Missing BodiesDisappearances in the Aesthetic Michael Davidson (bio) The name of the one who disappeared must have gotten inscribed someplace else. —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx In 2007 the British artist and designer Simon Starling began creating a large installation for the Massachusetts Museum of Art based on a haunting photograph. The image was a stereoscopic picture of Chinese workers who had been brought to a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 1870 as strikebreakers.1 The photograph shows the imported Chinese workers, ranging in age from fourteen to their midtwenties, standing in their work aprons in front of the factory. They were the first of many waves of Chinese immigrants who came to the East Coast, often brought by companies to crush unions or, as in the case of the recently completed Transcontinental Railroad, conduct labor at wages no white worker would touch. To inaugurate his installation, Starling extracted silver particles from a photograph of the stereoview and placed them under an electron microscope where they were magnified twenty-five thousand times in order to produce models for large clay and plaster sculptures that are a million times larger than their original trace particles. In order to create his large biomorphic shapes, Starling hired Chinese workers in Nanjing to cast them and then polish the stainless steel skin to a brilliant sheen on which visitors to the installation may see their severely distorted reflections. Installed at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (site of the former shoe factory), Starling’s project works across several scales: the transformation of photography into sculpture, the enlargement of the very small to the very large, the traversal of vast geopolitical landscapes, the exchange of labor across varying stages of capital. In the process he raises questions of racialized labor, the emergence of [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Henry Ward, View of C. T. Sampson’s Shoe Manufactory, with the Chinese Shoemakers in Working Costume, North Adams and vicinity, Circa 1875, Stereograph, 7.46 cm x 15.88 cm. globalization, and the transformative role of photography in modernity. He does so by re-creating bodies missing from history by the means through which those bodies were first spectacularized through stereoscopic viewing. Although the original photo did not contain names of the Chinese workers in North Adams, Starling in his installation provides the identities of the Nanjing workers who cast his sculptures, thereby completing a circuit begun when bodies began to replace bodies in a global economy. It is no small aspect of his project that Starling installed his sculptures in a museum that once housed the shoe factory, thereby linking two forms of production, material and aesthetic, in a common site. Starling’s installation is one of many examples of a re-visibilization that restores the body to the aesthetic while representing the biopolitical regimes that erase it. His emphasis is less on the finished sculptures as objects than the processes he undergoes [End Page 2] in tracing the larger economies of labor and production. In his work, the missing laboring body is returned to history through an aesthetic that links corporeality with the materiality of cultural production.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Simon Starling, The Nanjing Particles, (After Henry Ward, View of C. T. Sampson’s Shoe Manufactory, with the Chinese Shoemakers in Working Costume, North Adams and Vicinity, Circa 1875) 2008. Installation image at MASS MoCA, Photograph by Arthur Evans, courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. Production image and photograph by Kasper Akhoej and Simon Starling, courtesy of the artist. His procedure complicates a revived ocularcentrism when the body seems to be increasingly visible, whether through digital imaging, video endoscopy, MRI and CAT scans, or the post-9/11 security state. Several specific examples of the visible body come to mind. In 1994, the Visible Human Project created a vast “digital image library of volumetric data representing a complete, normal male and female” that, according to the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado, provided “a universally accessible, national resource for anatomical information for researchers, educators, medical professionals, as well as the general...
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Oct 4, 2017
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