Amongst the heroin chic fashion images of the 1990s, very few attempts at actively breaking with representational clichés can be discerned.
Mario Sorrenti’s work stands out in this regard. In many of his photo-graphs, as in Bacon’s paintings, a fi gure is presented alone, centred in the image and surrounded by a fi eld of uniform, saturated colour. Instead of trying to represent a known and knowable word, such images work to separate perception from the actual in order to open it out on to the fi eld of the virtual. By isolating the fi gure, such images circumvent the tendency to convey force through a story or sequence of events. Instead of telling a story, they focus on conveying a mood or a force, drawing attention to the capacities of the body for affecting and being affected.
In Mario Sorrenti’s Keren (1995), for example, a young woman wearing a black t-shirt and pale blue singlet and underpants is framed by a soft greenish-grey backdrop. Her slender fi gure is slumped forward on a stool, her upper body propped up by her elbows pressing into her thighs. Her head hangs down, as though the effort to raise it for the photograph might have been too great. She looks more unwell than exhausted, her uncomfortable position on the tiny stool suggesting a need, rather than desire, to sit down. The stillness of the image, with its uniform colour, does not seem at all tranquil. It is as though the room is in danger of spinning, its potentiality pressing like a weight against her head, her stomach, her body.
By isolating the fi gure, the forces upon the body are able to come to the fore: the numbing of muscles, the soft heaviness of the arms and eyelids, and the strange contortioning of the body as it tries to reposi-tion itself or hold itself together. Perhaps these are the forces of a drug, or of anorexia. Ultimately they are forces which would act upon any body which was forced – as in Bacon’s paintings – to ‘sit for hours on a narrow stool’ (Deleuze 2003: x): forces of gravity, exhaustion, dizziness;
the pressure of elbows against thighs; the weight of the head hanging forward. What is important is not that the body sitting on the stool has been depicted as though it were a body under the infl uence of – or with-drawing from – a drug such as heroin, but that it makes visible a force which is common to both (57).
In Sorrenti’s Francis Bacon I, II, II, IV (1997) series, a photographic technique similar to Bacon’s scrubbing has been used to dismantle the
clichés of illustration and faciality. Each fi gure is again isolated within fi elds of uniform colour (black backdrop, pink triangle of fl oor), and again supported in the image by nothing more than a stool. Like Bacon’s fi gures, these are bodies which are in presented processes of becoming:
becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. No longer bounded entities, their bodies are in the course of disintegrating, merging with the fl oor, the wall, or leaving the image altogether. These photos bring to the fore the corporeal potentiality of bodies: the ways in which they can affect and be affected.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, a range of other bodies-in-becoming appeared in fashion magazines alongside those of heroin chic. Advertisements tapped into themes of gender, sexuality, mas-ochism, bodily prosthetics (becomings-horse, becomings-dangerous), anorexia, bulimia, self-harm, suicide, accidents, disasters, crime, death and murder. Like heroic chic’s fi gures, these bodies work to render per-ceptible extreme forces upon the body – forces of gravity, of potentia, the force of fl esh falling on hard concrete; the force of a hand pushed against the back of the mouth; the force of the stomach fl exing; the force of a body trying to escape from itself, to leak out from its confi nes (‘Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 151)); the force of ropes pulling along skin, metal spikes pressing against fl esh; the force of a drug upon the body.
As with the fi gure in Bacon’s Version No.2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968), some of the extreme fi gures presented to us in mid-1990s fashion photography can be understood as bodies attempting to escape the confi nes of their corporeal existence. They are bodies which are leaking out in all directions, moving fast toward their limit-points: toward schizophrenia, overdose, unconsciousness, death. Through them, the body’s capacity for disintegration and deterritorialisation is made sensible, palpable. Deleuze writes:
Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs . . . It is an intense and intensive body . . . traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. (2003: 44–5) This body without organs is the invisible, desiring force of all bodies. It is the force of the virtual: the force of an outside of perception and sen-sation and which opens on to the future. It is the body un-actualised, or pre-actualised: the body in its virtual form.
To the extent that it effectively breaks with representational clichés,
heroin chic advertising can therefore be thought of as generating sub-stantial artistic and affective force. By rendering perceptible invisible forces upon the body – such as those of drug use, desire, exhaustion, dizziness and nausea – they have the potential to disrupt our percep-tion of the body and its relapercep-tionship with the world. More specifi cally, notes Harold (1999: 72), they have the capacity to challenge a range of modern assumptions about the self and the body. They do so, fi rst, by demonstrating the body’s fl uid, porous nature. The body here can no longer be understood as unifi ed and autonomous, but must be under-stood as intimately related to, and affected by, the world around it.
Heroin chic images also have the potential to dismantle modernist ideals of reason and rationality; a body affected by invisible forces, desires and passions is not one which can be governed by a rational free will. Such images thus work to deterritorialise the very idea of an enduring self or identity, illustrating instead ‘the self’s position within a fl uctuating nexus between always-changing, always-becoming identities’ (72).
Combined, these movements of deterritorialisation also have the potential to shift the ways in which a social ethics can be understood and enacted (Harold 1999). To the extent that they demonstrate the power of bodies to differ from themselves, heroin chic’s images might be capable of promoting a kind of ethics based on our mutual capacity to differ, to become-other, rather than an ethics or morality based on our essential sameness or human-ness. As Harold argues:
An ethical framework that accounts for corporeality . . . might encourage an engagement with others based not on the other’s degree of similarity to ourselves and our ideals . . . [but rather] this irreducible otherness that simultaneously connects us. (75)
Such an ethics connects bodies through their difference – through their power of differing – rather than through their sameness to one another.
As such, it enhances the potential for new inter-personal relations to form.
Yet most heroin chic advertisements are limited in these artistic, ethico-aesthetic functions. Many, as we have seen, fail to disrupt the clichéd forms of representation, and as such, have diffi culty launching new becomings and lines of fl ight. And even where drug-referenced advertising succeeds in breaking with cliché, there is yet another force which must be taken into account – that of consumer capitalism. As Roffe notes:
Even once an artwork breaks free of the gravity of the territorial cliché, there remains the other subversive movement: that of capitalism . . . which
threatens to strip the artwork of its distinctiveness in order to submit it to the commodity form. (2005: unpaginated)