BODY INTERRUPTED [The relationship between eroticism and death in the work of Nicolas Hasapopoulos]*

In essence the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation (Bataille, 2006: 16).

Contained in their white frame the figures hover in a dense, dark background from which they seem to emerge, only to stare at their viewer with anguish and anxiety. Their seeming uneasiness, a possible result of that intimate moment when they surrender to the animality of their human nature. This moment of interruption of the human body in erotic ecstasy is what defines the new work of the Cypriot artist Nicolas Hasapopoulos. Inspired by the work of Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman, his mixed media drawings are an elaboration of the interconnections between eroticism and death and of the violation or destruction of the unitary character of the human figure as a result.

In a closer inspection death and eroticism seem inseparable in Hasapopoulos’ work, and this relationship could theoretically be manifested in two ways. On the one hand, the dead bodies could be considered erotic, and on the other hand, the erotic act could be similar to death; the latter a sustained concern in the artist’s work. Both of the above cases are instances during which the consistency of human existence is interrupted: the first literal and the second metaphorical. It is no coincidence that in French the word for ‘orgasm’ is la petit mort; a tiny death at the moment of erotic ecstasy, a feeling that often interrupts the coherence of the living body.

This fascination with the relationship between eroticism and death has occupied other artists as well, such as Hans Bellmer. In Hans Bellmer’s drawing Rose open at night (1934) for instance – from the series of man-made dolls entitled Les Jeux de la Poupée (The Doll’s Game) (1936-38, 1949) – a young girl is shown to tear her skin apart, like cloth, to reveal her lungs, skeleton and intestines. There is an obvious contradiction between the young girl’s pretty head with the large bow on the hair, and what seems to be an enormous open wound on the body. In a parallel level the semiological contradiction between the name of the girl, Rose, – denoting a beautiful flower – and the gruesomeness of her interior makes the spectacle an unexpected one. In Bellmer’s work the femininity of the girl that alludes to the erotic desire and the uncanny effect of the body’s open interior suggestive of death by means of interruption are interconnected. This relationship is vital in Hasapopoulos’ work, illustrated through the contrast between the uncanny amorphous body-mass of his women, and their sharp, clear gaze, almost inviting and pleading, that call the viewer to participate in their erotic ecstasy.

In effect, Hasapopoulos’ women represent a taboo on the basis that often, social taboos are formed and defined in events that threaten the consistency and coherence of human existence. Such events can be the loss of control in drunkenness or eroticism (Hegarty, 2000), or death. Furthermore, faithful to Bataille’s conviction in his Eroticism (1957) that to maintain eroticism, it is necessary to sustain it as a sin, Hasapopoulos integrates this element in a playful manner in his work. He juxtaposes small images that allude to the Greek Orthodox Church and the amorphous but sexually active female body. This is an ironic statement to the fact that by maintaining the sexual act as a sin and a taboo, thus as something threatening, the Church not only prevents people from actually engaging in such acts, but instead accentuates the density of the erotic desire. As Bataille writes: ‘I can tell myself that repugnance and horror are the mainsprings of my desire […] and that this desire originates in its opposite, horror’ (2006: 59).

Beyond this, Nicolas Hasapopoulos’ work also stands as a mockery toward the fashion industry and the representation of bodies as perfect, quite distinct from the ordinary female body or the reality of the average woman. This is inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Untitled photographic series from the late 1980s and early 1990s, a re-interpretation of Hans Bellmer’s Les Jeux de la Poupée. The dichotomy of the inside/outside of the now amorphous body shifts the beautiful female body of the fashion magazine into one that is uncanny; one that is strange, unfamiliar, peculiar and almost frightening to the spectator. In Freud’s essay with the same title, The Uncanny (1919), Freud relates an aspect of the ‘uncanny’ with the German etymology of the word unheimlich. The latter literally means that which is un-homely and strange. The eyes of his figures are so capturing and inviting exactly because they reflect the anxiety of their own transformation as they give in to their instinctual desire to engage in a sexual act.

The amorphous bodies remind nothing of that which was initially ‘beautiful’ and similar to Sherman’s later photographic series, where the female body completely disappears to give its place to an amorphous mass of waste and detritus, Hasapopoulos’ mixed media drawings replace the female shape with bloated dark flesh mixed with body parts difficult to recognize. Meanwhile the artist’s aggressive marks on paper look like blood and veins spreading from the inside of his bodies towards the exterior surface. This possibly suggests what Rosalind Krauss also recognized in the work of Sherman: that behind the woman as beautiful hides the ‘monstrous otherness, the wounded interior’ (Krauss, 1996a: 398). On the one hand, the wound produced as semantic, ‘it thematizes the marginalized, the traumatized, the wounded, as an essence that is feminine by nature, and deliquescent by substance’ (Krauss, 1996b: 98). On the other hand, the uncanny amorphous body-excrement can signal decay, infection, disease, referring to corpses and all that stands as social taboos. In the end, these figures are the visualization of the artist’s theoretical experimentations with the idea that eroticism and death are inexorably linked.

* Nicolas Hasapopoulos presented his work at Is not Gallery, Nicosia Cyprus in November, 2010. A revised version of this text in Greek was included in the catalogue of the exhibition.

Bataille, G. (2006) Eroticism, (M. Dalwood, Trans.). London and New York: Marion Boyars [First published in 1957 in French by Les Editions de Minuit]
Freud, D. (2003) The Uncanny. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Hegarty, P. (2000) George Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist. London, UK: Sage Publications.
Krauss, R. (1996a) ‘Informe without Conclusion,’ in Z. Kocur & L. Simon (eds) (2006) Theory in Contemporary Art, pp.395-407. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Krauss, R. (Autumn, 1996b) ‘Informe without Conclusion’, October, 78: 89-105.