Otherlands

Jacqueline Taylor

‘Otherlands’ is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project traversing visual art, linguistics, psychoanalysis and philosophy. It interrogates Julia Kristeva’s concepts of abjection and the semiotic as pre-linguistic markers and their potential to articulate ‘otherness’ in visual art. Whilst Kristeva’s thinking is revolutionary in conceptualising dimensions of experience ‘beyond’ language and representation as vital to the signifying process, its application in aesthetic practice is limited. Those art practices that have engaged with abjection and the semiotic rely on representational strategies and thus undermine their very definition. Otherlands demonstrates that it is only where representational structures are disrupted towards the place where meaning collapses that abjection can function as ‘abjection’ in art practice, in turn articulating modalities of ‘othering’ as part of an alternative signifying process. Understood via a new theory of ‘intermateriality’ developed by the researcher, Otherlands offers for the first time vital new ways of understanding meaning-making in art practice that shifts from representational and visual economies of signification to the material, performative, affective and intersubjective dimensions of art. Informed by an eight-year corpus of practice-led research, Otherlands was developed collaboratively through 12 months of rigorously testing ideas. This included textual analysis, an on-site curatorial residency (University of Memphis), field visits to examine ‘othering’ in selected cultural sites, interviews with key practitioners and scholars, and feedback gathered at the Otherlands exhibition and live event at the Kristeva Circle annual conference, Memphis (prestigious interdisciplinary platform for world-leading Kristeva scholars). The work was blind peer-reviewed by the Kristeva Circle directors and Art Museum University of Memphis curatorial committee. The research includes a two-person exhibition with award-winning artist Georgia MacGuire, curatorial essay by Kristeva expert Professor Estelle Barrett and major live performative event. The research is simultaneously all these outputs, understood via the interrelations between its different parts as an ‘other’ form of signification.

OTHERLANDS

^[1]Estelle Barrett. Abjection, Affect and Othering Through Art (2015), performed as part of the live Otherlands event [pdf version available on right]

^[2]Jacqueline Taylor. 'Thinking difference differently: an exploration of l’écriture feminine, Women’s Art Practice and Postfeminism' in: L’Esprit Créateur: The International Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Femmes Créa(c)tives special issue, (2018), 58 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp41-55

A body of artistic work was developed by MacGuire and Taylor as part of the research process, subsequently presented in the Otherlands exhibition along with a curatorial essay by Barrett.^[1] Drawing on the artist's very different socio-cultural and linguistic contexts, particularities of experience and artistic practices, the work interrogated how the processes of artmaking and encounter can both articulate and renegotiate otherness. Underpinned by the concept of ‘intermateriality’ as proposed by Taylor and the theorisation of the relationship between materiality and abjection as process by Barrett, the Otherlands exhibition elicited alternative spaces of meaning-making operating via the material and affective dimensions of signification (as rooted in Kristeva's pre-linguistic space of the chora and semiotc). Significantly, the work departs from traditional engagement with Kristeva’s work in that it is not undermined by a reliance on the visual or representational structures aligned with the symbolic. Rather, the Otherlands exhibition enables otherness, difference and the abject to perform itself and thus be reinserted into discourse via aesthetic experience through a continual transgression and renewal of symbolic structures and the subject.

The artworks negotiate abjection through their material forms, as well as their artmaking processes and spaces of encounter with the work, rather than representing the abject, literally or metaphorically, as has previously been the case by visual artists.^[^2]MacGuire's work includes possum skin, naturally sourced ochre pigment and bodily fluids that are culturally significant in Indigenous heritage but considered to be taboo and other to normative cultural protocols. For Taylor, this includes paint comprising pigment mixed with mediums such as wax, vinyl and polyurethane, and text as the painted mark, which rupture dominant structures and conventions that consitute 'text' and 'painting'. The researchers also devised and put into practice new curatorial strategies that 'queered' the exhibition space by disrupting normative modalities of 'reading’, 'viewing’ and ‘looking’ aligned with ocularcentrism and the symbolic. By reconceiving the gallery space as a generative site of process and subjective exchange as underpinned by Taylor's concept of intermateriality, the viewer is actively engaged in the meaning-making process through their own intersubjective experience and encounter as a continual process related to différance.

Otherlands exhibition Georgia MacGuire and Dr Jacqueline Taylor, University of Memphis, Tennessee, US, 2015

EVENT > ABJECTION, AFFECT AND OTHERING THROUGH ART

> QUEEN OF THE OTHERLANDS

> BODIES-IN-PROCESS: INTERSUBJECTIVE (INTER)MATERIALITIES

Text by Jacqueline Taylor

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