Monique Genton

The Science of Swimming

Photo from original swimming manual ©1929	Three frame stills from video with text: "Its cool glove slipped over my skin and caressed me in its palm."	Installation View, NAME Gallery, Chicago, 1996
This 7 min video examines scientific representation's problematic reduction of human experience through a mind/body split, subjectification, the exclusion of feminine thought, creating a hierarchy of senses, etc. Scientific representation thus forms a violence on subjects rendered silenced and fractured through methodologies that remain largely unquestioned yet highly legitimate within the realm of knowledges. When I encountered my source images in a 1929 swimming manual, I was struck with how these instructional photographs fail miserably to describe swimming’s multisensory experi-ence, meanwhile, asserting legitimacy through an import of scientific rhetori-cal strategies. The Science of Swimming video at-tempts to reinvest the book illustrations' absent sensory experience through the introduction of poetic gestures, references to non-visual senses, subject-based perspectives, and a re-scripted narrative. I have augmented the original swimming manual's text with what the subject may have heard, thought, or felt. In addition, there is a voice-over of excerpts from Kate Chopin's The Awakening, a turn-of-the-century novel about a woman’s discovery of her identity and of her sexuality through the experience of swim-ming. The addition of these two narratives acts to de-center the authoritative scientific text and to tell stories not yet told. The new meaning created through these juxtapositions underlines science's moral and non-objective foundations and it's systematic exclusion of the sensual.