I have a great fear of not being understood. During my childhood I spoke in tongues. The term glossolalia—from the Greek word for tongue and language—refers to the religious practice of speaking gibberish as a form of worship. Characteristic of evangelical Christian faiths, this feverish practice erupts when one is ‘filled’ with the Holy Spirit. This phenomenon appears in the New Testament’s book of Acts, when Christ’s followers spoke in tongues after receiving the divinity of the Spirit.

Glossolalia thrives on a wilful resistance to human knowledge and comprehension. That much I understood, and yet I could not decrypt why God would on the one hand impart the babble of glossolalia as a divine ‘gift’ in the New Testament when in the Old Testament the city of Babel was punished with language division as a cautionary tale. The story goes that the city of Babel had ambitiously attempted to build a tower to heaven. A single homogenous language had united civilisation as building works commenced, but God was displeased at this feeble gesture at divine connection and struck the tower, splintering speech into a multiplicity of tongues and scattering humans across the globe like diasporic ash at a cosmic funeral.

I last spoke in tongues in 1992. Poised at a crossroads between a faith-based community and a secular world that beckoned, I felt the need to be understood. I had formed a deep mistrust of made-up languages that lead to exclusion and obfuscation. I vowed to speak and write as a way of making meaning intelligible—in my English ‘mother tongue’ inherited from my God-fearing English mother—and I knew it was the work of translation to push language in directions to which I could not possibly lay claim. 

Roughly coinciding with this personal narrative was my first encounter with the work of Eugenia Raskopoulos through Dangling virgins, her disturbing and dreamlike solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1993. That same year I threw myself into art school at Western Sydney University. I knew of Eugenia Raskopoulos as she taught there (though as it happened, she was never one of my lecturers).

The thirteen silver-gelatin photographs in Dangling virgins each depict a young girl’s legs and feet dangling from a swing, the images of which have first been projected onto a gleaming wax tablet. Surfaces of inscription, the tablets spell out the names of women from Greek mythology who committed suicide to escape rape and tyranny: Antigone, Aspalis, Charilla, Epicaste, Erigone, Helen. The fleshy wax surface offers a porous and penetrable membrane, strangely translucent while remaining opaque. It is as if the titular virgin’s hymen is offered up for the inscription of English letters, like a name badge tattooed into the skin or seared as branding. A feminist gesture to recuperate an inheritance of patriarchal oppression, this series is an early articulation of what has become a primary concern for Raskopoulos: understanding translation and its relationship to language, body, image and meaning. In this essay I intend to track the ways in which Raskopoulos invites language to leave its mark.

Feetfirst

While the dangling legs reference historic figures who hung themselves, this image is the first of many instances in Raskopoulos’s oeuvre where feet assert their status as instruments of language. Rosalind Krauss writes: ‘Writing was the tool of memory. Like other tools it was an operation of the hand, transferring speech from one organ—the mouth—to a lower, blunter one.’1 For Raskopoulos, this idea is taken a step further to an even blunter organ, the foot. Raskopoulos frequently represents the body, usually her own, through its fetishistic fragmentation. When considered through both body and language, such moves often introduce a visual–textual double entendre. For example, an ominous shattering of the whole, leaves the holes of the body exposed, or words formed in water appear impotent when taken in the context of the work’s title, Words are not hard (2006).

The body may be witnessed in parts—hands, mouth, torso and, notably, feet—but these are neither mute nor static. Paul Klee famously described the line of basic mark-making as peripatetic: ‘It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.’2 Raskopoulos could be accused of having taken this literally, as she often draws forms with her toes. In works such as Footnotes (2012) and Weak as piss (2005), the busy big toe of Raskopoulos’s right foot also acts like a tongue: fat with language, it scrawls words across a cold floor in warm saliva and urine.

With reference to Duchamp’s nude (after Muybridge’s before it), the immersive three-channel video installation Footnotes depicts the artist’s feet as she runs down a staircase. Stills of her feet with letters drawn in red lipstick on the tops of them are overlaid to spell the word ‘onanism’ on one screen, while her toe writes ‘moist’ in Greek and English using saliva on another. The third shows her standing, ominously, in a pool of thick red liquid—a progression from the yellow petals violently plucked by her hands and trampled with her feet in the 2009 video Stutter. ‘Most of us enter this world headfirst, then we leave it feetfirst’, states the writer Edwidge Danticat.3 Paraphrasing a line often recited by her late mother, Danticat reflects on her mother’s life through the imaginary line they would silently draw with their feet while walking together. In drawing attention to the feet while standing, Raskopoulos saturates words with the weight of the entire body and its litany of lived experience. As her toes move silently in fallen debris and rest in stagnant fluids, they bear something of this ‘feetfirst’ knowledge of death.

Translation as penetration

In Weak as piss, Raskopoulos’s toe pushes urine across the concrete floor to spell out the Greek word for ‘democracy’. The porous surface sucks up the fluid and it disappears as quickly as it is written. As a comment on undemocratic territorial ‘pissing contests’—the likes of which we still see today in the race to the bottom on the treatment of asylum seekers and a revolving prime ministership—Raskopoulos politicises her own bodily waste, charging it with poetic and erotic meaning. The ground on which she defiantly stands is a palimpsest, a skin continually marked by the language that penetrates it.

This penetration creates a space that is twofold: it refers to what Victoria Lynn and Nikos Papastergiadis have described as ‘the abyss that haunts all acts of translation’4 and a literal zone of erotic combat waged by the body on language. Raskopoulos’s bodies are therefore torn apart by language at the same time that the body-in-pieces becomes a communication device in and of itself. In Words are not hard, two figures face each other from either side of the frame. Cropped so that only their mouths and chins are visible against a black void, their lips spill a continually cascading stream of water that is animated to reveal a cacophony of lingual and numerical forms representing ‘69’. Commonly referring to a sexual position where simultaneous oral sex is achieved through the inversion of two bodies, the transmission of meaning in Words are not hard refers as much to sex as it does to the language we use to describe it.

Words are not hard liquefies language through gushing words and highlights both the commonality and differences of meaning enacted through translation. In sexualising this exchange of meaning through a suggestion of cunnilingus and fellatio, Raskopoulos underscores the body as a pre-linguistic site where language is ‘spoken’ corporeally through sex. While the Latin etymology of ‘cunnilingus’ refers to vulva (cunnus) and lick (lingere), I had assumed before looking it up that ‘lingus’ was shorthand for linguistics/language. An organ that holds and releases language, the lick of the tongue communicates intimacy and desire without words.

Castrated meaning

Untitled (1998)—a series of nine Cibachrome photographs—takes this lick of language elsewhere. Where Words are not hard foregrounds a depiction of text in place of sex, Untitled voyeuristically recontextualises scenes from Japanese pornography that portray women performing oral sex on men. During a stay in Tokyo facilitated by a grant to research new work, Raskopoulos turned up to her accommodation unaware that she was to stay in a ‘business man’s’ hotel. Heterosexual porn was available on the television in her room, but typical of the country’s censorship conventions, genitalia was pixellated. Photographing the screen, Raskopoulos freeze-framed the action to create unnerving images that frustrate sexual arousal. As with any attempt to redact dirty pictures, the pixellated content draws attention to the offending body part—the man’s penis—but in doing so criminalises the woman’s mouth. A simultaneous invitation to and refusal of visual pleasure, the mouth and penis become a blur of pixels in this feeble act of governmental control. Locating freedom of speech within sexual terms, the freely flowing liquid desire of orality that united the mouths in Words are not hard is rendered mute in Untitled, frozen in time and place.

Another photographic series from 1998, With(out) voice, juxtaposes the mouth and penis to different effect. A sequence of five images of the artist’s grandmother’s mouth alternate with five images focussing on the genitals of ancient Greek kouroi. Whatever enduring ideals of male perfection are signified by these classical statues, they are historical ruins of eternal youth, their penises fractured or snapped off entirely—castration imposed by time. In contrast, the woman’s lips are pressed shut, the deep creases in her weathered skin betraying an ageing body. Cropped tightly to repudiate the rest of the face and its sensory registers of sight, sound and smell, the mute protest of her pursed lips deny taste and restrict breath. Created in response to the trauma of her grandmother’s migration from Greece to Australia, Raskopoulos emphasises her mortality, engaging photography’s power to memorialise life as a future archive of the not yet dearly departed. Sealed shut and airtight, the deafening silence of her grandmother’s mouth is with voice in its defiant affront to death. And yet, the castrated kouroi imply that traditional culture and speech has been violently excised, rendered immobile and without voice.

Word as flesh

The fragmented mouths of Untitled and With(out) voice are sites not of pleasure but resistance, suggesting that the mouth can be an ambivalent space where the line between coercion and control is blurred. Yet the mouth represents a clear cut in the flesh, a non-reproductive sexual organ and a vaginal substitute among other penetrable holes, many of which are referenced elsewhere by Raskopoulos. Prior to its withering alpha-male manifestation as ancient kouroi in With(out) voice, marble already appeared in her work like a bruised skin, taught and veiny. In After Foucault (1993), a rectangular block of cold, hard marble with a diagonal breakage along the top left-hand corner leans upright against the white wall. A quote sourced from a newspaper article is chiselled into its surface: ‘The survey also showed that Greek–Australian men engaged in anal sex more frequently than other respondents.’5 Instilled with authority like a biblical commandment, the marble slab ends up reading like a tombstone—a chilling thought given the strong link often drawn between sodomy and death.

Anal sex came to be a signifier of death in the late twentieth century due to AIDS, ‘making’, as Simon Watney observes, ‘the rectum a grave’.6 The metonymic slippage between gay men and the anus posits the spectacle of gay sex as a ‘wound culture’—to borrow from Mark Seltzer, who first used this term to describe the fascination for serial killers in the US and Neil Macdonald who updated it in relation to the impact of HIV/AIDS on visual culture.7 An open orifice, the penetrable anus is a conspicuous cut into which the limits separating private desire and public interest collapse. Perhaps the gravestone-like marble of After Foucault is a sign that sexual difference can be stigmatised much like cultural difference can. 

The rectum is not only a ‘grave’ for the male; for women, too, the anus signifies a kind of death—a site where nothing can propagate. Another marble installation, Qua (1994) comprises three differently coloured slabs, one of which is inscribed with a quote from Aristotle relating to the ‘power of the seed’.8 Frozen over and immobile, it is a reminder that life cannot grow from seed set in stone or spilled on the ground. Deriving from the story of Onan, a man from the Old Testament who was slain by God for wasting his seed, ‘onanism’ refers to both coitus interruptus and masturbation, given dual biblical interpretations persist. Alluded to here in Qua and written on Raskopoulos’s foot in red lipstick in Footnotes, her invocation of onanism appears to be another unambiguous declaration that sex can be unshackled from cultural or religious norms, avoid the pressure of reproduction, and sometimes even encounter death—feetfirst.

Qua and After Foucault were made in response to the artist’s ‘anger about people being homophobic’9—particularly during a time when AIDS panic was rife. Though it bears a quote drawn from a media source of the time, After Foucault cannot be viewed without consideration of the French philosopher’s writings on how homosexuality was structured in Ancient Greece through an active/passive binary. In this phallocentric logic, a privileged sexual position ‘consists in being active, in dominating, in penetrating, and in thereby exercising one’s authority’.10 To be passive, in contrast, is to be powerless, or as a fear of AIDS stipulates for gay men: to court death. But sexuality and power dynamics have moved on since Ancient Greece, and since the 1990s, too. Indeed, in response to Watney’s assertion, Leo Bersani argues: ‘But if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death.’11

While the spectre of power dynamics in ancient male homosexuality delineates After Foucault, Raskopoulos also references the contemporary and widespread Greek practice of anal sex between pre-marital heterosexual couples. Seen as a method of preserving virginity and as a safeguard against premature procreation, the practice privileges the vagina as a refuge for reproductive hygienics. While the feminist canon abounds with critical writings on the vagina and its metaphors, Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut, written two years after the work, comes to mind. Moore’s visceral novel links language, desire and the body with an ever-present fatal threat of violent incision—she commences her narrative with a head job and ends with a decapitated head.12 For Raskopoulos, like Moore, language kills—leaves the body dangling—if you let it. Raskopoulos’ language combines into an ever-deepening wedge or a series of fissures, fragmenting the flesh. To return to Foucault here: ‘Sexuality is a fissure—not one which surrounds us as the basis of our isolations or individuality, but one which marks the limit within us and designates us as the limit.’13 Since these early works, the translations of language and culture have often found their way into flesh in Raskopoulos’s works, and she continues to poke and prod at their various limits.

Journey of a lone translator

The isolation that marks out the individual’s boundaries in Foucault’s understanding of sexuality ring true across Raskopoulos’s oeuvre. A dialectical processing of language, knowledge and power animates the problems her work seeks to unpack, and yet for the most part, she offers a single body—her own—as the erotic conduit for making meaning. The onanism declared in Footnotes reveals itself as a core methodology of her artistic practice. Her seed of creation is spilt on ground, which is walked upon with bare feet (a substitute for the supposed authority of the artist’s hand). In this onanistic imagination, the soil is stemless; native meaning has been uprooted.

Raskopoulos’s embodied poetics of translation come full circle, literally speaking, in the two-piece neon work Routereroute (2016). The cyclical nature of each neon, bearing the title of the work in Greek and English, reflects an endless journey that continues on endlessly, caused by differences in language and despite the inequity in size between them.14 The cyclical movement is echoed in the two-channel companion video Rootreroot (2016), where the artist is viewed from above, dragging a tree behind her—an olive tree is walked in a clockwise direction, a wattle tree anticlockwise. The unbroken circles on the two screens almost meet in the middle, creating imagery suggestive of the symbol for infinity. Also installed side-by-side, the circular neons play on the structures of language and the multiple meanings of phonetically identical words.

Raskopoulos constructs here a complex interplay between language and translation and, true to the logic of her practice, further complicates communication through visual and tactile means. Raskopoulos employs the displaced trees as drawing implements to mark the earth anew, but she walks, rather than writes, their meaning into being. For all her tracing of origins and translations of words, what often remains is embodied and erotic residue—the flowers and fruits of her independent labour. In this singular, embodied exploration of language, it seems that finding a common vernacular is just as important to our being understood as acknowledging the shared traces of our presence.