Is this Body a Ruin?
Exhibition Review: “Mythemes” by Clementine Keith-Roach at Ben Hunter Gallery, London
Beauty eludes me as I walk into the gallery. My plastic trainers squeak with every step I take. I try to silence them as I enter the room, conscious of the serenity I am disturbing and the silence of the objects inhabiting it, whose meaning seems to vanish at my excruciating, squeaking approach.
In the first room are two works, placed diagonally across the floor. One is a basin of a milky substance, held up by a strong feminine torso in an Atlas-like pose. The other is a vase of a transparent liquid, sitting on folded feminine legs. A third work on the wall is a relief sculpture split into four squares. On each square are parts of a feminine body: a breast, legs and feet, arms and hands. The neck, head and face are absent. Flowing drapery covers the body, but a breast is exposed. A finger points at the nipple; a hand tugs at the drapery—gestures of expectation and demand.
This relief sculpture appears to be a fragment dug up from some ancient site in pieces and reconstructed here. The human body is fused with a wall of bricks and plaster, and there are objects stuck into it: coins, nails, chains, shells, among other things. These details frustrate the archeologist’s gaze: they could be ancient or modern. This is no ordinary ruin. This object is a work of art by Clementine Keith-Roach, and the sense that there are meanings in it that elude the viewer is an effect produced by human hands. It is a classic strategy of beauty to show itself at the very moment that it disappears. But to view these works as merely beautiful would be to overlook what in them is disturbing.
In several places in the relief, a spongy stone irrupts through the surface, a formless matter that contrasts with the feminine form. I think of what the philosopher Georges Bataille wrote about the aesthetics of the formless, that it “serves to bring down things in the world.” What is being brought down in these irruptions of formlessness? In other parts of the wall, there are fragments of human bodies: hands, fingers, and parts of fingers. These are like spolia, as in “the spoils of war”: fragments from older buildings that are fitted into new constructions, as Christian churches contained parts of older temples. Here, it is the feminine body that has been “spoiled” or, rather, reconfigured. This work is titled “Mater,” and the artist herself notes that the Latin words for mother (māter) and matter (māteria) are said to be linked. This title suggests that the relationship between the feminine figure and these patches of deformed matter is crucial, that this work is staging a catastrophe, the prestige of figure reduced to the indifference of matter. Is this body a ruin?
Ruined buildings have for a long time been associated with the feminine body. As Susan Stewart writes, in The Ruins Lessons: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (2020):
… the ruin of women has been tied inextricably … to ideas of women as material and to the cache of value that a woman’s body, and particularly her virginity and chastity, can hold.
The ruin of a woman involves the failure of a capacity to “hold” value, and that verb is significant. A woman’s value has been tied to her ability to hold, to provide a “vessel” with her womb or with her care. If “she,” to refer to this fractured sculpture by the organic wholeness of the pronoun, is no longer holding anything, then what is her meaning? It may be only after the labour of containment has ceased that this question can be properly considered. Lisa Robertson’s answer, in Proverbs of a She-Dandy (2018), is that the menopause, and the end of a woman’s reproductive capacity, brings with it new creative possibilities. The so-called “ruin” might turn out to be a new foundation.
In the second room of the gallery is a large vase, held up by slender hands. The hands are curved in an erotic twist, apparently indifferent to their load-bearing task. Under our gaze, they seem to exhibit a certain secrecy. I think of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that describes a marble torso, “turning in his thighs a smile…”. The ancient statue captivates the poet because of what is absent but suggested by what part of it has survived. The Ancient Roman poet Horace called the fragments of a lost poem “scattered limbs.” In this sense, the works in Mythemes contain limbs that are not scattered but gathered, poetic fragments that gesture towards an absent whole. Unlike ancient statues, whose secrecy results from historical loss, their secrecy has something to tell us. Just as a secret only exists for the person who is not in on it, so do I grasp the meaning of these works precisely where it eludes me.
What do we need to know in order to understand these mysterious objects? In The Human Condition, the philosopher Hannah Arendt notes that the Ancient Greeks called woman’s life ponētikos, laborious. The condition of womanhood, irrespective of class status, was no different to that of slaves. Today, domestic labour remains substantially hidden, unequal, and oppressive. The maternal body becomes an object, as psychoanalysts have described, and in this relief sculpture, that objecthood is represented at an extreme point. The mother’s body has been reduced to a set of scattered limbs—a state of distress. If this is true for the mother, it is surely also true for the care worker, the sex worker, for anyone who carries out the labour of holding.
The works in Mythemes testify to a laborious life while, at the same time, guarding their meanings with a sphinxlike blankness. (There are no faces in this show.) However, the viewer might wonder if we do not know something about this, given our own personal roles in the linked histories of femininity and the labour of holding. In their very secrecy, these non-ruins bring to light something not imagined until now.