But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production.”
–Jean-François Lyotard, Critical Reflections
In fact we might say that the affect is a more brutal, a personal thing. It is that which connects us to the world. It is the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us. The affect is, in this sense, transhuman. Indeed, with the affect what we have is a kind of transhuman aesthetic.
–Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect”
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
–Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
South-Korean artist Mire Lee’s aesthetically cyborgian creatures penetrate our skin and make us flinch. Swallowed by grotesque all-encompassing, site-specific installations that make up a Gesamtkunstwerk, we encounter a deterritorialising and hyper-sensory experience in which the visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile coincide and collide, creating affects upon our corporeality. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari refer to such an experience as a ‘bloc of sensations’ that are reactivated by the onlooker.
Perhaps Lee’s gut-wrenchingly carnal, biomorphic sculptures and installations can best be approached by what they do – their function – rather than solely demystifying their modes of representation and deconstruction through a socio-cultural lens. This is precisely what critical theorist Simon O’Sullivan asserts in his essay The Aesthetics of Affect: O’Sullivan urges the reader to move away from the latter, and instead implores us to perceive the “aesthetic as the function of art.” As such, art is not solely a cultural object, but holds within it a fissure, a point of penetration or elation, and a potential of affiliations that go beyond its representation – its affect.
Situated at the precipice of a becoming or transformation, Simon O’Sullivan recalls Deleuze and Guattari when thinking about “the aesthetics of affect.” Coined the body without organs (BwO), a “hollow” body is perpetually reinstated into processes of production, which in turn allow for the creation of new relations and combinations. The body is therefore not prefixed as a full organism or entity, but instead, its lack thereof desires to create itself a full body without organs, through a site of becoming that is in a perpetual state of flux and experimentation. We can further comprehend this deterritorialising event as a “pure becoming without being,” as cultural theorist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek reiterates in relation to the body without organs:
A pure becoming is not a particular becoming of some corporeal entity, a passage of this entity from one to another state, but a becoming-it-itself, thoroughly extracted from its base. Since the predominant temporality of being is that of the present, the pure becoming-without-being means that one should sidestep the present–it never “actually occurs,” it is “always forthcoming and already past.”
Exhibited at the 59th International Venice Biennale in 2022, Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022) epitomises this interminable state of becoming. An aesthetically derelict low-tech kinetic machine engine on the ground, reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic steampunk b-movie, rapidly spins and pumps gut-like fluid into a protracted pipe that slithers its way through sculptures akin to fossilised lumps of malformed bodies, and onto an assembled construction of scaffolding. Here, ceramic sculptures resemble uncanny carcasses that gyrate and multiply, as flesh-toned liquid clay oozes from an entwined tube, gradually spewing fluid across the formations.
As pink liquid clay drips, layers, dries and cracks, the contaminated sculptures repeatedly take on altering formations over time, meaning no participant can encounter the unravelling event twice. The remaining liquid trickles through grates into a tank below ground, only to be recycled back into the cyclical flow of Lee’s engineered motor system. As if oscillating between Eros and Thanatos, or foreshadowing an unrealised Beckettian yearning for actualisation, Endless House: Holes and Drips reflects on the impossibility of actualisation by devouring itself through incessant and unabating motion, leaving traces of morphing compositions in the making.
For Lee, holes are a point of access wherein which new potentialities take place; a site that “make[s] the leakage happen,” Lee affirms in a recent article for The New York Times. Elsewhere, Lee exclaims that the works represent “bodies and entities with holes everywhere [that] become subjects [which are unable] to control what is coming in and out.” Indeed, vorarephilia (the desire of consuming another, or oneself being consumed by a human or creature) and its impossibility, is a key theme that is explored throughout her practice. In conjunction with the body without organs, Lee’s work enquires: what transpires when unexpected and altering combinations are amalgamated? What are its limitations? The body without organs represents a desire that acts productively, as it engages with multiple disciplines, continuously forging connections whilst entering new territories and permutations.
In an interview for ArtAsiaPacific, Lee unapologetically insists on resisting societal norms, urging for a deterritorialisation, a breaking away from fixed forms: “It destroys the form or the container itself, which is what I love most … I want to do things in a way that is not “nice.”” Lee deliberately portrays the shudderingly grotesque as corporal states; she depict animals or organic matter through an aesthetic that can be described as biomechanical body horror. Yet beyond the gut-wrenching shock factor, we experience a work in infinite flux. As Zizek mentions: “A truly new work stays new forever–its newness is not exhausted when its “shocking value” passes away.”
Exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 2022, As we lay dying (2022) depicts such a deterritorialised zone, in which a kinetic installation dichotomises between disintegration and resurrection, encapsulating an infinite, perpetual state in which a withered body battles to depart life. “People are like ‘meat’ in that state. I find that endearing, potentially sad, but also intriguing because only the physical presence remains,” Lee informs representative Gallery, Tina Kim, when confronting the work. For the artist, experimenting with clay best epitomises the ephemeral and organic state of a human, as the material, too, demands diligent attentiveness due to its delicate and receptive properties.
Visceral factors, such as temperature, moisture, time, density, tactility and sound, play a central role in shaping the desired event-sites or “sinthomes” (the traces of affective realities, as coined by psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan). As is present throughout Lee’s practice, As we lay dying experiments with tubes, liquids, latex, clay, and a cyclical mechanised pumping system. The initial conceptualisation of the piece is a direct response to the architectural layout of the exhibition space itself, which to Lee resembles that of a coffin. In The Aesthetics of Affect, Simon O’Sullivan turns to philosopher and writer Julia Kristeva, when recognising installation art as active sites that evoke affect. Kristeva concludes the following:
In an installation it is the body in its entirety which is asked to participate through its sensations, through vision obviously, but also hearing, touch, on occasions smell … As if these artists, in the place of an ‘object’ sought to place us in a space at the limits of the sacred, and asked us not to contemplate images but to communicate with beings … To make us feel, through the abstractions, the forms, the colours, the volumes, the sensations, a real experience.
Unlike that of a non-reciprocal and flat, pre-configured interaction, diving into Lee’s world means becoming a part of the work itself, as it performs in perpetual mutation. Analogous to a speculating alchemist, Lee manipulates variables, creating controlled and moist environments that lead to desired densities and flows within materials, allowing them to resemble animate and amoebic states, as earthy scents simultaneously permeate the air. We listen to Lee’s self-assembled machines pump and spin away in incessant motion, akin to a weary heart pumping life into matter tirelessly. A preferred desire for risk and experimentation is made possible through functional, automated low-tech machines that are, for example, juxtaposed with connecting tubes pierced with holes, allowing for altered liquids to escape, only to morph and solidify into abstract constructs over time.
Elsewhere, we are swallowed and encased by a womb. Berlin’s 2023 non-profit Schinkel Pavilion presents a duo show with artist H.R. Giger, whose renowned ethereal creatures from the sci-fi pastiche Alien (1979) fittingly coincide with Lee’s works on display. Here, we are situated in a womb-like environment, where suspended tubes engulf us and pump gut-like liquid throughout the space of the gallery. Atop an eerie black, reflective table by H.R. Giger, a sculpture akin to a fossilised, hollow shell lays cracked open and is lined with a glitchy pink substance – comparable to deserted remnants of a vessel from which an organism has freshly hatched.
Our affective experience through this multi-sensory engagement when confronted with Lee’s work is a piercingly pertinent result, and reflection, of the way in which Lee produces sculptures and installations to begin with. Fashioning herself a body without organs, the artist asserts that the physical interaction with a work in progress becomes repetitive, reciprocal, and entwining. Indeed, this full-scale advocation goes as far as manifesting itself as re-occurring lucid-like dreams, where Lee admits to transmuting into the sculptures at arm’s length – not unlike Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, she reaffirms in a recent interview.
—Sayori Radda
