Guestwords: The Body On The Table

Brian O'Doherty gave the lecture that follows at a Dec. 1 awards ceremony for scholarly achievement at Long Island University's C.W. Post campus.

Let us return for a moment to that beach near Viareggio, Italy, in 1822 where Shelley's body and that of the friend who drowned with him, Edward Williams, are being burned on two pyres.

As Shelley's body was being finally consumed, the heart resisted the flames, so Shelley's friend, Trelawny, who made a career out of knowing Shelley, reached in and plucked out the heart.

Shelley's ashes were gathered and, I believe, accompanied by the heart were brought to Rome and buried in the happiest of graveyards, the Protestant cemetery where John Keats had been buried the previous year.

Important Metaphor

What on earth was in Trelawny's mind? Did he see Shelley's heart as a collectible? A target of opportunity? Why didn't he stoke up the fire a little and reduce the obstinate heart to ashes?

Because he was responding to a powerful rhetoric attached to the body and its parts. He was acquiring the organ associated with the deepest sentiments of its possessor. If you took the heart away from the body of poetry, you would lay waste a whole cathedral of poetic conceits.

What we have is the exact superimposition of a metaphor on anatomy. The heart as the repository of courage, generosity, openness, when after all it's merely a sophisticated pump.

Heart Extractors

Thus, when Christian Barnard removed the heart of his first patient in December 1967 and substituted another from an artificially alive corpse, he was manhandling a metaphor, a bundle of traditionally sanctioned feelings associated with the heart.

I was fascinated with this, partly because I had been trained as a doctor, and partly because of the politics of that operation and of what I'll call the aesthetics of body parts, which will lead us to such fashionable matters as the self, identity, and their relations to the mobile lump that gets us from here to there: the body.

I was also interested because the year before Barnard's operation I had already, working as an artist, captured and extracted someone's heart, Marcel Duchamp's heart.

Pioneers

Why Duchamp's heart? It's been said that, speaking of art, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso and the second half, for better or as some believe for worse, belongs to Marcel Duchamp. But before that, a couple of points about Barnard's radical procedure, which at the time seemed as absurd as transplanting a head.

The technology to perform this "miracle" had been available for some time. A number of pioneering surgeons were waiting in the wings, names that may still have an echo for some of you: Shumway, the careful; Kantrowitz, the eager; Cooley from Texas, who briskly wanted to turn the whole thing into a routine; De Bakey, the man haunted by morality and conscience, who most recently surfaced with a pre-operative examination of Yeltsin in Moscow.

The reward for going first and succeeding was immortality. The punishment for failure was irresponsibility. A difficult situation for ambitious men.

Posthumous Gift

"I want to be the first but I don't want to wipe myself out. Better someone else goes first. But I don't want it to be him." Each was watching the other. Remember that, when William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, what he feared most was the criticism of his colleagues.

So far from the traditional centers of medicine, where each surgeon was watching the other, poised for action, but afraid to take it, from South Africa, came the news that released a storm of heart transplants.

Now it is possible to receive a posthumous gift that enables you to survive yourself. The hands that first performed this miracle, by the way, then became, as if in a Greek myth, arthritic and immobile.

The transplant era received an enormous impetus. Kidneys had been routinely transplanted, but there's not much poetry you can locate in a kidney. The heart was something else. A recipient has literally a foreign body inside the chest, working away like a donkey.

Then the notion of the heart as the seat of feelings which runs from Pierre Bontemp's "Monument for the Heart of Francis I" to Valentine's Day greeting cards began to kick in.

Does this foreign heart bear with it traces of its former owner's feelings? What is this foreign heart thinking? Can a body part, even one so regnant as the heart, think?

Mad Scientists

The newest of miracles aroused the oldest of superstitions. The operation raised the old specter of transgressive experiment that haunted 19th-century medicine. The body-snatching of artificially alive corpses raised the impolite ghosts of Burke and Hare, the most notorious of body-snatchers for the great 19th-century school of medicine in Edinburgh.

So the transplant, under the guise of progressive medicine and its habitual miracles, stimulated the gothic diabolisms of the scientist as evil genius. It leads us to a theme that recurs in modernist art and literature - the separate lives of body-parts.

Their insurrection against the whole cannibalizes the single identity and thus the part focuses a deep anxiety. The operation revived the monster created by the wife of the young poet with whom we began, Mary Shelley and her durable creation.

Unsolved Questions

So the heart transplanted from another person raised the Frankenstein myth, and the artificial heart, still an unproven technological tour-de-force, anticipates a kind of science-fiction future.

It points to two kinds of immortality: one in terms of a charnel house of ransacked bodies, the other in terms of transgressive technology. These visions are closely connected to matters of identity and consciousness - consciousness being one of the most attractive - and now researched - of mysteries.

Heart transplants are now routine, and questions initially raised by the operation, like questions in philosophy, don't get solved, they tend instead to go out of date. One point to add: The public was called in to adjudicate the ethics of the procedure, as it is currently with matters of genetic engineering, in vitro pregnancy, cloning, all of which tend to undermine the notion of my body, the possession of which is my ultimate capital.

Why Duchamp?

The year before Barnard's first operation, however, I had taken Marcel Duchamp's heart. Why? If we think of young men in history who were beautiful, charismatic, and extraordinarily brilliant, who do you think of?

Goethe, certainly. And Duchamp, who had an almost demonic influence over others as a young man. When I knew him, he was more benign. We'd talk about Long John Nebel and night radio, anything but art.

Duchamp, who was great company, was of course an iconoclast who defused many of the myths about the artist while vigorously substituting his own. In the Paris of his youth, one of the sayings he deeply resented was, "Oh, he's dumb as a painter!" Duchamp was pure intelligence.

Dead Art

If the cliche went that art is forever, existing in a timeless, idealized dimension, Duchamp felt that art, once it was institutionalized, dimished rapidly by half-lives. Once inside the museum it became a dead artifact in a mausoleum - out of context, deprived of its social interaction, gaped at by unknowing multitudes, its language as inscrutable as the Rosetta stone once was.

There at last was Du champ's heart, or its signature, refuting the dictum of its owner that art on the museum wall was quickly inert and dead.

It's not a new idea - the hostility of the advanced artist and the institution where his work finds its final resting place. As mild an Impressionist as Camille Pissarro had said, "Let's burn down the Louvre!"

If you've been making what you think is art all your life, it wasn't too thrilling to have Duchamp say, tough luck, it'll be dead almost as soon as you finish it. So the problem I set myself was to refute the supreme intelligence among modern artists. Presumptuous, cheeky, and appropriate to the young man I then was.

Dinner Surprise

I asked Duchamp if I could take his portrait. He said yes. My wife invited the Duchamps and some others to dinner. She looked up her Julia Child and cooked an escalope de veau a la creme, and followed up with a trifle which was immersed in more cream.

For Barbara this may have been the apogee of her culinary skills. It was all too rich for poor Duchamp, to whom this caloric plenitude must have seemed close to an assassination attempt.

After dinner I asked him to come into the bedroom, which he did unquestioningly. I asked him to take off some of his clothes, and since he was in a very French way never surprised, he did so. I asked him to partially disrobe. He did so.

Single Jagged Line

I took his electrocardiogram on a hired machine by the bed. Again not a question. When he stood up he said, "How am I?" As far as I could tell it looked okay to me.

Now I possessed the single jagged line produced by the unique electrical potentials of Duchamp's heart and body. What was I going to do with it? Some of you may remember those bouncing spots of light in whiskey ads in saloon windows - a series of bouncing dots describing a perfect arc as a cylinder rotated within.

So I went down to the living museum of spare parts for artists in the '60s, the teeming bazaar of Canal Street, and took back some rotisserie motors. Out of all this came a homemade oscilloscope, a box with a circular green window on which Duchamp's animated heartbeat traced its inevitable, repetitive course.'

Ironic Beat

The next step was to exhibit Duchamp's beating heart on the walls of museums and galleries. There at last it was, or its signature, refuting the dictum of its owner that art on the museum wall was quickly inert and dead. His heart had been manipulated to refute his head. The project was almost complete.

Did he understand this? Of course he did. Delacroix is supposed to have said he didn't understand Turner's paintings until he saw Ruskin looking at them.

I understood the final implications of the work when I saw Duchamp standing there in the gallery looking at his heart, or its electronic signature, beating. With proper etiquette, we never talked about it.

Heart Survived Him

But he used to meet my wife in the street and say, how is it? Is it still working? Something of the shamanistic, primitive power of artworks, submerged in our culture, began to attach itself to Duchamp's heartbeat.

When I saw Duchamp looking at his own heartbeat, I knew that it would be completed as a work of art when Duchamp died. Appropriately for the man whose "Nude Descending a Staircase" is one of the icons of Modernism, he died after climbing several flights of steps of his apartment in Paris.

His regnant faculty, his heart, had survived him in perpetuity, in a version of immortality. The work was complete. A somewhat humorous artwork at the start. Ruthless at the end, fully employing the scathing irony of which Duchamp was capable. Duchamp, who was no sentimentalist, would have fully understood.

A Shrine

When a German collector bought a version of this work, I'm told that he turned it into a kind of shrine. This superstitious perversion of the work told me that he saw the work as a relic, like a preserved fragment of a saint's body.

The idea of a relic is, I suppose, that the identity of the missing person descends into the preserved part. And in the case of a saint, some of his or her powers.

I'm reminded of how one of our great Long Island residents, Willem de Kooning, approached the body. We all know his flayed and monstrous "Women" series, which to me seemed made up piecemeal.

In the context of his moment, recovering the body was an act of courage. At that time, the whole body was, for many artists, unpaintable. To paint it whole would subscribe to a comforting, flaccid humanism.

De Kooning's bodies were responding to major stresses. As if the head were in next week, the arm detained in yesterday, the trunk mislaid in a past month. We have a vision of parts but they may not belong to the same person and may not even be of the same size. What is assembled in a defective cinematographic picture, trembling, appearing and disappearing, only parts visible at any one time.

This is de Kooning's version of Abstract Expressionist man, spread out in time as Leonardo's version of Vitruvian man is spread out in space.

What Is Human?

All this circles around a single issue: the matter of identity, of selfhood, of self-recognition, of a definition of self in terms of what space the body occupies and in what time we place it.

How is the self represented? What mythologies attach to parts of the body? In the past decade there has been a rage of artworks attempting a definition of selfhood, expressed through body parts, fragments, processes, reminding us of the body's vulnerability as it is driven through time.

Is this evidence of a displacement, an uncertainty, which in turn responds to the basic question of what is human, since we are all aware of the appalling range of definitions this departing century has provided us?

See-Through People

And that definition also responds to what has happened to what science has performed on the body on the table, which has been patiently awaiting the conclusion of this talk.

We find something that gives us pause, and that has contributed to the definition that the art has been attempting. For, through a series of subtractions and additions, the body has been utterly changed. Shuttling out and in are kidneys, lungs, hips, livers, hearts, knees. In the vicinity are models that mimic the brain's processes through artificial intelligence.

The body as we approach it has become transparent through forms of visualization, magnetic resonance, CAT scans - all blessedly nonintrusive. That body can be grown from a test tube, transplanted to a hostess; its genes can be isolated and corrected; it can possibly be cloned to produce spare parts, even doppelgangers.

Old Antagonists

Always, I'm pretty sure, our imagination instinctively applies such researches to ourselves. They tend to dispossess us of our corpus.

As we are progressively dispossessed, what is left? The definition of what is human? Which always has an unpleasant twin: What is inhuman?

Do some answers reside uneasily in the intersection of the old antagonists, partners, competitors, and sibling rivals, art and science? Each has a habit of looking at itself in the mirror of the other. Each is radically different than it was before.

Indispensable

And just as Barnard's heart transplant raised troubling questions, around that body on the table is another storm of ethical and moral questions, early stages of legislation, revived myths of nature transgressed, a sharpened awareness of identity compromised, and an intense curiosity about what a friend of mine described as that background buzz called consciousness.

To contemplate the last brings us to another horizon, which I am not competent to approach.

I'll finish with three thoughts. One, the concern with the body, an object that is simply indispensable. Maybe Descartes could have said I have a body, therefore I am. Or, I think, most of this is my body, so maybe I am.

Whirling Atoms

Two, the opposite of this, the dissolving power of media, spilling out of the TV screen, which puts all of us, mind and body, into a solution in which we are daily bathed: I don't have a mind, and it doesn't matter.

The third thought: How does all this relate to having your bacon and eggs in the morning as you read your paper? Does our awareness of the body, frequently dismembered, reconstituted, transparent, often with rented parts, affect the way we think about eating our bacon and eggs?

Maybe the answer lies in the kind of split-level awareness that is now part of everyone's equipment. We all know that the table under the breakfast is transparent, composed of whirling atoms. Just don't bump into it.

No matter what the miracle, things tend to go on as they are. We shuffle through the day, every day, as we have, and will continue to do, aware of distant rumors from art and medicine skirting the latest quasi-utopia which is always immortality.

Brian O'Doherty is University Professor of Fine Arts at Southampton College. He uses the name Patrick Ireland as an artist.