Body Horror
In David Cronenberg’s classic Body Horror film The Fly (1986), references to the vulnerability of flesh are present from the outset. Hamburgers, steaks, a computer chip embeds itself in Jeff Goldblum’s back, while Gina Davis wants to ‘eat him up’. Flesh is complex, emotional, porous. It is both meat and living matter, and here it is deconstructible and reconstructible via a teleporter. Controlled by a pre-Artificial Intelligence era computer, all the teleporter knows is what it is told by its creator, and so what it inevitably misses in its careful calculations is the emotional, irrational, nuance of living bodies.[1]
Body and brain are intertwined, and consciousness imbues the flesh with feeling – both emotional and physical. Bessel van der Kolk says in The Body Keeps The Score, that ‘the body is the bridge’ between our interior worlds and the environment; it takes the place of language where words do not suffice.[2] I’ll paraphrase and mutilate his words here, like Cronenberg’s teleporter. The body (or all of us that is not the brain) is a bridge between the mind and the world; the body is a place where emotions are inscribed and where they are expressed. And in the inverse, the body communicates emotionally back to the brain – ‘being able to perceive visceral sensations is the very foundation of emotional awareness.’[3] The mind-iness of feeling deeply – of fear, love, sense memory, anger— are felt in the matter of our bodies as it connects to the world. The electricity of attraction is felt in the fingertips, anxiety bubbling and cold in chests, anger hot and spicy on skin, past experiences telling bodies to tense, to relax, to heat up with embarrassment or freeze in fear before we’ve even managed to think. We use the word feeling to describe both the bodily sensation of touch, as well as the abstract - emotion. There is a reason these two concepts share a word. The sensations of skin are so closely intertwined with emotional sensations. The genre ‘Body Horror’ describes a brain-body connection, and the tension this difference in form can create, concisely – horror is immaterial while the body is matter.
The Gestalt concept of the ‘contact-boundary’ is useful here, as it describes the surface of the body as something with a dual purpose: it ‘limits the organism, contains and protects it, and at the same time it touches the environment.’[4] The contact-boundary in Gestalt is the main informant to the mind, because all relations to the world happen along it and pass through it. The actions along the contact-boundary give us information, but also leave us vulnerable.
The dissolution of this boundary of the body is what so much of Body Horror plays on – the fear of melting into the world that we make contact with, or of the world finding its way through this barrier and into our bodies.
I first saw Lou Hubbard’s work Bore Me in 2009 as part of her exhibition Lackness at Gertrude Contemporary. As I considered how to approach this exhibition, the work kept returning to my mind. Created before compulsive pimple-poppers were outed by YouTube, Bore Me tapped into something I had not previously known about myself: fearing the puncturing of my body also drove a compulsion in me to test its boundaries. So often, fears leads us to take risks in order to gain control over their bodily affects. The greater the fear, the more likely we are to fixate on it, and for the visceral sensation to take over, giving the fear a power that can only be shifted by conquering it or releasing it. Letting our worst fears to come true (the skin being broken through, a tumour being found), allows for the realisation that the object of fear is bearable, even useful. As Hubbard writes:
Bore Me shows in close up detail, like keyhole surgery, a ring extracted from a head (actually a human hair wig stretched over a rock-melon). Some words were uttered at the time I received the ring and scribbled onto paper just hours later.
When I received the ring, a gift, it was gorgeous,
an engorgement like a blood blister
and I knew I had to remove it from the head
like removing a tick from the family dog.
[…] this was my instruction to self on how to proceed in the studio: how to make the work. And make it effective. To affect me, the maker: the first person to receive the work.
The result was Lackness: a spine of tumours under the lights of an operating theatre. [5]
There is not much more satisfying than cleanly extracting a long ingrown hair after battling to release it, or pushing out a blackhead whole. This work plays on that compulsion, as well as the potential held within its uncanny substitutes for the body. Shown on a small, ex-CCTV, Bore Me suggests life scale – its tightly cropped view pulls us in, as if we are looking through a magnifying glass.
Body Horror is such an impactful genre because it pulls hard on our tendency to feel some measure of what we witness happening to someone else. It plays on universal fears of the body’s potential to fail or to become alien to us while we remain trapped inside it; of losing control, and of existing in an environment that doesn’t accommodate our fleshy bodies. Our brains’ mirror neurons activate genuine empathy, allowing us to understand someone else’s pain, fear, joy, sadness or anger by creating a perfect reflection of their feeling or action inside our own minds. Body Horror pushes this response to an extreme through imagery that slices directly into our sense of physical safety – puncturing, mutating and dissolving human bodies – triggering extreme responses for many viewers. Horror films, when they work, draw us out of our reasoning minds and into the body, into visceral feeling. We can’t easily resist this shift from reason to emotion because we are wired, as a protective measure, to focus on fear over all else. It can, though, be a respite from the logic of reality to experience this bodily anticipation and threat, and to come out the other side unharmed.
Like so much of Hubbard’s work, the absurd, anthropomorphised object is abject and affective in Bore Me, tapping into impulses that sit just below the surface of consciousness. While our mirror neurons cause us to cringe and protest as we watch, Bore Me also draws us into its supremely satisfying arc – a hard, foreign object has burrowed under the skin, it is carefully encouraged out, the ring is put in its right place and the damage is smoothed over.
Aaron Hoffman’s video work, Words In The Ground (2023) doesn’t use corporeal decoys to express compulsion and injury – the artist’s real hand enters the screen holding a glass, grinding it from side to side across the ground. At an unpredictable moment, the glass explodes into shards, ‘bursting against the body membrane, and the hand retracts on impact.’[6] The process repeats over and over.
Hoffman writes:
repeating this action invoked exhilaration—just like when a match catches fire. In this case, the glass held emphasized an intimate relationship, breaking stillness, and releasing a sense of bliss. I applied compositional rules to explore the interaction between opposing elements such as agitation and stillness, the act of grinding and the moment of breaking, and the states of being whole versus fractured.[7]
The jump scares of the shattering glass are repetitive, but they are unpredictable, irregular. The repetition does not inoculate us from shock, in fact it increases a bodily anticipation. We expect a glass to break but it refuses to, or it splinters almost immediately on impact with the ground. We’re given a small taste of gore here – the glass breaks the skin – and bloodied skin and glass build up throughout the work.
The action of this work engages bodily in the space – the screen is placed on the ground, reflecting the video’s action. Its pendulous momentum pulls away and back towards Kari Lee McInneny-McRae’s floor work, with which it overlaps. Hoffman’s work touches McInneny-McRae’s hospital flooring, moving in and out of the intimate space it holds, complicating the boundaries between works and bodies. McInneny-McRae’s broken eggshells and boot poised so close to Hoffman’s broken glass suggest fragility and potential, or unavoidable crushing and further injury.
I couldn’t watch horror films until a few years ago. For most of my life, I have suffered from a panic disorder my GP has politely called ‘health anxiety’. For months after watching a horror film, the inescapable fear and anxiety were unbearable as I fixated on images and sequences, and my rational brain would consistently lose the battle with my viscera. What troubled me most at the height of my anxiety, though, was how porous my body was. This realisation came to me suddenly – I was 24 and was being inducted into the art school workshop by Mark Friedlander. Mark began by introducing the safety measures we needed to take while working there – wearing earmuffs in the timber and metal rooms, goggles almost everywhere, dust masks for most tasks, a respirator in the spray booth, gloves sometimes, but not always (because they can get dragged into the machine), hair tied back (because it can get dragged into the machine), steel capped boots…
It might have been when he got to protocols for operating the eye wash station if you get chemicals in your eyes, or maybe he was talking about the effects of plaster dust on your lungs (not good) that I lost vision. I resisted panicking so intensely that I turned greenish, my skin turned to needles, I sweated out all the liquid in my body, then lost consciousness. My mind had conjured images of skin-burning acid creating a steaming hole in my skin like Goldie Hawn’s torso in Death Becomes Her, microscopic particles of unidentifiable airborne matter floating down my throat and settling forever in my lungs like in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, and that irreparable wound in Requiem for a Dream. My body responded by refusing to absorb anything at all from the environment, including air.
For this exhibition, I installed red vinyl on the gallery’s windows and lights in reference to the suffocating feeling that Dario Argento’s Suspiria creates; its dramatic, overwhelmingly bright colours, and the film’s lack of clear sunlight still makes me hold my breath as I wait for the horror to conclude and the freshness of reality to return.
For all 6 years that I was at art school, I experienced regular panic attacks. In response I undertook obsessive protective actions and bodily decontamination. But I kept going back to the workshop, using potentially dangerous materials and tools, facing my fears, and getting knocked down again and again by them. Exposure didn’t help me overcome my fear, but I could not stop myself – I wanted to learn skills, to create objects, to understand the elements that make up our constructed world and to imitate them, despite the expectation that at some point in the process I would pass out from fear of this same world seeping, unnoticed, into my body.
My anxieties speak to the inseparability of body and brain, and a sense that my body is not as distinct from its environment as I used to believe. Our entire body’s cells are regenerated every seven years, always leaving a little trail of us in our wake. Our pores and orifices are, disturbingly, both entries and exits for all the stuff that comes and goes to keep us alive, as well as the stuff that harms us. But this exchange is a non-negotiable part of being in the world. I finally felt widely understood when the pandemic hit, and I was prepared to manage an anxiety about the body’s relationship to the world that was new to most people.
Along with comprehending this mind-body-world connection, my anxiety narrative runs parallel to a more general creative process. Being an artist is ridiculous. We create our little worlds and stories, in which every detail is up to us. What our artworks are made with and how they are made, their scope, silliness, seriousness, complexity, rigour, and aesthetic have no constraints. But almost all artists, in my experience, are struck down by debilitating anxiety in their development. Our emotionality comes from a desire to chase some truth, to process it through our complex mind-body-world system and to send it out as a part of us. We are splicing ourselves with our observations, and putting a little bit of our insides out, in a gallery,[8] and we really hope you love it (or that you feel something significant, and remember it for a long time, and that it sparks a new way of thinking for you, or creates new connections in your brain).
We all talk about what a nightmare it is to be an artist – for a while we avoid making anything out of fear of failure, then a deep, serious dread of humiliation sets in, which is actually really useful because it forces us to start the bloody thing, then many of us isolate ourselves for the next month while completely consumed by the project. We make it to install and melt down again because one room never does the same thing as another, and we show up at the exhibition opening exhausted, kind of satisfied, and the community cheers us on. Then there’s the post show blues, and the cycle begins again.
Mark Friedlander’s Untitled (2024) is activated by creative process, and those unwittingly drawn into its performance. Enacting a stylised version of a workshop action – bending a length of steel on a specially constructed jig – Friedlander forces the viewers around him to consider their bodily relationship to the artwork and its construction. Entering the gallery with a straight length of steel rod, Friedlander signals that we are now in the workshop by hand sawing the rod into shorter lengths. The audience is not given instructions as the artist proceeds to silently bend the rod, manoeuvring his body and the rod in response to its previous bends, his bodily ability, the space, and the audience around him. The grinding and shattering soundtrack of Hoffman’s work further inflect this work with an eau de workshop – its industrial tools, busy activity, and potential danger.
Friedlander writes that this work:
[was] prompted by a curator’s acknowledgement that their concern was the risk an artwork posed to exhibition visitors in their gallery, and not the risk it posed to the artist or those connected with the making. Whilst this may have been about the practicalities of the curator managing their responsibilities, it none the less spoke to the separation between the work in the gallery and the way artists negotiate risk in the development and fabrication of artworks.[9]
Friedlander’s PhD research draws on his role guiding and supporting student artists like me in the workshop, a significant part of which is identifying and managing risk. ‘Due to the somewhat obscure nature of risk management, we are not asked to consider it as an element of the artwork. Visitors to exhibitions rarely, if ever, know that this has occurred, and yet, in this aspect of practice, artworks are commonly altered and a subsequent trace remains as part of the objects themselves, or of the experience of engaging with the work.’[10]
Untitled builds on an earlier performance, Workshopping: Bent Steel Bar (2021) in which a group of artists, academics, curators, and OHS management professionals supervised two artists bending a steel bar in front of them. In this work, the bending could not begin until the group collectively felt that the level of risk was managed, and they had to stop when the risk was no longer acceptable. ‘Faced with uncertainties around the specific hazards of the task, and competing questions around risk management more generally, the steel bar received only the slightest bend before the group devolved down to decisions of the maker.’[11] Friedlander’s work poetically brings unseen elements of the artwork into the gallery – its fabrication and management of the risk it poses, both in its making and when exhibited – and the visitor’s experience of this process.
If Friedlander’s work throws us into the middle of the action, Kari Lee McInneny-McRae’s work My mind needs a moon boot is this horror’s epilogue, in which they reflect on their lived experience of mental and chronic illness. A collection of fragments, the work was created while the artist navigated health institutions, diagnoses, treatments and diverse types of care. McInneny-McRae’s work is deeply personal, elucidating an experience of bodily failure, psychological challenge, and the reality of the self-work and external support that these experiences require. I don’t refer to healing here – though this is an element of the work: McInneny-McRae speaks, in part, to the still-in-progress healing of an infected toe bone, which appropriately for this show, was initially supported by the knee-high moon boot resting here on hospital laminate floor. This boot cushions 50% of the leg and most of the foot but exposes the toes that it was supposed to protect. But healing implies an inherent and curable problem. This work’s impact lies in its negotiation of self-acceptance in all forms, and self-advocacy in a world that is not built to support all people. McInneny-McRae’s accumulation of objects, materials and images creates a narrative ‘pile’, a set of instructions to self, observations, memories, word play, poetry, and moments of reflection:
This work speaks to me trying to make sense of the world working for me, as opposed to my body and brain working for the world. In an exhibition curated around pain, this work speaks to hospital and doctors waiting rooms, to the need for high level health insurance for a distinguished diagnosis, to family support systems, to not giving up, despite the pin pricks and lack of prognosis, despite the physical pain, despite not wanting to do it anymore. There is a breath of nostalgia from a younger me who won’t give up on my imagination through references to the miniature and the make-believe worlds in their mind.[12]
It is depressingly clear that our health and societal systems are not equipped to manage deviation from the norm, or whatever we can call an ideal contributing member of society. McInneny-McRae’s work alludes to this, as ‘someone who struggles to function within the constructs of an able bodied and neuro-normative society,’ creating this work has been a method of making sense of ‘being human in an inhumane world.’[13] It is not the people working within these systems, but rather the structures of support that are complex, disjointed, or ill equipped to make good on their promises.
We are expected to want to work 8-hour days in an office, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year for our entire adult lives. Grind culture is waning in popularity, but we still largely hold ourselves to standards that are, for most, impossible to maintain. This construct disregards the fact that many people do not do their best work while surrounded by co-workers, or require shorter days, or suffer from chronic pain, or need genuine flexibility for myriad reasons. The focus on hours present over the quality of work produced in contemporary workplaces is harmful to everyone, even the capitalist drivers of this expectation. The true horror here, though, is that we have been convinced to prioritise of work over life and its enjoyment – and this dehumanises all of us.
Our medical systems, intended to care for everyone equally, continue to struggle to accommodate and adequately respond to the gender spectrum. The classification of ASD and ADHD as ‘disorders’ categorises neurodivergence as a problem to be solved. Understanding one’s internal experience through this lens of negativity clouds self-acceptance and awareness. In fact, the increasing visibility of these experiences, and rejection of their ‘problematic’ auras, empowers gender and neuro diverse people to embrace exactly what makes them distinct – as the most powerful, idiosyncratic, and true parts of themselves. McInneny-McRae’s work quietly pushes back at the concept of treatments and systems that target a return to normality, instead shifting focus to supporting their true and current self at all times.
Expressing hope, McInneny-McRae invites us to consider what comes after the horror of realising that we are not the creature we expected to be. There is not only grief in this epilogue – there is an opportunity to become fully realised as an individual, to be happily unlike all others, and to learn how to make the world work for you, instead of futilely using all your energy in aid of late-stage capitalism.
Thank you to Mark Friedlander, Lou Hubbard, Aaron Hoffman and Kari Lee McInneny-McRae for generously sharing your work, thoughts and words with me for this project. It has been an absolute pleasure working with each of you. Thanks also to the staff and volunteers at Blindside, Ezz Monem, Joanna Kitto, Manfax Paints and Signage, Steven Rendall and the many and varied medical professionals and loved ones who have helped me have fewer panic attacks and to make more art.
[1] Cronenberg, David, dir. 1986. The Fly. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
[2] Van der Kolk, Bessel A., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, New York, Penguin Books. p. 196
[3] Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. p. 196
[4] Perls, Frederick S., Ralph F. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Penguin Books, 1951. p. 275
[5] Hubbard, Lou, 2019. “Lou in Bath: an art practice 2000 – 2019.” PhD Thesis, The University of Melbourne, Fine Arts and Music. p. 29
[6] Hoffman, Aaron, personal communication, 22 June, 2024.
[7] Hoffman
[8] I absolutely did not intend for this to happen, but a very small chunk of my thumb did end up on the floor due to an install accident that now reads, to me, like a blood sacrifice to the art gods. Or a microcosmic illustration of this exhibition’s intent.
[9] Friedlander, Mark, personal communication, 21 June, 2024.
[10] Friedlander
[11] Friedlander
[12] McInneny-McRae, Kari Lee, Personal communication, 24 June, 2024.
[13] McInneny-McRae
Written to accompany the exhibition Body Horror at Blindside (July 21 – August 24, 2024).
Curated by Brigit Ryan
Artists: Mark Friedlander, Lou Hubbard, Aaron Hoffman