Abjection, melancholia and ambiguity in the works of Catherine Bell

Estelle Barrett is concerned with the multidisciplinary practice of the Australian artist Catherine Bell and seeks to show how artistic practice can extend, develop and reconfigure established conceptions of abjection, in particular those of Kristeva’s and Bataille’s. She argues that extant commentaries on abjection remain within the parameters of exposition and referentiality but do not adequately articulate the implications of abjection for understanding the aesthetic experience in both the making and viewing of art. This is often characterized by ambivalence (namely attraction and repulsion) and Barrett explores the transgressive (in the Bataillean sense) in the photographic and video work of Bell. By shifting the focus from the reading of an artwork to an experiential encounter, Barrett conveys the power of Bell’s practice to evoke a complex of sensory and cognitive feelings that often involves ambivalence. Abjection then is reconceived as an operational function and as a process that is engendered by aesthetic experience in the making and viewing of art, thus reinvigorating its potential.