Monstrosity of the "Flesh" - Diederik Klomberg

By way of apology for our continued silence this month, we would like to make a peace offering in the form of a stunning piece of film art by Netherlands-based Diederik Klomberg: Flesh. For more of Klomberg's work, visit his website.

This 8-min short film offers what almost feels like a complete sensual envelopment, the soundtrack alone evoking a sensation perhaps akin to being bathed in amniotic fluid. The womb-like audio experience is paired alongside a mesmerising transformation of flesh as clitoris becomes ear, becomes bellybutton, becomes nipple. The film is a seamless mutation of the body in which folds, crevices, orifices, and unbroken skin melt into one another with a recklessness abandonment of the traditions of human form.

Flesh is a cinematic creation of the monstrous body in pieces, the body that is always already in the process of becoming both itself and its fleshly other. Each dissected, high definition pound of flesh becomes as alien as the Elephant Man's tumorous excess, or one of H.G. Geiger's biomechanical creatures. Each image is carved out of the healthy body to take on a life of its own; the breathing, pulsing soundtrack is not that of the body in-toto, but of a new, foreign body that quivers and grows as sphincters expand and an expanse of smooth skin crumples into canyons.

Since we are in the process of setting up registration and putting together a preliminary conference schedule, updates may be few and far between yet (although we hope to see a change in that pattern soon). Until then, treat yourself for about 8 minutes. There's really nothing quite like getting lost in a rolling tide of flesh and finding yourself confronted with the glorious monstrosity of a perfectly normal nostril.

A Grotesque Aesthetic? The Anatomia Collection

Joseph Maclise, Pl.III "Dissection of the
Neck and Thorax, Heart and Blood Vessels"
Surgical Anatomy (1856).

We would like to draw your attention to an absolutely fabulous resource provided absolutely free by the University of Toronto - perfect for researchers in the medical humanities, or anyone with an admiration for exquisite anatomical art. Please indulge yourself and explore The Anatomia Collection: 4500 anatomical plates from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, digitised and free to the public. The plates range in date from 1522-1867, and are fully indexed using medical subject headings (MeSH).

If you have perused our blog thoroughly, you might already have noticed that the gorgeous sketch depicting the face and skull of conjoined twins which we have selected as our header image is a section of a plate from Joseph Maclise's Surgical Anatomy (1856), all of the plates from which are available through the Anatomia Collection. This particular image was chosen not simply because of what it represented, but because Maclise's style itself, in this plate as throughout his body of work (pun fully intended), seems designed to elicit a highly sensual reaction.

His sketches often depict the hooks, strings, and instruments used to expose successive layers of flesh, vessels, and organs, remnants of the intrusion of medical probing which are typically erased from anatomical sketches. And also unlike many medical sketches, which hide the faces of their subjects, or else strip them of their identity, Maclise's "dissected figures", to quote the collection's description of the text, "seem almost life-like, with real faces, usually of young men with fair hair."

Joseph Maclise, Pl. 2 "Arteries, Veins, and
Nerves of the Thorax and Neck" in Richard Quain's
Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body (1844)

The description goes on to suggest that, "endowed with great dignity, the figures resemble the romantically noble heroic figures in his brother's paintings" (his brother being the artist Daniel Maclise). The assertion that Maclise endows his figures with dignity and romantic nobility is not necessarily untrue, but a scan through his work will reveal bodily contortions that seem more indicative of violent ecstasy, even torture, scattered throughout the romantic heroes. Amongst these evidently "life-like" figures also rises the gaunt, unavoidably lifeless face of one man, who simultaneously evokes images of decay, even of intense starvation.

Maclise's detailing of the feathered hair clinging to skin even as it is pulled apart to reveal each layer beneath, of the instruments that rip and tear as much as they slice, leaving ragged flaps as a grotesque frame, all of this casts a reflection of the dissected corpse on the page (or screen) onto the body of those observing it. As much as some images may evoke dignity and heroics, Maclise's overall style draws attention to a grim sensuality of dissection that is absent from many medical sketch. As he exposes the mystery of muscles and bones and blood vessels, his drawings render the subject/body monstrous; twisted, tortured, ecstatic, open bodies intimately tied to the living observer through an evocation of shared sensuality.

Horror and the Monstrous Feminine

For an exploration of the monstrous feminine and horror, take a look at Barbara Creed's 'Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection'. Most of you will be able to access this text through your university / institution.
This fascinating article explores horror films, experiencing 'the abject', horror sub-genres and various socially-constructed notions of the horrific mediated through images of the monstrous body, blood, vomit, pus and excrement. In Barbara Creed's words:

The horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears and putrefying flesh. In terms of Kristeva's notion of the border, when we say such-and-such a horror film 'made me sick' or 'scared the shit out of me', we are actually foregrounding that specific horror film as a 'work of abjection' or 'abjection at work' - in both literal and metaphoric sense. Viewing the horror film signifies a desire not only for perverse pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images, being filled with terror / desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, having taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, to throw out, eject the abject (from the safety of the spectator's seat).

Creed offers succinct readings of films such as the Exorcist, Carrie and Alien, as well as the mythological female monsters such as the Sphinx and the Medusa, mediated through concepts like the phallic mother, castration anxieties, female fetishism and numerous others.
Finally, Creed considers the central ideological project of popular horror films to be the 'purification of the abject', bringing about the confrontation with the abject' like the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine in order to eject it and 're-draw the boundaries between the human and non-human.'
If the above-mentioned concepts of blood, gore, monstrosities and 'ejecting the abject' touch upon your areas of interest, this text might prove inspiring indeed!