Abstract
In a series of ink drawings over the pages of a nineteenth-century medical encyclopedia containing illustrations of human anatomy, the contemporary Cuban artist, Roberto Fabelo, produces a catalogue of figures displaying zoological physiognomies. Overlapping the uniform incisions of the text’s original engravings with sketchy, gestural cross-hatching, Fabelo transforms tissue, capillaries, muscles and bone into aesthetic material. While these images produce hybrid morphologies on an iconographic level, I aim to demonstrate that the crossing of species identities does not simply remain at the safe distance of the fantastic. In the juxtaposition of clinical, two-dimensional illustrations and volumetric chiaroscuro we can observe agitated lines that subvert the privileged position of the human. Fabelo’s compositions undermine representational techniques that have served as the means of producing taxonomies.
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Notes
- 1.
Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), chap. 1, passim.
- 2.
Ibid., 54–61.
- 3.
Ibid., Clumsy suturing does not apply to all these artists; Thomas Grünfeld’s pieces are seamless and very carefully constructed.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), 13–15.
- 6.
Ibid., 11, 17.
- 7.
Baker, 19, chap. 1, passim.
- 8.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1972, 1982), 120.
- 9.
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 139–142.
- 10.
I’m borrowing the difference between figure and figurative from Steve Baker, 141.
- 11.
Braidotti, 139, 140.
- 12.
Bateson, 110.
- 13.
Ibid., Introduction, passim.
- 14.
Ibid., 114.
- 15.
Ibid., 119.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Bateson, 108, 119.
- 19.
Braidotti, 133.
- 20.
Ibid., 132, 133.
- 21.
Ibid., 133.
- 22.
Ibid., 133.
- 23.
Mbembe, 14.
- 24.
Ron Broglio, “‘Living Flesh’: Animal-Human Surfaces,” Journal of Visual Culture (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 110.
- 25.
Fabelo’s Anatomy, Museum of Latin American Art Long Beach exhibition catalogue, 2014, 16.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Giovanni Aloi, in his lecture On a Wing and a Prayer: Butterflies in Contemporary Art at the Natural History Museum in London, April 2014, describes the inherent violence in the production of natural science illustrations of butterflies and how the flatting of the butterfly serves our visual vantage point.
- 28.
W.J.T. Mitchell, “Illusionism: Looking at Animals Looking,” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (University of Chicago Press, 1994) 332–335.
- 29.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 19, 20.
- 30.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus,” in Thinking Bodies, ed. Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (Stanford University Press, 1994), 19, original emphasis.
- 31.
Ibid., original emphasis.
- 32.
Nancy, “Corpus,” passim, and Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2006), 143.
- 33.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 21.
- 34.
James, 143.
- 35.
In his reading of Bergson, Lyotard tells us that perception always results in action. In more organized beings there is a delay between perception and reaction, which explains indeterminacy, unpredictability and freedom of actions. Though an action will ultimately manifest itself in a particular way, many other actions were possible and “remain inscribed in a virtual state.” In my usage of virtual potentialities I refer to the memory of these other possibilities as well as (and here I draw from Deleuze and Guattari ) forces, energies, intensities, the invisible dynamics that constitute perceptible bodies.
- 36.
Direct quote is cited above, Fabelo’s Anatomy, 16.
- 37.
For more on the indistinction between human flesh and animal meat see James Goebel’s essay on “Uncanny Meat,” French Journal of English Studies 55 (2016).
- 38.
Monica E. Kupfer, “Roberto Fabelo,” Art Nexus 5, no. 60, Mr/My 2006, 147.
- 39.
Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7.
- 40.
Ibid., 13.
- 41.
Braidotti, 118.
- 42.
I would like to thank Ivette Hernández Torres for her comments during a presentation I did on the work of Roberto Fabelo. Noting his repurposing of old materials, she encouraged me to see the depth at the surface of his works, 2015.
- 43.
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 31, 32.
- 44.
Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2014), 5.
- 45.
Braidotti, 149.
- 46.
Caridad Blanco de la Cruz, “Roberto Fabelo,” Art Nexus 5, no. 60, Mr/My 2006, 130.
- 47.
David John Carton, http://www.fotolibra.com/gallery/533546/giant-mutant-cockroaches-havana.
- 48.
“Montaje de Sobrevivientes,” Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 10 ma Edición de la Bienal de la Habana, Video, March 2009.
- 49.
Gabriele Schwab, “Haunting from the Future: Psychic Life in the Wake of Nuclear Necropolitics,” The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis, 1 (2014): 85–101.
- 50.
“Montaje de Sobrevivientes”.
- 51.
Esther Katheryn Whitfield, Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 143.
- 52.
I want to thank David Tenorio and Jeremy Breningstall for their presentations Images of Counter-utopia: Queerness, Temporality and Visual Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba and Politics of Past and Future in the Visual Landscape of Havana, respectively, at the 2016 UC Cuba workshop at UC Merced. Both of their projects brought to the foreground a national subjectivity modeled on Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos and the ubiquity of these icons in the Cuban landscape.
- 53.
Ernesto, “Che” Guevara, “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba,” cited in Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, “Lecciones de cubanía: identidad nacional y errancia sexual en Senel Paz, Marti y Lezama Lima,” Cuban Studies 29, (January 01, 1999), 133.
- 54.
In her analysis of El Hombre Nuevo, Marta Hernández Salván highlights an ethos of self-sacrifice and heroic righteousness in Mínima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba (SUNY Press, 2015), 48, 49.
- 55.
In her dissertation chapter, “De testimonios y de reos: biopolítica y revolución. el seropositivo cubano,” (2015) Mirta Suquet Martínez explains how Cuban Revolution’s strong public health policy (and its corresponding moral codes) manifested itself in the medicalization of the New Man as an immune man, 303. http://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/383016.
- 56.
See Nancy’s “Corpus” (cited above) for a deconstruction of a Christian metaphysics and the unity of the sign and the body.
Works Cited
Baker, Steve. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
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Broglio, Ron. “‘Living Flesh’: Animal-Human Surfaces.” Journal of Visual Culture. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008, 103–121.
Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo. “Lecciones de cubanía: identidad nacional y errancia sexual en Senel Paz, Marti y Lezama Lima.” Cuban Studies 29 (January 1999): 129–154.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
———. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Goebel, James. “Uncanny Meat.” Caliban: French Journal for English Studies 55 (2016): 169–190.
James, Ian. The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
Mitchell, W.J.T. “Illusionism: Looking at Animals Looking.” In Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, 329–344. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Corpus.” In Thinking Bodies, ed. Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, 17–31. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
———. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Salván, Marta Hernández. Mínima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015.
Schwab, Gabriele. “Haunting from the Future: Psychic Life in the Wake of Nuclear Necropolitics.” The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 1 (2014): 85–101.
Whitfield, Esther Katheryn. Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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García, C. (2018). Incorrect and Beautiful Anatomies: Becomings, Immanence, and Transspecies Bodies in the Art of Roberto Fabelo. In: Ohrem, D., Calarco, M. (eds) Exploring Animal Encounters. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92504-2_11
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