Dillon Chapman on beck haberstroh
Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (with]1-72192092, me9-112192102, multipleunknown1242192102), 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, bed sheets, box spring, bed frame, and light, 100 x 100 x 130 in.
[Image description: Three bedsheet-sized pieces of fabric— with rust colored stains in various organic and creased patterns— are presented in the corner of a room with white walls and concrete floors. One of the pieces of fabric hangs vertically on the wall, another horizontally on a metal bed frame turned on its side so the legs face the wall, and the last on a wooden bed frame, lying oblique to the corner of the room. A spotlight shines on this one and reflects onto the fabric on the metal bed frame as well.]
In Hervé Guibert’s essay “The Cancerous Image,” the artist writes about his experiences with a stolen photograph of a beautiful man. [1] He sleeps with it in his bed, inside his pillows, and notices that his enacted desire, the physical touch that he longs to manifest with the man in this photograph, is exactly what is destroying it — the photograph spotting and disintegrating from the friction and moisture. Guibert accelerates the death of the photograph by taping it to his torso and, eventually, the porosity of both substrates (paper and skin) facilitates the image transferring onto his own skin: an end to the photographic body. The beautiful man whose image he coveted is now tattooed onto his very skin. It is precisely this kind of porosity that artist beck haberstroh investigates in a new series of work, titled Our Body is the Limit of Our Image.
Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092pit), Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092breastl), and Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092breastr), all 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, muslin, ceramic, and light, 6 x 4 x 2.5 in. each
[Image description: Three rectangular ceramic boxes, beige in color with sepia toned fabrics in the middle like an old fashioned television set, hang in a row in the middle of the image. The leftmost is the darkest brown, the middle the lightest, and the furthest to the left a middleground. The boxes look more organic than geometric.]
The act of Guibert strapping the photograph to himself conjures in my mind an image of binding, a practice in which transmasculine people use various methods (from bandages to clothing made specifically for the purpose of safely binding) to constrict their chest in order to present in a less perceptually female manner (I think of Elle Perez’s photograph of their own binder hanging on a shower rod). haberstroh uses the process of binding as a way to collect their sweat to create their smaller iterations of Our Body is the Limit of Our Image, which are photographs encased in ceramic bodies and, like a duratrans box, are lit from the back to illuminate the surface, their images reminiscent of intestines or a membrane stretched over an armature. In some ways that’s precisely what they are — excretions from that membrane that have now developed an image. The salt from the body’s sweat is imprinted onto the fabric and then coated with a silver nitrate solution that develops the salt prints under sunlight (the darker areas of the fabric are where the sweat is densest), a very early photographic practice invented by Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. It is fascinating to me that a nearly identical process results in the exact inverse of Guibert’s venture: haberstroh creates images through the act of sweating while Guibert destroyed one through this same process.
Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop52192092ribsl), 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, muslin, ceramic, and light, 6 x 4 x 3 in.
[Image description: A single rectangular ceramic box, beige flecked with black specks, with a small, illuminated fabric center sits obliquely in the picture frame. Folds are barely visible on the fabric through the light. The planes and edges of the box are more organic than perfectly geometric.]
While these images that haberstroh has produced are, in fact, photographs, they feel as if they belong to a different lineage. One might think of the abstract expressionism of Helen Frankenthaler, or Yves Klein (in which the body is central and visible in the application of pigment to a surface), or perhaps even the Shroud of Turin, whose mythos mirrors the process in which haberstroh imprints their own body onto fabric. For me, the sepia-toned prints call to mind the work of legendary performance artist Ron Athey, specifically his infamous blood prints from various performances. The colors in his prints and haberstroh’s are almost indistinguishable. Today on Athey’s website you can buy blood prints as “relics” from his shows. The controversy that has always surrounded this work has, of course, been Athey’s HIV positive status as a queer man. As bodily fluids are the key means of HIV’s transmission, for Athey to let blood in a performance space — creating prints with paper towels, and then suspending them over the audience — might seem sensationalist or even unsafe. It brings to mind a scene from the film 28 Days Later in which a drop of blood from an infected person falls into the character Frank’s eye. While 28 Days Later is not a film about the AIDS crisis, it is hard to think about blood, disease, and transmission without thinking about the queer body, especially post 1980s. A world in which queer bodies are framed as porous, leaking, and infectious. These works exemplify Julia Kristeva’s writing about abjection in art: “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.” [2]
Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (loop62192092heart), 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, muslin, ceramic, and light, 9 x 5 x 3 in.
[Image description: A single rectangular ceramic box, beige flecked with black specks, with an illuminated fabric center sits obliquely in the picture frame.The fabric bears stains the color of rust. The shape of the box and the fabric resemble a pancreas or other bodily organ.]
We are currently in another pandemic, though the AIDS crisis never truly ended (especially for poor people, people of color, queer and trans people, and the people that exist at the infinite number of intersections between and among those identities), and it is hard to tell if we are near the beginning, middle, or end of this one. I have a distinct feeling that, like the AIDS crisis, COVID-19 will become an ingrained part of our lives. To create work that centers on the excretion of bodily fluids — particularly from a queer body — during a pandemic, when the porosity of bodies is feared and contemptable, is, in some ways, courageous. haberstroh explains to me in an email that their initial interest in sweat was piqued by learning that an individual’s sweat is changed by testosterone when undergoing hormone replacement therapy, a process some trans and gender expansive people may undertake as a means of feeling more at home in their bodies (they also tell me that there are a number of other factors such as age, diet, exertion, and illness that may also impact someone’s sweat makeup). Photography fixes bodies in time, and haberstroh endeavored to fix their own biochemical signature in an image. While the COVID-19 virus and its various permutations (some sounding like Star Trek villains) are spread primarily through airborne means, it is the respiratory droplets that contain the virus itself. In other words, spit. Theoretically, you could create salt prints from spit and silver nitrate solution, but haberstroh focuses on the sweat excreted from our pores, which feels significant (there is currently no scientific evidence that one might contract COVID-19 from sweat). Spit is, fundamentally, about the interior of the body, whereas sweat is about the surface — osmosis. Our Body is the Limit of Our Image images the body as a sort of imprint. I see the residue of the body and conjure an idea of a body in my mind to fill in what is missing, like a mold of a hand without the positive cast.
Our Body is the Limit of Our Image (with]1-72192092, me9-112192102, multipleunknown1242192102) (detail), 2022, human sweat, silver nitrate, bed sheets, box spring, bed frame, and light
[Image description: A close up detail shot of one of the large fabric pieces. It is slightly illuminated, enhancing the contrast between the darker rust colored sections of the fabric and the off-white sections. They resemble the impressions of prehistoric flora in rock formations.]
Though they are not always thought of as such, photographs are simultaneously images and objects. The shift from analog to digital photography has been a shift in materiality. The photographs are still objects when digital but, like water evaporating into a gas, the state of matter has changed. The specific kind of objectness that is associated with photography is perceived to be lost. The rise in nostalgia over the past decade for analog photographic processes is indicative of this mourning. Chief amongst the resurgence is the Polaroid. The instantaneity of the process pairs well with the immediacy of digital photography, yet it retains that image/object duality that is so captivating to us. haberstroh’s Our Body is the Limit of Our Image captures this magic quality while also imbuing the photographs with a kind of abstracted intimacy. Polaroids have a distinctly queer history for, as Guibert points out, they were the only kind of photography that didn’t require that someone else in a dark room develop and print your images. For some— like April Dawn Alison, a gender-expansive person who lived everyday life as a man but photographed their feminine persona in the privacy of their home for over three decades— they are a way of privately imagining oneself outside of cisnormative gender norms, or of imaging one’s queer desires. Guibert writes about Polaroids and their relationship to the erotic (he posits that they are the first form of personal pornography) a quality having to do with the unique, unreproduceable nature of these photographs (as positives rather than negatives that must be transferred). haberstroh’s photographs embody this characteristic but are framed through a lens of the laboring queer body (which may also be erotic). There is an intimacy that is both displayed and withheld, which is a fundamental nature of photography.
haberstroh presents Our Body is the Limit of Our Image in two distinct manners: in ceramic bodies of various scales and forms in which they function as membranes/screens, as well as on bed frames (and an adjacent wall) in which they visualize the labor through which they are made. One set presents a queer group of bodies while the other presents the residue of the queer body. However, these works don’t necessarily announce themselves as queer. They merge labor and imagery while queering conventional methods of creating photographs, but they are not representational. As such they are able to be connected with and contextualized by different (at times parallel and at others intersecting) histories of image-making— queer, erotic, and private. They are reminiscent, conceptually, of Gordon Hall’s sculptures that seek to teach us what to do with our bodies. haberstroh’s Our Body is the Limit of Our Image seeks to show what our bodies can do, and what their body has done. With the pervasiveness of photography, conventional image-making practices have merged to an average in which most photographs look the same: a distinct perspective is hard to pick out. In a contemporary moment where it continues to be increasingly difficult to say things with images, haberstroh opts to say something about the nature of our bodies' relationship to photographs while refusing representation. This prompts viewers to engage with the work first, rather than filtering their perspectives of it through the subject position of the artist, as if that could truly reveal the nature of a work of art.
Dillon Chapman is a Southern California-based artist who works in filmmaking and writing.
Notes
Guibert, Herve, and Robert Bononno. “The Cancerous Image.” Essay. In Ghost Image. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Kbh.: Nota, 2017.