Writing the Body/Resistance/Endurance:
An A/r/tographic Ritual Inquiry

Barbara Bickel
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL

Abstract

Resistance and endurance are the words that surface when I begin to share the process of art making, reflecting, and writing. Can I write a language of the body without the guilt of betrayal? I have made a commitment to integrate language and writing into my art; to do this I must continually release the power of silence. I resist what Barthes as cited in Rose (2001) called anchorage, text that accompanies an image and “allows the reader to choose between what could be a confusing number of possible denotative meanings” (81). As a weak form of anchorage, words must be hunted down in my art and are often a late discovery in the viewing. Trinh Minh-ha (1999) reframes the struggle that I find my body moving through as I write in what she calls,

…women’s womb writing, which neither separates the body from the mind nor sets the latter against the heart…but allows each part of the body to become infused with consciousness. Again, bringing a new awareness of life into previously forgotten, silenced, or deadened areas of the body. (262)

This a/r/tographic[1] (Irwin and de Cosson, 2004) project began in the warmth of the summer with a desire to externalize and embody writing as art. The private performance ritual[2] was the starting point, an intuitive effort undertaken in part to embody and understand the numerous feminists[3] who compellingly summon women to write from their own bodies and write with the body as a form of resistance. The creative process involved witnessing the body/self in a ritual experience of writing on my body that was enacted on August 2, 2003 in a secluded forested area in the University of British Columbia Endowment lands. The performance ritual was a testimony, self-witnessed by myself, the artist, by the life forms and creatures of the forest, and by two women friends, Cathy Pulkinghorn and Nanè Jordan who documented the event with a still and video camera respectively.

Charles Garoian (2001) reflecting on the work of performance artist Robbie McCauley wrote that “…she uses her body as an instrument with which to witness and give testimony…. As an instrument of culture, [she] claims her body resonates with “her experience and imagination” (102). In my desire to find peace with words I follow my body and its ability to witness and serve as the ground for my reluctant written testimony.

Performance ritual has been a significant part of my art practice. The underlying thrust of women’s ritual, as stated by spiritual feminist Dianne Neu in Northrup’s (1997) study on women and ritual, is to “affirm women’s power, acknowledge its roots and use it to transform society” (38). The intimate performance ritual described in the poetic rendering Third Body Testimony was the beginning of the my thesis research and informed a public performance ritual which accompanied the art installation and performance ritual at the AMS Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC in April of 2004. 

Performance rituals have affirmation, transformation, and a re-inscribing of female experience as well as subversion of restrictive cultural norms as their intention. The material for the public performance ritual was drawn from trances that took place throughout the inquiry.  Educator Peter McLaren (1999) defines,

Ritualization [a]s a process which involves the incarnation of symbols, symbol clusters, metaphors, and root paradigms through formative bodily gesture. As forms of enacted meaning, rituals enable social actors to frame, negotiate, and articulate their phenomenological existence as social, cultural, and moral beings. (50)

Performance Ritual. UBC Endowment Lands. August 2, 2003.
Photography by Cathy Pulkinghorn

As I look at the photo images of my private performance ritual and the video documentation I ask what did I incarnate, enact, reorder, reinterpret, and challenge? In the experience of the performance ritual I trusted my desire to enact the event, but I was not aware of a significant purpose beyond undertaking the task I had set out for myself of writing on my entire body. In the poetic rendering, Third Body Testimony, written shortly afterwards, I was able to describe the experience yet still felt a gap as to the full significance of the act. It is through the reading of theorists that I move beyond my own artistic impulse and begin to articulate and further re-value the importance of giving ritual space to the body.

Feminist philosopher Carol Bigwood (1998) writes that: “Though the body is primarily nonrational[4] and nonlinguistic in its communications, it nevertheless is full of a significance and has a way of ordering of its own (106).” The ordering of my a/r/tographic inquiry called for a natural nurturing and supportive environment to begin my work within. In this space I became a “living body.” In her concept of renaturalizing the body Bigwood draws upon Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body:

The body that is sensitive and in deep communion with its environment is not the biological object-body that science describes but is the “living body” or the “phenomenological body”…. [that] is not fixed but continually emerges anew out of an ever changing weave of relations to earth and sky, things, tasks, and other bodies (105).

My visual art practice and performance ritual processes utilize the elements of collage. In approaching writing as an art form I echo the structure of collage in this article. I weave together the voices of theorist, writers, and artists whose words have brought illumination and sense to my feminist art process and practice, their words are woven with my own writing[5], art images, poetic renderings, and trances. Through their ideas and theories I have come to find that my art is not completely embedded in the numinous, the mysterious, and that it flows with a sense of direction that can be articulated within a phenomenological, feminist, and educative discourse. The ongoing work of integration is possible because of and with the struggle of resistance and determination to endure the unknown.

This article and my academic and arts-based research is situated within a/r/tography, an alternative and evolving form of inquiry that calls for an inner collaborative relationship between the art/researcher/teacher self. Educator, researcher, and artist Rita Irwin (2004) explains a/r/tography as the act of the “artist/researcher/teacher art making and writing offer[ing] complementary yet resistant forms of recursive inquiry.” She goes on to describe “A/r/tography [a]s a fluid orientation creating its rigour through continuous reflexivity, discourse analysis, and hermeneutic inquiry” (8).

The a/r/tographic project that forms the basis of this article is not completed, resolved, or pulled together. It is not in possession of itself but it is in motion, learning. I write from the third space[6] that Stephanie Springgay (2003) alludes to with Merleau-Ponty’s written image, “my body inserts itself between the two leaves of the world, which itself is inserted between the leaves of my body (1968, 264)” (8). This article allows others to witness the formation of a performance ritual and art installation. The elements of the inquiry are not presented or cast together as fixed or linear. They are in an emergent state that includes large gaps in rational understanding. I am taking the risk of inviting others into the felt experience of what I feel is still a raw process[7] of inquiry. I do this remembering that the work is held within the third space of ritual. I invite the reader/viewer into a ritual third space—into trance[8].

Writing the body, then, is both constative and performative. It signifies those bodily territories that have been kept under seal; it figures the body. But, writing the body is also a performative utterance; the feminine libidinal economy inscribes itself in language (Dallery, 1992, 59).

(Re-)discovering herself, for a woman, thus could only signify the possibility of sacrificing no one of her pleasures to another, of identifying herself with none of them in particular, of never being simply one. A sort of expanding universe to which no limits could be fixed and which would not be incoherence nonetheless…. Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her (Irigaray, 1997, 254).

The trance is a “performative utterance” that “inscribe[s]… into language” (Dallery, 1992, 59) that a woman is “never …simply one” whose “expanding universe… [has] no limits” (Irigaray, 1997, 254). This trance experience, I believe incorporates and documents the multiple aspects of the body/mind/spirit of a woman returning to her body to reclaim a text that is embodied and authentic to her spirit.

Trance is a performative ritual act that takes place within an altered state of consciousness. I experience it as an active form of meditation that is not focused on the concept of emptying the mind, which predominates in most traditional Eastern meditation (Suzuki, 1975). The active mediation/performance of trance is a place of expanding the mind’s imaginary. Within the third space of trance the mind can imagine and hence practice performing the body outside of limiting conditioned “regulatory norms” (Butler, 234) that our learned minds and culture repeatedly perform.

The artist part of me has great resistance writing about the art while the art is newly emerging; between the worlds and I am very reluctant to be pulled into consciousness. From this location of resistance, ambiguity, and disagreement I continue to struggle to write knowing that “[t]he hegemony of patriarchy is embedded in language”(Dallery, 62).

My body rebels
legs bounce
below the computer desk
shoulders burn
facing the computer screen

My being screams
soundless
as I write
offering voice, giving birth
to new language

How does one integrate body and word after more than 500 years of separation? [10] I live the split with my love/hate relationship of ambiguity with words. I love the mark-making aesthetic of script and the wisdom and knowledge that is shared through the written and spoken word. I hate when words and language are used to control and manipulate, when the power that they can hold is not acknowledged. I have kept my sense of power often through silence and a refusal to give importance to words. It is in the shadow of this dichotomy that words find their way into my art. When words are in an art piece they are my own, I resist making them clearly visible for the viewer, often leaving traces of text to be pondered.

Performance Ritual. UBC Endowment Lands. August 2, 2003.
Photography by Cathy Pulkinghorn

Continuing my a/r/tographic inquiry, in the next cast created in my studio I embodied the experience of the bird wings that had propelled my body at the end of my performance ritual in the forest, described in the following poetic lines.

My hands       arms catch the wind
Bird wings singing

Although this process was not as physically arduous as the casting of the frog position, I went through the same experience of confinement, loss of awareness in my limbs, and discomfort. Through the physical creating of these sculptural “objects” my body went through the metaphoric loss of control (subjectivity) that many theorists write of as the objectification of the female body within patriarchy. Blood circulation, the body’s life source is metaphorically blocked in the objectification of women’s bodies.

In writing and re-telling these experiences I have became aware of the parallels to Iris Young’s (1998) writing where she brings forward,

Beauvouir’s account of woman’s existence in patriarchal society as defined by a basic tension between immanence and transcendence…. The female person (261)…live[s] a contradiction: as human she is a free subject who participates in transcendence, but her situation as a woman denies her that subjectivity and transcendence (262)…. To the extent that a woman lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities. (267)

As a female in this society, I live the tension between the polarization of immanence and transcendence daily. The tensions and the struggles are embedded in my body and the bodies of those around me. Susan Bordo (1997) reminds us that,

Our conscious politics, social commitments, strivings for change may be undermined and betrayed by the life of our bodies—not the craving, instinctual body imagined by Plato, Augustine, and Freud, but what Foucault calls the “docile body,” regulated by the norms of cultural life. (91)

Two artists, whose work I have been drawn to, who work with the body and address the tensions created by the regulated body in our society, are Shirin Neshat, a Middle Eastern woman living in North America and Cindy Sherman, an American woman. I turn to these artists’ work to assist the understanding of the emerging theory within my own a/r/tographic process. Freda Droes (1998) in writing about Sherman’s art observes that,

The unifying factor in her work is …the body. The unity of her work resides in the centralization of the body. The body is the most real, and at the same time provides an image of transcendence. The living body takes on traits of God, although it is not deified or idolized. It is neither worshipped nor revered. (132)

Neshat utilizes the text of feminist poets and Sufi mystics as a veil over the skin of the women in her art images. For Western audiences, who are the majority of viewers as her work is not exhibited in the Middle East, the text that is written on the exposed body parts of these seemingly silent women is unreadable and a mystery. Lehmann (2001) shares that the artist felt the images were “naked” (378) without a script. The addition of the script is an aesthetic decision that I believe adds a transcendent (subjective) component to the body that is energized with the challenging and spirited words. My own written upon body became an additional layer of skin covering my nakedness while simultaneously exposing my internal thoughts and struggles.

I am appreciative of the artists who have forged this ground ahead of me and feel fortunate as a practicing visual and performance ritual artist to be familiar with dwelling in the unknown territory of the creative process. The a/r/tographic inquiry requires a willingness to follow the process and “not [be] in possession of itself,” and as such holds fertile ground and possibilities for new ways of learning and knowledge making in this world.

My passion as a feminist artist creating re-presentations of the body has been to make “visual art [that] expresses the altered world of a trance/dream state and reflects a female vision within non-confining time and space” (Bickel, artist statement, 2001). My art walks the fine line of reminding and embolding women. “To open her body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directedness” and in so doing runs the risk “for a woman to invite objectification…. The threat of being seen is, however, not the only threat of objectification that the woman lives. She also lives the threat of invasion of her body space” (Young, 1998, 271).

Reclaiming and transforming the space that our bodies, voices, images, and writing occupies is the dangerous ground that my art continually leads me to. Without ignoring this danger in my art making process, I continue to enter and draw upon the territory of the third space of ritual, which offers a sacred space for the full honouring of our bodies and voices without censor. To have a place where full breath and movement is practiced can lead us closer to the place of holding a healthy ground in what is “normally” a disempowering and invaded location within our society.

Endnotes

References

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About the Author

Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, educator and independent curator. She received a Ph.D. in Art Education (Curriculum Studies) from The University of British Columbia, where her arts-based research focused on women, ritual, spiritual leadership, collaboration, and restorative and transformative learning. She completed an arts-based MA in Education at The University of British Columbia, a BFA in Painting at the University of Calgary and a BA in Sociology and Art History at the University of Alberta. Her art and performance rituals have been exhibited and performed in Canada since 1991. Her articles on arts-based inquiry and a/r/tography have been published in numerous journals and book chapters. Her art is represented by the Kensington Fine Art Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women’s focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Her art portfolio and arts-based research can be viewed on-line at http://www.barbarabickel.com

She is an assistant professor in Art Education, in the Department of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

email: radicaltrust@shaw.ca

Author Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the UBC a/r/tography study group, led by Rita Irwin, for early editing and encouragement in the writing of this article, as well as members of the Educational Insights Editorial team, Valerie Triggs, Wendy Nielsen and Lynn Fels, for their thoughtful final edits.