Body Bags

Clémentine Deliss

 

Body bags pile up so fast in the middle of a roundabout on a Jerusalem street that emergency workers can barely keep from stacking them one on top of the other. All around, the carnage left by a suicide bombing on a packed city bus litters the pavement severed arms, legs, a lower torso, and bits of flesh and bone. The stench of charred skin hangs in the air. As mangled bodies are pulled one after another from the shattered double-length bus, workers rush to sheath them in plastic. Just up the street from the bombsite stands the Museum on the Seam for Dialogue, Understanding and Coexistence, its doors and windows boarded up or cemented over.

A woman buries her father in a solid oak casket. As the coffin is lowered into the hole in the ground, a sheer gap in the solid earth is all she can see. She imagines bodies swelling confusedly between the paths of a city planned for the dead, partial, inconsistent, and hand-made. The casket bears a brass plaque but the date is wrong. Underground fiction could be triggered off yet the body just becomes one among many, a new inhabitant in this strangely cramped yet civic necropolis.

An Athens-based architect designs a living condition for a man whose fate has been blacklisted, whose identity is terrorised, and for whom mobility and subterfuge are architectonic necessities. His kitchen is less of a problem. But his bed and his office are disjointed from a central plan, dismembered from the backbone of daily living, quartered and drawn across the Greek capital. Hostage to permanent movement, forced to dissolve his trail after every pause, this tenant rents enclosures that auto-destruct faster than he can.

Nearby in a bar, an old man speaks aloud. He can because he knows that no one will hear him over the compressed drone, that numbing barrage of human speech. He can shout all he wants, gap-toothed, stupefied, and inaudible. His voicelessness is concealed from others by the dense honeycomb of noise. He stands staring inwardly, his existence truncated and deficient.

Bagged yet breathing bodies become indistinguishable from the dead, immobile and yet all the reverse: people who live, work and survive to survive others, even children. In movement even when they sleep, internally tracking conscious hours until they re-awaken to early mist, huddled on the streets that are gardens, courtyards, and roads. The body bag becomes an anachronistic substitute for that very absence of domestic environment when violent outcome no longer offers the roof of normality, of peace and of serenity.

Earthquakes, ruptures, cloud-clashes and land-slides require body bags as containers of the accidental dead but also as sealants between the organic elements of human death and natural catastrophe. Imagine the strata over time: grey green clay, crumbled brown earth packed and compiled, streaks of chalk, and then a violent sliver of orange skin, a millimetre thick, slicing through like a streak of artificial copper, impermeable to decomposition. Are these body bags the curious transformers of potentially alchemical putrefaction? Could they offer the raw material of future human relationships waiting to be excavated from inertia and transcribed into a new generation?

A group of nine mine-workers, picks raised above their shoulders, collude in rhythm, as they prepare to force their axes into the earth. Captured into immobility by the South African artist Gerard Sekoto in his painting Song of the Pick (1946-7), they act as living proof of human energy capitalised for industry, mining deep into the earths Plutonic force. Kendell Geers responds to the synchronised formation of Sekotos diggers by placing sixty empty body bags along a narrow passage, lining both sides of a corridor. He uses the orange South African body bags produced in lurid coloured vinyl so that, he is told, no corpse can be forgotten in the dark mines that lie below South Africas vast expanse of green fields. Emotionally, it is The Burrow by Franz Kafka that comes to mind in which the narrator, an unidentified beast, watches over its tunnel built from a series of cell-like enclosures that entomb the attacker as well as the creator, forming a paranoia of enemies in the bowels of the earth. Song of the Pig transmits most acutely the intrusion into individual existence that Geers questions repeatedly in his work.

What functional distrust underpins the design of this dead-house? Where is the humility of a body bag? Can it possess humility as a design product? Plastic, glossy, and easy-wipe, it resembles an outer tent with an inner rubber lining. But why the excessive length, why the unconvincing cylindrical shape that extends to giant proportions? Whoever designed the bag had accountability and numerics in mind whereby one bag equals one life, the identity of one human even if only the wrist watch rattles about inside. Here is an object where the unit evokes more than the name, enabling the media, governments, hospitals, demographers, statisticians, and the vultures of post-catastrophic industries to norm and quantify aggression or the aftermath of disaster. The US military shuns the term body bag. Instead, they speak of "human remains pouches". If made of heavy-duty olive green vinyl, they are known as "human remains pouch type II." They are considering ways to modify body bags so that remains may be viewed through a clear screen, preventing the contamination of surviving troops or mortuary teams. Body bags smuggle something somehow, but not humility, unless their implementation follows an act of such non-aggression that only nature could compel us to feel small, unworthy and disposable.

In an edition from 1993, The Cares of a Family Man, in which five orange body bags hang loosely from a wall, Geers evokes another of Kafkas short stories of the same name in which something lurking with no fixed abode and a senseless yet persistent existence, offers little aim in life but to be able to outlive the identities of other more forceful objects. While Geers may look for an extension of meaning he is ultimately fascinated with the impasse of associations that certain objects or actions appear to encourage, functional items such as body bags or padlocks that seem to say too much, that constrain the viewer to swallow more than the educated ambivalence of meanings would prescribe, pinning one down to the full-frontal by simply being there, and repeating their unambiguous presence over and over again. One could argue that his references to the mechanisms of violence and repression are attempts to pre-empt the choreography of a more insidious psychology of manipulation, something Geers has resisted to since becoming an artist in the later years of South Africas Apartheid regime.
He writes, I have always tried to work with the concept and strategy of recycling objects, images, texts and such from the quotidian into the realm of art. I am curious about what happens when you try to translate the untranslatable aspects of colloquial culture into high art. The brash rawness of toilet humour or drunkard politically incorrect jokes, pornography, horror and B-grade films and childrens games are extremely difficult to assimilate into the cold detached an-aesthetics of art. (1)

This is not about reactivating a debate on the high and low. Geers wants us to actually live through the cerebral cul de sac that a generic object can trigger off in a spectator, which, in the case of the body bag, encourages a blank definition of death and the physical numbness of knowing that wars continue, that corpses need to be gathered and that you can only pretend to be neutral if you insulate yourself from emotive associations. These unavoidable appendages of the mechanics of war or catastrophe quite literally incorporate us, test our emotions, and remind us of the other, more macabre side of creative and industrial design. Or in the somewhat gothic words of Kendell Geers, Its where the familiar twists around and suddenly becomes your own corpse staring back at you. (2) Perhaps Geers searches for an emotional language that is neither reactive, nor staged: a concept of sentiment that in its complexity floods all associative gesticulations, deadens easy responses and call into question the difficulty of representing the conditions that have defined, characterised, and contaminated entire continents.

In a final travesty, the body bags can be seen as objects of performance, as the material left-overs that follow a scenario of ritual enactment. In this context, the associations are the hardest to demarcate or exploit. It is effectively their status within a temporal chain of events founded on a system of beliefs and a metaphorical representation of power that leads one to a quite different production of meaning. Rhetoric, together with the enactment of movement through performance are aesthetic tropes that, in the first instance, are denoted through presence. Body bags are the relics of these manifestations of presence within the aesthetics of war, or in the case of natural catastrophes, the vestiges of the uncanny and the sublime. The collection of such remains in the context of Africas earlier art production has engendered a discourse on artistic value that invests in the aftermath. Museums are filled with the relics of performative languages eagerly gathered up by early anthropologists and collectors. The distinction between authentic patina and fake curio often discussed in African art is actually not the issue. For it matters little whether the bags have been used or not, however impracticable this may sound. Their pristine condition conveys a process of identification within a sequence of exchanges and alludes to the investment of the object regardless of its transformation. In this context, the body bags are doubly significant for not only do they play on the location of human rather than conceptual or dramaturgical remains, but they evoke the static end of energy not as a scene within a masquerade of order and hygiene, but as the hermetic sealant of a messy and desperate flow of aggression.

The body bag as a component within Song of the Pig can be read as an energising transformer and as an inert, synthetic sarcophagus that through association brings us back to the safe-haven and the architecture of adaptability as living urgency. It is equally a symbol of anonymity and voicelessness, a sign of industry and expansion, and perhaps one of the least predictable units within human existence.

(1) Sympathy for the Devil, interview with Jérome Sans, Tema Céleste 92, August 2002.

(2) Phoenix Expelled, interview with Christine Macel, ARTPRESS, 257, 2000,
pages 28-33.

Franz Kafka, The Burrow, 1923-24, English version in The complete short stories of Franz Kafka, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, Vintage Classics, 1999.

Franz Kafka, The Cares of a Family Man, 1914-1917, English version as above.