The Flower Vase Cut

In Michael Taussig's 'The Language of Flowers' he describes a work of artist Jaun Manuel Echavarria which is titled the Flower Vase cut. Echavarria cites the title of his work as '...referring to the name of one of the mutilations practiced in the Colombian violencia of the 1940's and 1950's in which the amputated limbs were stuffed, so it is said, into the thorax via the neck of the decapitated corpse.' (Taussig 189)

The fanciful titling of this brutal treatment rather than Echavarria's art in response to it is what catches my attention, it seems that somehow the naming of this psychotic deed as something so whimsical like 'The Flower Vase Cut' has removed it from the glaring reality of a killing which will shortly be followed by stinking decay and has instead changed it into something else entirely. This magical ability of language to transform is exhibited by Sigmund Freud in his essay 'The Uncanny' where he devotes four entire pages to an examination of different translations of the German word heimelich. Of his findings he writes that:

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one (meaning) which is identical with its opposite...In general we are reminded that the word heimlih is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets of ideas which without being contradictory are very different (Freud 132).

Freuds examination of language to help define the uncanny has in fact moved him further away from an exact meaning rather than closer to one, it is this ability of words to conceal rather than concede the truth that is both magical and menacing in its possibilities.

The Flower Vase Cut doesn't sound like a bloody, screaming, entrail dragging type of thing, giving it a whimsical title has moved it far from its existence as a brutal and violent death, its new name has placed it calmly in a new corner where it sits as a finished object, an outcome that has been achieved.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Britain: Antony Rowe Ltd, 2003. Print

Taussig, Michael. The Language of Flowers,Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print