In Artistic Labour of the Body, Rose-Anne Gush places us within what she terms the “chasmic open wound” of modernity.1 This wound is chasmic because it is a cut that fails to close. It is not a scar, because it has failed to heal. For Gush, modernity is an unhealing wound that divides the body. The modern body is in pieces: body parts which if pieced together do not form a whole.
To attend to the cut(s) of the body is to attend to “the unhealing modern world” (126). The book approaches the wound as a body. The body is not only the site of a wound or that which is wounded but is the wound. There is the wounded body and the body of the wound. They do not coincide. The body in modernity and of modernity names something like the division of the body. By closely considering how the body was put to use, made use of, “how the body emerged as the primary material, site, and concern in Austrian artistic practice from the 60s onwards,” Gush demonstrates that the body at issue in the artistic labor of the body is not self-identical (203). The body that makes a body with the body is no longer the same body. Readers will thus have a hard time pinning down the sense of the body in this book, but this difficulty is inseparable from the body at issue in the artistic practices the book treats.
To think the body as antagonistic to its form—the body divided by pain—Gush turns to two specific bodies of work: those of VALIE EXPORT and Elfriede Jelinek. Both EXPORT and Jelinek take the body as material. To take the body as material gives a twist to Peter Weibel’s claim in On the Possibilities of a Non-Affirmative Art that the human body (Körper) becomes the medium, the artwork. The following passage is the epigraph to Weibel’s second chapter, “Escape into Illness”: “Centered in the body [Leib] and in the world, the body [Körper] is the artistic medium. The human body [Körper] itself is the work of art, the material” (quoted on 78).
Gush’s book is in a certain sense an extended Auseinandersetzung with Weibel’s claim, which takes up Günther Brus’s declaration: “My body is the intention. My body is the event. My body is the result” (quoted on 13). Weibel’s formulation defines art as the expression of life: the life of the body (Leib as “the lived, experiential body”) becomes the body (Körper) of art. Körper names both “the physical body” and the work or corpus (110). For Weibel, there is a unity of expression between intention, event, and result. These comprise three moments of the body’s expressive articulation. Yet the life at issue in the body as it is conceived within the feminist practices of EXPORT and Jelinek approaches the body as divisive material. The Körper attests to an unlivable Leib: a body whose wound cannot be assumed, cannot be wholly integrated into a corpus.
The body at issue in both EXPORT and Jelinek’s bodies of work is the body that labors and the body that desires. The body is inscribed into history in and through labor and desire, through the social and the sexual relation. Gush conceives of the body as the material bearer of these two fundamental relations. Each body only becomes a body by embodying the stigmata of class and sex. The body is a divided body, and this is the source of the body’s antagonism. The artistic labor of the body consists in the production of a body of work that treats the body as a kind of “artifact”—visual and textual—of a violence done to bodies by the social structures within which they are embedded. Like Weibel, Gush approaches the body in terms of the three moments articulated by Brus: intention, event, and result. However, they no longer form a unity, a coherent whole. The body that labors, the body of work (the artwork), and the body treated in the work do not form an expressive whole even when it is one and the same body apparently at issue in performance. The three moments fall asunder. Perhaps we can even say that they no longer belong to the same body, or they are not the same body. Rather than the expressive identity of Körper and Leib, the artwork marks either a Leib that is not a Körper, or a Körper that is presented as Leiblos. EXPORT exemplifies the former. In “The Body According to Geometical Method” she claims: “The body [Leib] is not to be compared to a physical object, but to a work of art” (quoted on 130). For EXPORT, the work of art is a kind of retrieval of the body as Leib. It restores the body to life. Jelinek’s work draws the consequences of the latter. The physical body (Körper) for her bears the brunt of the violence of history and thus lays itself bare as socially bruised and battered. Erika Kohut’s masochism in The Piano Teacher attempts to locate the place of the Leib, but the wound that traces its place lays bare its absence: “Jelinek maintains both Leib and Körper. Körper is not transcended by the Leib” (138).
Yet both of their practices are efforts to provoke in the body a sense for what the body has lost and what is foreclosed from the expressive body. The expressive identity of Leib and Körper, Erlebnis (the lived experience of the body) has become the invisible structure of everyday life. This is the problem examined in EXPORT’s film Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries), as Gush analyzes it. Gush paraphrases Weibel: “Weibel says that the protagonist’s consciousness displays no differentiation between concrete reality, observed reality and media reality” (160). The protagonist, Anna, experiences a schizoid breakdown of the endogenous and the exogamous, of what is internal and external, which leads to a unstable structure where it is impossible to decide if one’s experience of the body is the product of the body or the body the product of experience; the experience of reality and the reality of experience become indistinct.
In dialogue with her psychiatrist, Anna states:
What does the person say or do? I only see the shells of people, inside they are empty. They are exhausted and occupied by aliens. I see craftsmen but no humans [Menschen], priests, conductors, but no humans. Masters and servants but no humans. Young and old people [Leute] but no humans. I see a great battlefield where humanity killed itself. I see everywhere mangled limbs. I am alone in my search for human beings. (Quoted on 158.)
The production of the Leib as the “object” of the work of artistic labor makes this indistinction or breakdown observable, an object of research and investigation. By replacing the eye with the eye of the camera, as EXPORT says in “The Real and its Double: The Body,” the loss of Leib becomes the object of concern (161). Based on Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Unsichtbare Gegner—“a psycho-fiction thriller,” as it is presented in its press material (140n4)—considers the absence that remains after the snatching. This is Jelinek’s starting point: the body after the invasion.
This provides an allegory for one of the book’s central concerns that I have yet to mention. By treating the victimized body, i.e., the suffering body, the violated body, both of these artists construct bodies of work that address the historical wound of Austria’s complicity in fascism by shattering the postwar revisionist historical narrative that Austria, with the Anschluss, was itself the victim of German colonial aggression. They shatter it by explicitly avowing its form: a body politic that is suffering, that is a victim, but wants to know nothing about the truth of its victimhood. The construction of the narrative of victimhood serves the ideological function of disavowing what Austria is in fact suffering from: fascism. The work of EXPORT and Jelinek thus turns, according to Gush, on a fundamental displacement or shift in stress. As if to say, it is not that we Austrians were the victims, but that we Austrians are the victims of a fascism born of its disavowal. This is perhaps one way of understanding Gush’s claim that “the task of this book is to write the historical content that these works are unable to ‘speak’ themselves” (31). These works unsettle the revisionist form of the historical narrative (official, state-sanctioned history) through the temporal reversal of its content: We were fascists and thus we are its victims. If I understand Gush’s argument correctly, the artistic labor of the body in EXPORT and Jelinek consists in the construction of a body whose suffering, whose pain, is not a matter of immediate access; it is not the lived experience of the one who suffers that is at issue in the book. Expressing pain is neither the book’s nor these artists’ concern. These artists distrust such expression and thus deny the pseudo self-evidence of the subject who believes they are victimized.
It is not the expressive body but the exhibited body that is at play in the book. One of the more crucial formulations is thus: “There is no possible non-painful, unmediated experience of the body” (133). Pain, despite all appearances to the contrary, is not immediate. It must be analyzed. It is the body put on exhibit that allows us to read in its pain and suffering a wound that places the individual who suffers it in relation their social and historical context. It is through the work—the artwork—that we gain access to the historical content of pain: what pain signifies. A divided body learns to distrust the spontaneity of its feelings and thus read the body as a surface of social historical import.
This is what the book does. Through its analysis of the manner in which artistic labor produces a body—wagering with Adorno that this body is a “transfigured body” (ein verklärte Leib)—the book attempts to keep open modernity’s wound and thus break the grip of the siren song of the promise of a beautiful elsewhere. It does so by prying apart the body’s univocity. Erika Kohut’s masochism can be read as an allegory of writing, Gush’s included: “She executes [vollzieht] a cut, magnifying the aperture that is the doorway into her body [Leib] … Her hobby is cutting her own body [Körper]” (quoted on 113). Writing is a difficult and strange hobby and all the more so when it takes as its task the clarification of an “object” whose signification is at odds with its signifier. This is the book’s difficulty, its challenge to the reader. It asks the reader to unknow what she may think she knows about the body. I am not one for hope or what hope clings to. But if there is hope in this inferno, it may just lie in the embrace of such difficult investigations.
Rose-Anne Gush, Artistic Labour of the Body (Brill, 2026), 126. All subsequent page references to this source are cited in-line.
