In his posthumous book confessions of the flesh (Gallimard, 2013), Michel Foucault (1926-1984) analyzes what is involved in sexuality within nascent Christianity. Following the works published during his lifetime — The will to know (1976), The use of pleasures and The care of self (Gallimard, 1984) — this fourth volume concerns the sexual body. Started in the XVIIIe century, from the perspective of what he called “biopower”, this study of the body moved, with the second and third volumes, towards the philosophers and doctors of Greco-Roman antiquity, and finally towards the religious approach of the Fathers of the Church.
In this last work, the experience of the flesh will be subject to abstinence, virginity and marriage. In this philosophical-theological context, the relationship to the flesh may well be the place of several prohibitions, it remains constitutive, according to Foucault, of our being-subject. As a “mode of experience, knowledge and transformation of oneself by oneself”, the flesh participates in our subjectivity associated with our sensitive body.
The Latin etymology of the word “flesh” — card — means meat, the predominant component of the human or animal body, essentially consisting of muscle tissue covered by the skin. But the notion of flesh also refers to the color of the skin, which is certainly not unique, but of an infinite variety of hues. Moreover, in some expressions, it refers to the physical aspect of a person. The flesh is therefore not only mine, it is identified with that of other people or groups of individuals.
According to the principles of biopower, the living body, the one that corresponds to the flesh, is often subject to forms of control, if not submission. This is the case in a religious context, but also when it comes to race, gender or various minorities. The work This flesh (2017), by Haitian-born artist Stanley Juillet, is an example. This sculpture, which is part of the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, reproduces the body of the artist life-size. Made of plaster, it shows him wearing a simple underwear. He is on his knees, his arms raised, as if threatened. Covered in white paint, the work suggests the negation of its natural epidermis in the name of a color symbolizing the dominant culture.
It is in this spirit that the dossier of this issue, coordinated by Didier Morelli, reports on the issue of the flesh. As a “material and sensible understanding of being”, this is not experienced in the mode of asceticism. Intrinsically political, the flesh, when associated with various cultural communities, expresses itself in the way we understand ourselves, but also from how we are perceived by the various instances of power.
In this file, the text of Itay Sapir, art historian, specialist in European art of the XVe in the XVIIe century, emphasizes the carnal aspect of the body based on certain works by the Venetian artist Titian (c. 1488-1576). Although this fabulous artist also painted canvases related to religious themes, his paintings inspired by Metamorphoses by Ovid (43 BC-17 AD) are an ode to female flesh presented, according to Sapir, from the angle of a sexist vision of the flesh and violence against the female body.
In the field of artistic expression, we will have to wait for the advent of contemporary art to account for the exploration of the flesh in a context of political affirmation. Several artists, notably of Aboriginal origin such as Ursula Johnson or Sarah Maloney, interpret the living body “as a site for investigating colonialism, racism and sexism”.
Long considered within Christianity as a “power of spontaneous inclination to evil”, the flesh is also a potential for self-affirmation. Therefore, the sacrifices proposed by the Fathers of the Church are not always the best solution to “transform oneself”. Although the Christian religion granted an ontological status to the flesh, offering at the same time the possibility of representing it in the form of artistic images, this status was never to keep it away from a moral framework subject to repression.
From then on, the aesthetics of the flesh deployed within contemporary art is transmitted this time under multiple approaches where salvation no longer comes from rules prescribed by an ideal of purity, but rather from our desire to make our lives an experience of oneself in relation to others. Taken to the extreme, this experience sometimes presents itself in its most obscene form. Faced with an authoritarian religious or political power, certain artists, including the militant transvestite of Chilean origin Hija de Perra (1980-2014), turn their own flesh into a work of resistance. A resistance that focuses on actions requiring excessive aesthetics coupled with an ethic of the liberation of desires.
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