The Body as Medium and Metaphor (review)

Focusing on the body in self-representation, this study examines the intersubjective nature of self-portraiture and self-writing. In a volume which has successfully been developed from her doctoral thesis, Hannah Westley selects artworks and texts which exemplify instances of a shift in conception and experience of subjectivity that has occurred over the last century to examine the ways in which artists and writers have moved towards the creation and construction, rather than the revealing, of a subject. Drawing on Lejeune's concept of the autobiographical pact, Westley frames her exploration of the changing nature of subjectivity (and, bound up in this, the relationship between object and subject) through a close reading of critical works by Barthes, Bataille, Butler, Kristeva and Lacan. The study highlights the intertextual nature of self-representation in the contemporary visual arts and French autobiography, yet succeeds in avoiding reductive comparisons by adopting a structure that juxtaposes artists with writers, chapter by chapter. The first and third chapters reveal the ways in which Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon use self-representation as a means by which to question the possibility of self-knowledge, and explores their engagement with and subversion of the traditions within which they work. Chapter 2 examines the critical probing that pervades Michel Leiris's L'Âge d'homme to highlight the distinction between the past self of memory and the present writing self, while the focus on Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos in Chapter 4 demonstrates the extent to which corporeal existence informs our visual apprehension of the world. Noël's work in particular draws attention to the ontological gap between the writing self and the self-reflexive protagonist of the work by focusing on the very (un)representability of the body. Finally, in Chapter 5, Westley traces the negotiation of the subject/object dialectic in the work of Louise Bourgeois and performance artist Orlan to study their shared preoccupation with the positioning of the subject and how this subject interacts with corporeal morphology. Westley demonstrates how these works 'splinter rather than cohere the self ' (p. 202) while acknowledging that subjectivity remains embedded in the materiality of the body. These five chapters are framed by a useful introduction and conclusion, giving a sense of coherence to the volume. However, the provision of translations for quotations in French and the inclusion of images of the artworks under discussion would have made the book accessible to a wider audience. Presentation is also marred by an incorrect header running through Chapter 2 and a few noticeable typing errors. Despite this, Westley's study offers an original and thought-provoking contribution to a substantial body of critical work on autobiography as well as to the more neglected sphere of self-representation in the arts.