Amanda Manitach, What R U Working On?

Hysterical tongues

(appropriating the iconography of hysteria, spiritist camp, and meat from the butcher in order to attempt communion with my dead mother)

written by Amanda Manitach

"The word 'hysteria' should be preserved, although its primitive meaning has much changed.  It would be very difficult to modify it nowadays, and, truly, it has so grand and so beautiful a history that it would be painful to give it up.  However, since every epoch has given to it a different meaning, let us try to find out what meaning it has today."  —Pierre Janet 1894

When my mother was born in England in 1953, two different friends of the family unwittingly gifted my grandparents with identical christening gowns.  These twin gowns were cheaply made with stiff netting and acetate linings, embellished periodically with satin ribbons.  When my mom gave birth to my sister and me, she used the same gowns for our respective baptisms.  Shortly before my mother died last May, I found myself altering the garment by degrees: staining the lace, dying the acetate, finally parceling the dress into fragments, rags, strips, ribbons resembling the mourning lace of veils or shrouds.  

Also in the past few months I've been experimenting with the use of raw flesh in my studio, especially with tongues. [More after the jump.]

A tongue can signify endless things, but for me the primary connotations are psychological and religious.  Psychologically the image/object of the tongue relates to hysterical verbiage or aphonia as well as to physical tics and gesticulations.  It is also a token of my religious past, since speaking in tongues was a regular aspect of our communal experience.  I'm no longer religious, but of course the rhetoric and ritual that structured the public and private experience of my youth retains much of its signification. 

As an exercise in reconciling the sudden lack of my mother's presence, I've found myself seduced by the old fashioned symbolism of spiritism (with its cornball ectoplasmic effusions and false table-rapping and other sleight of hand tricks, it straddles an intermediary ground between the seriously spiritual and the atheistic comical), staging seances in miniature with the lambs' tongues in an attempt to stir some glossolalic vapors.

I've cut strips from my mother's christening gown and sewn them into little shrouds for the tongues. In this imaginary dioramic space, the tongues are able to function as transitional objects, as mediums.  As corporeal objects they are dead but not quite dead, their inherent materiality emphasized by the still-flushed surface of the tissue, which is slightly tinged with pink blood.  They are perishable dolls; they've soiled my hands with all this farcical praying and playing!

As a result of handling freshly butchered parts in my studio, I'm often leaving a faint impression of watery blood or blooms of lamb's saliva on precious things. (There's now a patina of body fluids staining the bottom of this antique box.)  

I can't help but sometimes consider that the violence implied by even a frail bubble of watery blood exhaled from the underside of a severed tongue is a token of childish revolt.  

Given the perishability of my materials, these projects are doomed, in a sense, to be ephemeral rituals, and I'm always left with only fragments, photographs and videos as souvenirs.  The remaining nonperishable elements amount to elaborate and emotionally expensive stage props, which in these reduced states resemble the poetic underpinnings of most sacramental and sentimental rituals.  In both scenarios (the sacred and the romantic) it is the absent thing that is signified and thus recalled by the flourish of fetishistic bric-a-brac and ritual surrounding its void.  The production of hysterical aphonia/religious glossolalia signifies what can never be adequately expressed, just as the infant's gown suggests my mother's infantile body that once filled it but is now reduced to ashes (as well as my own being and body, which is continually refusing and sublimating the idea of its mortality).  When these tongues have begun to rot and I'm forced to dispose of them, I will once again be left with their void and only the simulacric reminders of impossible conversations.

Photos by Amanda Manitach

Amanda Manitach is an artist living in Seattle. Follow her work and writing at her personal blog My Heroes Died of Syphilis.

What R U Working On is a semi-regular column in which artists can introduce readers to their usual process or new works in progress. If you're interested in contributing an essay to the series, contact the online editor at bondh@cityartsmagazine.com