THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN MIRIAM CAHN

NO ONE IS LEFT INDIFFERENT BY MIRIAM CAHN’S ART: HER FIGURES CALL OUT TO YOU, OFTEN WITH VIOLENCE. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM, THESE BODIES? WHY ARE THEY HERE? NUMÉRO ART LOOKS BACK AT THE TWO SHOWS SHE RECENTLY SELF-CURATED AT JOCELYN WOLFF’S TWO PARIS GALLERIES.

Miriam Cahn’s work always summons the intensity of the present. Not that her figures, landscapes or events are “topical” – on the contrary, there can be long periods of latency between the day’s news and her creations in pencil, graphite, watercolour, pigments, oil, scanner, video, etc. The wait is filled with memories, fantasies, ghosts and retroactive fears. And yet, a present always runs out to greet us: that of doing, each label bearing a date (or dates, for there are exceptions to the artist’s single-day rule); and that of showing, since she orchestrates her hangings herself (sometimes remotely, coronvirus oblige) from her studio in Bragaglia, in Switzerland’s Engadine Valley. It’s as though an arc of energy, from fabrication to exhibition and beyond, irradiates our eyes and sets our bodies in receptive tension, viscerally exposing us to her figures, to their incandescent colors, and to the physical situations they embody.

For example, among the works on paper shown at Jocelyn Wolff’s Belleville gallery, most of which were dated 1994, there was an indescribable figure, a kind of crustacean-machine made of lines and curls and held up by a hand, also made of repeated loops ( o.t., 24.1.94). Then the viewer realizes that it is in fact an anamorphosis of a face, seen from an improbable angle. The figure’s hand gently rests against its cheek, not because the face is emerging but because it might dissolve. The “physicality” of the figures

without identity or social norms is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the context is always difficult to comprehend. What are they doing there? Why are they naked, bald and wrinkled, with mouths open and breasts erect in indefinable places? Where do they come from? How did they come to find themselves on canvas or paper? Such questions permeated the hang at Wolff’s Romainville space with a kind of violence that was all the more pressing because never “normalized” by context. Sometimes this coercion is particularly graphic: in the rape scene in White Supremacy Porn ( 12/ 15/ 19), or in a gun stuck to a face, or in a blood-splattered depiction of childbirth, the half-born baby attached to its mother by a paint-loaded umbilical cord, the head and features literally upside down (Gebären müssen 16.6.19 und 27.10.19). Genders are often undefined: a figure with an electric mouth presses a rag doll’s open mouth against its cheerfully glowing penis; a muscular figure throws a punch at a mountain in erection; silhouettes sink one after the other into streaks of submarine colours. Cahn’s figures silently face situations where the body is torn from itself, in landscapes too strident not to be already spectral. Faced with its own capacity for resistance, the body stands firm on canvas or paper: it did not run away, it is here, now.

Cahn’s two Jocelyn Wolff shows shared the title Notre Sud ( Our South), suggesting our role in processes of exclusion that are now called “structural” or “systemic” violence. Cahn incarnates them in a way that is both highly specific and completely indeterminate. Whether their eyes fix us or not, we are involved. They pierce and pursue us, even when we turn our backs, and carry on doing so for long afterwards.

SPANISH PHILOSOPHER PAUL B. PRECIADO, AUTHOR OF I AM A MONSTER SPEAKING TO YOU, SALUTES THE VIOLENT, PROPHETIC POETRY OF MIRIAM CAHN.

Humans wrap a neutron bomb in a national flag and throw it directly at the sun. Plutonium radiation has a half-life of 80 million years; the pleasure of military conquest hardly lasts 80 seconds. For centuries, thousands of fragments of the bomb come to perch on each of the planets as incandescent military medals of honour. Bodies considered lessthan-human are declared exterminable. The Party shovels the best radioactive fragments into the orifices of those it considers dissidents or unproductive: the pieces enter by the vaginas and penises, by the anuses and mouths, by the ears and tear ducts. The Empire seals less-than-human bodies so that nothing can re-enter or leave. Women’s vaginas and anuses are split. From male breasts flows an atomic spring from which survivors are fed. Men’s penises are torn off. Or women’s penises are torn off and men’s vaginas and anuses slit. A transuranic fuel flows from female testes. Bones disappear. The ability to speak disappears. Skin disappears. The new less-than-human flesh is exposed. It is almost liquid and acquires the color of plutonium in four degrees of oxidation: pink, green, yellow and finally, when it mutates, phosphorescent blue. Sometimes it is possible to see the four degrees of oxidation in the same body. Then flesh becomes a screen that reflects the power of the bomb. All this is filmed and retransmitted – visible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. On the other side of the border, bodies still regarded as human say they know nothing about what happened. The radioactive bunker is their happy home, a start-up in constant growth. The sky has turned violet and the roots of the razed trees grow like dicks to which the children of the military give blowjobs.

Stockbrokers ride the dicks that children do not suck. Radiation and finance are the universal languages. The border has become the only territory.

Who will clean the inner part of the thighs where blood and lime spill? Who will talk about us when we are dead? Who will remember the speed of entropy when all eyes have burned? Who will count our steps when our feet cease to exist? Who will dare refute Frontex’s drawing of our tongues? Will our teeth be reduced to digits by a drone’s software? Will our footsteps be green flames sparkling in the digital memory of a gigantic disembodied server? Less- thanhuman bodies run away cut wide open. Some introduce an arm into their vagina to prevent their organs from falling through the open hole. They escape the necropolitical celebration of national honour. Since they have no skin, their bodies mix with the environment. They become atmosphere and sound. They soak up feelings and light. Like a live swarm of forces, they run to the other side. You wait for them right there, with your canvas.

For centuries, everything has been disappearing. There are no more cities or forests. The only animals are those that have survived dismemberment in slaughterhouses. They walk through an empty place without skin and without viscera, but have a very attentive look. There are less-thanhuman foetuses on the edge of reality. They wait for the border to reopen, a very narrow passage once every 22 hours. Some pass. None come back. There is nothing beyond the border. One of them says to you: “I want you to paint the only portrait that will be of me.” Who will honour the lives of those considered less-than-human? Who will sing to them while they die? Who will lie down across the border, who will put her body in the place where the border is, to collect as witnesses the footprints of those that crossed? Who will pick up the hands left behind by those

who fled with only their feet? The scream explodes against the canvas like a bomb, and nothing remains but the inside of the body shown to the world as pure exteriority. Who would dare to make our mutant portraits? Who but you would dare to invent the colour of our flesh just after Hospitality is ready to put it on sale in the market?

You say: “I do not paint portraits of anyone. Have you forgotten that you lost your face?” One day, 122,000 years before the end of the Earth, you decided to make an exact pictorial translation of the decomposing reality. It is the act of erasing the face that interests you rather than the portrait. You started with your own less-than-human figure. For its excess of vitality, of masculinity, of chlorophyll, of fire. Meanwhile, they take the files of psychiatric institutions and prisons, of internment centres and clinics, they paste them together with human fat and build a House of Humanity with them. No one will ever live there. It will be a monument to their anger. Who will invent our names before our birth? Who will rock the water cradle of drowned children? I say: “I want you to paint the only existing portrait of me. I want your portrait of me as a legal document opposing the government’s description of what my life was like. They will see that I did not have the sex that they believed. They will note that one of my arms was given to me and came to take the place of a penis. They will see that my hair was made of luminescent algae. They will not believe it. But you will invent it as true. You will paint that image with traces of plutonium that will last 80 million years.”

You say: “Do you not realize that this is not your portrait? Do you confuse your face with any mass of transuranic flesh?” The intensity of your blue will set the computer of the world on fire and the skin of nuclear power plants will fall revealing a woman’s belly. Utopia or death. Colour or death. Painting or death.