Christian Mieves

Department of Fine Art, 

School of Arts and Cultures 

Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne

Reino Unido

This paper will explore the links between the motifs of the beach and cannibalism in contemporary North-American painting and of how such motifs and their connections relate to the concept of gender and sexual identities. Both tropes represent an ‘in-between’ state, thus contradicting and queering certain ‘straight-laced’ tendencies in modern civilisation. As such, they offer an ideal arena to discuss the boundaries of gender definition. 

Further to this, the paper will investigate why the beach appears to be the most adequate environment for anthropophagy, also strongly linked to sexual perversions. These theoretical issues will be illustrated with an analysis of the work of contemporary US painter Dana Schutz (born 1976), who gained recognition through her paintings of cannibalistic scenes. Her work questions the relation between beginning and end, self and other. In her paintings the individuals are not dreading cannibals on the beach, instead they devour themselves. These scenes of horrific devouring suggest that elimination and creation cohabit in a sublime in-between stage. 

The beach is often described as a kind of hybrid space which lies outside the social and ontological restraints, where different orders or value systems collide. In the early eighteenth-century Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) offered a route of escapism to readers, whereas in the nineteenth-century Western bourgeois society imagined itself depicted at new sites of leisure at the height of industrialisation (Monet’s The Beach at Trouville (1870) would be a classic example). Today’s television programmes such as Shipwreck (UK Channel 4), Lost (USA ABC) or popular films such as The Beach (dir. Danny Boyle, 2000) are comparable illustrations of how society perceives the beach as a site of ‘jouissance’ but also danger. 

In sharp contrast with leisurely perceptions of the beach, television news broadcasts are inundated with horrifying scenes of would-be immigrants arriving in decrepit fishing vessels at various beaches throughout the European coastline. The threat of intrusion, penetration and danger is almost intrinsic to the site of the beach. The tensions between these aspects are palpable in Schutz’s unsettling work. Whereas the notion of cannibalism has been traditionally reduced to an anthropological phenomenon, in recent years it has gradually become a cultural signifier that defines the relation to the Other, as clearly seen in the work presented at the XXIV Biennale Exhibition in San Paulo 1998. 

The pictorial representation of cannibalism can also be traced historically to key referents such as Rubens’s Saturn devouring his Children (1523); Goya’s painting of the same title (1821-23); Salvador Dali’s Autumn Cannibalism (1936) or Jeff Wall’s The Vampires’ Picnic (1991) to mention but a few. Dana Schutz’s work follows a certain currency in contemporary painting – widely noted by critics: an overinvestment on remote, liminal spaces such as alpine regions, forests, seaside, or beaches also seen in the work of Peter Doig, Dexter Dalwood or Michael Raedecker amongst others. 

Topics which show subjects such as ‘folk’, ‘tribe’ and ‘outsider’ are frequent and reflect a fascination with ‘the Other’. In Freudian terms, cannibalism could be seen to endanger the progress of modern civilisation and to threaten the idea of the self by breaching the separation between self and other. Using such readings as a point of departure, this paper will explore the ‘queering’ potential of both the beach and cannibalism as pictorial motifs.

About Christian Mieves