Body as Destiny: A Fragment in the Work of Alina Shapochnikov

Berest Valeriia Adlerovna ORCID: 0000-0001-8292-3359 Senior Lecturer; Department of Theory and History of Culture; Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University of Russia 117198, Russia, Moscow, Miklukho-Maklaya str., 10, room 2, office 207 cascabelada@gmail.com

Introduction

The human body is a universal medium: it is influenced by the cultural practices of its time, organizes images, reproduces them and creates a new imaginative reality. Since ancient times, man has been exploring the body, repeatedly reproducing it and its fragments. The body is ubiquitous in culture, it appears in plastics, sculpture, ceramics so often that the history of ancient art can be understood to some extent as the history of the representation of the human body. At the same time, aesthetic canons, methods and forms of representation depend on the political, social and cultural context. The Venus of Willendorf, for example, representing fertile femininity, has a lot to say about the peculiarities of Paleolithic culture, and Polycletus' Doriphorus, with its perfect proportions and athletic body, has a lot to say about the aesthetics and art of Antiquity.

In modern culture, the body image and its interpretations are very ambiguous. If, speaking about traditional culture and the Cartesian tradition, we mention the binary nature of the image of the human body and the principle of its reflection in perception, then in modern culture one can consistently distinguish the ruin of the body, its reconstruction, fragmentation and escape. The new artistic language allows us to revise the dogmas of classical art, initiates the emergence of a different plastic and a different body image.

The main part

The fragmentation of the body image, the rejection of an integral and complete form, is becoming programmatic for modern art. Since the second half of the twentieth century, this trend has intensified further due to the subversive aesthetic practices of the avant-garde, the overcoming of the leading role of easel painting and the blurring of genre boundaries, the feminist deconstruction of binary oppositions and criticism of the power of an autonomous male subject. For example, L. Nokhlin, paying special attention to the fragmentation of the female body in the art of the twentieth century, emphasizes: "On the one hand, a bodily fragment — a female one — can function as a sign of the miraculous in surrealist art, as it happens in Max Ernst's La Femme cent têtes. <...> On the other hand, reassembled in the form of horrifying photographs of mutilated dolls, female body parts can serve as a place of transgressive questioning about both the nature of sexuality and the body as an integral entity in the work of German artist Hans Bellmer, who was associated with the French Surrealist group" ^{[1, p. 53]}.

The concept of a fragmented body is becoming especially significant in the humanitarian discourse of the twentieth century. Melanie Klein, the founder of the theory of object relations, which addresses the experience of early childhood relationships of personality and their impact on the individual's self, emphasizes the importance of fragmentation (as a type of splitting) of the body image as a protective mechanism in situations of anxiety and uncertainty. Jacques Lacan, on the contrary, argued that mental health and identity require a mental image of the whole body: here, the mirror phase in a child's development, in which disparate (fragmented) ideas about one's own body are combined into a single holistic perception, becomes an important stage in the process of personality formation. The inability to survive this stage leads to psychosis. Thus, the fear of fragmentation accompanies the subject throughout his life and can be expressed as a feeling of disintegration, loss of identity. At the same time, fragmentation is the primary tool for understanding our own body and forming an idea about it: we learn about our bodies through vision, and the visual signal is transmitted to the brain in fragments, through touch, which does not allow us to grasp a complete image simultaneously, etc.

The image of a fragmented body in culture has a special meaning. Starting his work "To Supervise and Punish" with a description of Damien's execution in the form of public dismemberment of the body, M. Foucault emphasizes the role of fragmentation of the body as a powerful tool for controlling it. The abolition of physical punishment, the "abolition of pain", leads to the beginning of the "era of punitive restraint" ^{[2, p. 22]}, displacing spectacular experience and bodily practices into the artistic sphere. Following Foucault's logic, shifting the point of application of punishment generates "a field of new objects, a new regime of truth and many new roles..." ^{[2, p. 35]}.

Modern culture is marked by a sense of social, psychological, mental fragmentation and loss of integrity. It is characterized by a feeling of rupture and disintegration. The development of medical practices, in which the body is considered as a set of replaceable elements (Theseus' paradox in action), also contributes to the strengthening of this feeling. Fragmentation here acquires a positive meaning as an opportunity to preserve a functioning integral form, but even in this discourse it generates a revision of the "I-concept", the self and the nature of integrity.

Strategies for forming a new integrity through addressing fragmented form and rethinking the role of the bodily fragment are revealed through various cultural and artistic practices. One of the most striking examples is the work of the Polish artist Alina Shapochnikov (1926-1973).

Alina Shapochnikov was born into a Jewish family in the Polish city of Kalisz in 1926. She survived the Pabianice and Lodz ghettos, and then internment in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, where she and her mother worked in camp hospitals. After the war, the artist contracted tuberculosis, but despite this, she continued her studies in sculpture, first in Prague, and then in Paris. Her career was quite successful — in Poland, where socialist realism prevailed in art at that time, she completed several major government orders, including winning a competition to create a monument to Polish-Soviet friendship, created several sculptures of Stalin, and already in 1962 represented Poland at the XXXI Venice Biennale.

In the same year, 1962, the artist created the first plaster cast of her foot. The image of a fragmented body is found in her work before ("The Naked Woman", 1949-1950; "Motherhood III", 1950; "Exhumed", 1949-1950; etc.), but it still recalls the classical tradition and the works of Rodin. The interest in their own physicality and personified form among the Hatters manifested itself only after 1962.

The "Leg" marks a turning point in the artist's work — a plaster cast of a part of her own body becomes an independent work and a finished form corresponding to the real biological body of the artist, but not referring to it. This is a semantic flicker, a transgressive transition made by the viewer and the creator himself: from a personal imprint (similar to handprints in the famous Cueva de las Manos cave) to an alienated fragment of a once integral bodily form: the artist herself in her 1972 manifesto emphasizes this alienation, calling the forms maladroits - "clumsy objects"^[3].

Repetitive sculptural forms — prints of the artist's own body or those close to her — become a distinctive feature of her work ("Leg", 1962; "Bust", 1964; "Multiple Portrait", 1965; "Bellies", 1968; etc.). For Shapochnikov, reproducing body fragments in sculpture becomes a way to materialize sensations: she turns to materials uncharacteristic of academic sculpture, possessing different properties that allow her to create complex collage images, introduce photographs (it was she who created a new genre — "photo sculpture") or, in the spirit of surrealism, turn sculptures into utilitarian objects: lamps, armchairs, etc. In 1963, Shapochnikov moved to France, where He became close to representatives of the artistic association "Le Panique", who developed the ideas of the Surrealists, and with the "New Realists" (Nouveau Réalisme), who sought to combine art and everyday life. Until her death in 1973, she continued to work with the image of a fragmented body, creating, like Rodin, multiple torsos, arms, lips, bellies and other body parts.

In a fairly short period of time, Shapochnikov created many works in various techniques: from drawings and photo sculptures to independent sculptural forms. The human body becomes the key motif for all of her work: the repeatedly recurring image of a fragmented body dominates her art. Repetition as an artistic strategy in Shapochnikov's work may be related to the artist's previous traumatic experience. Despite the fact that Shapochnikov managed to survive, the experience of being in concentration camps was reflected in the artistic form and material: throughout her creative career, she addresses the theme of the deformed and fragmented human body, recreating it from clay, plaster, wood, marble, polymer resins, polyurethane, rubber. The recurring motifs in Shapochnikov's work are probably sublimational in nature. "Obsessive repetition," as Z. interprets it. According to Freud, it is necessary in order to integrate a traumatic event into a familiar symbolic order: "All these painful remnants of experience and painful affective states are repeated by the neurotic in transference, relived with great skill" ^{[4, p. 27]}. Such repetition is a mechanism that allows a person to experience a traumatic event that has not been truly experienced for various reasons. The constant appeal to the image of a fragmented body (first of all, your own) allows you not only to return to tragic memories, but to visualize this experience in isolation from the really traumatic events.

The artist's personal tragedy becomes accessible to the viewer through reproducible forms, but the fragmentation of the presented body itself refers to personalized trauma and pain. Shapochnikov's art is ambivalent — on the one hand, referring to a fragmentary body image means returning to a traumatic past, on the other hand, the absence of direct references to this experience in the title or commentary on the work becomes a kind of resistance to such a return. The replication (obsessive repetition) of casts of body fragments transforms the subject into an object, reduces the traumatic experience of breaking with the integral form to an aesthetic experience reflected in a decorative form.

In 1967, she began one of the most famous series of her works, "Bellies". The artist was the first to create a plaster cast of the belly of Arianna Raul-Oval, the bride of the Polish—Jewish director, surrealist artist, member of the Panic group Roland Topor ^[5]. This plaster cast became the starting point for the entire series. Shapochnikov often made casts of body parts of friends and acquaintances. The exposure of body parts of specific people is the main difference between her work and the work of the new realists, to whom she is often attributed. Thus, Cesar, one of the brightest representatives of the new realists, created sculptures of impersonal body fragments, thus denying the viewer the possibility of empathic perception.

Shapochnikov also continues the long tradition of casts in the visual arts. Masks-casts were made in ancient Egypt for funeral rites. As Pliny wrote, the ancient Greek sculptor Lysistratus was the first to make a plaster cast of a face, using it to convey maximum realism and authenticity of the image during the subsequent creation of an artistic sculptural portrait ^{[6, p. 27]}. During the same period, the tradition of Roman death masks, imagines maiorum, developed, made of plaster and later wax. Casts of faces and hands are also found in other cultures: until the twentieth century, they were used precisely as posthumous testimonies or monuments, and only in the twentieth century they lose this function and become independent artistic forms. In the second half of the twentieth century, George Segal created plaster casts of the bodies of specific people; Robert Gober made casts of individual parts of human bodies; Jasper Johns, Paul Teck, Edward Kienholz — plaster casts of their own bodies. Shapochnikov works in line with this tradition, creating casts of his own body and the bodies of friends. On the one hand, these fragments become imprints of the personal history of the artist (or her relatives), and on the other, they allow us to distance ourselves from our own biological nature.

In 1968, Alina Shapochnikov was diagnosed with breast cancer. From that moment on, she begins a series of works called "Tumor" using different materials and techniques. "The Big Tumor I" (1969) reflects the combined experiences associated with the disease and the experience of concentration camps. The work resembles a tumor in shape, but is complemented by two female photographs pasted on top. On the one hand, there is a photograph of a dead woman lying among corpses in one of the German concentration camps. On the other is a photo of actress Emmanuelle Riva (a shot from the film "Hiroshima, my Love." 1959, directed by A. Rene). This feature film, based on the novel of the same name by Marguerite Duras, is filled with documentary images of the aftermath of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and references the horrors of wartime.

Following S. Sontag's idea about the nature of cancer ^[7], it can be noted that the metaphorical embodiment of a tumor in Shapochnikov's work is in a spatial rather than a temporal dimension: by the end of her life, the artist had created a large number of plaster casts of her body and amorphous objects resembling tumors, which literally "grew" and "captured" new ones spaces ^[8]. One of her last works was the Herbarium series (1971-1973), in which she moves away from three—dimensional sculpture and creates, on the one hand, planar images of her body and the body of her adopted son Peter, and on the other, alienated human forms consisting of individual fragments of body casts made of polyester resin. The special compressed form of the presented body images explains the name of the project – herbarium, each page of which is an attempt to preserve elusive memories of form and matter.

Conclusion

Thus, a general analysis of Alina Shapochnikov's creative strategies showed that using the image of a fragmented body allows the artist to explore themes of trauma, illness and death. The gap, which is kept in silence due to the fragmented bodily form, at the same time generates a feeling of new sensuality and empathy. Shapochnikov expands on traditional methods of working with sculptural form through his experiments in material and form. The objects she creates – elements of a new visual vocabulary – the artist herself calls maladroits ("clumsy objects") in her 1972 manifesto, thus emphasizing the special status of alienated (objectified) casts of bodily fragments.