FAYE MULLEN

A POSTHUMOUS AESTHETIC:
FAYE MULLEN
by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher
The video and performance tableaux of
Faye Mullen inquire into the experience of
embodiment and death. Working at the juncture
of symbolically-charged materials and repre-
sentational technologies, her works evoke a
tension between biological, biographical and
mythical femininities. Choosing to stage her own
body in dramatic landscapes or derelict industrial
settings, Mullen performs thanatal self-portraits
for the camera. Such acts of self-observation
as if oneself were an object, sometimes
alive, sometimes deceased promotes a self-
othering that at once estranges and intriques.
Beyond the contingencies of personality and
identity, the body becomes a site of phenom-
enological exploration and intense engagement
with the limits of corporeality.
Despite using photography and video, Mullen
acts like a sculptor because of the persistent
exploration of gravity and weight. For instance,
the performance Mass: A Study (2010) posed
the artist on a gargantuan teeter-totter counter-
balanced by a mound of bricks. Likewise, I am
an artist and I weigh (2010), a series of C-print
diptychs, paired fellow artists with an accumu-
lation of objects presumably related to their
personal mtier assembled by weight, such as a
pile of books, tools, rocks, clothing or furniture. In
this way, they are reduced (or made equivalent)
to their vocational attributes and belongings.
Also evident in Mullens work is a preoccu-
pation with an uncanny integration of the body
into the surrounding architectural environment.
In The wall (2009), the artist affixed herself into
the gyproc of a white cube gallery wall during
a five-hour performance, and in The air duct
(2009) her body was concealed in an industrial
ventilation unit suspended from the ceiling, with
only her toes and sphinxlike face emerging to
spook visitors. Both instances reveal a comic if
not also poignant single-mindedness of getting
into the gallery: her body, art, and building are
merged to the point of near personal dissolution.
As much as Mullens works rely on the reduction
of person to body, and flesh to matter, it is
never the case that the human body simply
takes up space or weighs a certain amount. A
trace of culture persists even when the body
is naked and presumably stripped of identi-
fication.
1
This especially applies to works in
which Mullen immerses herself into elemental
organic substances. Lying nude and half-buried
in a bed of peat moss or pine needles, her body
seemingly seeks intimacy with the sensuous
earthiness of wetlands and forests. The eros,
however, of such a full-body embrace yields to
thanatos, communion to decomposition. These
two works here, I lay (2008) and in your arms
(2010) reference funereal conventions: the
first presents Mullen curled in a shipping crate
packed with peat moss; the second ensconces
her in a 10 stack of pine needles. In both instal-
lations, she disconcertedly appears to be an
abandoned, if not also murdered, corpse.
2
If the
poetics of these flesh/nature encounters leave
the morbid as a somewhat open question, by
way of (2011) brilliantly literalizes it. Here she
arranged for an art mover to ship herself from
her home to her studio in a coffin-shaped crate.
The fact that her studio at one time served as
a morgue (located as it is in a former hospital),
confirms and sublimates the death wish implicit
in the creative process.
These works evidence what could be called
a posthumous aesthetic practice. Such a
practice runs counter to a broader cultural geist
that tends to deny death by delegating it to
the private sphere, defying it through medical
technologies, and focusing on the cult of youth.
3

13
FAYE MULLEN 13
1 On the one hand, Mullens work could be considered a problematization of the distinction between naked (vulnerably
deprived of clothes) and nude (formally aestheticized). See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and
Sexuality, New York, London: Routledge (1992).
2 Virtual suicide is evident in other performative artworks, such as On Hearing (2011), in which Mullen ritualistically
drowns herself in a bathtub filled with milk, or jamais (2011), in which she buries herself in salt.
See http://fayemullen.com.
3 These are reasons given by Shoshona and Teman, to which they also add a mania for fitness, the conversion of death
into a life-affirming event, and mass media reinforcement of the separation of life and death into an opposing binary.
See Avi Shoshana and Elly Teman, Coming Out of the Coffin: Life-Self and Death-Self in Six Feet Under, Symbolic
Interaction 29(4) (2006): 559.
FAYE MULLEN 14
this page: to be veiled. Still image from performative video
installation. Endless loop, HD video. 2012.
previous page: jamais. (to never forever.) Still image from three-
channel performative video installation. 52 min, HD video. 2012.
15 15
FAYE MULLEN 15
As opposed to grisly images of death in popular
media, Mullen foregrounds death in a decidedly
undramatic fashion: serene, bloodless, without
putrefaction. Her cadavers are beautiful, as in the
tradition of the Death and the Maiden genre.
But, in the end, death defies representation.
Mullens practice is not just photographic, it is also
performative. Her work exceeds the conditions
of representation by engaging her own body,
and so the process of creating the work, along
with the viewers own affective resonance in
witnessing it on video, becomes significant.
Since death exists beyond tangible experience, it
is impossible to know, as psychologist Jesse M.
Bering asserts, what it will feel like.
4
The pieces
here, I lay, in your arms and by way of serve as
experiments, then, in seeking out a phenom-
enology of death by performing the activities
of burial, decomposition and transportation to
the morgue. While many spiritual adepts utilize
the technique of imagining ones own death to
disengage from the ephemeral pleasures of the
body, Buddhists, shamans and Tantric practi-
tioners among them, Mullen, by contrast, directly
engages the body to pre-emptively experience
what is otherwise speculative and abstract. Her
pieces act like necrological meditations that
straddle the divide between life and its cessation
a living death so to speak.
5
In literature,
Jacques Derrida names projects such as these
autothanatography, inserting thanato for
the more familiar bio, to address narratives in
which authors write about their own death.
6
Mullen performs, instead of writes, her autothan-
atography, so no voice is heard and no story is
told. What comes across thus rests on the level
of affect and the phenomenological.
Mullens work for the exhibition at UTAC
continues her interest in extreme states and
the thanatological, and employs large-scale
video installations that focus on the body and
its visceral presence. Like tableaux, each is
framed and shot in a single take, using available
light and charged spaces. The first piece, to be
veiled (2012), is set in a fallow field near Niagara
Falls and recalls monumental Renaissance
paintings. In extreme slow motion, a parachute-
sized cloud of white fabric billows over the
unclothed artist, who lies prone on the rough
earth, eventually falling to conceal her. Unlike the
earlier tableaux pieces, however, to be veiled
reads as an extended ritual. Being veiled
carries weighty cultural associations regarding
both eroticism and death. In Christian marriage
ceremonies, the lifting of the veil marks the
climactic reveal of the virginal bride by the
groom; in Muslim cultures, the hijab ensures the
chastity of women in the public realm, and in the
west is seen by some as a form of repression.
To take the veil in the Catholic tradition means
to enter a convent and a life of celibacy. Besides
such fixations on sexual purity, death rituals
utilize the veil or shroud to cover the recently
deceased, protect the body from prying gazes,
and swaddle the corpse in a dignified manner.
Mullens veil, by contrast, is shadowy and
ominous. Its descent from the sky may allude
to angelic visitations, and the rippling effects
evoke the luxurious fabrics in Baroque portraits,
but the endpoint of the veils trajectory all too
clearly points to suffocation. In this case, the
veil displays more agency and liveliness (not
to mention malevolence) than the inert body it
covers. It is as if the voluminous folds of Berninis
Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1647-52) arose as an
independent entity rather than merely serving
to express the rapturous pain of the saint. By
equating the veil with the shroud, to be veiled
also equates marriage to death. In this instance
of autothanatography, the kind of death alluded
to seems to be a civil death, an outcome
of Victorian-era laws that disenfranchised
women of their legal, property and other rights
when they married, even as wifeliness was
supposedly esteemed as a cultural virtue.
7
The
veil/shroud in Mullens video replicates a similar
paradox: beautiful but ultimately smothering.
Even when death is not pre-eminent, Mullens
work focuses on the related theme of
abjectness. The corpse is but one instance of
the abject in Julia Kristevas theory, another
is menstrual blood, both of which must be
repelled in order to deny the everpresent
threat of contamination and mortality.
8
Scarlet
Woman, a two-channel video, presents the
artist clad in a translucent night dress, enframed
FAYE MULLEN 16
17
FAYE MULLEN 17
within a dark, dilapidated shed. In one section,
she collects menstrual blood in a vial. She then
walks into another where she raises the vial
and drinks. For Mullen, to drink her own blood is
to address the sense of loss represented by the
bodys excretion. Re-ingesting what the body
eliminates defers that loss, counters the bodys
unruliness, and regains an element of personal
agency. At the same time, her act seeks a
quasi-homeopathic effect: as much as blood
symbolizes a life force, to swallow it recaptures
and internalizes the mythic characteristics
of vigour, romance, and courage.
9
Menstrual
blood, however, carries specific taboos. Marsha
Rosengarten, for instance, notes the paradox
it poses: while menstrual blood is a naturally
occurring process of womens reproductive
cycle, it is socially abhorrent despite the cultural
valuation of motherhood.
10
Mullens gesture
confronts such a taboo, and could be perceived
as a feminist act. For Germaine Greer, tasting
menstrual blood without disgust was integral
to emancipation from the patriarchal stigma-
tization of the feminine.
11
Scarlet Woman,
4 Jesse M. Bering, The End? Why So Many of Us Think Our Minds Continue on After We Die, Scientific American Mind,
October/November (2008): 34-41. Bering attributes the near-universal belief in the afterlife to be a result of the minds
inability to imagine its own non-existence, i.e., to feel absolutely nothing.
5 Linnell Secomb, Autothanatography, Mortality 7(1) (2002): 33-4.
6 Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press
(2000). Mullen uses the term distant autobiography to convey the use of her own body to explore these situations,
where she stands in for everywoman rather than reveal specific personal traits.
7 See, e.g., Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, Princeton: Princeton University
Press (1989).
8 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University
Press (1982).
9 Menstrual blood has been found to contain dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a hallucinogenic substance that can prompt
waking lucid dreams. One quality of DMT is to slow the experience of subjective time, to expand the interval of the
flash of its psychedelic trance state or altered consciousness, which is then followed by euphoria.
10 Martha Rosengarten, Thinking Menstrual Blood, Australian Feminist Studies 15(31) (2000): 91-101.
11 Germaine Greer, The Madwomans Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings 1968-85, London: Pan Books (1987).
12 Mullen plans to include two more pieces Disappearance in Prose (2012) and Existence in Waiting (2012) in her UTAC
exhibition, but they were unfinished at the time of our writing.
however, avoids the spectacle of political
statement. Consuming oneself defies the very
logic of differentiation between self and other
that abjection sets out to accomplish. The
videos noirish affect suggests a secretive,
intimate ritual. The desolate mise-en-scne
implies shame and trauma an outcaste on the
outskirts as if a woman garnering embodied
self-knowledge were a dangerous undertaking.
Overall, Mullens phenomenological investiga-
tions convey more than can be represented
visually. The physical integration in The wall
and The air duct, the focus on weight in Mass,
the sensory immersion of here, I lay and in
your arms, the suffocation in to be veiled, and
the tasting of the taboo in Scarlet Woman, all
point to performative gestures geared towards
producing experiential understandings of the
body, self, life sustained in the presence of
thanatos.
12
Through a process-oriented method
that is as conceptual as it is corporeal, Mullen
performatively combines art with knowledge
production and self-transformation.