Blog 8: Nicolas Mirzoeff- “Bodyscapes”.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Bodyscapes". Bodyscapes, Art, Modernity amd The Ideal Figure. Routledge: London, 1995: 19 – 33.

Nicholas Miroeff writes as a Professor of Visual culture. In his writing Bodyscapes he opens up the idea that visual representation of the body has an effect on the body and on the individual.

In the reading group we discussed the idea that we come to realise our own body, outside of our body; that our body becomes coherent outside of itself. Lucille used this example- as babies we are born without control of our bodies and need someone to look after us. Our experience of our body is thus fragmented, it is not organised within ourselves, it is organised outside of itself.

In this sense our body is fragmented. It changes and grows with influence and control form outside of itself. It is affected by social and environmental situations. A body can be adapted to suit its surroundings. Mirzoeff writes, “In the contemporary world, such arguments run, the fragmentation of the body has become a fact of everyday life.” (Mirzeoff, 1996; 25). One can change the body through food exercise, plastic surgery etc, bit by bit, fragment by fragment.

And because our body is affected by what happens outside of it, I think visual representation can play a part in shaping what our bodies should be like. We look outside of ourselves in advertising, other people etc to gage who we are or who we think we should be. In a way I think we are feed a whole lot of ideas and ideals that are outside of ourselves. In this sense our culture and society can affect so much of who we are and how we see ourselves.

Donna Haraway suggests that we are cyborgs- human organisms made up of our material being (our body) and machine (the imagined the external or in-organic, constructed and fabricated).

"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination." (Haraway, 1991: 150)

The thing that really interests me in Haraway’s statement about the cyborg is that it is involved in a “border war”. I feel a border war is concerned with a space of negotiation between one and the other. Looking at the borders of the internal body and external world as places for change opens up the idea of the internal individual negotiating the external influences in the construction of identity. It makes me think one can choose how to represent him or herself- not just have a idea, identity or image forced upon them.

References:

Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge: New York, 1991: 149-181.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘Bodyscapes’. Bodyscapes, Art, Modernity and The Ideal Figure. Routledge: London, 1995: 19 – 33.

Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. New York University: New York, 2008. 12th June 2008. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Nicholas_Mirzoeff