In this episode I speak with Dr Annie Sandrussi. We discuss ontological disruption, slow cinema and the everyday, and what is excess to religious icons.
Dr Annie Sandrussi applies phenomenological and gender-based methods to examine how everyday and public understandings are underpinned by ontological commitments, especially with respect to relationality, embodiment and materialism. Her research is primarily at the juncture of ecofeminist ethics and existential-phenomenology, and she works on philosophical enquiry in biology and technoscience.
Dr Annie Sandrussi, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Thank you for having me.
Can you begin by telling us a little about yourself and how you came to be doing your academic work?
Yeah, sure. Thanks.
My undergraduate was actually in cultural studies.
And in cultural studies, the kind of main focus is at looking at how different texts, artworks, institutions function in relation to systems of power. And, so you analyse how meaning is made and how it in turn— And how those different forms of knowledge exchange interact with social norms. So a lot of philosophers start off kind of doing classical philosophy and then move into these social questions. That’s kind of the typical path. But my path was reversed, so I got a lot of exposure into kind of questions related to how meaning is made through various texts, including artworks and then—
And I was really started to get really interested in the relationship between people and institutions and how practices – like, everyday practices – are informed by kind of dominant meanings and values that underpin those institutions. So I went on to complete a Master of Philosophy where I looked at key disputes about empathy in an area of philosophy called phenomenology, which primarily deals with kind of questions about subjectivity and kind of first person experience, but also what are the kind of grounding structures, so what are the kind of structures we have, for example, structures of our cognition and our minds that make those kinds of experiences or ways of knowing possible.
And the main dispute I was dealing with was between a philosopher called Edmund Husserl and twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, which is kind of— He’s quite popular even outside of philosophy and it was really interesting to see a shift from like this kind of phenomenology, which was really much about a phenomenology of knowing to this very practical what we call “existential phenomenology” in Heidegger and one of the things that Heidegger is most recognised for is kind of this account of the human from the perspective of everydayness. So what are the everyday kind of – in philosophy we call them “comportments” – so the way that we move through the world, interact with others, but on an everyday level.
But then between my Master’s and my PhD I had this experience of becoming pregnant and gestating, and birthing my own child and having this child come into my care and so I had this highly transformative embodied experience. But then I also had this interesting experience of domesticity that I’ve never had before. So everything when— Like, when you become responsible for another human being, whether that’s a child or someone else who you are a carer for, everything becomes about feeding and socialising. So I had this really kind of classic path into philosophy where feeding and socialising or eating and socialising were not at the centre, but then I had to kind of become responsible for the existence of another being, and those were the primary things that I was responsible for.
And so for me, you know, something shifted both by having this very what I would call fleshy, transformative experience, but also because I suddenly had to attend to the bodily needs and the social needs of another human. I end up realising how entwined kind of feeding and socialising is. I kind of thought, well, those are things that are absolutely necessary to being human. And in classic philosophy or, you know, dominant philosophy, I would call it— We spend a lot of time thinking about “human flourishing” in terms of happiness and wisdom and really spend very little time thinking about those other two aspects in a way that we call central to being human. So for me that was kind of like a pivotal moment. And so I decided to pursue my PhD taking on the work that I’d already done with Heidegger, but trying to centre questions of the body.
And so I started looking at how it was— Really, the question that that was motivating me was how could it be possible to do so much fundamental training in philosophy, read all these really important texts, and yet not have had the opportunity to really think about these really kind of important questions about what it means to exist as a human and to be a human?
Has art influenced your academic work?
Art has always kind of been in the background and one of the ways that it’s influenced my work is that, in a very general sense, it provokes new ways of seeing things and new questions for me.
So something that I’m really committed to in my kind of methodological approach is this commitment to what’s called “ontological disruption”. So that’s something that’s really prominent in the area I work in called “ecofeminist philosophy”, or “ecofeminist ethics”. In ecofeminist ethics, there’s kind of a value system which is called the logic of domination. So someone who works on this is Karen Warren, who talks about the logic of domination being that we have these hierarchies between and among all the things that exist, which mean that whatever’s greater can justifiably dominate whatever’s inferior.
So the way that works is really common. You know, as humans, for example, we have this concept of humans sitting at the top of the hierarchy and so that kind of logic permits us to take things from nature and use them for our own purposes. So we can subordinate things that are kind of lesser or inferior to things that are superior.
How does that relate to art? Well, you know, artworks that we consider great have this particular power to both represent something that’s really quite on the surface while communicating something that’s hidden or underlying.
And so for me artworks can provoke us to really recognise that what they are showing us through their explicit representation – so whatever, if it’s a photograph, what’s actually in the photograph – but they also provoke us to think about the meaning behind – I mean, in ordinary terms, you call it the meaning behind the photograph – but they provoke us to question or think about the values that are being communicated by what might otherwise be either a still image or kind of an explicit representation. And so for me, the way that art functions is really very much an expression of this distinction between what happens at the everyday or what we call in philosophy the “ontic” level, and what’s going on at the ontological level.
But also, you know, I work also in an area, you know, looking at Heidegger, Heideggerian philosophy, so philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Heidegger has kind of a quite a similar count of art. So he talks about this kind of artworks as having this capacity for unconcealment. And so what he says is, you know, when we represent something in an artwork and one thing that he famously talks about is like a painting of Van Gogh’s shoes – you know, the artist Van Gogh – and we see what’s represented, but also in that image we have, he’ll call it an unconcealment where the whole of the world that those shoes exist in is shown to us. And it’s also at the same time hidden.
And that kind of play between showing or presencing and absencing or hiddenness and representation, I think that’s something that’s what makes art art rather than what makes art purely representation of objects. And so for me, that’s kind of always been a provocation for the way that I think about ontology.
You mentioned artworks that we consider great. And you said that they have this kind of provocative property. So I’m wondering what you mean by artworks that are great, or the greatness of artworks?
Yeah. So this is a really tricky conundrum in the area of philosophy that I work in and in the way that I also think about art. One thing I’m really interested in is the everyday and the mundane.
And kind of things that are typically undervalued or not highly valued. And when we think about artworks that are great, we tend to think of them as doing some kind of explicit showing of their quality as artworks, and so that poses a challenge because one of the interesting problems that we have when we talk about art in philosophy is whether we take this kind of aesthetic approach.
And really, the aesthetic approach is about artworks being able to invoke emotion in me or invoke reaction on an individual level. Simply being moved can register an artwork as a work of great art.
Those claims are really value-laden. What we call great, what we call canonical, or what we centre as the kind of great works of art actually require us deliberately to devalue other kinds of things that could be considered art. So one of the places, for example, that that’s played out is, you know, in the film that’s really influential to me.
From 1975, it’s called Jeanne Dielman [,23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles], and it’s directed by Chantelle Ackerman. It’s a film about, like, a single, widowed mother.
And one of the incredible things about the film is how it represents the kind of mundane, everyday, domestic chores that this woman has to do, and every kind of activity is presented in the same way. So, there are extensive scenes of her changing— making and changing the bed. There are, like, really long drawn-out scenes of her, for example, preparing a roast or peeling potatoes.
And they’re shot in, you know, what you’d call now, like, ASMR [Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response]-type. You can hear the peeler scraping against the potato. There’s no kind of theatrics around it. What’s interesting is that there are some things that we’d ordinarily call really remarkable events in Jeanne Dielman’s day that normally, or in like what we’d expect for cinema to represent them, would be like the height of the action and we’d just see a lot of, kind of, centring of that through various cinematic techniques, so you’d know what the most important parts of the story are.
And one of the interesting things about this film is that everything is presented as equal. So there’s even scenes where— Dielman is, like, a single mother, and so she has sex with clients every day before her son comes home, and you see that represented in just the same way as the peeling of the potatoes. So it’s all very ordinary.
The director, when she was interviewed about this, said that she made the film to give kind of representation, or to make seen, or to give value to things that were typically undervalued.
And so one of the interesting things is, you know, that kind of claim was really, really resonated with me because what we’re used to seeing as great films of all time, it’s often something about the story, something about the action. Something has to be really powerful or shown to be powerful, and what was really powerful about this film is that everything was represented as important, as equally contributing to the story of Jeanne Dilman, as part of who she was.
For Ackerman to say, “I’ve made this film to give value to things that are usually undervalued,” and to make those just as important or just as meaningful to the picture of Jeanne Dilman that she’s painting is a really important provocation to question what we think makes a person, what we think the most important or definitive things about a person is, and we’re often driven to exclude the mundane, to exclude the domestic, and to exclude the things that really bind us together, and to really focus on what makes us unique or different.
And so I think when you ask about— Sorry, you know, you asked me about what makes a great work of art— I think we need to allow, we need to be willing to push back against kind of fixed definitions of what that is, because a great work of art has the capacity to push back against what we typically value.
How did you discover this film? Did you see the film and then think, “oh I found that really interesting,” then go and have a read of what the director was saying about it? Or was it the other way around: did you see this really interesting quote and then you were kind of prompted to watch the film?
Actually what happened was, I was with some friends and someone who’s really into, you know, slow cinema said, “oh, but the film was so boring! This woman was just peeling potatoes,” and I went, “oh, what do you mean?”
And he described it and he said, like, “she was just peeling potatoes for about six minutes.” And I went, “oh, hang on.” like, “no, I could see that”. Because the act of peeling potatoes, right, potatoes are like— You know, I’m a carer of children and if you have to feed people— You know, earlier I mentioned, you know, we don’t think enough about eating and feeding is part of what makes us human, and for me, if I have the opportunity to peel potatoes in silence for six minutes—
I think in those moments, which are represented as really mundane, and I think this is something that comes out of kind of the existential phenomenology that I work in, the moments of the mundane you can really go through the motions, like if you’re peeling a potato—
Firstly, I heard, you know, a friend talk about this and I went, “well, I have to see this film!” because to me— He was saying it was boring. But as someone who’s had to take care of the physical, bodily needs of other humans, I do a lot of peeling potatoes and chopping onions and, you know, boiling water and all those kinds of things that are really mundane. And so for me, I thought, “wow, like an artist has put those in the centre, let’s see what that’s about”.
And you really can, like if you sat there— I mean for me, I should say, if I sat there peeling potatoes for six minutes, I know that I would go through the motions and those motions are existential motions. You would be thinking, and you would be having, kind of, philosophical kind of thinking in that moment – apart from all the thinking of all the other things you had to do – but if you just had to sit there peeling potatoes.
And I also thought that potatoes are really interesting because they’re a high utility food. You know, if you have a lot of mouths to feed, potatoes are a versatile— They are the most mundane of food objects, so even just the fact that she’s preparing potatoes and not, I don’t know, a zucchini flower, it was really interesting to me because they’re high utility, they’re filling, they’re satisfying. You can accommodate them to many people’s tastes. You could cook potatoes every day and feel like you’re eating something different every day.
So even the image of a potato for me was about really making this as mundane as possible. And for me, centring the mundane and thinking about people’s bodily needs as an important part of what we do was really amazing.
So, I watched the film and then to see the director say that, to say the thing that I had been thinking in my philosophy, was again really pivotal. So I started to think about all the ways that what we call mundane is just a way of devaluing and allowing things to escape from view.
That’s really interesting and I guess that, classically, the kind of mundane aspects of life were thought to be distinctly unphilosophical. So it’s really great to hear you talk about revaluing things and reframing the mundane and the ordinary. And I wondered if you could, you could tell us about Lisa Sorgini’s Behind Glass photographic series.
Lisa Sorgini, so she got a lot of publicity for her work during the COVID pandemic. So she’s an Australian-Italian photographer and Behind Glass was a series of photos that she took of mothers with their children during the pandemic. And lots of her work is kind of characterised by her representations of fleshiness, and so she takes what you would call a care-centred approach to photography.
So, she also has another artwork called Thick Like Water, which is more recent, 2022, and that explicitly is about representing marginalised embodiment.
But what she makes focal is the kind of fleshy entanglement, I would call it, that characterise caregiving. So she’s not just representing pictures of mothers and their children at home during the pandemic, but she’s showing how bodily that relationship is.
One of the things that she does that I think is quite interesting is that she has these images of mothers and their babies or their children or other people that they’re caring for, and the focus and the emphasis is on the way that flesh is entwined or flesh is grasped, and yet at the same time she keeps, you know, the installation is called Behind Glass.
Representing fleshiness while keeping it behind glass still keeps a sort-of of distancing, still keeps something uncaptured. So, we can represent the maternal-child relationship. We can give it value by choosing to represent it, but also by keeping it behind glass we keep it at a distance. And for me that suggests that we can never capture the wholeness of this relationship.
And so for me, that’s kind of a similar play between this presencing and showing. So, what this provokes me to think about really is about going beyond representation for art and not just showing, you know, or making it clear that, you know: during the COVID pandemic, there were all these mothers trapped at home with their children. What does that look like?
By making it an artwork, we give it value and at the same time by calling it Behind Glass and presenting it behind glass, even though that was obviously within the confines of the pandemic— But just emphasising that behind glassness of these images shows that whenever we show something, we can never bring it fully into view. We can never capture and contain the wholeness of that relationship.
And so one of the things in philosophy, one of the ways that the body’s been forgotten or erased is to say that it’s excess. It’s beyond what can be articulated or made intelligible. And if the body is excess, then when we capture it, what we don’t want to do, if we want to retain that, we want to kind of challenge this idea of what can be articulated, what can be made intelligible or representable, then being able to represent it, but also show that the limits of representation remain, that there’s something that the fleshiness that we’re focusing on we can’t be involved in, we’re still barred off from. For me is, like, an exercise in challenging the limits of representation.
There’s so much in what you’ve just said and so much in this series as well. And then another really interesting perspective that Sorgini herself gives on this series: Sorgini says of this series that, “Behind glass, mother and child appear like living and breathing masterpieces, divine comedies of domesticity.”
And I think that speaks to the partiality that you’ve spoken about, but also throughout our conversation, the reframing and the revaluing of things, looking at these kind of domestic portraits as living, breathing masterpieces.
I just, sort of, wanted to give you an opportunity maybe to respond to Sorgini interpretation of what she’s doing.
And it’s interesting that she called them “divine comedies of domesticity” because in the Divine Comedy by Dante [Alighieri], there’s still, there’s also there’s kind of grappling with the limits of what we can know and what we can make intelligible.
And so you know there are these, kind of, three figures and one of them is Virgil, who’s kind of the philosopher, and Virgil’s role is—
So the Divine Comedy is like a procession through the various stages until Dante arrives at heaven, or the Beatific Vision, or God.
And so one of the interesting things is the kind of middle figure, Virgil, who’s the philosopher, can teach Dante a lot about avoiding evil and coming away from sin. But that knowledge, right, wisdom can only take you so far. So, understanding things and being logical about things can only take you so far towards, kind of, the truth, or the beauty of being.
And so what’s really interesting is that along comes this different character, Beatrice. And Beatrice is this – comes after Virgil, who’s the philosopher – Beatrice comes in as, like, as beauty.
And beauty being this really aesthetic experience. And so it’s really like: knowledge can only take you so far, and then the next thing that you need is an experience of beauty to get closer and closer – I guess for Dante it’s to God – but let’s say the truth about what it means to be human, or to become, you know, fully human or to become perfected.
One of the fascinating things about Beatrice – and there’s been a lot of scholarship on this – is that Beatrice happens to be the namesake of Dante’s real-life infatuation. So her name’s Beatrice Portinari. And a lot of scholarship on this has called attention to the way that the Beatrice of the Divine Comedy is totally stripped of her physicality.
So for Sorgini to then say that these are divine comedies of domesticity and to centre that fleshiness is really a push back, whether the artist intends it or not, is really highlighting or push back against this stripping of beauty from Beatrice In Dante’s Divine Comedy.
And what’s interesting is the further Dante moves towards God the more beautiful Beatrice comes, but the less physical, the less her physicality is apparent.
And the question for me – what that provokes for philosophy – is if philosophy is about wisdom and about knowing and about getting closer to the truth, then talking about divine comedies is a provocation to suggest that maybe knowing can only take you so far, and that there there’s always this kind of retained mysticism that is really about experience rather than about knowing; it’s really about living and experiencing something and existing, as an existentialist would say, rather than just about knowing or understanding the truth about existence. You really have to live. You can’t just know.
I think that’s something that is really captured also in these images. So, one of the things that the pandemic did was plunge everyone into the domestic sphere. And what that did was force us to think about all of the labour that sustains the kind of work of our society which is done totally separate to the household.
And so Sorgini also representing these flashing entanglements of mother and child. I think that kind of captured that moment because it wasn’t just that parents were having to make sure their kids got their schoolwork done – home schooling, while also working – but they had to do all that while also being physically, relationally involved with children. And so bringing that into the surface is really about messing up that clear division that we had between the domestic or the private, and the public.
In light of the discussion that you’ve just given us of that work and the Divine Comedy and, you know, all these issues around mysticism and representation, I wanted to invite you to talk a little about growing up with religious art and icons of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus.
I would say these things were the most like quietly influential things in the background that led me to approach philosophy from this kind of question of hiddenness and showing.
So, my parents are migrant settlers to Australia, so they’re from Lebanon and Argentina. And that means that they are kind of Eastern Christians or Eastern Catholic.
Whereas in the Western tradition a crucifix is the kind of main or most recognisable sort of worship totem, in Eastern cultures most icons feature Mary holding the infant Jesus.
But they’re part of a tradition that’s also much more insistent on the mysticism of religious belief, rather than the logos— So logos being, kind of, the word or logic, that’s a really dominant kind of way of thinking about religion in Western traditions and in eastern traditions mysticism is a lot more strong.
And the mysticism is really crucial here because mysticism is the idea that there is always something hidden. There’s always something beyond logos; something that defies logos, which defies representation or articulation. And so religious icons: that’s what they are to me. And they, kind of, invoke that kind of thinking.
And I find them quite powerful depictions, but also really uncanny. So on the one hand I I feel like of course growing up with these images or representations of the feminine was really influential on my work because I’m very interested in re-centring the feminine. And at the same time there was something totally uncanny about these images. So I still keep them around because there’s something about that uncanniness that kind of feeds my philosophical thinking.
So Mary— It’s something about the way Mary’s holding Jesus. So Jesus is often smaller in size, but he doesn’t look like an infant. He’s often got, like, quite a mature face, and then they’re not typically looking at each other. Occasionally you might find one where they’re looking at each other, but they’re not even— It’s not even this maternal gaze. They’re both just looking out at whoever’s observing the image.
And so we, here’s this depiction of a mother and her infant, but they’re fully clothed, you know, which is very different than Sorgini’s work. Mary holds the infant Jesus in this very kind of perfunctory, awkward pose, like she’s propping up her arm like it forms a bench. And he’s kind of propped up on top of it. And so here we have this kind of depiction of, like, the pinnacle of firstly, beauty; but also the pinnacle of relationality. This relationship between a mother and a child.
And yet, that’s not really what it’s like to be the mother of an infant, Jesus or otherwise. So I’ve always— The uncanniness of that depiction that I’ve always been aware of is that Mary’s a mother.
So she’s captured in this way and she’s captured almost exclusively – actually exclusively, entirely in this way – and at the same time, we’re not to think of all the things that entails. So, you know, it entails fleshiness, you know, they, kind of, they were sharing a body, there was an exchange of bodily fluids; there was probably milk. There’s child birthing and feeding but there’s also, like, cleaning up after the infant Jesus, and all of these things are things that have been thought of as excess to representation.
And so those icons do that: they hold up these images and they keep away everything that’s excess to that representation and that makes that representation a little bit more fractured, a little bit less what we think of, what we typically think of as sacred.
So if you think about those in relation to or against what Sorgini’s doing with the fleshiness which is also a representation of motherhood, but is centring those very things that remain hidden in this, kind of, iconography then you’re kind of confronted with this idea of asking what are we choosing to represent and what do we feel is excessive to that representation?
But I think also the most important thing about icons is that they’re also, they’re a picture but they’re also supposed to evoke this kind of encounter with Truth with a capital T, or Beauty with a capital B, like really important, universal, powerful and transformative truths because they’re supposed to evoke faith or prayer.
I think that’s such a terrific bookend for this conversation.
What are you currently working on?
Yeah. Thanks. I’m working on a project that talks about technological deworlding and ontological disruption and asks what the effect is of taking things out of what their – what I call – fleshy life world and putting them into a new or decontextualised object, so deworlding them, and alienating it from that life world has the effect of changing how we think about it and how we encounter it as kind of a resource for human use.
Listeners can find links to Dr Sandrussi’s work and some of the art we’ve discussed on the Concept : Art website.
Dr Annie Sandrussi, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Thank you for having me. This was great.
Concept : Art is produced on muwinina country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
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