The Abject
Art that dwells on what the body expels or dreads, such as blood, waste, decay and the corpse, provoking disgust and fascination.
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About
The abject is what the body must expel to remain itself: blood, vomit, excrement, rot and the corpse. The philosopher Julia Kristeva gave the idea its modern shape in Powers of Horror (1980), describing the mix of revulsion and fascination such things provoke. Long before, Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22) laid out a greenish, stiffening corpse, and Théodore Géricault studied severed heads and limbs while preparing The Raft of the Medusa.
The idea echoed through art of the 1980s and 1990s. Cindy Sherman's photographs from the late 1980s spread food, mould and vomit across the frame, and Kiki Smith's Tale (1992) shows a crawling figure trailing a tail of excrement. Berlinde De Bruyckere models wax bodies and horse forms that seem flayed and exhausted, and Teresa Margolles has made work with water used to wash bodies in a Mexico City morgue.
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