Rose Higham-Stainton: 'Chora'

“The drives that extract the body from its homogeneous shell and turn it into a space linked to the outside, they are the forces which mark out the chora in process.”

—Julia Kristeva, The Subject in Process, 1998

Before we can speak the words or tell the stories there is the chora—caught on a tailwind, lifting elongated, vibrating around the larynx and in the hollows of our cheeks like drumskins.

Before the mind can speak, there is motion—careening motion towards becoming and thus towards being. The mind dances and we dance with it. Like children, we are impulsive and chaotic. In those initial sweet tender months, we know nothing of language and roam free from the oratorical or teleological. The chora, from the Greek khoreia, meaning “dance”, was Plato’s name for the pre-linguistic stage of infancy—before the body is burdened with the weight of God or language—a language posing as reason. Later, the semiologist Julia Kristeva assumed the chora but did not locate it in a particular body. Her body is a body of many—an accumulation of bodies with their imprints, trauma and intent; a body of expulsions that alludes the position of signifier or signified. Unable or unwilling to distinguish between our own body and that of our mother’s, or the world around us, this unintelligible body simply consumes with pleasure and without boundaries.

Kristeva writes that “the chora, as rupture and articulation (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.[1]” Good painting does this. It challenges the closure of meaning—we don’t know where it starts and where it ends.

“Art utters what cannot be uttered: instinct,”[2] writes Calvin Bedient.

In 1938, my maternal grandmother Sybille left Vienna by force. Assimilated into German culture, she inherited the familial name of Mu—from the German mutti, for mother. She arrived in England at 16, settling near Birmingham and was soon engaged to my beloved grandfather. The next seventy years were dedicated to building a house and a family around which she pursued an artistic impulse with great fervour and with varying degrees of success, training at adult education institutes in order to equip herself with the material skills. I do not know whether she lacked the desire to pursue a career towards professionalism—or the need, or courage—but you will not have heard of her and nor has Google.

The largest—and the most free—of Mu’s surviving works is on a flimsy and torn metre-wide sheet of paper suckered into a frame. Rarely do the edges of the paper and the frame meet. The picture, let us call it untitled, —in oil pastel, crayon, water-based paint—appears like an ill-remembered dream; a compositional narrative disintegrating into chaos. It now resides in my uncle’s house, but was a haunting fixture of my grandparents’ home when I was a child. Encountering it again for the first time in twenty years, I am moved by its scale, my elderly grandmother’s loose, free movement, carnivalesque bodies and animate creatures.

Below the painting, on my uncle’s sideboard, is a portrait of Mu looking uncharacteristically staged and serious, with white permed hair and a fuchsia catalogue blouse and I am speechless with questions and muted by her absence.

Grains of knowledge handed down through the family suppose that this image formed part of a series she made in response to a reoccurring dream.

There is no start and there is no end. In lieu of sequencing—of a compositional narrative—I begin at the edges, frayed edges populated with beasts—neither human nor animal. Gulls encircle overhead in Eau de nil and brown and there, a thing like a fox with protracted ears and a wiry coat of fiery pastel lines, matted in places like bloody wounds or the patternation of bloated polka dots, sniffs at somebody’s ankles. We are easily distracted; the cat claws at a trailing white robe and the figure jettisons; the cat’s jet black body reaches up on hind legs clawing like pleading to go with them. The figure’s face blazes in rouge—chalk pastel—and heavy eyeshadow and in the space beneath her body, among a wash of pigment like a stain is this large lidded eye—watery and pervasive.

Another form materialises—a dark bearded head and shadowy eyes that crayon into a body; it is their boots that the fox is sniffing, like delicacy and next to them, another body painted white except for two large orange hands—and protractor-like, outstretched and revealing a cleft at the crotch and cornflower blue shadows as breasts that pinken at the nipple. While a dark orificial mouth, set in a large bare skull, exhorts or shrieks.

Those mobile hands are entangled with another’s—someone loitering at the far edge of the frame—eyes slanting towards her compatriots, curls of hair ablaze in red—baring her body with some discomfort. Swimming towards her is this large pink organism—a fish with a holy mouth and a green tail; she kicks a foot and we feel its impact as the soft fleshy body passes by. Beneath them, another creature enters with vehement red razor-like beak and a rotund brown mottled body—he is proximate, but attentive. Overhead, a bird—avian mythic, with curious round eyes and plume of blue feathers—purveys the scene and everything caught within the dogged frame. We trace the uneven page, torn at the edges to reveal its backboard, and its permeations of water and paint and collage in which colour slips, pronouns slip, bodies slip,

sense slips.

How to make sense of another’s dreams? How to describe a thing without making sense? There is something implicit but not spoken between a dream and a painting and what painting can do with dreams. I am not speaking in a language of science but in a dialectic of movement, before language.

I will never know how and when this dream took on a shape or who made it—which splinted parts of Mu, what episode. The mind does what the mind does—it is our only certainty.

Dreams are a form of searching for meaning. The chora is a form of searching for existence. A pure material existence that “is and becomes a precondition for creating the first measurable bodies” writes Johanne Prud’homme and Lyne Légaré. In The Subject in Process they trace this stage of becoming from Plato through Kristeva for whom the chora imagines a body on the brink—its spatiality and temporality all within reach.

untitled imagines this brink state—of a shifting, surging, impulsive body in perpetual renewal. There is neither evidence to prove it, nor any otherwise, we must trust the erratic and shifting bodies eluding the precepts given to them by men or god or reason. Our means of identification—our metrics for bodies—as in animals, as in human, as in un-human—metastasize in pastel lines, in globs of paint and evasive washes. These are bodies beyond language. Of her formative years as a painting student Amy Sillman writes ‘gesture painting was a form of expression lying between language and image.’ She binds our instinctive desires, urges and pleasures with the ‘not-knowing’ part of the art-making process—“the weird unformed excess, the chora, not information.” [3]

Beyond its compositional failures—those failures of reason—untitled puts into practice the chora. This tender chaos of gestures, feelings, needs and desires form a body that is ill-conceived, ill-composed, ill-defined. Imagine a small woman in Solihull with this dogged scroll of paper working wildly at corners—adding and subtracting spilling and stymying the flow. There is so much flight—her flight. Bodies shift, split spring; there is no sense, without meaning. There is no start and there is no end—the composition engulfs all things—and us—into its body, in a kind of rotational pull—our infinite renewal.

Who are you, I ask, but she does not reply.

She is young once; her passport says she is blond, middling size, blue eyes, all of it despite her “degenerate” blood; a blood not yet spilled. She lives in Vienna, in Mödling, a leafy suburb towards the hills; she is in the cradle of privilege and when this photo was taken, yet to be stirred by the force of the impending war—itself a tight operation dressed as chaos in thunderous noise and broken glass. Soon, I think. Soon.

Tenderly, Mu left Vienna, and her beloved grandmother who refused to leave. I linger on the outstretched hands and the fingers spreading to the edges of the frame like a greeting—like a parting. bell hooks is interested in what happens beyond the edges of that frame—beyond the compositional window for which its contents is bent into shape. untitled’s uncontrollable bodies lurch and leap, preparing to breach its borders and teasing the paper, which retracts and tears under the weight of its material.

If the chora is the time before language, then untitled returned my grandmother to those early moments and the tender chaos of it. She is not searching for answers but looking to reconcile the parts of herself and reconstitute them on the page—emancipating her from the simulation of womanhood, of housewife, of mother, of British citizen, of Austrian citizen, of Jew.

I know what it is to search beyond parameters—to whip our parts up in a frenzy. Chora, she whispers on the tailwind from somewhere, from nowhere, and I whisper it back.

[1] Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), 79.

[2] Calvin Bedient, ‘Kristeva and Poetry as Shattered Signification’, The Critical Inquiry, Summer 1990, 807.

[3] Amy Sillman, ‘Notes on the Diagram’, Faux Pas (Prototype, 2019), 134-135.

Rose Higham-Stainton writes at the intersection of creative and critical practice. She is interested in material resistance in women’s art and literature and her work has been published by LA Review of Books, The White Review, Art Monthly, MAP Magazine, PIN—UP magazine, The Skirt Chronicles, Ache, Worms Magazine, Passe-Avant, Deleuzine and upcoming in Bricks from the Kiln.