What is Abject

The abject, in ways is the feeling of threat. Its a loss of distinction, when our minds can see a similarity but don’t want to. Revealing the thoughts is it real or an object, is it horrifying or human?

Artist Jane Alexander has created a piece called ‘Butcher Boys’ which challenged the viewers minds with the abject figures that were made and placed so life like. She helps give people a clearer understanding of why we may reject what seems unnatural to us with the human body. Why is it we find disfigurements of the human body so hard to look at.

‘In Butcher Boys, the viewer faces a sculptural tableau of three highly realistic, mutilated, pale, bestial figures seated on a simple bench, similar to those placed elsewhere in the gallery for museum visitors. The Boys' twisted animal horns, cleaved backs, exposed spinal columns, mutilated faces, and castrated genitalia seem to manifest the disfigured social body of South Africa under apartheid; although the significance of Alexander's practice seems to be the horror and repulsion that she causes us to experience, the challenge that she poses to us as viewers is to deconstruct this sensation -- that is, to consider why we feel this way in the presence of the figures that the artist produces.

Indeed, in spite of their bestial horns, frequently disfigured faces, and castrated genitalia, these figures do not horrify us because they are inhuman; rather, they are horrifying because they are fundamentally human. Their hands, skin, musculature, life-size bodies, familiar postures, and expressive affect are recognizable as like our own, regardless of whether we want to acknowledge this similarity.’

Tenley Bick’s words from his article on Alexander’s piece describes the feelings we experience when presented with the abject clearly. Tenley presents the idea that we are so struck by these kinds of disfigurements and images because it could be or happen to us and if so we want to ignore this idea.

(Quote and research found on www.athens.ac.uk, Horror Histories Apartheid and the Abject Body in the Work of Jane Alexander, author Tenley Bick)