1 Methodology or the process of speaking
2 Forming a science of swimming
3 Reconfiguring the sensual body
1 Methodology or the process of speaking
I
would like to introduce the idea of a liminal space or interstices as a useful
concept to which I return again and again. This liminal space is a fluid place
through which to maneuver and from which to speak. It is simultaneously restrictive
and potential and is here symbolized as the practice of swimming.
I have long been intrigued by the disparate space between two and three dimensions, and between still and moving images. I have recognized this liminal space as an odd place, but one from which I have felt some comfort speaking. As a methodology, it circumvents reverences within individual disciplines to which I refuse to subscribe--either for their masculine authority or conceit, or for their language's inadequacy in articulating female subjectivity. Consequently, my practice involves slipping discursively among media and ideas, along the tunnels undermining their authority in a form of artistic espionage: I animate still images, still moving images and re-narrate narratives to tell stories not yet spoken. Speaking from this liminal space suits me--a female artist who at the end of the century, as in its beginning, persists as an impostor--ontologically unsettled, ill-defined, monstrous. 1
Now, for me to address scientific representation of the female body, is, first, to be conscious of problematic sexual dualisms integral to Western culture and, second, to then displace women's subordination by subverting its terms; this is not to speak in a different language, but to uncover, re-present and shift meaning from within--to slip along my interstitial space and push new meaning up from its roots into the visible space of the cultural milieu.
2 Forming a science of swimming
By the eighteenth century, early modern science formed an increasingly dominant discourse with its promise of empirical knowledges unencumbered with religious or state ideologies. Its practitioners increasingly assumed the role of social arbitrators in a European society primed for a sense of order in a seemingly chaotic world of war, colonialism, industrialization, urban growth, and emerging democratic and feminist ideas; however, then as now, science remained mired in institutional and socialized texts: its brand of "natural order" simply reinforced existing social hierarchies based on differences in race, sex, and class. Themes, such as the relegation of females to non-intellectual spheres based on perceived anatomical difference, persist to the present day.
As Rosi Bradotti describes: "Western thought has a logic of binary oppositions that treats difference as that which is other-than the accepted norm,"2 and that difference is required "as perjoration in order to erect the positivity of the norm."2
Difference is central to our way of "knowing" and science is a means by which difference is inscribed within our truth-seeking cultural projects. While recent claims identifying genetic differences in homosexuals may in a positive light suggest the naturalness of homosexuality, the comparative process subordinates homosexual genetics to the "standard" heterosexual model, ascribing thus, a deviant, pathological status--one that can perhaps be repaired.
Of
interest to me are long-established visual rhetorical strategies that signify
empirical "truths," and that privilege scientific knowledges over
other, more marginal ways of knowing, such as the telling of personal stories.
These rhetorical strategies include reduction of the body's forms and functions
to particulate information, measurement, comparative analysis, the ignor-ance
of context, and the use of technology as an "objective" mediator of
information.3
We largely fail to question science's authoritative voice and its claims of
universality; we cling to our beliefs in science's "will to truth"
in knowing the human being through its methodologies. While acknowledging biomedical
science's productive contributions, it is important to recognize its language
and systems of representation as complicit within and contributing to all
socio-political life. For example, a long history of skull measurement has described
the female brain as smaller and compromised and this has informed educational
policy that systematically excluded women from institutions of higher learning
until well into this century. Thus, skull illustrations themselves can be seen
as emblematic of a practice invested in defining difference and in the construction
of a fractured, subjugated, and gendered body. I became especially interested
where this form of representation had extended into popular culture such as
manuals of various forms.
Accordingly, when I came across images in the book Swimming Simplified, (1927), I was struck with the import of scientific rhetorical strategies as a means of enfranchising its representations within a legitimate cultural discourse.4 While the book fails miserably to describe swimming's multifarious experience, (to the point of being almost comical), its representations bear a recognizable currency within a scientific context. I was most interested in what had been denied or excluded in this process as non-knowledge, for example: the emotional; sensual; and less-quantifiable, kinesthetic experiences; specifically since these excluded elements have been historically linked to the feminine realm and the non-rational, hysterical body. Thus, my work has absence as its subject. Though I employ various symbolic means to give agency to these prisoners of scientific representation, absence haunts these images; the dialectic struggle between absence and presence, between speaking and voicelessness, between denial and acknowledgment are sadly very much reflective of feminine experience.
3 Reconfiguring the sensual body
Rene
Descartes (1596-1650), a father of modern science, felt that what stood between
"man" and truth was a confusion between our inner and outer realities.
He believed an ability to distance ourselves from the prejudice of personal
experience and from the continuum of nature, leaving reason as our guide, was
the key to epistemic objectivity.5
This ability for detachment, clarity, and dispassion became linked with a progressive,
masculine cognitive style, as opposed to subjectivity and an inextricably empathetic
bond with nature, historically considered feminine.6
Thus was borne, as Francis Bacon would later declare, "a truly masculine
birth of time."7
Consequently, a long history of biomedical science in search of objective--thus
legitimate--knowledges has performed a violence on the body, severing its parts
under its precise technological gaze and denying the contextual, temporal, and
interrelated nature of a complex being. Only recently has an unprecedented movement
toward more holistic forms of medicine marked a public's questioning of the
sanctity and conceit of scientific knowledges; we now identify ourselves as
formed through social politics, through memory, and through sensual and other
subject-centered sensitivities ignored by science. 
An illustration from the manual Swimming Simplified demonstrates these strategies. Here, the camera, as technological mediator, has reduced the complex subject into four, numbered, two-dimensional forms for the ease of analysis. Although swimming is a multi-sensory experience, the privileging of the visual here is consistent with a (scientific) hierarchy of senses that, put simply, maintains that seeing is believing and other less readily quantifiable senses, are deterrents to objective representation. Furthermore, the subject is not identified, nor is the context. It is doubtful one could learn this stroke from this illustration but we are culturally conditioned to suspend our doubts and to trust this familiar strategy.
The
work titled
Learning Breath Control / I think of you often,
contrast's the book's didactic assertion to control the body with the vulnerable, sensual subject who is looking out. Mirroring the image ruptures the book's linear narrative, and the application of a richly glazed, skin-like surface reifies the individual in contrast to the book's universal, emblematic, two-dimensional subject. Water issues from the two mouths in silent conversation. And, as in many of the works, the water's exaggerated density suggests the excess weight of a slow-motion dream--the dream, like swimming, being an ideal space where the whole experiential spectrum from fear to pleasure is played out. The exaggerated density recalls also water's sensual physicality caressing the swimming body. I am informed here by an early experience with a boy in my neigbourhood swimming pool when I was about twelve. I did not know him but he approached me slowly from behind, arms encirling my waist. Our bodies moved in unison--water mediating an exchange that would not have been possible in the rarified and timid air of the dry land. I recall feeling both exhilliration and remorse that my space had thus been intruded.
In the hierarchy of senses established in Greek philosophy and sustained through Platonic metaphysics and Christian moralities, the order follows roughly the level of the body--sight and hearing being the senses of highest regard (for their proximity to the mind and for their detachment from direct physical contact), smell and taste are next, and lastly, touch and the sensual pleasures of the body.8 Thus relegated to the realm of non-intellectual bodily pleasures, particularly of the sexual, it is not surprising that the sensual would be denied in a rational and moral science of swimming, although the sensual forms a considerable component of swimming experience.9 In his history of swimming, Charles Sprawson, describes the sensual as a dominant theme in swimming discourse; the same individuals who developed swimming techniques also described the seductive, often homo erotic pleasures of swimming:
"When Herbert [Swinburne] set eyes on the sea off Northumberland for the first time, his face trembled and changed, his eyelids tingled, his limbs yearned all over: the colours and savours of the sea seemed to pass in at his eyes and mouth, all his nerves desired the divine touch of it, all his soul saluted it through his senses . . . . he was thirsty to be in between the waves."10
Similarly, in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, (1899) a woman comes to know her sexuality and her freedom to act as agent of her own life through experiencing her body moving in water--the body speaks when the rational mind is unresolved.
"A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before."11
Narrated excerpts from Chopin's novel are interwoven throughout The Science of Swimming, video to rupture a didactic narrative that denies subject-based perspectives including the sensual. My own text scrolling across the image eludes to swimming as escape; it is the land that "roars" rather than the sea, the land and its dominant texts that impose a violence on the female body. The heading subtitles: relinquishing, extension, awakening, and reconcilliation describe a process of awareness and the development of subject-centered knowledges formed through the body. After each assault of fractured representation, water slowly dissolves over the body caressing it, making it whole, and freeing the voice. Finally, we slip between subject and agent, silenced and speaking, fractured and reified in a third, liminal space that is our own.