This paper is a transversal encounter with, and application of, Kristeva’s thinking on abjection that is concerned with how it is articulated in art as a process of othering. It is argued that Kristeva’s account of abjection as process rather than a demarcation between established categories is fundamental to understanding that whilst a precursor of language, abjection is crucial to the making and renewal of meaning as arising from inner experience of pure carnality and excess. It is also fundamental to enabling alternative and resistant or 'queer' meanings to be made possible through the making and experiencing of art.
In doing so, this paper problematises for the first time so-called 'abject art' depicting the obscene or those images that evoke disgust whereby abjection articulates already established categories though the demarcation between what can and cannot be assimilated by society. These demarcations are critiqued as representational: here abjection is only understood and experienced within a given socio-symbolic system. However, such depictions of the abject are in themselves not performative and thus do not disrupt established codes nor bring into being anything new.
Otherlands offers a radical new argument that asserts that it is in the production or bringing into being of what has not yet been symbolised through material process that art can reveal the blind spots in dominant discourses and practices. Subversion that occurs in revolutionary forms of creative production is material in that it is founded on biological and psychic processes triggered by an ongoing drive to maintain responsiveness to objects in the world. This is intensified when there is a striving to move beyond the constraining limits of what is already given in an established meaning system.
Within the framework of the collaborative research undertaken as part of Otherlands, Barrett examines the works of artists MacGuire and Taylor to demonstrate how abjection as process can reconceptualise customary codes that marginalise the 'other.' She interrogates how materials and materiality embody and perform cultural knowledge through a specifically Indigenous notion of the “feminine” in Maguire’s practice, in so doing having the capacity to operate as an expression of identity and difference.
Because abjection articulates separation, it is a process of maintaining the subject and identity by ensuring the proper place or demarcation between subject and objects. In this sense abjection can be understood as a spatial concept. This aspect of abjection is applied in Barrett's analysis of Taylor’s 'intermaterial' practice through which the entanglement of the textual with the painterly gives rise to poetic or non-representational dimensions of the image that illuminate of the nature of abstraction in art.
" It is possible to conceive of a different kind of subject and a different kind of signification that constitutes a performative articulation of images which emerge through creative practice and aesthetic experience. This and other ideas presented in this paper relate to the performative practices of Georgia MacGuire and Jacqueline Taylor. "
