© Aris Sarafianos, 2005

Helen Chadwick, the ‘shorelines of culture’ and the transvaluation

Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective, Manchester Art Gallery,

The recent exhibition of Helen Chadwick’s work in Manchester Art Gallery is a smaller version of the

artist’s retrospective, which took place at the Barbican Art Gallery last May to mark its re-opening.

This is the first major retrospective of Chadwick’s work since her premature death in 1996 and

undertakes what the organisers rightly think to have been a long overdue imperative, namely to dispel

the ‘mist of invisibility’ in which ‘her art has become wrapped.’1 More specifically, the organisers set

out to demonstrate Chadwick’s overwhelming importance for the making of the British art scene in the

1990s, and explore the freshness and relevance of her works today. Though more narrow in range,

the MAG show still included Chadwick’s most famous and influential output. From her early work, her

first opus magnum, Ego Geometria Sum (1983), to her celebrity pieces, Piss Flowers and Cacao, all

the way to the final phase of Chadwick’s work (her residence at the King’s College Hospital Assisted

Conception Unit and creation of Nebula and Monstrance, 1996), the exhibition traced with clarity

Chadwick’s essential preoccupations, and largely succeeded in its declared objectives. In this respect,

the only cacophony in the exhibition perhaps was connected to the way Chadwick’s final phase of

work, incomplete at the time of her sudden death, was represented. The two pieces chosen here

seemed to be a lot less able to generate the kind of vibrant discussion about aesthetics, normality and

culture than Chadwick’s Cameos – especially her Cyclops (1995) – or her Opal (1996), which were, in

fact, incinerated in Momart’s warehouse fire last summer, while the retrospective was under way.2

Photographs/Sculpture of the Body: Material Production

Placed at the entrance of the show, The Philosopher’s Fear of the Flesh (1989) and Enfleshings

(1989) rocketed visitors straight into the core of Chadwick’s entire project, a ‘Soliloquy to Flesh’ that

ventures to overcome the sterile polarities of mind and body.3 Moreover, these pieces embody one of

Chadwick’s trademark approaches to media: these so-called light boxes consist of the adaptation of

cibachrome photography (transparencies) on three dimensional bases of glass and steel, cut in

different shapes and illuminated from behind by an electrical apparatus. Among the most interesting

1
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

characteristics of Chadwick’s work is precisely this communication that she set up between fine art

and photography: photography is turned into a potentially three-dimensional medium and sculpture

into a flat screen for two-dimensional narrative.

Helen Chadwick, Ego Geometria Sum, 1982-4 (detail), photographic emulsion on plywood.

(Photograph: Philip Stanley) © Helen Chadwick Estate.

Chadwick’s earlier take on the theme of enfleshment, Ego Geometria Sum, shows another variation

on this technique. Pieces of plywood are worked into a diversity of sculptural forms that simulate

symbols of childhood such as incubators, fonts, prams, boats, beds, pianos, horses, and even

schools. Plywood is then photosensitised and large photographs representing Chadwick’s nude body

in a diversity of poses are printed directly into it. In this most explicitly socio-political of Chadwick’s

works, she traces the history of the body from birth through to maturity as it is bent and twisted to the

structural logic of those technologies of power that undertake to socialise it. The body is not exactly

encased and straitjacketed; it is pasted on the surface, losing all volume and depth, dimensionality

and solidity, becoming a mere trace within the ‘structure,’ a part of the wood’s graining.

2
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers, Helen Chadwick, Cacao, 1994, chocolate,

1991-92, bronze, cellulose lacquer. aluminium, steel, electrical apparatus.

(Photograph: Anti Kuivalainen) (Photograph: Edward Woodman)

© Helen Chadwick Estate. © Helen Chadwick Estate.

Chadwick’s work also exploited more concrete types of materials put in immediately abject roles. Two

of her celebrity pieces, the Piss Flowers (1991-2) and Cacao (1994), exhibited in the exhibition's main

room, belong to this category. Here, opacity rather than transparency, raw materials and three-

dimensional forms rather than the glossy disembodiment of cibachrome photography, prevail.

Chadwick’s Piss Flowers is a monody to the pristine permanence of urine and the fluidity of gender

roles, and stages the dissolution of widely held structural oppositions. These casts of urine in snow

register the meeting between body heat and meteorological frost, male and female urination, casting

and transience. This famous and most written about of her pieces was appropriately offset in the

show by her Cacao (1994), placed immediately on the opposite side of the main room. This big

container of bubbling and spattering chocolate is an equally notorious ode to the sweetness of

chocolate and the revulsion of coprophagy.

Underlining Chadwick’s oscillation between these different media, the Wreaths to Pleasure (1992-3),

thirteen different photo-tondoes, were arranged on the walls surrounding Cacao, and entered into a

series of playful contrasts with the chocolate pulp. This confectionary of hybrids depicts thriving

colonies of flowers and fruits – deliberately evoking the vital profusion of tissue cultures – swimming

into the poison of toxic substances. Blurring the boundaries between parody and sublimation,

pleasure and abjection, vitalism and ‘mortalism,’ these works produce mixed and unexpected

3
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

pleasures, mutant sensations that radiate with the rhetorical tropes that created them, defiant

inversions and exuberant promiscuities.

Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure No. 1, 1992-93, cibachrome photographs, powder coated steel,

glass, aluminium faced MDF. (Photograph: Edward Woodman) © Helen Chadwick Estate.

Medicine/Culture: the Viral

One of the most visible achievements of this exhibition was the way in which it brought out the multi-

disciplinary nature of Chadwick’s work. The erudition and literacy of this corpus have long been

detected and acknowledged – not least by the insightful essays in the catalogue that accompanies the

exhibition (prefaced by one of the most incisive commentators on Chadwick’s art, Marina Warner). Of

course, it has recently become a topos in the field of cultural studies and art practice to underline the

affiliation of art and science. Continuing a long tradition of combinatorial thinking on the ‘two cultures,’

the effort to seek and retrieve their ‘synergies,’ ‘interface,’ ‘parallels’ or ‘divisions’ is still continuing.4

Chadwick’s art happily exceeds the frequently narrow parameters of this academic routine. It

foregrounds neither an uncritical espousal of scientific positivism in the quest of a new ideal of correct

and authoritative image-making (realism, naturalism), nor a dismissal of science in the name of a

nostalgic spiritualism (romanticism, symbolism). It is motored neither by facile relativisms nor by a

reductive conviction about the uniformity of art and science.5

Rather more plausibly, it seems to me that Chadwick’s engagement with science resonates nicely

with one of the most interesting moments of this tradition of integrated thinking about art and science,

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In Chadwick, we could argue, Nietzsche’s inducement ‘to look at
4
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

science through the prism [Optik] of the artist, but also to look at art through the prism of life’ is

appropriately honoured.6 Thus the aesthetic emerges as the privileged ground for a rigorous critique

and active re-evaluation of science and life, and Chadwick pursues this agenda with unusual caution

and uncompromising inventiveness. Indeed, if we look at Chadwick’s work for facile criticisms of

medical science, we will be missing the point. I suggest, therefore, that her Self-portrait (1991), a

picture of the artist’s hands grabbing her own naked brain does not exactly denounce the supposedly

chronic vulgarism of the polarity of mind and body in medical theory.7 Likewise, the Oval Court, which

provides a stage for the display of the creative inescapability of pain, cannot possibly be capitalising

upon the usual accusations of a supposed oblivion of the cultural importance of pain in the history of

ideas and medical history in particular. As Chadwick knew, both of these topics – mind and body

relations and the importance of pain – were vigorously debated and ultimately solved within the

history of philosophical medicine itself long time ago. Eighteenth-century materialisms and their

contemporaneous vitalist revolution dislocated those traditions, if they ever actually existed

unquestioned.8 As a result, rather than an outright dismissal of medical theory, prevalent in much of

contemporary cultural theory about the body in which Descartes’s dualism is a cherished bête noire,

Chadwick’s works attempt a rigorous acculturation of medicine.

I will endeavour to explain this project through her Viral Landscapes (1988-9) – a series of enlarged

photographs, each three metres long, shown in the main area of the exhibition. These pictures

register the meeting of monumental landscape photos of the craggy shoreline of Pembrokeshire with

overlaid streaks of Chadwick’s own cellular material taken from her cervix, vagina, mouth and ear.

The visual resemblance of the striated stone of the landscape with flesh matter and body muscles

makes this superimposition of floating cells more plausible. Moreover, these pictures of cells are

treated as equivalent to viruses with broad implications for the understanding of the relations of

humanity with nature. At the popular level, viruses are the enemies of life, the epitomes of offensive

invasion; at the level of medical rhetoric and practice, they are the target of systematic exclusion and

organised intervention. Chadwick, however, works from a more complex agenda. Viruses show that

bodies are ‘vulnerable to manifold incursions’ by other coded structures. This communication takes

place not ‘in a moralising space’ but rather ‘in an infinite continuity of matter’ which ‘welcomes

difference not as damage but potential.’9 When she insisted that Viral Landscapes do not evoke

5
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

‘ruined catastrophic surfaces but territories of a prolific encounter, the exchange of living and

informational systems at the shoreline of culture,’ she was just rehearsing a bio-cultural theory of

‘error’ rampant in medico-philosophical communities from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s.10

But Chadwick takes this one step further and intermingles this understanding of biology with the

history of culture. Susan Sontag’s famous call for the boycotting of all metaphorising of illness,

another way of perpetuating the suspicions between science and art, is thus reversed.11 Chadwick

indeed speaks from within the multiple and messy histories of bio-medical knowledge. From this

position, her work underlines and explores the crucial problem of how medical science chooses to

understand, implement and disseminate the knowledge that it generously produces. Chadwick’s art

reaffirms and actively mediates the processes of metaphor and error according to which the social

dispersion of the meanings that bio-medical science generates is conducted. Migrations and

crossovers, self-reflexive reinterpretations and misunderstandings, cultural transmissions and

disruptions of the bio-medical ‘soup’: this is the stuff of her imagery. The history of medicine is treated

as a variable of the history of culture and both demand a re-evaluation of life.

Moreover, we could go as far as to say that Chadwick pushed the use of biological metaphoricity to

the domain of the ‘tragic,’ to the chaotic force-fields of contradiction and porosity in which life,

individuality, language and art operate. For Chadwick, viruses are vectors of ‘change’ and

‘dissidence,’ of the dissolution of polarities where ‘rigid boundaries cease to be’ and ‘flesh is released

from the bonds of form and gender.’12 Viral Landscapes strove to visualise precisely this biological,

social and artistic optimum: ‘a vital relation of incompatible elements co-existing in gentle friction...the

between of nature - patterns of desire in symbiosis.’13 It was this larger context that also explains how

Chadwick’s art came to endorse and fulfil the destiny of the modern artist, while it significantly

managed to avoid the reactionary dangers associated with this myth. Indeed, the viral condition

evokes something of the function of the modern artist as that ‘being most suffering, most full of

oppositions and contradictions,’ only able to ‘redeem and release’ themselves in the Dionysiac

intoxication of semblance.14 Likewise, the virus dismantles ‘the self-sufficiency of the cell’ and allows

flesh to become ‘volatile and free to wander in an aetiology of complete abandon.’15

6
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

However, Chadwick acknowledged that the viral ‘shock of change asserts the need for

immunologies’; 16 or, in Nietzschean style, Dionysiac transcendence demands the Apollonian

frameworks of resistance, both must ‘unfold their energies in strict, reciprocal proportion.’ 17 Viral

Landscapes explore precisely these fields of interpenetration formed between abstraction and

figuration, visibility and invisibility, interiority and exteriority, landscape and body, the world and the

self, and, ultimately, medicine and culture. Contrasts are affirmed exactly as they dissolve in the new

environments that they had marked out. A philosophy of prepositions, a discipline of the in-between,

meets an aesthetic of contradiction; Chadwick’s ‘mediology’ can only function within a realm of rigid

contrasts and exclusions.

Sublimity/Contradictions: the Tragedy of Speed

Chadwick’s work deliberately sets up and ‘irritates’ a plethora of standard contrasts with a myriad of

serious implications. Her interest in binary oppositions, ‘counterpoised values’ and ‘unholy alliances’

has long been singled out as ‘an abiding theme in her art.’18 In the middle of the main room of the

exhibition rested one of Chadwick’s masterpieces – Of Mutability –, which should help us understand

the stakes involved in this aspect of Chadwick’s art. Even in its truncated form – without the Carcass

(1996), a funerary stele of rotting refuse – the remaining Oval Court (1984-6) is one of the richest,

more ambitious and revealing works by Chadwick. It comprises a gigantic floor collage where

photocopies of Chadwick’s nude body floating in twelve different sets of contorted poses are arranged

circumferentially around an ovoid platform in a way that evokes a cherished theme of this would-be

archaeologist. 19 Chadwick’s luxuriant poses are captured in the setting of an equally provoking

cornucopia of floating still-lives of animals, fruits, flowers, ropes, cords, pieces of cloths and tools. On

each side of this pool of plenty, a colonnade of three twisted Salomonic columns (copied from

Bernini’s Baldacchino in St. Peter’s, Rome) is pasted on the wall. In the place of capitals, they carry

images of Chadwick’s contorted face in different expressions of pain, grief and crying, securing a

steady supply of water for the pool of manic joy represented on the floor.20

7
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

Helen Chadwick, The Oval Court, 1984-86 (detail), photocopies and assorted media. (Photograph:

Edward Woodman) © Helen Chadwick Estate, courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum London.

The Oval Court flirts with a kind of art with direct roots back into the work of Georges Bataille and,

better still, further back into Nietzsche and his idea of the ‘tragic.’ Indeed, the piece is situated on the

boundary between two kinds of intoxicating excess, of joy and grief where each one serves as the

defining moment of the other. Chadwick’s tears make the pool of plenty possible but, in their turn, they

seem to be engulfed by those solid three-dimensional golden globes – symbols of bliss and optimal

form – resting on its surface. The following Nietzschean questions posed by the artist define the Oval

Court and reverberate throughout Chadwick’s work: ‘Is there an intellectual preference for the hard,

gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being,

from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence’ (Cacao, Meat Abstracts)?21 Are the arts not

the products of an ‘excess of plenitude,’ or of the ‘neuroses of health’?22 Is ‘excess’ not, as Chadwick

put it, the dimension proper of ‘expression’?23

Chadwick follows a long and prestigious modern tradition of mobilising contradictions as an

expressive tool, contradictions which grab the very matter of life and death, pleasure and pain, health

and disease. This ‘mongrel’ of a Greek mother of ‘hedonism’ and an English father of ‘turgid control,’

as she jokily used to describe herself, developed indeed an aesthetic of contradiction with different

modes.24 On the one hand, the Oval Court displays a method of ‘dissolving opposites’: she sets up an

aggressive division between the pool of plenty and the tears of over-fullness over which ‘pleasure and

pain, joy and grief cohere’ ‘in the quest for fullness of feeling.’25 On the other, in the Wreaths to

Pleasure a different trope, particularly favoured by current art criticism, a rhetoric of fusion, of

‘twinning,’ ‘doubling’ and ‘syzygy’ is developed. 26 A thriving vitalism of vegetative profusion is

luxuriantly fused with the poisonous mortalism of toxic substances, both shining with the deceptive

exuberance of life. Finally, in Enfleshings, Meat Abstracts and Meat Lamps an interesting reversal is

staged. The 'body of art' – the principles of figure painting, rules of viewing and established practices

of art education – is turned inside out. Viscera, hitherto the emblem of revolting interiority, and the

traditional zero degree of artistic anatomy, now attract all the scrutiny and joyousness previously

assigned to the exterior of the body.

Rupture, inversion and fusion, or, schisms, detours and amalgamations: these are the three tropes for

tackling oppositions that Chadwick used in order to weave loops around binary categories.

Understanding this is important because it allows other perspectives into her art than the routine

evocations of the ‘metaphysics of evil,’ the abject and the informe – the usual topoi of hypercriticism

and denunciation. Chadwick’s project also exceeds the usual parlance of the deconstructive ennui of

‘undifferentiated sensations,’ ‘nameless pleasures’ and the ‘limbos of non-identity.’27 Her engagement

with contradiction seems to have a different horizon of fulfilment: the transvaluation rather than the

devaluation of all values, that is to say, the sublime, followed by the tragic, namely, the hyper-sublime

maximisation of existence.

Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure

No. 10, 1992-93, cibachrome photographs, No. 12, 1992-93, cibachrome photo-

powder coated steel, glass, graphs, powder coated steel, glass,

aluminium faced MDF. aluminium faced MDF.

(Photograph: Edward Woodman) (Photograph: Edward Woodman)

© Helen Chadwick Estate. © Helen Chadwick Estate.

9
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

Since Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry of the 1750s, polarisation and opposition have

functioned as the basic motors of the sublime. Burke was actually the first to demarcate a special area

within his broader category of the 'Sublime,' which he described as a rapid passage across extreme

conditions of existence. The 'highest intensity' sublime, the sublime par excellence, is, in Burke, a force

of quick transition in and by which ‘extremes,’ ‘two ideas as opposite as can be imagined,’ can be

‘reconciled.’ 28 The highest possible velocities, the longest distances to cover, the most extreme

intensities in the points of exchange: this is the sublimity of Chadwick's Viral Landscapes or her Oval

Court. A further acceleration, alongside sensitive systems of unstable co-existence, like the Wreaths

to Pleasure, also materialise in her work. If we slow down, however, one of the most notorious and

visible ‘contradictions’ of Chadwick’s work becomes easier to grasp. Indeed, criticism has repeatedly

underlined the ‘inconsistency’ between the ‘immaculate craftsmanship’ of Chadwick’s works and the

abjectness of its subject matter. Objects and frames take decorative shapes verging on the kitsch,

reproduction techniques (photography, digitisation, photocopying) ensure the sanitary containment of

subject matter, lighting devices bathe the detritus of meat and fluids with a special luminescence

(Enfleshings). Different evaluations of this structural contradiction have been offered: a vital ingredient

which helped Chadwick ‘smuggle her ideas across the border of convention’; or the implicit curse of

her art that ‘stops any of it being great.’29 None of this sounds satisfactory.

Setting up a contrast between what is represented and the means of its representation, enacting a

division between the polar extremes of style and subject, continually irritating both: these are

inseparable from the sublime synthesis that Chadwick’s aesthetics sought. Chadwick knew that, as

Michel Serres put it, ‘the best synthesis only takes place on a field of maximal differences – knotted,

mixed together – a harlequin’s cape. If not, the synthesis is merely the repetition of a slogan.’30 This is

why she savoured contrasts and aggravated contradictions: the invigorating spaces of interference

are ‘situated between things that are already marked out.’ Moreover, these spaces are revealed only

in the rapidity of passing, in the fullness of ‘metaphora’: ‘speed is the elegance of thought,’ Serres

claims, and the work of synthesis proceeds ‘by short circuits which produce dazzling sparks.’31

Serres’s ideal figure of the ‘troubadour of knowledge’ sought the Dionysiac melody in a new chaotic

theory of knowledge that navigates the precipitous passages between the sciences, the humanities

10
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

and the arts in the speed of light.32 Chadwick’s ‘tragic style of thinking’ sought a similarly urgent

synthesis navigating the same dangerous passage from the opposite direction.

It is in this sense that this sublime aesthetic of contradiction finally opened up to life: art glorifies the

atrocities of existence as the means to ‘heal’ oneself of the burden of existence, as Chadwick was

frequently keen to underline.33 Contrary to the utilitarian and literal way in which healing came to be

understood by an earlier generation of artists (Joseph Beuys or Lygia Clark are cases in point here),

Chadwick’s visual and verbal rhetoric of ‘self-repair’ should be understood in this hyper-contradictory

motion that affirms life in its totality. 34 Art does not calm, cure, sublimate or pay off. But Chadwick’s art

was never a disinterested exercise either. Rather, it defines a permanent state of maximal existence

lived out in all of its ‘immense, ludicrous and painful convulsion.’35

‘Curing’ thus becomes a form of largesse; Chadwick carries into the visual field a variety of versions

of plenitude. Loop my Loop describes a mode of luxuriant existence between, with, around and

across contradictions; the Wreaths to Pleasure, Piss Flowers, and Cacao negotiate a kind of living

joyfully in scorn of life; and the Oval Court raises the possibility of peace and happiness in misfortune,

while Viral Landscapes affirm the triumph of existence in its negation. As Bataille noted, a different

theory of the ‘positive value of loss,’ neither as gain/profit nor as an irrevocable chasm/guilt, is needed

to understand the human yearning that fuels this kind of amoralist celebration of life. 36 Indeed,

Bataille’s evocation of Nietzsche’s persona can serve as a final commentary on Chadwick’s own

approach to art. Like Nietzsche’s thought, Chadwick’s art reveals a ‘matter-of-fact relationship to the

worst eventualities’ and ‘a passive presence of the abyss within,’ but also a great deal of ‘ease and

playfulness,’ and, what is most important, a resolute avoidance ‘of the heavy and constraining

raptures [of] mystics.’ 37

Aris Sarafianos

University of Manchester

1
Mark Sladen, ed., Helen Chadwick, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2004, 7-8.
2
Charlotte Higgins, ‘Fire Claims works by Helen Chadwick,’ Guardian (30 June 2004).
11
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

3
Chadwick, ‘Soliloquy to Flesh’ in Helen Chadwick, Enfleshings, New York, 1989, 109.
4
The recent history of this frequently frustrating story is magisterially reviewed by Roy Porter in ‘The
Two Cultures Revisited,’ Boundary 2, 23:2 (Summer 1996), 1-17.
5
See note 33.
6
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’ (1886) in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings,
ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, Cambridge, 1999, 5.
7
See, for example, Mary Horlock, ‘Between a Rock and a Soft Place’ in Helen Chadwick, 33-46.
8
Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain, Cambridge, Mass., London, 1995, 110ff, and Anne Thomson,
‘Materialistic Theories of Mind and Brain’ in Between Leibniz, Newton and Kant, ed. W. Lefevre,
Amsterdam, 2001, 149-173.
9
Chadwick, Enfleshings, 97.
10
Chadwick, Enfleshings, 97. Compare with Michel Foucault, ‘Life: Experience and Science’ in The
Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion,
London, 1998, 465-478, and Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Question of Normality in the History of
Biological Thought’ in Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, Cambridge, Mass.
and London, 1988, 125-147.
11
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, London, 1979. Compare to Michel Serres with Bruno Latour,
Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, transl. Roxanne Lapidas, Ann Arbor, 1995, 31ff.
12
Chadwick, Enfleshings, 95-7.
13
Chadwick, Enfleshings, 97.
14
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 8.
15
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 8.
16
Chadwick, Enfleshings, 97.
17
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 115-6.
18
See for example Horlock in Helen Chadwick, 41.
19
‘Interview with Haworth-Booth’ in Helen Chadwick, Stilled Lives, Portfolio Gallery, Edinburgh, 1996,
np.
20
Marina Warner, ‘In the Garden of Delights’ in Chadwick, Enfleshings, 39-62.
21
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 4.
22
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 7.
23
Chadwick, Enfleshings, 29.
24
‘Helen Chadwick: Obituary,’ Times (19 March 1996), 19.
25
Warner, ‘Garden of Delights’ in Enfleshings, 56.

12
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005
 © Aris Sarafianos, 2005

26
Marina Warner, ‘In Extremis: Helen Chadwick and the Wound of Difference’ in Chadwick, Stilled
Lives, np.
27
See, for example, Horlock in Helen Chadwick, 41.
28
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Wornersley, London, 1998, 121. For Nietzsche’s use
of the motors of contradiction, see Nietzsche, ‘The Dionysiac World View’ in The Birth of Tragedy,
119-138.
29
Jonathan Jones, ‘Helen Chadwick,’ Guardian (21 May 21 2004).
30
Serres with Latour, Conversations on Science, 91.
31
Serres with Latour, Conversations on Science, 67-70.
32
Serres with Latour, Conversations on Science, 183 and 77-123.
33
Warner, Enfleshings, 54-55 and ‘Preface’ in Helen Chadwick, 10. See also Evan Martischnig,
‘Getting Inside the Artist’s Head’ in Helen Chadwick, 51-3.
34
For an example of this kind of art production and interpretation, see Pulse: Art, Healing and
Transformation, ed. Jessica Morgan, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2003.
35
Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, transl. Bruce Boone, St. Paul, Minn., 1992, xxix.
36
Bataille, On Nietzsche , xxi.
37
Bataille, On Nietzsche, 139.

13
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005