The Animated Abject: Erik Ferguson
Adam Tedesco
Have you ever had a fear of cumming while on psychedelics?
I found Erik Ferguson’s art through his Instagram, the animations of throbbing larval and organoid forms instantly recalling for me the night some friends and I each dropped four hits of 2C-1 and went to a screening of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. It was a night that ended in violence and property damage after I turned down a handjob from one of these friends.
While I’m tempted to propose that Ferguson’s work fits into a new trend of acceptance including the popularity of Fatberg sightings, slime, and television programming like Dr. Pimple Popper, it seems equally likely that this is not the case, but rather the overflow of these materials from their conceptual containment as mere object exploitation. It’s worth noting here that Ferguson has stated that he actively uses social media to test concepts, which may indicate the scale tipping toward the possibility of the former.
The internet is rife with abjection. I once tried writing a process based work by searching for nausea inducing videos on YouTube. But in addition to the titles I had the strongest reaction to the name of the businesses whose ads appeared before, after, or during the video. I wasn’t able to complete the project, as I threw up after watching three mango worm removal videos in a row.
The genius of Erik Ferguson’s work lies in his ability to instill the horrific with a playfulness that borders on cheery. Whereas classic examples of the abject in popular film, like Cronenberg’s body horror-centered work, the Alien series, or Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, harness the darkness of the abject, Ferguson’s animation is the best, if not the only example I know of liminal corporeality harnessed in a relatively unthreatening manner.1
Julia Kristeva, whose Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection is the core theoretical text concerning the concept, states that the abject, “is something rejected from which one does not part.” The orgasm is a temporal interval ripe with abjection, but the experience of it is regarded as disordered. Our relation to other bodily movements are thought perverse if experienced free of abjection. The thing about psychedelics is you often become acutely aware of the ridiculous predicament of embodiment. You recognize your body’s place in the lineage of animal forms. You feel alternating wonderment, strangeness, and fear in all its functions.
At times Ferguson’s work leans toward the sexual to the point of anatomical overtness, dangling the choice to abject before the viewer. Of course, there’s a strong heteronormative bent to popular conceptions of the abject, a point Judith Butler has expounded on at length. With this in mind the importance of Ferguson’s work becomes clearer. By drawing us closer to a reacceptance of abjection, our othering tendencies become easier to dissect.
1. Jackie Skrzynski is an artist who is masterfully depicts the natural echoes of form between flora and fauna, with similar but alternating currents of both abjection and its amelioration in her larger works.
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Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His video work has been screened at MoMA PS1, among other venues. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, jubilat, Posit, Conduit and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Misrule (Ursus Americanus, 2019). His first full-length poetry collection, Mary Oliver, was published by Lithic Press in February.