Be Takerng Pattanopas: Interior Horizons
Lawrence Chua

It is easy, starting with the worm, to consider ironically an animal, a fish, a monkey, a man, as a tube with two orifices, anal and buccal: the nostrils, the eyes, the ears, the brain represent the complications of the buccal orifice; the penis, the testicles, or the female organs that correspond to them, are the complication of the anal. In these conditions, the violent thrusts that come from the interior of the body can be indifferently rejected to one extremity or the other, and they are discharged, in fact, where they meet the weakest resistance. All the ornaments of the head, of whatever type, mean the generalized privilege of the oral extremity; one can only contrast them with the decorative riches of the excremental extremity of apes.
- Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’ in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985.

I had always considered my body a sort of home until I fell seriously ill. For over a year, all the things in which I believed seemed to fail me over and again: Chinese medicine, Western medicine, and then religion. Time and again my body failed to live up to the logic of these systems to which I had once been faithful. My body seemed so willful and malicious at times, failing me at precisely the moments that I needed it to perform. Just as I thought my body was repairing itself, it would show me just how little I knew of the way that it functioned. My body felt as if it were a strange new country where I could not even discern the fundamentals of the language. Doctors tried to map out this country. Cameras invaded my body and attempted to render it in visual terms. The images that they produced, while textbook-familiar, revealed nothing.

Be Takerng Pattanopas’ sculptures remind us of the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy. Freud used the term unheimlich, or ‘unhomely’, to refer to the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become de-familiarized, de-realized, as if in a dream.  In Pattanopas’s work, what appears at first to be familiar to the point of being mundane becomes something unsettling and strange upon closer examination. While there is much about Pattanopas’s works that point literally to the human body, it also rises above metaphor to pose difficult questions about the quality of space in global capitalism.

In Hal-O 2 2008, the solidness of the sculpture’s steel exterior gives way to a play on depth and perception. The monolithic exterior gives way to a series of sensual folds as the viewer’s eye is lead along a series of meandering tunnels. Although the immediate reference of this work is the enigmatic computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the series conjures less obvious similarities to aspects of religious architecture as well as contemporary art. Three references that come to immediate mind are the tunnels attributed to King Ku Na at Wat Umong (Chiang Mai, ca. 1380 C.E.); the interstitial spaces of Gordon Matta-Clark such as A W-Hole House: Datum Cut 1973; and the way the eye is conducted in Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés 1946-66. At Wat Umong, pilgrims enter a series of connected tunnels underneath a hill. While the daily activities of the wat are usually conducted in pavilions closer to the temple entrance, the tunnels themselves remain the key architectural focus and the namesake of the complex. Fragments of paintings adorn the walls; their narrative meanings have faded long ago. In Matta-Clark’s work, the interior spaces of common dwellings are opened up to the exterior, breaking down the boundaries between private and public life. In Duchamp’s diorama, the viewer’s eye is conducted through a crack in a doorway to a woman’s naked torso lying in a field. Invariably, the eye falls on the woman’s vagina. One gets the sense that one is looking at something one is not supposed to see but it is impossible to look away.

In all of these precedents, the act of seeing is more than an intellectual exercise. Pattanopas similarly produces an environment in which the act of viewing becomes a sensual exercise. The transitory space of the body is grasped in a compelling, visceral way. The tunnels in Hal-O 2 are conduits into other, heretofore unseen spaces. These dream spaces, at once familiar and alien, are transitional territories between inside and out, between the solidness of the sculpture’s exterior and the curious worlds that inhabit its interior. Susan Buck-Morss, writing about Walter Benjamin’s master work, The Arcades Project, reminds us that the 19th-century covered shopping arcades that inspired Benjamin were the precise material replica of the internal unconscious of the dreaming collective. All the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there as well as all of its utopian dreams. 

Pattanopas’s works invite viewers to consider not only the impermanent quality of the human form, but the kind of home such a form might inhabit. What does a home in the world today look like? What is the strange new dream spaces opened up by contemporary global capitalism? The history of capitalism has been a process of interiorization. Nearly everything has been brought under the roof of the market place. Global capitalism today demands that our bodies be in many places at the same time. Time and again the body is called on to perform according to this rigorous logic. And time and again it fails. What are these places where the body fails the demands of the market place and instead produces its own logic?

In the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa’s 5th century commentary on the Tipitaka, the body is compared to a maternity home, a hospital, a charnel ground, a privy and a urinal, a host shared by many creatures that live in dependence on all its parts and organs and feed on them.  Be Takerng Pattanopas’ work draws out the tension between this view and the ways that global capitalism values the space of the body as something akin to real estate. At once solid and porous, finite and endless, Pattanopas’s work is a meditation on the ever moving and ultimately unknowable worlds that continue to open up within us.

Lawrence Chua is a widely published cultural critic and author of the novel Gold by the Inch (Grove Press 1999), set in SE Asia. He is currently completing research on Thai architectural history in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning of Cornell University and is based in the Faculty of Architecture of Chulalongkorn University throughout the academic year of 2008-09.