The Abject
No open-access works for The Abject are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About The Abject
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.
The makers
Related artists.
The Afterlife
The American West
The Art Market
The Artist's Studio
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The Body
The City
The Domestic and Domesticity
The Elements
The Environment
The Fantastic
The Mundane
The Seasons
The Senses
The Sublime
