Abjection in the Visual Arts

Abstract

The concept of abjection, which provoked new ways of thinking about art and aesthetics, came into prominence in the visual arts in the late twentieth century, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, with ‘[t]he postmodernist return to the body’ (Ross, 2003, p. 281). In these manifestations, the body was not necessarily featured as ‘a whole, integrated entity but as something evoked by corporeal fragments and physical residues’ (Hopkins, 2000, p. 225). It was also subject to a number of processes that involved dislocation, evisceration and other ways of breaking up its unity and revealing its relentless materialism and uncontrollability. There were a number of significant exhibitions which brought abjection to the forefront of aesthetic considerations in the late twentieth century. These included Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art at the Whitney Museum (of American Art) (New York, 1993), which was the first formal identification of abject art; Rites of Passage: Art for the End of a Century at the Tate (London, 1995); and L’informe: Mode d’emploi (Formless: A User’s Guide) at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1996).