Berlinde De Bruyckere: The Knowledge of Sculptures
by K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

The shape of silent knowledge

Humankind’s knowledge of itself requires clarification through science. But it also needs enlightenment by means of the arts. Enlightenment through art often concerns those matters that otherwise eke out a neglected existence in the twilight of tacit knowledge. The area of silent knowledge—routine abilities, expertise, awareness, certainty of sense, clinical eye, etc.—is much wider than generally perceived, and also much more impor­tant from a scientific point of view. Especially forms of art that are silent in the strictest sense of the word, like sculpture, may reveal that this silence does not expressly have to be broken because, as with Berlinde De Bruyckere, it achieves not just a vivid but also an unalterably characteristic form through its materiality.

And there is more to it. Let’s follow for a moment Arnold Gehlen’s rough classification of western art: firstly, there is an art which visualizes ideas (depicting biblical scenes, myths or historically and symbolically important events in the Middle Ages); secondly, there is realistic art (the ‘bourgeois’ conquest of the real world); and thirdly, abstract, modern art. As most possible objects of depiction have been worn out, not to say used up by excessive use and advertising by the bourgeois-capitalist expansion, modern art concentrates on procedures, not on depiction; it encodes objects and thereby turns into an indirect, tacit form of reflection. It stages itself as ‘need for comment’ that has to be satisfied by the art scene.¹

Disorders between body and soul

Berlinde De Bruyckere demands and offers more. She offers objects—and very powerful ones at that—which irritate the viewer’s need for reflection and interpretation, maybe even obstruct it, whilst gravitating towards theory or at least some diagnostic insights. First of all one needs to establish the sculp­ture’s critical significance concerning a central feature often noticed: the distorted, bent figures of humans and animals that have been thrown out of kilter in terms of their position. Keep­ing in mind well-known western models of thought about the body, even the inevitable if never obvious correlation between spiritual movement and physical manifestation, we must draw upon Kleist’s essay on the puppet theatre. Since the moment we ate from the tree of knowledge, Kleist maintains, paradise has been ‘barred’. Human movement demonstrates that the soul, meaning the original principle of movement, the true human physical-emotional force of movement (‘vis motrix’), does not correlate any more with habitual human movement. We move as if our soul were located in ‘the vertebra at the small of our back’ or even in our elbows or some place. Therefore with humans there is an unavoidable and also strong connection between emotion and body movement. This connection, however, cannot be formulated as a transparent or comprehensible structure or order, but at most as a diffuse space of diversity that is often threatened with con­flict or pain. Obviously the artist’s figures do not move in the true sense of the word. But the movement that brought them into their pitiful positions is somewhat discernible. Thus the figures create a ‘slow and solid world’ (Beckett). De Bruyckere herself mentions in an interview on the exhibition We are all Flesh at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2012 the heaviness of the antlers in her Actaeon sculptures and also the fact that some viewers find her work generally too heavy.²

This world will hardly allow us to avoid the notion that deflec­tion, distortion, being-thrown-out-of-kilter, a disorder between body, soul—which nowadays we can only call ‘psychological’ anyway—and sense of movement are not just some misalignment that might be solved, but have become second nature. And the expansion to animal sculptures hints at the fact that nowadays we can perceive all life only as dysfunctional second nature. Having studied the bodies of horses—which are often suspended from a ceiling— for over twelve years, the artist claims in an interview that they represent human emotions.

Naturally De Bruyckere’s sculptures do not state if we can come to our senses or gather our wits again, in this world that is so busy and yet frustratingly slowed down by all the disruptions that make it sluggish and heavy. Coming to Our Senses is also the title of a book by Morris Berman concerning the ‘hidden story of the body and the spirit in the west’.³

Berman nominates among others the spiritual love of Christen­dom that was later on to have generalised privileged status, especially with sects like the Cathars, Descartes’ division of res cogitans and res extensa, as well as industrial mechanisation as the decisive driving forces responsible for the division between those human dimensions that should actually be intimately con­nected.

Complex physical interior worlds—the alien body as a whole

Berman also notes that the term ‘meat’ for mechanically ‘treated’ flesh is a definition of the 20^th century. (It is permitted, by the way, when looking at the various works, to note—with great caution— that the artist is a butcher’s daughter.) This takes us to another central point of De Bruyckere’s world. The massive figure, which in its power of reference and correspondency is disturbed, is opposed by a physical interior world that is also often formed dif­ferently by the artist. We do not know much more about the inner world of our bodies than that it is fragile and more or less beyond our control. Modern medicine is busy minimising the drasticness of its ‘intrusions’ which it owes to the obscure complexity and lack of control of the inner world of the body. Anatomy atlases like the Color Atlas of Anatomy by J. W. Rohen and Chihiro Yokochi⁴ or similarly the plastination projects by Gunther von Hagens try to eliminate this lack of transparency by depicting specified body circulatory systems with colour-graphics or models, like in von Hagens’ ‘body worlds’ (where he correctly uses the plural). Still, what seems to be so close to reality comes to a standstill midway: it does not add up to the one body that we would like to feel that e are. The functional specifics—even comprehensible perhaps to the layman—of larger, but also smaller and the smallest partial worlds hardly tell us anything about comprehending the whole. Berlinde De Bruyckere leaves us the idea of a vague physical whole, the scale of existence of which cannot be ignored. She shifts this whole into uncontrollable realms that might intimidate some spectators. One could maybe tame it down somewhat by looking at it as an illustration of the formula of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology: I am (perceive and feel myself as) a body, but I also have another body that is physically not distinguishable from the felt body, the nature of which evades me. With De Bruyckere, some figures that have been summarised under the title The Mystery of the Body impose themselves, thus increasing the sense of alienation: they appear to be fragmented enlargements of organs or functional parts (sinews, muscles, intestines), or that are hardly distinguishable, as for example with the Actaeon sculptures, from the shards of some antlers. With oth­ers one seems to recognize skinned flesh, to be looking through arteries, or to come across open wounds. It becomes eerie when the heads of the figures have been obliterated or seem to be miss­ing altogether. However, with the Inside me series (2008-2011) the inner body worlds remain hollow. In the literal sense of the word, it could mean that the body is being treated as ‘meat’ and has already ‘been gutted’. Metaphorically it could be hollow because there is not much to say about the inner world, despite all the pressures it places on us.

The particular nature of human feelings

Looking at De Bruyckere’s older installations such as the dis­torted corpses of horses on the battlefield (In Flanders Fields, 1999/2000—which is also the title of a famous poem by the Canadian John McCrae, 1915, written during the second battle of Flanders near Ypres which marked the beginning of chemical warfare), or sculptures such as Schmerzensmann, the result of her studying Lucas Cranach (or the artist herself in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 21, 2011 being condescendingly and improperly referred to as ‘Woman of Sorrows from Ghent’, meaning Berlinde De Bruyckere herself), one might draw the conclusion that these depictive strategies are to remind us what our authentic emotions—especially suffering—consist of, which in everyday life usually occur only in a diluted or stereotyped way. One cannot possibly question the fact that the arts play a major role in visualising feelings, the reason being that we know much less about the characteristic qualities of our feelings than we think. We presume to have this knowledge because language offers some words for affective conditions in certain social situa­tions. The body therapist Moshe Feldenkrais maintained that we know more about movement than love, anger, envy or even think­ing itself. In his books on the priority of emotions (Ifeel therefore lam) and on Spinoza, neurobiologist Antonio R. Damasio assigns most of the feelings that we perceive as our most personal to secondary or social emotions that are linguistically-socially encoded and designated for certain social situations (embarrass­ment, jealousy, guilt, pride etc.—and Damasio also discerns six primary or universal emotions: joy, grief, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, and some background emotions like feelings of comfort, uneasiness, tranquillity, tension). Be that as it may, an organic- physiological dynamic suffuses our emotions without us being able to connect these two areas by means of direct correlations. Damasio’s imagery of the body as the ‘theatre’ of emotions, of the landscape of body and brain that is deeply changed by emotions, though principally correct, actually obscures the inadequacies which brain researchers have also not been able to overcome, and probably never will, when trying to define the interrelationship between physiological-chemical processes in the brain and actu­ally felt, affective or other states of consciousness.

The arts therefore have to work out a more attractive form—one might claim a more authentic form—to create emotions quasi- artificially or in some kind of experimental situation. This con­straint is not just reduced to the older arts; film, for instance, uses the unrealistic form of close-up and slow motion without further ado, both of which are not part of our normal perception, in order to convey emotional qualities and also to make them conceivable. In some of his films dealing with the feudal wars (Kagemusha, Ran) the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa shows the death of horses on the battlefield in slow motion—impressions that are reminiscent of De Bruyckere’s In Flanders Fields. However, one must not make the same mistake as Lessing did, when he talks about a sculpture in his Laokoon Essay in order to explain— besides poetry—his main focal point, the art of painting, while along the way forgetting his original point, a critique of Winckel- mann’s interpretation of pain of the Laokoon Group. One should however not forget that in 2002 Imke Kreiser, among others, tried to bridge the different effects of the arts on the basis of neurobiol­ogy in her book Laokoon⁵; especially since De Bruyckere insists on this proximity in the connection of sculptures with the pictures of Lucas Cranach or Luca Giordano or with Pasolini’s film.

Relations to the body—relations to objects

Whether the sculptures really primarily serve to illustrate emo­tional conciseness remains undecided. If it were so, precisely the physical weight of the sculpture would fix emotions in place over an infinite time span and thus contradict their dynamic, versatile and changeable character. It is easy to overlook or neglect the fact with Berlinde De Bruyckere that most of her figures—animals and humans alike—are in physical relation to objects by way of their positioning: they sit or lie on them, usually in a rather strained manner; they are suspended from or locked up in them.

It is naturally most noticeable when the figures are suspended, for example the sculpture Lingam (a Hindu symbol for energy, from the divine to the sexual), whereby two copulating figures seem to be like remote-control puppets on a string by way of their suspension.

But our perception would also have to be alarmed by sculptures like We are all Flesh II, a Pieta made of wax, or by Romeu (2010) and, as well as Lingam, more copulating double figurines. Here the figures sit or rather lie (both verbs do not cor­rectly relate the circumstances) on a kind of bedspread, which in turn is spread over some sort of construction. With the double figurines, both figures function as the object of the other. In the case of We are all Flesh II, one figure huddles—or should we say crouches, or cuddles?—in the bedspread. The Pieta lies—whether or not relaxed one cannot tell because its facial features are miss­ing—nearly fully stretched on its back. With Romeu, the back is rather pressed through by the constr uction; viewed from the side, the figure seems to almost glide off the frame whilst trying to keep the danger in check through body tension.There is a key cultural-psychological question hidden in these hesitant descriptions. De Bruyckere hints at it in the above-men­tioned interview when she talks about how (in the first case) the figure almost disappears within the bedspread, wanting to make it a part of its body like a toddler does, to incorporate it. These works offer a silent yet all the more effective aesthetic image of the ‘thinking right to the end’ of ‘western’ relations to objects as they have been drawn up in partly alarming perspectives by the English child psychologist Donald W. Winnicott. According to Winnicott⁶, ‘the baby’s well-known characteristic incorporation behaviour in its perceived body-environment-unity has to be resolved with the help of transitional objects from intermediate areas of experience if the development into an adult is not to be made very difficult or even prevented. Here Winnicott means the relations with objects (the infamous teddy bear and doll) that in certain environments are perceived as part of its own body as well as objects in their own right, but can neither be completely ascribed to the toddler’s illusionary world of ontological unity nor to the adult’s conventional subject-object thinking. A successful life, maybe even the optimistic vitality of an entire culture, is dependent on the fact of how the childish transitional objects can be replaced by culturally acceptable objects and activities for adults. To this day some cultures manage to absorb this problem to some extent by rituals or ceremonies. Other cultures seem to manage to transfer the libidinous relationship with the body of the mother and the child’s transitional objects to various other objects, even those of everyday life. A third type, and now we are approaching the ‘western’ type that we ourselves often consider problematic, substitutes the libidinous or sacred attachment to objects by fetishising on a broad scale. The west is mainly bound to Christian creational beliefs and does not really trust the inner strength of the bond to all kinds of objects established by intimate mother-child relations. Thus the objects once created by God can very quickly lose their ‘inner’ value by the distance acquired along with capitalist conditions, and so sink into the realms of arbitrar­ily exchangeable objects.

Naturally, no one has to let their perception of De Bruyckere’s work be forced into the corset of such theories. However, De Bruyckere’s reception and its history to date firmly prove the extent of (mental) disturbances that the artistic intervention in what appears as solid concreteness or bodily materiality entails. The artist clearly has not created any allegories, as the text-image structures of the Middle Ages did (but not only), structures, both parts and whole, to which one was supposed to ascribe signi­fications, for example moral ones. One successor, however, of allegory is theory, and there is no harm in substituting one’s own prejudices now and then with those of theory, especially when such an opportunity arises.

‘Actaeon, son of Aristaeus and Autonoe (daughter of King Cadmus), was one of Thebes’ most famous heroes, having been reared and taught by the centaur Chiron. This famous hunter’s death inspired a number of beautiful poetic works. The myth can be rendered as follows. One day Diana was bathing with her nymphs in the val­ley of Gargaphia, where A. was out hunting. Captivated by the goddess he happened to catch sight of, he stopped. Diana was so enraged by this she transformed him into a stag of which nothing human remained, only what could prove worst in such a situation: consciousness. A. fled but his own fast-footed dogs chased him up Mount Cithaeron where they literally tore him apart. They then searched the entire country for their master until Chiron fashioned an image of him in order to soothe them. Another slightly deviating account of the myth: Diana did not just want to punish him for his curiosity but for the outrageous impertinence of a mortal wanting to use force against her. And according to yet another version: Diana is said to have trans­formed him and had him chased to death so that he would not obtain Semele whom he desired as his spouse.’

1. Arnold Gehlen: Zeit- Bilder. Zur Soziologie undAsthetik der moder- nen Malerei. Frankfurt a. M./Bonn 1960.
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ffzINEejOsO
3. Morris Berman: Coming to Our Senses. Body and spirit in the hidden history of the West. New York 1989.
4. W. Rohen, Chihiro Yokochi: Color Atlas of Anatomy. 3^rd ed. New York, Tokyo, Stuttgart 1993.
5. Imke Kreiser: Laokoon im 21. Jahrhundert oder die Neurobiologie der Asthetik. Bochum 2002.
6. Donald W. Winnicott: Playing and Reality. London 1971.