TOWARD A POLITICAL APPROACH OF MUTATION

Far from being a narcissistic quest, a teenager's revolt against his family, or any other kind of “pathetic or burlesque” experiment of self- mutilation, as some may claim, as if to better reduce it, the assertion of the reapropriation of the body by a few contemporary artists experimenting with the range of possible mutation, goes far beyond: it is a major political statement.

The recent declarations made in France by the presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen highlights the importance of this issue: “ To maintain that your body belongs to yourself is wholly trivial: it belongs to life, and thus it belongs in part to the nation”.
Although this submission of the body has at all times been emblematic of totalitarian regimes, through the image of the perfect man with his thoughts as smooth as his skin, one should not forget how this domination of the self is by no means their exclusivity, but that it has been practiced throughout the centuries, and this since the “lex romana”, across regimes and oceans, ranging throughout the western world by way of migrations, without ever being called in question. In fact as recently as late 1999 when it was upheld by ordinance of the European Court of Justice, and no one was even moved by it. General ignorance about these facts has led some body artists to assert that it is the only thing that really belongs to us at all!


This body possessed by a controlling thought becomes representative of man's position of submission faced with the nation, of the individual faced with the masses, which is only free to exist and think within the limited framework of imposed rules that have always been accepted in the name of “general interest” and of the so-called “common sense”. No wonder if the medical profession adopts a conniving stance, posing as a guardian of the pseudo-scientific values of the West. (One must not forget that this medicine rejects some alternative medicines like the millenary Chinese one.) They thus guarantee them the monopoly on our destiny and also on our power of life and death over our selves. Furthermore, they reserve themselves the right to define the rules of correct appearance and thought, they take the liberty of considering deviant all other “extra-normal” or individualistic behaviour. This could eventually lead to social exclusion, to psychiatric wards or even to prisons, at the discretion of particular regimes.


The new interest taken by the French government into even the softest of body modifications has apparently attracted some new allies among some of the practitioners who were looking for a respectability they hadn't yet acquired because of their “former” status. The gutter press let these moralists, disguised as elder brothers or elder sisters, repeat that the open-minded we are were gurus, this based on the simple fact that our ideas do not enter into the consensus which they were the former spokesmen.
Their reject of the established rules might have as a ground a post-teenage crisis. They might not be aware of the action they engaged at this time.
In this pre-defined framework, the possible mutations given to us by the technology nowadays will remain limited to additional means to handle what we appear to really be: sheep.
By this way, how long will it take governments, approved by the medical association, by moral guarantee of the Church and with the support of intellectuals like Baudrillard, to attack directly the artists we are, and who, through the re-appropriation of our own body, through its re-definition, who, by the awareness and the free choice we make of our bodily future, and by some works that have to do with the frontiers of legality and explore those of possibility, have set out to retake what they have been stolen from :
themselves?