Spigot of Love by Elaine Tam
When Dr. David Kapesh slowly re-awakened, he felt for himself, as one does usually for a fondle after a sumptuous dream, however in this unusual case, he would find himself unable to make contact hand-to-body, and instead find the sensuousness of touch foreclosed from this new realm of bodily possibility. What an obscure curse it is not to be able to touch oneself, a kind of contact that one takes for granted, but affords a special circuitry best described by Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus.[1]. One hand touches the other, lacing the twin acts of touching and being touched in a single, elegant loop. The double joined and re-divided, it issues forth a certain self-knowledge, assurance of place, of still being there. Touching oneself possesses its own perfection. But sadly, as Philip Roth would have it in his novella, Dr. David Kapesh would lose the immanent pleasure of this basic gesture. Being without limb nor hand, he found himself, that day of waking, transformed into a glabrous, spherule mass: an oversized 155lb breast.
In the drawn-out temporality of his sorry state — a protraction slowly dawning upon permanence — Kapesh moves through myriad conclusions, mind like a rolodex in search of an addressee. Flitting from total devastation, to a paranoiac’s suspicion of deceit and trickery, to a schizophrenic’s insistent self-delusion, his existential quandary makes several revolutions attempting to grasp this strangest of fates. In the late pages of the text — between spells of tears, moments of quietude or acceptance, and awkward hospital visits — Kapesh wonders why [he] ‘had chosen a breast. Why a big brainless bag of dumb, desirable tissue, acted upon instead of acting, unguarded, immobile, hanging, there, as a breast simply hangs and is there? Why this primitive identification with the object of infantile veneration? What unfulfilled appetites, what cradle confusions, what fragments out of my remotest past could have collided to spark a delusion of such classical simplicity?’[2]
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Art history may ask itself similar questions, which I dutifully echo in this short essay on aberrant breasts. Appealing to both the tactical and tactile, we first turn to our situated knowledges, which is to say, instantiate an epistemological form (and problem) which is something other-than Roth’s entertaining fiction, or the ghost of our art canon’s disembodied past. ‘Dumb and desirable’, the breast attenuates to corporeality in the most primordial of ways, being as it is a protagonist figuring prominently in the writings of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.[3].Written into the fate of our attachments are complex associations with body parts, embedded into the unconscious by the learning and loving between infant-parent. Confronted by a sudden enlargement of its world upon birth, the newborn adjusts by consuming it piecemeal. The infant intuitively ascribes the breast a basic set of traits as corollaries of good and bad, characterisations that flip like a switch, beholden to the fulfilment of its needs. Saddled with positive and negative psychic associations, the breast of infancy is eminently split; it is split in that the breast is good when it provides comfort and nourishment, bad when it is felt to be neglectful or frustrating the desires of the infant. It is split from the mother, who the infant cannot fully recognise nor reconcile with the breast. It is with this in mind that Klein refers to the breast as a part-object. The infant’s early world is experienced in this fractional or splintered way, and likewise it is a constellation of such part-objects that populate the infant’s early world. “If I could only remember my hungering gums at the spigot of love, my nose in the nourishing globe—!”[4].
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The royal couple were responsible for invigorating the luxurience of ‘milk services’ in the latter part of the 18th century — a device in the ploy of Louis XVI to attract the young queen to Chateau Rambouillet, the property located on his favoured hunting grounds. Created as a function of this, the dairy became a centrepiece of the picturesque French garden with natural-appearing sinewy paths, a tour of which could then culminate with refreshments such as milk, soft cheese and fruit. No expense was spared on Laiterie de la Reine. Retreating to their cool interiors for respite from the heat, one would find lavish, if not ostentatious, settings for entertaining. In one chamber, a sculpture of Amalthea — the ‘tender goddess’ and ‘goddess of milk’ — is set within a rocky outcrop, highlighting the neoclassical aesthetic leanings of their time. Other spaces boast swathes of marble and embellishments such as mosaics in mother-of-pearl. To cater the range of dairy delectables, finely decorated Sèvres porcelain tableware was deployed. One particular piece, the Bol Sein or otherwise known as Jatte-Teton, is allegedly modelled upon Marie Antoinette’s breast, and an icon of the collection of the royals’ ‘pleasure dairy’. Though exemplary of the royals’ obscene decadence and frequently used to denounce Antoinette’s frivolity, the ‘breast cup’ remains an enduring symbol of how refinement and beauty is itself a form of nourishment.
‘Jatte-téton’ milk bowl with tripod base, from the Service for the Dairy for Queen Marie Antoinette, 1788. Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. Painted by Fumez, after a design by Jean-Jacques Lagrené and Louis-Simon Boizot. Photo: M. Beck-Coppola (Musée National de la Céramique, Sèvres, France).
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An alarming number of articles written in the past decade suggest that milk is among the foodstuffs about to become a luxury item once again.[5] As summer temperatures reach new heights year upon year, climate councils dry their sweat-soaked brows. Cows shuffle uncomfortably in their sheds, heaving, for respiration is how they express the act of perspiration. Some will die of heatstroke; we’ll know it when, overnight, milk production plummets, the supermarket shelves emptying, the spigot running dry. Children of the future will learn that to drink cold milk in the summer months is a privilege, an exquisite and expensive thing, because the cows from which they come must live in air-conditioned environments.
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The aberrant breast is a lone traveller in time, ricocheting from porcelain, to literature, to picture. Unsung heroine of Surrealism Lee Miller documents the mystical retreats of the group; portraits of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Andre Breton silently stare beneath museum-grade glass. Tell as she does — in tones perfectly exposed — the adventures, escapades and personal affects of the iconic band, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy), on the other hand, shocks and challenges. Rings of horror. A silent scream. Following a mastectomy at a medical school in Paris, Miller carries the breast to her studio and photographs what will become a radical bid against bodily dispossession, an overt response to the motif of amputated female parts favoured by male Surrealists of the time. Dismemberment, the ability to incise, or cut and splice at will, is here an act wrought with power. The power to frame how one engages; the choice to make a sordid edit, and obscure certain details from view; the ability to objectify the subject on show, without further repercussion or reflexive thought. It is the power to recompose in a grand act of fictionalisation, so that her image escapes her, and she no longer entirely belongs to herself. With this work, Miller serves us a pained reminder of very real flesh, sensate corporeality and its discontents — all that lies behind the smoke and mirrors of lofty Surrealist technique.
Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy), 1934-5. Digitised photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2021. All rights reserved.
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St. Agatha of Sicily is famously depicted holding her breasts on a platter, a sacrificial votive act arousing both veneration and abjection. Untold centuries later, a young woman with wild swirls of raven-black hair, and impishly good looks, discovers polyester resin. With this knowledge, she will proceed to press herself into moulds, from which she will cast fragmented body parts. She melts and melds into distortion, exceeding paradigms of the unified whole, she lends herself to something else: intransigent, ahistorical, subject-as-object. She is not the clipped bodies of classical sculpture — coarse where parts are missing by the chunk — which ignited early imaginations about continuum between figure and abstraction. It feels more appropriate instead to speak of transubstantiation here, the bread which is the literal body and blood of Christ, it's becoming-flesh. From representational object thingliness to the body material proper, faith’s ecstatic investments delivers the dead into the emergent realm of live and living interactions. Roughly a decade of experimentation in this new medium passes. The year is 1971 when Alina Szapocnikow creates Dessert III which, elsewhere South, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Italian confectionary Cassatini Siciliane, created to honour the Feast of St. Agatha. These perfect prim pastries offer themselves up for consumption, ticklishly delighting the secret infant whim. Detached, the breasts undergo a certain desexualisation — the sign meets with its desertification at a disquieting junction. A sultry slew of abjection, horror, and delight foregrounds this confrontation, before the mind understands what the eyes can see. Eyes big like saucers; the appetite desires but the stomach cannot want. Two years following Dessert III, Szapocznikow dies of breast cancer. Outliving her are a small number of what she called ‘personified tumours’, palm-sized pebbles made of resin, crumpled newspaper, gauze.[6]
Alina Szapocznikow, Dessert III, 1971. Kravis Collection, Oklahoma. Photo: Thomas Mueller, courtesy Broadway 1602, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne. © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow / Piotr Stanisławski / ADAGP, Paris.
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If discomfit were ever a strategy of art, it could be said that Hans Bellmer’s biomorphic dolls signify a transgression which takes one beyond the realm of art. Surveying his practice, one will witness myriad exploded female forms in sculptures and photographs, viciously maimed, leaving a scant series of appendages. Exemplary of this is The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace (1937), a work among many ostensibly motivated by phanta-seismic fetishism. It is with a sense of debauched irony that the artist invokes grace in this title — at once referring to elegance, good will and prayer — which serves to emphasize the absence or perversion thereof. (He dares God to judge him.) For the Gunneress is Bellmer’s beloved poupée broken in a tantrum, and recalls the child’s treatment of its mother as partial-object, freely expressing the tortured drives that overwhelm and inform its worldview. La Poupée is reconstituted in servitude as a gratification machine, becoming The Gunneress: she is comprised of female parts attached to joints that can be maneuvered into numerous recombinations for reading by eye and hand. Fragments of her body held in suspension, poupee becomes puppet; the child, a manipulator or puppeteer; and ultimately, Bellmer grants himself his whims. The machinic (dis)organization of body-as-object ousts the fleshly, so that the breast is subservient to living-dead notions. The chiasmic touch of oneself is redirected outward, but to contact without reciprocity.
Hans Bellmer, The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace, 1937. Photo: Museum of Modern Art. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study #6, 1995. Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland © The Easton Foundation / 2019, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Francis Jacoby. Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth.
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“Although the surrealists preached the liberation of sexual desire for all, most surrealists were men, and men came first in this liberation. Surrealism included women, of course, and in many ways its liberation focused on women, but they were asked to represent desire more than to experience it.”[7] As such, we might say that Bellmer’s approach differs vastly from the reparative form Louise Bourgeois’ artwork takes. Decoupling the breast from it’s purely perfunctory value is Nature Study #6 (1995), in it ‘clusters of breasts like clouds’[8] are nestled within a cradle, all of pink marble. Repetition exacerbates the representation of these feminine familiars, and though the compulsion of repetition drives it to aberrant ends, it is also tender and inviting. The inability to apprehend the breast can signal a diversion from meaning, a surrender to instinct; likewise, without meaning as a buttress, the artwork falls to impression. What is thought but impressions left to percolate?
As Mignon Nixon points out, the artist’s work is described by critic Lucy Lippard as ‘hill-breast-cloud’, the treatment with hyphens linking multiple entities as though there is always excess, another name by which we might call the breast.[9]. ‘Within, your breast is a sea that pulls me to its bed’, to quote poetess Ingeborg Bachmann.[10]. In Bachmann as in Bourgeois, the body exists someplace figurative but also careens into other shapes and forms which, perhaps, allows us to site it someplace at the precipice of the abstract — ever unspooling. This sensitive yet ambiguous anatomical play makes of the body something continuous and transmutable; ‘[t]he whole person becomes a breast that stretches in order to give.’[11]
[1]. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining — The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 130-155.
[2]. Phillip Roth, The Breast (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1972), 64.
[3]. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation (New York: Vintage Classics, 1998).
[4]. Phillip Roth, The Breast, 68.
[5]. Cayla Dengate, “Milk, beef and bread to become luxury items in a climate changed future”, Huffington Post Australia, 2016. Accessed 14 August 2021.
[See https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/10/08/milk-climate-change_n_8260772.html]
[6]. Charlotte Higgins, “Body shock: the intense art and anguish of sculptor Alina Sapocznikow”, The Guardian, 2017. Accessed 14 August 2021. [See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/06/human-landscapes-body-shock-the-art-and-anguish-of-sculptor-alina-szapocznikow]
[7]. Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 239.
[8]. Louise Bourgeois, as quoted in Frances Morris (ed.), Louise Bourgeois (London: Tate Modern, 2007), 268.
[9]. Mignon Nixon, “Posing the Phallus” in October, vol. 92, 2000, 99–127. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/779235. Accessed 13 August 2021.
[10]. Ingeborg Bachmann, In the Storm of Roses, translated by Mark Anderson (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 207.
[11]. Louise Bourgeois, as quoted in Duncan Macmillan’s review “Blood Ties” in Modern Painters: The International Contemporary Magazine (May 2008), 75.