undeniably themselves.
Participation with this artwork carries the potential of a therapeutic conclusion. Engaging with another in equalizing vulnerability, the participants assist each other by recreating the initial scene of subject-formation. Instead of an illusion of wholeness, the hole where the material of the self becomes other, the invisible-self, is reflected. The artwork reconnects with subjectivity’s nascence, and thereby sutures the rift brought about by a “too- complete” image of being. An entry into the machine is a pact. It creates a performative transmutation; the ridiculous turns into a compassionate revelation, redeems shame through vulnerable efforts. This redemption of the abject is the beautiful ideal that can be gained through a perilous encounter with another in Lacroix’s machine, embodying both platonic eros and Badiou’s definition of love. There is a minimum to operate properly is presented at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in latent form. Only by entering and operating the machine can two linked participants actualize its meaning.
1www.lexico.com/en/definition/abject
2www.etymonline.com/abject
3 www.thesaurus.com/abject
4Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Translated by Leon S Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982
5 Reeve, C. D. C., "Plato on Friendship and Eros", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/plato-friendship/>.
6 Badiou, Alain and Nicolas Truong. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush, The New Press, 2012
7 Johnston, Adrian, "Jacques Lacan", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/ entries/lacan/>.
Born in Toronto, raised in Connecticut, Michelle Weinstein earned her Bachelor of Fine Art at Maine College of Art, and Yale University. She began exhibiting her work upon graduation and has been shown nationally and internationally. Weinstein’s first solo exhibit, Orogenesis, was in Los Angeles, in 2007, and her 2010 solo exhibit at SmackMellon in Brooklyn, NY, was warmly reviewed by Modern Painters magazine.
Weinstein held her first solo exhibit in Canada, Mars Pamphleteer, at the Gam Gallery in 2014. She was awarded a Social Science and Humanities Research Award by the Canadian government in 2014, after relocating from Los Angeles, CA to Vancouver, B.C. in order to earn her MFA (2015) from the University of British Columbia. She has been on the board of directors of Or Gallery, acting as President in 2018.
Weinstein is currently working on a series of one-night art events that occur at the Ladner Clocktower and its surrounding sunken garden, on the UBC campus. These projects have taken the form of a long-term residency, and aim to alter the experience of temporality. Michelle Weinstein lives and works in Vancouver.