Samantha Langsdale
My visit to the Landy exhibit in the National Gallery was, like Asa’s, tinged with some disappointment, but it was also infused with enthusiasm, as was Karen’s. I had the good fortune to attend the exhibit on a day when all the saints were ‘alive’ and kicking (or poking, thumping, whacking, whatever the case may be), and so it was not the level of functioning that disappointed me, but rather the size of the exhibit. Once I truly caught on to what Landy was presenting, or perhaps, into what kind of experience I was being invited, I was instantly sorry that the whole of the exhibit was contained in only two rooms. Nevertheless, I found myself studying every collage in detail, playing my own personal game of ‘name the saint’ bingo and I, like Karen, pushed, pulled, and stomped on every available button, pulley, and pedal until I feared I might damage my own body (Asa is spot-on, the noise was all-encompassing), in addition to the ‘bodies’ of the saints.
The exhibit was compelling for me personally not because of the ways in which it ‘brought new life’ to the saints; again, I agree with Asa, if that was indeed Landy’s primary aim, he missed the mark. I loved ‘Saints Alive’ because of the ways in which Landy’s collection of ‘rusty, mechanical, broken, noisy, creepy’ sculptures (as Karen suggests) blurred boundaries between viewer and participant, between the medieval and the (post)modern, between ‘art’ and ‘gimmick,’ and most importantly, between mechanisms and bodies. Appropriately, these boundaries were blurred or even broken (repeatedly for visitors like myself and Karen) through the material self-destruction of Landy’s mechanical saints.
Perhaps it’s just the nature of my own research (a critical theoretical analysis of an historical case study), combined with the time at which I saw the exhibit (during the last months of completing my thesis), but as I wandered through/experienced ‘Saints Alive,’ I couldn’t help but recall the work of Donna Haraway. Attempting to explain the relevance of Haraway’s analyses to Arts and Humanities undergraduates is challenging at the best of times; attempting to explain the relevance of her work in the context of medieval history can seem an insurmountable challenge. Yet there I was, surrounded by mechanical holies, almost longing for a class full of sceptical undergrads to which I could proclaim, ‘See? Cyborgs!’ Not only were these sculptures literally hybrids of machine and ‘bodies,’ but they also hinted at the ways in which actual saints’ bodies were chimeric.
Haraway herself does not, of course, deal with historical content, in fact ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is an analysis aimed at and located specifically within ‘the late twentieth century.’ Nonetheless, Haraway’s work is not about implementing Sci Fi-like technological change to human bodies; she does not argue for us all to trade in flesh for steel, or grey matter for Pentium chips. Rather, Haraway is interested in ‘the image of the cyborg’ as an already-functioning representation of the complexity of human ontology. She defines cyborgs as ‘creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.’ Modern-day people are, she argues, ‘all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short [they] are cyborgs’ (1991: 1). Again, although Haraway deals specifically with contemporary people (like us), and thus, her work should not be seamlessly mapped on to historical bodies, as I stood in front of Landy’s impressively tall sculpture of Apollonia, I became increasingly convinced that the model of the cyborg, if applied carefully, could also be a fruitful one for understanding the embodiments of these medieval saints. Moreover, as I reflected on the ways in which the piety and devoutness of saints like Apollonia was inextricably tied up with external mechanisms (in this case, a menacing set of pliers), I realised that my own (post)modern embodiment was perhaps not so distant from that of this medieval woman.
It began to dawn on me, as I spun Landy’s recreation of Catherine of Alexandria’s wheel, that without this machinery, Catherine’s body might not have materialised as ‘saintly.’ The sanctity of Catherine, as constructed by medieval hagiographers, relied upon her exemplary life, yes but also on the wheel itself. Indeed, what would Catherine’s story be without such a mechanism? The ways in which her body and the wheel were interrelated within the ‘fabrication’ of Catherine’s hagiography contributed, in no small part, to her canonisation. Furthermore, in numerous painted representations, saints were recognisable to many medieval viewers because of their familiar associations with certain objects (for instance, Catherine and the wheel, Elizabeth and roses, etc.). Even for medieval viewers then, representations of the saintly body were multi-layered; they portrayed person and thing, flesh and object. I think this point was not entirely lost on Landy. His collages, hanging in the first room of the exhibit, have been labelled by the artist as ‘Frankenstein’s monsters’; this allusion to what is perhaps the most well-known chimerical creature in modern western literature was not made—I would argue—because they are grotesque, but because they demonstrate the multilayeredness of the saintly body.
Even my own hybridity was called into question as I interacted with, and yes, as Karen and Asa have implied, became the cause of destruction to Landy’s sculptures. I became conscious of the fact that my role as ‘viewer’ was predicated on my already-cyborg body: I rely on contact lenses to such an extent that I am only able to occupy an ‘able-bodied’ subject position because of this technology. Of course I wasn’t ‘viewer’ for long–my positioning quickly bubbled over into ‘participant’ and again, I had to recognise that it was because of my relationship with, and reliance upon machinery, that I could traverse this (admittedly very porous) boundary. The pedals and buttons provided by Landy made every visitor a cyborg-visitor, humans and machines combined to create participants in the martyrdom of the saints.
In this light, I think Landy managed to sneak in a subtle commentary on the performance of the original paintings upon which his sculptures were based. Many pieces of medieval ritual art were intended to perform in ways that brought viewers into the narrative of the painting. Representations of the Pietà, for example, were not meant to be only observed but they were to be meditated on such that ‘viewers’ should become ‘participants’ in the events, they should feel the anguish of Mary and the suffering of Christ. Often, paintings like the ones from which Landy draws were not, for medieval people, simply two-dimensional images; they were affective and like Landy’s sculptures, they blurred the lines between viewer and participant. Having said this, I agree with Asa that Landy’s sculptures achieve this blurring by decidedly less subtle means than the original paintings and for some visitors, I have no doubt that the performance of the original paintings was obscured by the commotion of the sculptures.
Ultimately, I enjoyed ‘Saints Alive’ because of the provocative possibilities it presented for thinking about the medieval production of saintly bodies. It is certainly not the case that medieval Christians themselves would have been able to engage with ‘the cyborg,’ but for those of us situated in a more (post)modern position, I think this model provides an interesting way to ask questions about the historical construction of sanctity as it relates to the material, about the complexity of medieval embodiment, and about our relation to history through our own chimeric corporeality.
BIO: Samantha Langsdale recently submitted her PhD thesis in the Study of Religions Department at SOAS, University of London. She’s an American by make, Londoner by trade. Her research interests include feminist theories of corporeality, art history, Early Modern history, materiality, and popular representations of women. In her spare time she is the Managing Editor of GEEKED Magazine www.geekedmagazine.com.