Writing with the Body

Luc Vander Vennet*

The Skin project: writing with bodies

In 2003 the Californian artist Shelley Jackson created her Skin

Project. She wrote a novel on the skin of 2095 volunteers by
means of tattoos. Volunteers who wanted to participate to the
project had to write a solicitation. If they were accepted they got
one word that they had to tattoo somewhere on their body. She
possesses a video fragment from each volunteer exposing his/her
tattoo and pronouncing the word. When she had collected 2095
volunteers - ‘words’ as she calls them-  she wrote a novel with
them. Assembling all these videos in a movie in a certain way
makes appear a novel text. So she literally writes with bodies.

She herself called this Skin Project a ‘mortal work of art’: “From
this time on, participants will be known as ‘words’. They are not
understood as carriers or agents of the words they bear, but as
their embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed text, such as
dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body
parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of
words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will
change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The
author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words”

Shelley Jackson was born in 1962 in a little bookstore in

California. She teaches actually in New York (The New School)
and Switzerland (European Graduate School). Reading around
her autobiographical works we discover a subject with particular
problems concerning her body and her relationship with language,
and more specifically with the articulation of both. Her whole
artistic oeuvre tries to deal with it from the beginning to the end.
When a subject doesn’t dispose of an established discourse
about the function of the body

Let us start with the body. In her digital project, A patchwork

girl, she makes a digital rag doll, an assembly of different parts of
female bodies. When you click on the different parts, a text opens.
Within the text appear several hyperlinks that conduct you again
to other texts. So you can navigate in several different ways
through several parts of the body and several texts. The goal is
very clear: to ‘patchwork’ a woman. “To become a whole, a unity,
you will have to puzzle me together like a collage, an assembly
wherein boundaries, limits and borders will always stay obscure
and vague.” We notice also that while she is writing her texts she
chains herself to the table with her piercing in her belly button so
that her body doesn’t ‘run away’.

Another digital project, My body. A

Wunderkammer ( http://www.altx.com/thebody/ ) , reveals us still
more clearly her problem with her body. She made a drawing of
her naked body and once again you can click on the different
parts of it. A text opens in which she writes her experiences with
that body part. Several hyperlinks conduct you again to several
texts. Let’s quote some fragments of these texts. Clicking on the
breasts we read: “The arrival of breasts was traumatic. I hated
having breasts, dangling, ridiculous extras. Gravity had a taunting
grip on me.” We click on the hips and read: “I never understood
hips, what or even exactly where they were, though I knew the
womanly hip was supposed to be a desirable entity from
occasional soft-core pornographic passages in novels (I
remember the phrase, "churning hips"). My hip was an
indeterminate straight stretch connecting my stomach to my legs.
There was nothing there to linger over.” We continue with the
vagina and read: “The landscape between my legs was hard to
map, any more than these other organs, mooted about, whose
functions I hardly understood.”

So she testifies in several ways of the impossibility to experience

her body as a whole and that she doesn’t dispose of an
established discourse that prescribes the function of the body and
its organs and the way to behave with it.

Language as a parasite infiltrating the body

The second problem is the invasion of the language into all the
holes of her body without any barrier. She herself describes it as
her ‘libidinal attachment’ to books as a result of the ‘love for
books’ that was developed during her childhood in the bookstore.
But we will see that this love and libidinal investment has to be
understood as a jouissance, as the invasion of language into her
body. She describes that she started putting pages of the books
she read in all the holes of her body, her mouth, her vagina and
her anus. Pulling out the moistened pages she discovered that
the ink and the words had flown out so that the text was changed.
“So I had rewritten Joyce with my vagina. I decided to become a
writer.” And she became indeed a writer….with bodies.

In a first step she started to scratch a labyrinth in her bottom that

her lovers had to ‘read’. Then she cut out her initials in a piece of
textile that she draped on her shoulders when she took a sunbath.
The sun burned the red marks of her initials in her body. Then she
put two tattoos on her body but she hated the questions people
asked her about it and she decided to let the whole of her body be
tattooed with an ink that was of the same color of her skin.  Her
whole body was virtually covered with a tattoo that was only
visible as white lines when her body was burned red by the sun.
She teaches her lovers to read her as a book. So she became a
book herself.
It was only in a next step that she started writing on the bodies of
others by means of tattoos. Bodies that became in this way the
embodiment of words with which she started writing novels. She
literally writes books with bodies. We let you discover yourself one
of the examples that circulate on the
internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viF-xuLrGvA

* Member of Kring Psychoanalyse-NLS, NLS, AMP