Strangely, Disturbingly, and Disgustingly Human

By Steve Finbow.

Michael Carter, The Practitioner (Infinity Land Press 2023)

In Care of the Self, Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes, “Sexual ethics requires, still and always, that the individual conform to a certain art of living which defines the aesthetic and ethical criteria of existence. But this art refers more and more to universal principles of nature or reason, which everyone must observe in the same way, whatever their social status. As for the definition of the work that must be carried out on oneself, it too undergoes, in the cultivation of the self, a certain modification: through the exercises of abstinence and control that constitute the required askesis [the practice of severe self-discipline], the place allotted to self-knowledge becomes more important. The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth — the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing — central to the formation of the ethical subject. Lastly, the end result of this elaboration is still and always defined by the rule of the individual over himself. But this rule broadens into an experience in which the relation to self takes the form not only of a domination but also of an enjoyment without desire and without disturbance.”

Comparisons are facile. Commencing a critique of a book with a pessimistic assertion already undermines the subsequent content. I could start with the usual suspects — Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Jean Benoît, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Diane Arbus and her “freaks” — but their work (however shocking in its corporeality) does not present a personal mythos of “otherness”, of what I would term an “ante-anti-aesthetic”, a brutal and yet concomitantly personal and rigorous examination of what it is to be strangely human. What the above artists create is “art”, what Michael Carter constructs are edifices of weirdness, archaeological excavations of self-apprehension that — like the works of Henry Darger — become art in their discovery, in their presentation.

I will not delve into Carter’s biography, read the book and Martin Bladh‘s exemplary analysis of the man, his life, his photography, mixed media works and writings; however, an early statement by Michael in response to Bladh’s questioning reveals a clue: “I am working through past experiences and reinterpreting them using my body. Self-mutilation, anorexia, bulimia, kleptomania, transformation. My artwork started off as intricate line drawings in biro, usually aspects of the body, and of being or feeling trapped. I now use myself to create a kind of pornography and only now I am aware of this.”

A kind of pornography? That is revealing. If pornography “is best defined as a medium, such as a picture, video, or text, that is intended to be treated as sexually arousing”, then we — as viewers of Carter’s work — would need to find them erotically stimulating. I will be so bold as to say they are not — at least not for me. To be even more bold, I will state that some of the images are anti-pornographic, that, rather than arousal, I feel a kind of disgust. Of course, many things prompt different forms of sexual excitement and are categorised in the growing list of paraphilias, which include autonepiophilia, maiesiophilia, necrophilia, and teratophilia. I would argue — and what Bladh brilliantly elucidates through his astute and deep analysis — is that Carter’s “pornography” comes closer to Walter Kendrick’s statement in The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture that pornography is “not a thing but a concept, a thought structure”, an archaeology of self-knowledge and a constant unearthing of pain and pleasure, pain as pleasure, pleasure as pain.

Carter’s main paraphilias — transvestic fetishism and autoerotic asphyxia — point us towards a “kind of narcissism”, an anti-narcissism. In Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, she writes, “Phobia literally stages the instability of object relation. The lability of the ‘object’ within the phobic ‘compromise’ — which may also be seen in some psychotic structures — can lead us to consider the formation in question from the point of view not of object relation but of its opposite correlative, narcissism. There, too, we come up against difficulties of analytic theory that are linked, this time, to its postulating a primary narcissism following upon autoeroticism and to what amounts to a forcing of thought — the assignment of a subject to archaic, pre-linguistic narcissism, taking us back, in short, to the mother-child symbiosis.” This corresponds to Bladh’s assessment of Carter’s art as originating from “The trauma of being born and the severe damage it caused to his mother”, and that “When Michael says I split her perineum it sounds like he was responsible for a sinister violation. Whether his mother suffered any long-term physical problems he does not know, but she did constantly remind him of the traumatic pain of giving birth to him.” Carter constantly reimagines his birth — the confined space, the painful vaginal evacuation, the blood, the mucus, and the vernix caseosa, all appear and reappear in Carter’s work in the form of dolls, wounds, tapes, tights, liquid emissions, and domestic objects.

Carter goes beyond both of these paraphilias to create and enact an immersive study of what it is to be male and/or female. Yet this is no English Renaissance theatre cross-gender acting, this is no pantomime or Noh theatre onnagata. Indeed, it is the antithesis of what William T. Vollmann describes in Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, “What is a woman to me? The answer must be: A projection. Who is projecting, and for what reason, I cannot necessarily know from the performance itself. Mr. Umewaka and Mr. Mikata do not when playing their feminine roles feel themselves to be women; they strive, as I so often in my wonderment repeat, to be nothing; yet when they enact women I see them as women. Meanwhile the psyche within a male body which mechanically performs itself as such may see itself as female.” Carter states in response to one of Bladh’s probing questions that, “Familiarity breeds indifference. I can glimpse something that has always been there, beneath the surface. The anonymity of the masks was arousing, in fact, I think the masks developed their own peculiarities.” To be nothing, to be no thing, and yet to be some thing, something. “I could always see myself behind any mask, these images are not brave and are open to ridicule, once the novelty wears off, then a new type of bravery may be revealed.” These images are not projections of the imagination, they are not role-playing fantasies, they are the reification of the thought processes of a multi-faceted mind, personality, and body exploring the psychopathology of what it is to be strangely, disturbingly, and disgustingly human.

For this viewer, Carter’s work is disconcertingly real and honest; behind the masks, beneath the wigs, under the nylon stockings, a man prostrates himself before a camera revealing his tortures, his desires, his memories, his visions. However grotesque, however perverse, these are “real”. “I would say that the masks or who I become when I wear them is not based on one specific person. It’s a mixture of Lowry’s hidden girls, my ex-girlfriend, and my mother. Initially, I got turned on by my unrecognition, being possessed by another aspect of myself. Mirrors have been a constant with the masks. My mood at the time affects the character and personality of the mask.”

An attempt to describe an image. There is a word that keeps appearing in my mind when I look at some of Carter’s work — “cloaca” — “a common cavity at the end of the digestive tract for the release of both excretory and genital products in vertebrates (except most mammals) and certain invertebrates,” and that is because there appears to be a conflation (conflagration) of the oral, anal, vaginal and phallic contents. Gilles Deleuze writes in The Logic Of Sense, “When we link sexuality to the constitution of surfaces or zones, what we mean to say is that the libidinal drives find the occasion for an at least apparent double liberation, which is expressed precisely in autoeroticism. On the one hand, they free themselves from the alimentary model of the drives of preservation, since they find new sources in the erogenous zones and new objects in the images projected onto these zones: thus, for example, sucking (suçotement) which is distinguished from suction (la succion). On the other hand, they free themselves from the constraint of the destructive drives to the extent that they get involved in the productive labour of surfaces and in new relations with these new pellicular objects. It is important, once again, to distinguish, for example, between the oral stage of depths and the oral zone of the surface; between the introjected and projected internal partial object (simulacrum) and the object of the surface, projected over a zone in accordance with an entirely different mechanism (image); or finally between subversion, which depends on depths, and perversion, which is inseparable from surfaces. We must then consider the twice liberated libido as a veritable superficial energy. We should not believe, however, that the other drives have disappeared, that they do not continue their work in depth, or especially that they do not find an original position in the new system.”

Carter sits on a bed or sofa, a grey felt-like material beneath his body. His head has been cropped out of the frame but we can see his skinny torso, the scar tissue from self-inflicted wounds on his chest, his tiny nipples, and his left arm with jutting veins. He wears a short black skirt hitched above a new and disturbing zone of an impossible erogeny, of supernumerary body parts, of polymelia and polyorchidism. This is the surface of Carter’s challenging and pathological eroticism and yet it is a construction of zones that produce an energy of depravity and disgust. The image creates an entirely different mechanism of aesthetics to what we are used to perceiving because, below the skinny torse and the short black skirt, protruding from what appears to be a pair of pale-blue panties, are a blood-stained doll’s arm and two doll’s legs as simulacrums of either a birth or of monstrous protruding phalluses — projected internal partial objects — the metonymical manifestation of the repudiated and emasculated penis. If I were to undertake a word frequency count of the manuscript, mother would be close to the top of the list along with penis.

As Daniel Kelly asserts in Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, “An undeniable affinity holds between disgust and various sorts of organic materials. Hence at the most concrete end of the spectrum of elicitors are … the best candidates to be universals: faeces, vomit, blood, urine, and sexual fluids. Equally plausible as universals are corpses and signs of organic decay, which are also some of the most potent elicitors of disgust. Bodily orifices — and via contamination, things that come in contact with bodily orifices — are likewise powerful and potentially universal elicitors. More generally, artificial orifices or breaches of physical bodies such as cuts, gashes, lesions, or open sores (violations of the ‘ideal body envelope’) are also good candidates for disgust universals.”

To return to my earlier declaration of the impossibility of a comparative aesthetics, Carter’s work goes beyond the organic detonations of Artaud, the visceral muscularity of Bacon, the obscene assemblages of Bellmer, the necrophiliac theatrics of Benoît, the cartoonish constructions of the Chapmans, and the staged sideshows of Arbus, to present the viewer with an intense compulsive portrait of a troubled human being.

As ever with books from Infinity Land Press, the breathtaking design by Karolina Urbaniak complements and augments the text and images, a coffee-table book to provoke shock and awe in anyone likely to pick it up and open its gloriously gruesome pages. Bladh’s profound analysis goes beyond conventional art criticism to offer readers a comprehensive exploration of creativity at the boundaries of comprehension. Through his eloquent prose, he delves into the artist’s thoughts and practices, constructing a philosophy centred on surplus and repulsion and, as critic, becomes the Ruskin to Carter’s Turner, the Rilke to his Rodin, the Stein to his Picasso, the Greenberg to his Pollock, the Burn to his Hirst, in order for the dynamics of the critical essay to become a work of art in its own right.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Steve Finbow’s Sanbashi – a biography of the Japanese postwar photographer Toru Nakagami – will be published later this year. His next writing project is a deep analysis of the diaries, letters, and journalistic responses from a particular year.