2005-05-03 - 9:52 p.m.
It's two years later. Hi.
What a peculiar little time elapse, just one little web button click, and POW, there goes a couple of years.
In this millisecond lapse, I moved in by myself in an excrutiatingly charming apartment, enrolled in Public Health school, had glorious and disemboweling personal revelations, and watched my sister get married twice (once on her continent, once of that of her husband). POW!
I am looking at the book I am to read by Friday and thinking about all of the things that will potentially distract me from it. My procrastination is very articulated and conscious, which makes little sense. Isn't the key to procrastination supposed to be self-trickery, in which other things fool you in taking on importance, and only in retrospect do you label it "procrastination?" Mine does not fit this model. It's entirely conscious. In fact, it's becoming intentional: "I have to do X,Y and Z... I better find a way to procrastinate."
The funny thing is that I am incredibly engaged with being in school right now. Hugely. I'm reading these articles and provoking emotional response-- I can't express it better than to call it exhilaration. But, in that self-referential way, the hugeness of the concepts I am presented in the context of classes brings into focus all of the ways in which school is a tiny, sterile, constrained institution, one that is notorious for laying claim on the Interesting Idea and then letting it recirculate endlessly within its walls, and without hope of a breath of fresh air, embodiment, application. Until it grows weary of flying in circles and dies a quiet death. This is the tension that inspires the procrastination... not all of it is worthy, of course. This tension and frustration is not at the root of my compulsion to check for very cute shoes on eBay. It is, however, at the root of my straining against the very material that piques the interest to take it further. I've opened up books I haven't looked at in years. I've been writing like nobody's business. And the connections I've been making feel so very material, real, and embodied. School is a weird cave. What it has been providing me with, though, is this strange ray-gun like tool to aim at all the things I already like to think about and explode them into expansive networks of "what ifs" and "I wonder whys". It's like I needed the parental presence of school to re-inspire the curious little imp in me. Well.. it's an expensive little family, and a little sick... but it's working for me, in its little twisted way. I wouldn't necessarily advocate it, but I'm not sorry.
Anyway. I can't stop thinking about this article I just read, Jose vanDijck's chapter on the "Bodyworlds" exhibit in Germany. Gunther von Hagens, an anatomist, developed a technique to "plastinate" cadavers, which allows both preservation and extensive bodily manipulation. These corpses, with their artistic interventions, were put on display (as science and parenthetically as art) in Germany. It's now touring around the U.S. You *MUST* check out the website (bizarre and slightly gruesome). It includes a corpse, stripped of skin, and with a mask-looking face doing a HANDPLANT WITH A SKATEBOARD. Totally, totally mind-blowing. Anyway, my favorite part of the article is VanDijck's argument that this person is essentially imitating imitations, but with substance (real human bodies) that is "real and authentic," and in this process, ideas about fake and authentic break down. I wonder the same thing about my own surgeried body, and ideas about authenticity as it is discussed in terms of transgender and transsexual individuals-- are surgeries and medical interventions recapturing the (authentic) gender we were "meant" to have? Are identities recapturing this? Or is our authentic self the transitioning/transitioned self? Or are we creating authenticity in our very claim to identities? Or is our very existence dismantling the notion of authenticity? (this is something I'm not sure I would be so upset with, though it feels so dangerous to say so).
Anyway, the Bodyworlds website is worth looking at: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/home.asp
So is Van Dijck's book. I've only read a few chapters, but she seems pretty great.
_The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis Of Medical Imaging (In Vivo: the Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science)_. Jose Van Dijck
Anyway... I'm making all these fun connections about science and art, my favorite messy collision since make-up and special effects. The Sensation exhibit and the way people were way more upset with the elephant-shit piece than they were with child mannequins with butts and genitals for faces. Organic matter as art FREAKS PEOPLE OUT, it totally fascinates me. The Bodyworlds thing, though, even has me freaking out a bit about organic matter as art, particularly when I wonder about the bodies that find themselves plastinated... is donating one's body to science by translation donating it to art? What happens when we look at things with "science eyes" that would be inappropriate to look at in a mundane context (assuming we don't look out of science eyes all the time, which some of us do). When can we call voyeurism voyuerism? When can we call science art or art science? When can we justify shifting moralities by context, and when is this a sneaky or convenient shift? And when will I ever begin my homework!?!
