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| 5. Non-reappropriable organs (bio as well as techno prostheses) in heterosexual libidinal economy are anal: dildos, nasal and oral orifices, implants, preexisting cuts or hollows or those produced with the intention of being penetrated. The vagina that does not procreate, that is extracted from the heterosexual machine, ceases to be a "hollow viscera" that tries to get "filled up" to become rather an organ with anal characteristics. Thus Monique Wittig's expression: "Lesbians do not have vaginas." In the same way, from a strictly biopolitical point of view, and within the economy of the sexual reproduction of the species, fags do not have penises, because they do not penetrate vaginas (but rather anuses, mouths...) | | 5. Non-reappropriable organs (bio as well as techno prostheses) in heterosexual libidinal economy are anal: dildos, nasal and oral orifices, implants, preexisting cuts or hollows or those produced with the intention of being penetrated. The vagina that does not procreate, that is extracted from the heterosexual machine, ceases to be a "hollow viscera" that tries to get "filled up" to become rather an organ with anal characteristics. Thus Monique Wittig's expression: "Lesbians do not have vaginas." In the same way, from a strictly biopolitical point of view, and within the economy of the sexual reproduction of the species, fags do not have penises, because they do not penetrate vaginas (but rather anuses, mouths...) |
| All that's left is for me to wish you the best: Communize your anus. The weapon is modest, but the possibility of action is close by-and infinite. | | All that's left is for me to wish you the best: Communize your anus. The weapon is modest, but the possibility of action is close by-and infinite. |
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| LATRINXIA AS ANAL UTOPIA
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| The first space of the exhibition visualises the planet Latrinxia, to which the former humans have been transported and where they are now living as ttongkkoch’ung. Here, a series of contrasts are played out and collapsed: natural and artificial, solid and liquid, durability and fluidity, human and nonhuman. The pure white land formation, grass, and worms depict natural forms using synthetic materials – three-dimensional plastic, white AstroTurf, and silicone, the latter of which also evokes cosmetic surgery, body modification, and sex toys. The landscape erupts from the ground, solid yet geyser-like, glistening with water directed onto it from the silicone tube above. The play between liquid and solid is captured, too, in the worms’ forms, many of which are arranged stretched out or hanging off surfaces as if to emphasise their malleability, strained taut by gravity. The worms appear conspicuously gooey and amorphous, and barely hold their form; at the same time, the silicone from which they are composed is suggestive of durability and non-decomposability. The puckered shape at the centre of each form is an imprint, a memory of the human body from which it was cast (specifically, the artist’s anus), while the worms’ searching tendrils evoke the nonhuman, alien forms of sea anemones.[44] The nonhuman associations are sustained in the idea, stated in the text accompanying the exhibition, that the worms use ‘light energy for metamorphosis’ and also for ‘breeding’ (bŏnshik), a word which in Korean equally suggests the asexual propagation of plants or the multiplication of viral cells.[45] It is implied as well, then, that the orifice lying between the folds of each worm’s sexless form is not for nutrition, nor for reproduction – but for pleasure. Moreover, as the silicone catches the light, the worms are limned with translucency, making their skin appear less like a border protecting interior from exterior, and more like a porous boundary. These bodies are visibly more ‘radically open to the world’, more obviously imbricated in it and penetrated by it, than Cohen’s modern body.
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| The first space establishes the themes of the exhibition: purity and filth, bodily metamorphosis, and the withdrawal and eruption of pleasure. The sight of the anus worms, the reference to utopia, and the preponderance of silicone together evoke Preciado’s writing on the anus and its relationship to sex, gender, and desire, principally his Countersexual Manifesto (first published in 2000) and the essay ‘Anal Terror’ (published in 2009 as an introduction to the Spanish-language translation of Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire). Kim recounts that he was introduced to Preciado’s thinking by Luciano Zubillaga, an Argentinian artist with whom Kim has collaborated.[46] Preciado understands sexuality as a ‘technology’ or ‘machinery’ which frames how the organs are understood, bestowing them their ‘meaning’, ‘nature’, and proper use.[47] Both in the western European context Preciado describes and, as this article has argued, in Korea, the meaning, nature, and proper use of the organs relates to reproduction. Hence, the reproductive organs – the penis and the vagina, organised into a hierarchy – become the only ‘natural’ sex organs, and erotic practices involving other organs, marked as nonsexual, are cast as deviant and abject. In Preciado’s playful, epic account, the anus needed to be ‘close[d] up’ or ‘castrate[d]’ for the ‘honourable and healthy’ expression of sexual energy. ‘Open’ bodies – male-assigned bodies that desire anal sex and female-assigned bodies, for example – therefore came to be considered as particularly in need of discipline and intervention, as evidenced in psychoanalytic, medical, and legal discourses.[48] Several of the anxieties about homosexuality, the anus, and the ‘open’ body resonate in the homophobic framing of ttongkkoch’ung mentioned above – an obsession with the repeated anal penetration of the body sexed as male, with non-reproductive sexual practices, and with health and disease.
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| In response to the disciplinary mechanisms of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality, Preciado proposes an ‘anal’ or a ‘countersexual’ politics, enacted by reclaiming as sexual any organ (organic or inorganic) that has the capacity to channel the potentia gaudendi [orgasmic force] through a nervous system connecting a living body to its exteriority’.[49] By acknowledging the body’s porosity, its openness to penetration and pleasure by means of various erogenous zones beyond the reproductive organs, we might be estranged from predominant topographies of the body and its desires, and invent other, more equitable and pleasurable topographies – such as those represented by the anus worms in Latrinxia. The anus is particularly useful for Preciado, as it was for Hocquenghem, because it has historically been maligned, unlike other orifices such as the mouth, for example; because it is an organ shared by bodies of any sex; and because sexual practices involving the anus allow for fluid and reversible sexual roles – that is, through the use of dildos and other prostheses (or ‘inorganic’ organs), any body, regardless of its genitalia, can penetrate or be penetrated. In short, the goal of an anal politics is the end of the social and bodily order predicated on phallocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.
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| While the first space of the exhibition visualises the landscape of Latrinxia, the second space stages a literalisation of the metaphors of purity and disease, alluding more obviously to sexual practices associated with an anal or countersexual politics. Led by the suspended silicone tube into this room, the viewer discovers the source of the clear water covering the ttongkkoch’ung – described in the exhibition text as ‘humans in their pure and ideal state of being’ (emphasis added) – and the untainted white landscape in which they languish: a toilet bowl. The toilet, of course, recalls the irreverence of Duchamp’s urinal, itself plagued with accusations of indecency and a test of moral (and aesthetic) standards.[50] In Kim’s installation, the toilet bowl stands in for the wider ‘utopia’ of Latrinxia, a word derived from the Latin lavatrina, which can equally mean ‘washing place’ or ‘privy’, and has etymological connections to the English ‘latrine’. Next to the toilet stands a sink, also connected to the water from the toilet bowl and using which visitors are invited to ‘cleanse’ themselves below a stylised, stained-glass image of hands cupping water.[51] This clearly parodies certain discourses in Christianity, including in the vociferously anti-LGBT Protestant Right in Korea, regarding purification and the washing-away of moral and physical contaminants accumulated through queer sexual practices.
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| Allusions to these practices, and more specifically to gay subcultures and public sex, can be found in the UV light that partly illuminates the space, which evokes the backrooms and dungeons of fetish bars and clubs. The lavatory cubicle, too, is steeped in gay resonances, recalling the acts of cruising (walking or driving around a public space in search of a sexual partner, a practice historically associated with gay men) and cottaging (cruising in a public toilet, specifically).[52] For Preciado, cruising articulates an anal politics because it enables the ‘public redistribution of pleasure’: by transforming public space into the site of an erotic act, it defies the binary between public and private and the confinement of the sexual to the realm of the private, naturalised under conditions of heteronormative, patriarchal capitalism and its ‘castration’ of the anus.[53] The towel hanging on the wall, depicting a hirsute finger sensually grazing some muscular buttocks, acts as a further suggestion of cruising – including, perhaps, a specific cruising site near the gallery in Itaewon where Latrinxiawas installed.[54] Nestled within Latrinxia’s orgy of plastic and silicone, the terrycloth fabric serves as a nostalgic relic of the Latrinxians’ past in their human form, and marks cruising as a precursor to social, political, and bodily life on Latrinxia. In this sense, Latrinxia gives form to what José Muñoz called the ‘ideality’, the ‘horizon imbued with potentiality’ of the queer utopian future, ‘distilled from the past’ in order to imagine ‘new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds’.[55] And for Muñoz, the ‘blueprints’ of queer utopian futurity can frequently be glimpsed in the realms of art and the aesthetic.[56] The ‘utopia’ of Latrinxia’s title, it seems, is a world in which the body’s porosity is acknowledged, even celebrated, rather than denied. In such a world, heterosexual reproduction is not a biological imperative along whose lines bodies and lives are stratified, valued or devalued, according to which bodies can and cannot, or should and should not, reproduce.
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| Latrinxia’s prolific use of silicone and its visualisation of the parasitic anus worm suggest, as well, that to acknowledge the porosity of the body is to recognise its existing entanglements with toxins, microbes, bacteria, viruses, and a variety of other nonhuman presences. These entanglements are ‘more than horizon’, Chen contends, invoking Muñoz. They are ‘already here’, and thus ‘it is not so much a matter of queer political agency as a queered political state of the present’ (emphasis in original).[57] Discussing the toxic metal particles lead and mercury, Chen observes that toxicity is generally ‘understood as an unnaturally external force that violates (rather than informs) an integral and bounded self’ (emphasis in original).[58] Similarly, Neel Ahuja notes that the policing of disease typically frames disease-causing microorganisms as ‘parasite[s]’ that, like the fictional anus worm, ‘threaten the body’s functions, even life itself’, where both ‘the body’ and ‘life’ are understood in heteronormative, racialised, and rigidly gendered and sexed terms.[59] The silicone form of the future humans or anus worms in Latrinxia is suggestive, however, of the body’s ‘plasticity’. While for Preciado bodily plasticity refers, for example, to the potential mutability of understandings of the body and sexuality, for Ahuja plasticity captures the body’s ‘transitional’ form, its interminable constitution and reconstitution through other nonhuman bodies such as disease-carrying microorganisms.[60] Combined with the exhibition’s apocalyptic storyline, the appearance of a plastic geyser (Fig. 1) evokes plasticity in another, more literal sense, too: namely, the increasing prevalence of plastic and other (near) non-decomposable materials in the ocean and the effects of these materials on the body. Heather Davis, for instance, writes that plastics in the ocean host their own microbial communities and develop their own ecologies. As plastics make their way back into the human body, they slowly ‘contribute to queerness, causing mutations and inhibiting sexual reproduction.’[61]
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| Latrinxia’s unbridled celebration of the body’s porosity and plasticity vis-à-vis toxins, microbes, and other supposedly ‘foreign bodies’ registers as unsettling in light of the structural and involuntary vulnerability of certain demographics—typically, the economically disadvantaged and negatively racialised—to conditions of environmental toxicity and disease, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic.[62] In its attentiveness to toxicity and contamination, though, the exhibition shores up and counters the ‘bellicose antagonism’ between self and world, between the (human) body and (nonhuman) matter, that characterises the modern body theorised by Cohen. To quote Ahuja, Latrinxia’s emphasis on the possibilities of the parasitic body ‘calls life itself “queer”’, ‘dislodg[ing] it from commonplace pro-life discourses that compress biological life into the able-bodied, individuated, and anthropomorphized reproductive form of the body.’[63] The queer body theorised by Latrinxia, then, not only exceeds fixed and striated categories of sex, gender, and desire, but also confuses sharp divisions between the human and the nonhuman.
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| Moving, finally, into the third space of the exhibition, the viewer is greeted by the sight of a metal rod skewering a crumpled piece of yellow paper into the ground. Behind it, a stainless-steel icon in the shape of a flame leans against a tree, which has neon laces tied around its trunk and branches (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). The paper can be likened to a neok – a shamanic prop symbolising or temporarily housing the soul of a dead person, here inscribed with Chinese characters arranged in the shape of a human figure.[64] In the exhibition’s narrative, the flame represents metamorphosis: the objects in this outdoor space are the remnants of the shamanistic ritual by fire that transformed humans and transported them to Latrinxia, with its novel conception of the body and social relations. The flame’s cold, thorny form invokes the pain involved in this act of transformation, recalling both the immolation of men and women accused of sexual transgression in the Middle Ages, and redemptive attitudes towards suffering, sacrifice, and corporeal transcendence in Christianity, whose iconography is evoked in the previous room.[65] As Robert Mills has noted, medieval displays of the wounded bodies of Christian martyrs emphasised the ‘spiritual transcendence’, ‘special status’, ‘intercessory power’, and ‘incorporat[ion] into the heavenly community’ granted through their suffering and disfigurement.[66]
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| By contrast, in ''Latrinxia'', the humans’ transformation can be characterised not as an ascent, passage onward, or progression, but as a descent, return, or regression, particularly in the context of Korea’s anti-parasite efforts in the second half of the twentieth century, which positioned parasites (and specifically the roundworm), as backward, as antithetical to the Korean nation’s modernity.[67] Kim’s worms, moreover, vividly recall Preciado’s tongue-in-cheek description of the human organism in its early, undeveloped stages, which he calls a ‘dermic tube’ held together by skin, with plentiful possibilities for sensuality, for rubbing up against things, and for pleasure.[68] In ''Latrinxia'', then, the sacrifice and metamorphosis represented in the fire ritual marks a queer directionality, not up but down, not progressive but regressive. This perverse directionality is matched by viewers’ movement: as they progress through the exhibition, proceeding from the landscape and lavatory to the outdoor space, they regress in the teleology of the exhibition’s narrative, moving from the present to the past. The various objects that comprise ''Latrinxia'' require the viewer to lower themselves, to crouch down in order to inspect them – a gesture which mimics the downward movement of the transformation from human to anus worm, or from higher to lower on Chen’s hierarchy of animacy.
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| The invocation of shamanism is another way that Kim enacts his critique of the modern body, its ‘bellicose ideology’, and its attendant discourses on sex and gender. Kim has framed shamanism as ‘transcending binary thinking and overcoming it’: life and death, human and nonhuman, but also male and female, as shamans use their bodies to channel spirits of any gender.[69] It is worth noting that shamanistic practices in Korea predate the more rigid understandings of the body that became hegemonic in the twentieth century with colonisation, market capitalism, and the spread of Christianity. But before labelling Kim’s focus on shamanism here a radical decolonial gesture, it is important to note the shaman’s spectacular and global pull, particularly in the context of modern and contemporary art from Korea. Notably, the figure of the shaman has been deployed in the work of some of Korea’s most globally successful artists of the last few decades, notably Paik Nam June, Lee Bul, and Park Chan-kyong. Concurrently, the Korean government has in recent years attempted to institutionalise, regularise, and reclaim shamanism, alongside other oppositional aspects of Korean culture such as the ''minjung'' movement of the 1980s. Jecheol Park has observed a marked tendency by the government to render these practices and cultural products ‘spectacles of [neoliberal] consumption’, as expressions of indigeneity and national identity.[70] The invocation of shamanism in ''Latrinxia'', then, raises questions about the growing economic and cultural currency and frustrated critical potential of (formerly) minoritised figures and practices – not just what is framed as ‘local’ but also the ‘queer’. By leading the viewer into the gallery’s outdoor space, ''Latrinxia'' moreover invites the viewer to reflect on the surrounding neighbourhood of Itaewon, whose buildings frame the display of the ritual’s remnants. By way of conclusion, I want to take up this invitation, and consider the more recent changes that have occurred in the neighbourhood, what this has to do with global contemporary art and questions of neoliberal consumption, and what might be at stake for queer art in particular.
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The first days of the revolution were not many, but they taught us some lessons. Here they are; these are some (only some) of the surprises that the collective use of the anus affords. Revolutionary anal virtues, one could say, were it not for the risk of seeing them transformed into Anal Facebook or MyAnuSpace.
1. The anus has neither sex nor gender; like the hand, it escapes the rhetoric of sexual difference. Situated in the rear and inferior part of the body, the anus also erases the personalizing and privatizing differences of the face. The anus challenges the logic of identification of the masculine and the feminine. There is no division of the world into two. The anus is a post-identitarian organ: "Any social use of the anus, apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of the loss of identity" (101). Rejecting sexual difference and the anthropomorphic logic of the face and the genital, the anus (and its other extreme, the mouth) establishes the basis for inalienable sexual equality: everybody (human or animal) is first and above all an anus. Neither penis nor vagina, but oral-anal tube. On the horizon of the post-human sexual democracy is the anus, as the orgasmic cavity and receptive non-reproductive muscle, shared by all.
2. The anus is a bioport. This is not simply about a symbol or a metaphor; it is an insertion port through which a body is open and exposed to another or others. It is that portal dimension that demands, for the masculine heterosexual body, anal castration: everything that is socially feminine could enter and pollute the masculine body through the anus, leaving uncovered his status as equal to any other body. The presence of the anus (even a castrated one) in a body with a biopenetrator dissolves the opposition between hetero and homosexual, between active and passive, penetrator and penetrated. It displaces sexuality from the penetrating penis to the receptive anus, thus erasing the segregative lines of gender, sex, and sexuality.
3. The anus functions as the zero point from which an operation of deterritorialization of the heterosexual body could begin, or, in other words, of the degenitalization of sexuality reduced to penis-vagina penetration. It's not about making the anus into a new center, but rather setting into motion a process of de-hierarchization and decentralization that would make of any other organ, orifice, or pore, a possible anal bioport. Thus a set of practices unfolds here that are irreducible to masculine/ feminine, homo/ hetero identities: enemas, dilation, lubrication, penetration with the tongue, fist, or dildo ... The anal machine rises up before the heterosexual machine. The non-hierarchical connection of the organs, the public redistribution of pleasure, and the communization of the anus all announce a "sexual communism" (111) to come.
4. Historically the anus has been contained as an abject organ, never clean enough, never quiet enough. It neither is nor can be politically correct. The anus does not produce, or rather it only produces trash, detritus. No production of profits or surplus value may be expected of this organ: neither sperm nor egg nor sexual reproduction. Only shit. It is the exalted place of ecological non-production. Or better, the escape hatch through which capital may escape and return to the earth, turned into humus. Although it is imaginable for the strategies of capital production to eventually reterritorialize anal pleasure, they would have to be ready to be transformed into shit.
5. Non-reappropriable organs (bio as well as techno prostheses) in heterosexual libidinal economy are anal: dildos, nasal and oral orifices, implants, preexisting cuts or hollows or those produced with the intention of being penetrated. The vagina that does not procreate, that is extracted from the heterosexual machine, ceases to be a "hollow viscera" that tries to get "filled up" to become rather an organ with anal characteristics. Thus Monique Wittig's expression: "Lesbians do not have vaginas." In the same way, from a strictly biopolitical point of view, and within the economy of the sexual reproduction of the species, fags do not have penises, because they do not penetrate vaginas (but rather anuses, mouths...)
All that's left is for me to wish you the best: Communize your anus. The weapon is modest, but the possibility of action is close by-and infinite.
