Tears Are The Ashes Of Emotion

Pierre et Gilles (b. 1949 & 1953) - La Madone au Coeur Blessé, Lio, 1991


The Weeping Song (1990) - Nick Cave (b. 1957)

Go son, go down to the water
And see the women weeping there.
Then go up into the mountains;
the men, they are weeping too.
Father, why are all the women weeping?
They are all weeping for their men.
Then why are all the men there weeping?
They are weeping back at them.

This is a weeping song,
A song in which to weep
While all the men and women sleep.
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long.

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying, son.
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come.

This is a weeping song,
A song in which to weep
While all the little children sleep.
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long.

O father, tell me, are you weeping?
Your face seems wet to touch.
O, then I am sorry, father,
I never thought I hurt you so much.

This is a weeping song,
A song in which to weep
While we rock ourselves to sleep.
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long.
No, I won't be weeping long.

Paradise Is Not A Box Of Chocolates

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Basel, c. 1875

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."

"No price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself."

"To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity."

"Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter."

"If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You've Got To Pick-A-Pocket Or Two, Boys

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) - Pickpocket, 1959

"There is a prominent credit at the start of Pickpocket to the mysteriously named Kassagi, who is not only part of the cast as ‘Accomplice 1’ but, even more importantly, ‘Technical Adviser for the Thieves' Gestures’. And what gestures they are! Nimble fingers that steal into breast pockets, a hand that drops a wallet in a split-second beat down to another hand (his own or someone else's), swift movements that transfer an object from a newspaper to a bag to a coat...

Robert Bresson may well have found Kassagi in the criminal underworld. Cinematographer Leonce-Henry Burel tells the story of a day on set when, due to complex outdoor filming, several gendarmes were present to supervise crowds and traffic. At the end of the day, Kassagi took these cops to the pub - where he revealed to them every key, wallet and watch he had surreptitiously stolen from them while they worked. After the film wrapped, Kassagi was too well known to return to a life of crime. Instead, he started on a successful career as a music hall and cabaret entertainer. His magic skill of prestidigitation moved from streets and train stations to the showbiz stage.

Pickpocket is all about the transformation of an identity. Michel (Martin Lasalle) represents the fanciful temptation of living 'beyond the law'. Depending on what you bring to the film, this character is an archetype derived from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or French existentialist philosophy; or he is a rebel-hero who anticipates the restless anarchism of any period in any country since. Babette Mangolte, who made the wonderful documentary Pickpocket’s Models, first saw the film a year before the events of May 1968; for her it expressed “what it is to be a student in Paris and also the desire to be a criminal, which is a profound insight into people's desires.”

For this reason, Michel is also a superb figure of cinema. He is single-minded, obsessed, driven; but also an ascetic, bookworm intellectual (and hence the model for Paul Schrader's leading men from Taxi Driver to Light Sleeper. He is caught up in an escalating thrill that Bresson captures so well in each new, extravagant round of thievery - culminating in a veritable group-ballet of three pickpockets which rivals the finest piece of Hollywood musical choreography. He is an amalgam of both Gangster (increasingly suspicious and paranoid, like Scorsese's Henry Hill in Goodfellas) and Artist (always pre-visualising, rehearsing, staging ...directing).

Pickpocket exists to take this fascinating character through the gauntlet of his own fixated, solipsistic desire ...but to where, exactly? Commentators on the film have given this destination at the end of Michel’s journey many names, often with a religious ring: Grace, Fate, Predestination, Redemption. Filmmaker Marco Bellocchio puts it in simpler, earthier terms: “The madness of a man is defeated by a beautiful woman who is not mad”. Michel's last-moment swerve towards humanity (and normality) has been copied in a hundred subsequent films, almost never convincingly. What secret Bressonian ingredient are they lacking or missing?

Whatever it is can surely be found in those thieves’ gestures. Pickpocketing is, quite literally, the movement, the action, of something mysterious in the world. It is physically visible, and yet swifter than the camera-eye or viewer-eye can register; now you see it, but you don't. Bresson, with the close-up inserts of details he loves so much, abstracts this action of theft: there is no longer a criminal and a victim, but only parts of bodies, dancing, interchangeable, fused into a rhythm that calls up the lush music of Lulli. You can call this movement of a trans-personal force in the world something Divine, a Spirit or Soul; or you can quit the heavenly metaphors and think of it as the movement of Eros, a chaste but thrillingly intense sexuality within the bustling, metropolitan everyday. But the greatness of Bresson’s best films lies in the way that we can never finally adjudicate between, or even separate, the material and the spiritual, the ecstasy of the transcendent and the ecstasy of the flesh.

A preliminary text from the auteur advises us that the style of Pickpocket is “not that of a thriller”. He's kidding, isn't he? Bresson had already made one of the most thrilling, suspenseful films in cinema history (the Resistance prison movie A Man Escaped, 1956), and he would do it again in Pickpocket. It is hard to imagine Bresson had not seen the opening of Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), and impossible for a film buff not to think ahead to Jean-Pierre Melville's maniacally detailed ‘crime procedurals’, like Le Samourai (1967). But Bressonian suspense, it is true, has nothing much to do with Hollywood’s, or Hitchcock’s, techniques. Bresson worked with a savagely pared ­down economy of elements focused on with blinding concentration; that is what we would be prone, these days, to call 'minimalism', if it did not rocket the narrative of Pickpocket forward with an elliptical pace that is completely exhilarating.

Disarming, too. There is something almost outrageous in Bresson’s stylisations - that famous method, system or syntax which belongs authentically to him and nobody else. Take a look and listen to the first three shots: after the preliminary image of Michel writing his life-account, there is a dissolve to a woman's gloved hand (it, too, could be criminal!) daintily transferring money from a purse to a male hand; this old chap, now shown full-body, walks over to a betting booth, as the sound (even more than the image or setting) informs us that we are at a racetrack; this man, at the end of his action, turns and shoots a sudden suspicious glance off-screen. Cut to Michel, static but alert and nervy. What we need to know about his state of mind is instantly 'punched in' via voice-over narration: “I was now determined. But would I be bold enough?” In around twenty seconds, the plot is already flying.

This little introductory vignette perfectly encapsulates everything about Bresson’s style: its 'hard cuts' on looks and glances as well as its ‘soft dissolves’ that link objects across diverse times, scenes and spaces; its driven will to skip as much superfluous incident, exposition and explanation as possible (later, we won't even see Michel’s two years of “gambling and women” in London); and its penchant for what filmmakers call ‘the reveal’ (Michel is always discovering strange things in his path: his best friend in his humble apartment, Jeanne’s baby on the floor...)

Perhaps the most controversial element of Bresson’s style, yesterday as today, is the use of what he termed ‘models’: non-professionals who rigorously had any tics or mannerisms of expressivity knocked out of them during endless rehearsals. In their blankness, paradoxically, they become full, reflective of everything around them, as well as the desires we project onto them. The model-legacy in cinema is evident in everything from Alain Cavalier to Ivan Sen, and not always happily. Even in Bresson’s own work, models can too easily become just zombies or sleepwalkers. But in Pickpocket, there is life in these models: Lasalle, looking a little like Montgomery Clift, is like a spring coiled tight, eyes darting, shoulders hunched forward, ever-ready for action; and Marika Green (mother of Eva Green, star of Bertolucci's The Dreamers) is the sort of tough, terse, impossibly sublime beauty that Bresson often found - the film casts only a sidelong glance at Jeanne's story, but it is still a fascinating one, poised enigmatically between the ethereal and the carnal.

There is another master of legerdemain hidden within Pickpocket - with a strange (and hitherto unremarked) Australian connection. A book circulates between Michel, his friend Jacques and the Chief Inspector- The Prince of Pickpockets, written by Richard S. Lambert in 1930 - and its subject, George Barrington, is discussed several times. Barrington was an extravagant criminal legend in London; when he was finally arrested and deported to Australia in 1851, his mere presence was enough to win the colony the dubious title of ‘The Continent of Pickpockets’. But Barrington turned his life around; moving swiftly to the side of the Law, he became Superintendent of Convicts at Parramatta - and the author of an admired book on penal colony history (as well as his autobiography). Suzanne Rickard describes this strange figure in Australian history as “archetypal ...a folk hero in elegant dress, the implicit model of the universal sinner, saved from himself by the generous act of transportation, and provided with a new life and new identity.” That works well as a description of Michel.

As a film artist, Robert Bresson devoted his life to offering us his 'generous acts of transportation'. Durgnat jusged the "emotional intensity" of his work to be "generated by his terse, almost secretive, style". Kassagi, Michel, Barrington, Bresson: all of them artists, showmen, inspired and driven thieves in the bright daylight, involved in something spectacular, secretive - magical."

The Prince of Pickpockets – Adrian Martin (2005)


Links:

Pickpocket - Rick J Thompson

Bressonian - Adrian Martin

The Narrative Cracks: Emotion in Robert Bresson - Bill Mousoulis

Bresson - Kent Jones

Bresson: Destinies Making Themselves in a Work of Hands - M C Zenner


The Week in Review:

Films:

All About Eve - d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1950)
Of Human Bondage - d. John Cromwell (1934)

Television Series:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Series Seven

Ep. 1: Lessons
Ep. 2: Beneath You
Ep. 3: Same Time, Same Place
Ep. 4: Help
Ep. 5: Selfless
Ep. 6: Him
Ep. 7: Conversations with Dead People
Ep. 8: Sleeper
Ep. 9: Never Leave Me
Ep. 10: Bring On the Night
Ep. 11: Showtime
Ep. 12: Potential
Ep. 13: The Killer in Me
Ep. 14: First Date
Ep. 15: Get It Done
Ep. 16: Storyteller
Ep. 17: Lies My Parents Told Me
Ep. 18: Dirty Girls
Ep. 19: Empty Places
Ep. 20: Touched
Ep. 21: End Of Days
Ep. 22: Chosen

Take Me To My Reader

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) - Protect Me From What I Want, 2002

"We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us."

François Rabelais (1483-1553)

"The desire to write grows with writing."

Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536)

"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."

William Blake (1757-1827)

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"If you desire many things, many things will seem but few."

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Where Others Fear To Leap

Yves Klein (1928-1962) - Leap Into The Void, 1960


"All sins are attempts to fill voids."

"Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only be one who is detached."

"I can, therefore I am."

"In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."

"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know."

"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest."

"The role of intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions - is merely to submit."

"To be a hero or heroine, on must give an order to oneself."

"Every separation is a link."

"We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise."

"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know it is really a door."

"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."

"Humility is attentive patience."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

"As in his carefully choreographed paintings in which he used nude female models dipped in blue paint as paintbrushes, Klein's photomontage paradoxically creates the impression of freedom and abandon through a highly contrived process. In October 1960, the American photographer Harry Shunk made a series of pictures re-creating a jump from a second-floor window that the artist claimed to have executed earlier in the year; the figure and the surrounding scene were then collaged together and rephotographed to create its "documentary" appearance. To complete the illusion that the event had actually taken place, Klein distributed a fake broadsheet at Parisian news-stands commemorating it. It was in this mass-produced form that the artist's seminal gesture was communicated to the public and also notably to the Vienna Actionists."

From Timeline of Art History

The Red Tower: Part Three

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) - The Red Tower, 1911-12

"There were some artists to whom this mechanical age was more than a context, and very much more than a pretext. They wanted to explore its characteristic images of light, structure, and dynamism as subjects in their work. The most gifted of them in the Ecole de Paris, and still the least appreciated today, was Robert Delaunay (1885-1941). For him, the master-image was the Eiffel Tower, which he viewed with real ecstasy as an ecumenical object, the social condenser of a new age. . . .

[Delaunay] wanted a pictorial speech that was entirely of this century, based on rapid interconnection, changing viewpoints, and an adoration of "good" technology, and the Tower was the supreme practical example of this in the daily life of Paris. His friend and collaborator, the poet Blaise Cendrars, remarked in 1924 that

No formula of art known up to now can pretend to give practical resolution to the Eiffel Tower. Realism shrank it; the old laws of Italian perspective diminished it. The Tower rose over Paris, slender as a hatpin. When we retreated from it, it dominated Paris, stark and perpendicular. When we came close, it tilted and leaned over us. Seen from the first platform, it corkscrewed around its own axis, and seen from the top it collapsed into itself, doing the splits, its neck pulled in . . . .

Delaunay must have painted the Tower thirty times, and he was almost the only artist to paint it at all - although it makes a modest appearance in an oil sketch by Seurat, and crops up now and again in backgrounds of the Douanier Rousseau. The Red Tower, 1911-12 [above], shows how fully Delaunay could realise the sensations of vertigo and visual shuttling that Cendrars described. The Tower is seen, almost literally, as a prophet of the future - its red figure, so reminiscent of a man, ramping among the silvery lead roofs of Paris and the distant puffballs of cloud. That vast grid rising over Paris with the sky reeling through it became his fundamental image of modernity: light seen through structure."

From 'The Mechanical Paradise' (The Shock of the New) by Robert Hughes

The Red Tower: Part Two

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) - Eiffel Tower with Trees, 1910

"The planners of the Paris World's Fair wanted something even more spectacular than the Crystal Palace. But Paxton's triumph could not be capped by another horizontal building, so they decided to go up: to build a tower that would be the tallest manmade object on earth, topping out - before the installation of its present-day radio and TV masts - at 1056 feet high. No doubt a Biblical suggestion was at work, consciously or not. Since the Fair would embrace all nations, its central metaphor should be the Tower of Babel. But the Tower embodied other and socially deeper metaphors. The theme of the Fair was manufacture and transformation, the dynamics of capital rather than simple ownership. It was meant to illustrate the triumph of the present over the past, the victory of industrial over landed wealth that represented the essential economic difference between the Third Republic and the Ancien Regime. What more more brilliant centrepiece for it than a structure that turned its back on the ownership of land - that occupied unowned and previously useless space, the sky itself? In becoming a huge vertical extrusion of a tiny patch of the earth's surface, it would demonstrate the power of process. Anyone could buy land, but only la France moderne could undertake the conquest of the air.

The Fair's commissioners turned to an engineer, not an architect, to design the Tower. This decision was in itself symbolic, and it went against the prestige of Beaux-Arts architects as the official voice of the State; but Gustave Eiffel, who was fifty-seven and at the peak of his career when he took the job, managed to infuse his structure with what now seems to be a singular richness of meaning. Its remote inspiration was the human figure - the Tower imagined as a benevolent colossus, planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris. It also referred to the greatest permanent festive structure of the seventeenth century, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome, which (like the Tower) was a spike balanced over a void defined by four arches and (like the Fair itself) was an image of ecumenical domination of the four quarters of the world.

You could not escape the Tower. It was and is the one structure that can be seen from every point in the city. No metropolis in Europe had even been so visually dominated by a single structure, except Rome by St. Peter's; and even today, Eiffel's spike is more generally visible in its own city than Michelangelo's dome. The Tower became the symbol of Paris overnight, and in doing so, it proclaimed la ville lumiere to be the modernist capital - quite independently of anything else that might be written, composed, produced, or painted there. As such, it was praised by Guillaume Apollonaire, the cosmopolitan poet who had once been a Catholic and imagined, in a tone of mingled irony and delight, the Second Coming of Christ enacted in a new Paris whose centre was the Tower, at the edge of the coming millennium, the twentieth century:

At last you are tired of this old world.
O shepherd Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning
You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here, even the automobiles seem to be ancient
Only religion has remained brand new, religion
Has remained simple as simple as the aerodrome hangars
It's God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday
It's Christ who climbs in the sky better than any aviator
He holds the world's altitude record
Pupil Christ of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows what he's about,
And the century, become a bird, climbs skywards towards Jesus.

The important thing was that the Tower had a mass audience; millions of people, not the thousands who went to the salons and galleries to look at works of art, were touched by the feeling of a new age that the Eiffel Tower made concrete. It was the herald of a millennium, as the nineteenth century made ready to click over into the twentieth. And in its heights, its structural daring, its then-radical use of industrial materials for the commemorative purposes of the State, it summed up what the ruling classes of Europe conceived the promise of technology to be: Faust's contract, the promise of unlimited power over the world and its wealth."

From 'The Mechanical Paradise' (The Shock of the New) by Robert Hughes

The Red Tower: Part One

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) - Champ de Mars: The Red Tower, 1911-23


"In 1913, the French writer Charles Peguy remarked that "the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years." He was speaking of all the conditions of Western capitalist society: its idea of itself, its sense of history, its beliefs, pieties, and modes of production - and its art. In Peguy's time, the time of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the visual arts had a kind of social importance that they no longer claim today, and they seem to be in a state of utter convulsion. Did cultural turmoil predict social tumult? Many people thought so then; today we are not so sure, but that is because we live at the end of modernism, whereas they were alive at its beginning. Between 1880 and 1930, one of the supreme cultural experiments in the history of the world was enacted in Europe and America. After 1940 it was refined upon, developed here and exploited there, and finally turned into a kind of entropic, institutionalised parody of itself. Many people think the modernist laboratory is now vacant. It has become less an arena for significant experiment and more like a period room in a museum, an historical space that we can enter, look at, but no longer be part of. In art, we are at the end of the modernist era, but this is not - as some critics apparently think - a matter of self-congratulation. What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

For the French, and for the Europeans in general, the great metaphor of this sense of change - its master-image, the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together - was the Eiffel Tower. The Tower was finished in 1889, as the focal point of the Paris World's Fair. The date of the fair was symbolic. It was the centenary of the French Revolution. The holding of the World's Fairs, those festivals of high machine-age capitalism in which nation after nation showed off its industrial strength and the breadth of its colonial resources, was not, of course, new. The fashion had been set by Victoria's Prince Albert, in the Great Exhibition of 1851. There, the greatest marvels on view had not been the Birmingham stoves, the reciprocating engines, the looms, the silverware, or even the Chinese exotica; it had been their showplace itself, the Crystal Palace, with its vaults of glittering glass and nearly invisible iron tracery. One may perhaps mock the prose in which some Victorians recorded their wonder at this cathedral of the machine age, but their emotion was real."

From 'The Mechanical Paradise' (The Shock of the New) by Robert Hughes

Twelve Skulls (December Special)

Barthel Bruyn - Vanitas Still Life (early 1500s)

Willem Claesz Heda - Vanitas (1628)

Pieter Claesz - Vanitas Still Life (1630)

Harmen Evertz van Steenwyck - An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (c. 1640)

Harmen Evertz van Steenwyck - Vanitas (1640)

Adriaen van Utrecht - Still Life with Bouquet and Skull (1642)

Simon Renard de Saint-Andre - Vanitas (c. 1650)

Simon Renard de Saint-Andre - Vanitas (mid 1600s)

Simon Renard de Saint-Andre - Vanitas (mid 1600s)

Philippe de Champaigne - Memento Mori (c. 1655)

Franciscus Gysbrechts - Vanitas (late 1600s)

Pieter Gerritsz van Roestraeten - Vanitas Still Life (late 1600s)


Andy Warhol's assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, once remarked that to paint a skull is to do "the portrait of everybody in the world".


Links:

Skull Symbolism

Memento Mori

Vanitas

For Those Days When Art Just Gives You The Shits

Piero Manzoni (1933-63) - Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit), 1961

"Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist who died at the age of 29 in 1963. But before he went he got some excrement - his own - and put it in a tin can. 'Excellent!' he said, in Italian, 'I think I'll call it Merda d'artista!'

Manzoni's canned shit is well known now, or the idea of it is. It's an idea as powerful in the popular imagination as the idea of blank canvases. In fact the actual cans are not all that well known. There are many of them. Each one contains an amount of the artist's own shit. On the label it says 30 grams but of course no one can really tell. The labels are quite detailed and well designed, with the name of the work in three languages, plus the date, the artist's signature and the name of the collector who owns the individual can - all this is part of the look. PIERO MANZONI is printed on the label in light grey letters on a grey ground, with the name repeating so it makes a mantra of the artist's name, as well as a grey and yellow pattern.

When they were first sold they cost their weight in gold. Now they're worth much more. If one came on the market today it would cost about 30,000 pounds. So while a pile of them was shown in a vitrine in London's Serpentine Gallery recently, it was a pile of shit but it was nearly a million pound's worth. . .

Money, shit, art: the holy trinity. Manzoni took jokes to a higher plane than Duchamp, in that he elevated them to the spiritual plane which was somewhere Duchamp never really wanted to go. Manzoni transubstantiated the things of the earth into mystery things. His signature was his magic medium. With it he could turn balloons filled with his breath into saintly relics or make women into artworks. He signed them and issued them with a certificate so that they knew what class of living art work they were - temporary, permanent, intermittent and so on. Each state was symbolised by stamp of a different colour on the certificate - for example, a state of permanent art was symbolised by a red stamp. The women had no special duties as works of art but they did become prisoners of Manzoni, prisoners of his idea.

He wanted to make the world into a prisoner too, with a metal cube inscribed with the words 'Base of the world', which he exhibited upside down on the floor, making the earth into a sculpture, one that floated in infinite space."

From This Is Modern Art by Matthew Collings

Not Being There - Or, We Like To Be Watched

Gilbert and George (b, 1943 and 1942) - Spat On , 1996

"We don't have anything to say except with our pictures."

"We don't want to think. It's exhausting enough without that."

"We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought."

"We don't want to know what we're doing. It's much better not to know."

"A clergyman once said to us, 'Jealousy is a bad thing'. But I must confess that I am sometimes jealous of the artist because the artist is closer to creation."

Gilbert and George

The Week in Review

Viewing:

All About My Mother - d. Pedro Almodóvar (1999)
Bad Education - d. Pedro Almodóvar(2004)
Il Bidone - d. Federico Fellini (1955)
Heat - d. Michael Mann (1995)
The Insider - d. Michael Mann (2004)
Jezebel - d. William Wyler (1938)
Now, Voyager - d. Irving Rapper (1942)
Palindromes - d. Todd Solondz (2004)
Pickpocket - d. Robert Bresson (1959)
Thief - d. Michael Mann (1981)


Reading:

Dada and Surrealist Film - ed. Rudolph E. Kuenzli
Forces of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film - Linda Williams
From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema - Steven Kovacs
Surrealism and Film - J. H. Matthews


Listening:

Different Trains - Steve Reich (1990)
Desert Music - Steve Reich (1990)
The Cave - Steve Reich (1995)
Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich (2000)


Exhibitions:

Juan Davila - National Gallery of Victoria (International)

I Have Heard The Absinthe Singing

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) - At The Moulin Rouge, 1892


"Of course, one should not drink much - but often."

"I paint things as they are. I don't comment. I record."

"These people annoy me. They want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. Look, it is easy to finish things . . . Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then."

"In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new. They see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves. Novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with only one thing - making a subject better from its intrinsic nature."

"I had placed my stick on the table, as I do every evening. It had been especially made to suit my height, to enable me to walk without much difficulty. As I was standing to get up, a customer called to me: 'Monsieur, don't forget your pencil.' It was very unkind, but most funny."

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk

Paul Klee (1879-1940) - Southern (Tunisian) Gardens, 1919


"He has found his style when he cannot do otherwise."

"A painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen."

"Art does not reproduce the visible - it makes visible."

"To emphasise only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that concerns itself only with positive numbers."

"A single day is enough to make us a littler larger or, another time, a little smaller."

Paul Klee

"Transcendentalism was the common interest of the painters who formed the Expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1910. It was also a deep-set part of Bauhaus thought and practice, for nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the Bauhaus represented some kind of logic opposed to the world-transforming aspirations of Expressionism. When Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus, so did a Swiss artist named Paul Klee. And though Klee was not a Theosophist he was, like Kandinsky, devoted to an ideal of painting that stemmed from German idealist metaphysics.

The monument of Klee's obsession with this metaphysics was a singular book, The Thinking Eye, written during his teaching years at the Bauhaus - one of the most detailed manuals on the "science" of design ever written, conceived in terms of an all embracing theory of visual "equivalents" for spiritual states which, in its knotty elaboration, rivalled Kandinsky's. Klee tended to see the world as a model, a kind of orrery run up by the cosmic clockmaker - a Swiss God - to demonstrate spiritual truth. This helps account for the toylike character of his fantasies; if the world had no final reality, it could be represented with the freest, most schematic wit, and this Klee set out to do. Hence his reputation as a petit-maître.

Like Kandinsky, Klee valued the "primitive," and especially the art of children. He envied their polymorphous freedom to create signs, and respected their innocence and directness. 'Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us . . .' In his desire to paint 'as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe,' Klee was a complete European. His work ferreted around in innumerable crannies of culture, bringing back small trophies and emblems from botany, astronomy, physics, and psychology. Music had a special influence on him. He believed that eighteenth-century counterpoint (his favourite form) could be translated quite directly into gradations of colour and value, repetitions and changes of motif; his compositions of stacked forms, fanned out like decks of cards or colour swatches, are attempts to freeze time in a static composition, to give visual motifs the "unfolding" quality of aural ones - and this sense of rhythmic disclosure, repetition, and blossoming transferred itself, quite naturally, to Klee's images of plants and flowers. He was the compleat Romantic, hearing the Weltgeist in every puff of wind, reverent before nature but careful to stylize it. Klee's assumptions were unabashedly transcendentalist. 'Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth,' he wrote in 1920, 'things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities . . .'

Klee's career was a search for the symbols and metaphors that would make this belief visible. More than any other painter outside the Surrealist movement (with which his work had many affinities - its interest in dreams, in primitive art, in myth, and cultural incongruity), he refused to draw hard distinctions between art and writing. Indeed, many of his paintings are a form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating letters, misplaced directions, commas, and clefs; their code for any object, from the veins of a leaf to the grid pattern of Tunisian irrigation ditches, makes no attempt at sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a purely mental image, a hieroglyph existing in emblematic space. So most of the time Klee could get away with a shorthand organization that skimped the spatial grandeur of high French modernism while retaining its unforced delicacy of mood. Klee's work did not offer the intense feelings of Picasso's, or the formal mastery of Matisse's. The spidery, exact line, crawling and scratching around the edges of his fantasy, works in a small compass of post-Cubist overlaps, transparencies, and figure-field play-offs. In fact, most of Klee's ideas about pictorial space came out of Robert Delaunay's work, especially the Windows. The paper, hospitable to every felicitous accident of blot and puddle in the watercolour washes, contains the images gently. As the art historian Robert Rosenblum has said, 'Klee's particular genius [was] to be able to take any number of the principal Romantic motifs and ambitions that, by the early twentieth century, had often swollen into grotesquely Wagnerian dimensions, and translate them into a language appropriate to the diminutive scale of a child's enchanted world.'

If Klee was not one of the great formgivers, he was still ambitious. Like a miniaturist, he wanted to render nature permeable, in the most exact way, to the language of style - and this meant not only close but ecstatic observation of the natural world, embracing the Romantic extremes of the near and the far, the close-up detail and the "cosmic" landscape. At one end, the moon and mountains, the stand of jagged dark pines, the flat mirroring seas laid in a mosaic of washes; at the other, a swarm of little graphic inventions, crystalline or squirming, that could only have been made in the age of high-resolution microscopy and the close-up photograph. There was a clear link between some of Klee's plant motifs and the images of plankton, diatoms, seeds, and micro-organisms that German scientific photographers were making at the same time. In such paintings, Klee tried to give back to art a symbol that must have seemed lost forever in the nightmarish violence of World War I and the social unrest that followed. This was the Paradise-Garden, one of the central images of religious romanticism - the metaphor of Creation itself, with all species growing peaceably together under the eye of natural (or divine) order."

From The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes

Planet Of The Meat Puppets

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) - Self Portrait, 1971


"The moment you know what to do you're just making another sort of illustration."

"An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then leaks back into the fact."

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."

"There is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else."

"When I am painting I am ageless. I just have the difficulty or pleasure of painting."

"Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later."

"You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need paint."

"My painting is not violent; it's life that is violent."

"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It's not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it's a little like making love, the physical act of love."

"It (painting) can be as violent as fucking, like an orgasm or ejaculation. The result is often disappointing, but the process is highly exciting."

Francis Bacon

The Man Who Painted Shoes

Vincent van Gogh - Shoes (1888)

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

"I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream."

"I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly'."

"The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech."

"I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate."

Vincent van Gogh

Holy Doppelganger, Batman!

Roy Lichtenstein - Image Duplicator (1963)

"Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms."

"I don't have big anxieties. I wish I did. I'd be much more interesting."

"I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me."

"I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way."

"What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization."

Roy Lichtenstein

The Colours Of Ecstacy

Emile Nolde - Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910)


"What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work."

"The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks."

"The art of an artist must be his own art. It is always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colours."

"Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties."

"Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks . . . Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time."

Emile Nolde (1867-1956)

Soulful, Sexy, And Very Spanish

Pedro Almodóvar - Talk to Her (2002)

"Those who follow closely the trajectory of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar will probably agree that he entered a phase of cinematic maturity with the release of the film The Flower of My Secret (1995), when the strident camp of his earlier work gave way to more sophisticated, subtle and multi-layered works (Live Flesh, 1997, All About My Mother, 1999). With Talk to Her, he reaches a pinnacle, and while the film does not have the same exhilarating effect as, for example, High Heels (1991), it proves that Almodóvar has perfected the art of looking for the absurd and making it absolutely plausible. Almodóvar probably is the last great European auteur, combining old-school integrity and vision with a post-modern bite.

Talk to Her takes us back to one of Almodóvar favourite scenarios, the hospital, which is used as a metaphor for many of his favourite motives: loneliness, soul-baring impromptu meetings and desperation, and the absurd humour that can be wrought out of this combination. During a Pina Bausch performance of Café Muller, Benigno (Javier Camara) notices that Marco (the quintessential Latin new man Dario Grandinetti) is shedding a tear of joyful emotion (which is quite often Almodóvar's way of establishing sexual ambiguity, even when there isn't an obvious one and just leaving it there). Jump cut to Benigno working in a hospital where 24 hours a day he looks after Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer who's been in a deep coma for four years. One of the things Benigno does for his comatose object of desire is to pursue her favourite cultural activities on her behalf, such as art house cinema and dance shows (hence the reason why he went to see Pina Bausch in the first place) and then 'tell' her what he's seen (hence the title). We also find out that Benigno had been obsessed with her ever since he was unleashed from a homebound existence looking after his ailing mother. Meanwhile, Marco finds love with Lydia (Rosario Flores), a celebrity bullfighter who also goes into a coma after being gored by a bull. That is when their lives cross again, and Benigno remembers Marco from the Pina Bausch performance (for those who ever saw Pausch's Café Muller and Mazurca Fogo, the film will provide an extra ingredient of pleasure).

Here starts the second part of the film, when the lives of the two leading men ironically hinge on the lives of two comatose women, and Benigno's character grows increasingly dense and psychotic as he leads the narrative to an unexpected turn. At this point Almodovar treats the audience to a fantastic narrative experiment: he weaves in a short black and white silent film called Amante Menguante (Shrinking Lover), which takes up about seven minutes of the film and which is used as a distraction for a defining moment in the plot. With this structural interference, Almodóvar proves for good that he is a symbolist of the highest order. While it would be a crime to reveal the details, the finale is once again in the hands of Pina Bausch, with a dancer letting out long, deep sighs. It's a cathartic end to a film so rich that it leaves the audience gasping for air and which makes you want to go out and tell your friends about. Just like Benigno does."

Antonio Pasolini (kamera.co.uk)

Filmography:

Pepi, Luci, Bom y las otras chicas del montón (1980)

Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions) (1982)

Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) (1983)

¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (What Have I Done to Deserve This?) (1984)

Matador (1986)

La ley de deseo (The Law of Desire) (1987)

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) (1988)

¡Átame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) (1989)

Tacones lejanos (High Heels) (1991)

La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret) (1994)

Kika (1996)

Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997)

Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) (1999)

Hable con ella (Talk To Her) (2002)

La mala educación (Bad Education) (2004)

Volver (Return) (2006)

Links:

Pedro Almodóvar - Steven Marsh (Senses of Cinema)

The Guardian (interview)

'All About My Father', The Guardian (interview)

Pedro Almodóvar, Guardian Unlimited (interview)

'All About Pedro's Women', The Observer

The Passion of Pedro (interview)

Pedro Almodóvar Official Website

Almodóvarlandia

The Marriage Of Order And Chaos

Georges-Pierre Seurat - Circus Sideshow (1887-88)


"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science."

Georges-Pierre Seurat

"We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colourless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. This is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much. We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules - resemblance, continuity, causality - which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our "fantasy" (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire. But there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not also a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective antichaos: "If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy. . . my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar." [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason] And finally, at the meeting point of things and thought, the sensation must recur - that of heaviness whenever we hold cinnabar in our hands, that of red whenever we look at it - as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past. This is all that we ask for in order to make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of "umbrella", which protects us from chaos.

Our opinions are made up from all this. But art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast planes over the chaos. . . . Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. . . . The philosopher, the scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead. . . . The artist brings back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite. . . . Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap leads them from chaos to composition. . . . It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance - the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself."

From What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri


"A parade, the free entertainment offered at the entrance of a travelling theatre, is intended to attract a crowd and encourage the sale of tickets. Seurat painted this extraordinary work during six months in 1887–88 and showed it at the fourth exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1888. It was his first attempt to render the effects of artificial light at night using the Pointillist technique and seems to have been inspired by a lecture on artificial light by James McNeill Whistler that was translated into French and published by the poet Stephen Mallarmé. Seurat achieved an unprecedented effect in the rendering of the illumination from the row of gas jets. Circus Sideshow is also Seurat's first systematic application of the scientific theories of Charles Henry (1859–1926) regarding the relationship between aesthetics and the physiology and psychology of the senses. By 1890 Seurat had formulated an aesthetic based on these theories that explains his intentions in Circus Sideshow: 'Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of colour, and of line, considered according to their dominants and under the influence of light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations . . . . Gaiety of tone is given by the luminous dominant; of colour, by the warm dominant; of line, by lines above the horizontal.'"

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Devilish Thrills

Phenakistiscope (19th Century) from the Joseph Plateau Collection

"In the medieval Christian tradition, the devil is a mimic, an actor, a performance artist, and he imitates the wonders of nature and the divine work of creation. Unlike God, he can only conjure visions as illusions, as he did when, in the person of Mephistopheles, he summoned the pageant of the deadly sins for Doctor Faustus and then seduced him with the appearance of Helen of Troy.

The Devil summons images in the mind's eye, playing on desires and weaknesses; the word "illusion" comes from ludere, "to play" in Latin. Conjurers mimic his tricks: an early Christian Father, denouncing magicians, gives a vivid account of the lamps and mirrors or basins of water they used, how they even conjured the stars by sticking fish scales or the skins of sea horses to the ceiling.

From the first showings of magic lantern slides, optical illusions were ascribed to the Devil's mischief. In the mid-17th century, when the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher began experimenting with shadows, lenses and reflections, he made images of devils with pitchforks, Mister Death brandishing his scythe, a soul burning in purgatory and other supernatural scenes, as if the new technology inevitably involved phantasms and spectres.

Optical illusions are not supernatural, however, as Kircher was intent on demonstrating through his experiments. But illusions also kept disrupting the boundaries between reality and fantasy. Demonstrating tricks of perception, especially through the use of mirrors (the art of catoptrics), Kircher showed how he could manipulate the natural properties of light and play on the limits of human faculties to create seductive and wonderful delusions.

Running through the history of magic and the anxiety that it stirred runs a parallel history of optics: if the Devil was able to conjure appearances whereas God truly performed prodigies, it was imperative to establish the truth status of the vision.

The collection that Werner Nekes has made over the past 30 years, displayed in the coming Hayward Gallery exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusion, gives a fascinating insight into the enchanted enigma of appearances, and into the history of optical investigation into these mysteries. It's a rich repository of human thought about vision and all that it implies, and it includes the whole range of optical devices, playing with every kind of effect, from supernatural apparitions to visual puns and cracker fillers, from the highest accomplishments of human intelligence to the most light-hearted eye-twisters or visual jokes. His assorted wonders of instruments, images, machines, toys, illusions and effects span more than four centuries of human ingenuity and invention at its most lively, ranging from an exquisite prism said to have belonged to the philosopher Blaise Pascal to an 1898 automated flip book-cum-peepshow of a female dancer dimpling and flirting.

"The soul never thinks without a mental image," declared Aristotle. Trying to enhance human physical capacities with lenses and apparatus of various kinds has been a strong motive behind optical inventions. But the desire to reproduce mental imagining has been an equally powerful engine behind inquiries into the working of eye and brain. Robert Fludd, an Oxford philosopher and esoteric neoplatonist of the generation before Kircher, imagined the "eye of the imagination" as a prototype film projector, beaming images on to a screen floating in virtual space, somewhere at the back of the eyes. Descartes declared, "First, it is the soul that sees, not the eye...", and this primacy of the imagination offered some explanation for dreams and visions and apparitions.

In the field of optics, many instruments were created to analyse and reproduce vision, such as the camera lucida, the lens of which projects a reflected image onto the artist's paper or canvas. But optics also reflects ideas about consciousness at any given period; it expresses the potential of the inward eye for every generation, the concepts of cognition and mental projection, and the tendency of the mind to assemble random marks into intelligible data.

In 1784, the landscape painter Alexander Cozens advised fellow artists to follow the promptings of fantasy and create images from blots of ink on crumpled paper: this astonishingly modern idea about chance and composition echoed Leonardo da Vinci's practice, nearly three centuries earlier. Leonardo was in fact quoting his fellow artist, Botticelli: "By merely throwing a sponge full of diverse colours at a wall, it left a stain on that wall, where a fine landscape was seen." But Cozens arrived at his "New Method" on his own, without prior knowledge of his Renaissance precursors, and made startlingly expressionist images. Werner Nekes has a rare album of 1885 filled with drawings of imps and devils that were doodled by workmen following the drips and splashes of coffee on the walls they were plastering.

Anxiety about the unreliability of vision continued long after most believers in the Devil's antics had faded away, and after the 17th century it spurred closer analysis of the human faculties, especially sight. These discoveries led to the society of surveillance on the one hand, and of mass media on the other. But it is also the case that new technologies created a mass of popular illusions that no longer alarmed their consumers, but amused them hugely. These were diversions and spectacles, and they were pure pleasure.

In 1827, John Ayrton Paris created the thaumatrope (from Greek "wonder" combined with "motion"), a round disc threaded on a string with one picture on one side and another on the reverse; when the disc was spun, the images merged. The thaumatrope was crucial to the development of moving pictures, which would eventually give the impression of life itself flowing past when projected on to a screen at the rate of 24 frames a second. Phantasmagoria shows began touring Europe at the end of the 18th century. In the wake of the Terror in France, the brilliant impresario, balloonist and cinematic pioneer Etienne-Gaspard Robertson inaugurated the thrills of the horror movies when he projected spectres on to smoke - including the severed head of Danton, then a recent victim of the guillotine.

The Victorian audience was travelling vicariously in the footsteps of explorers who continued to open up continents: the natural magic of the lantern slide beamed natural wonders from all round the world. Many different kinds of shows revealed worlds near and far through spectacular illusions. In 1821, in order to make a panoramic painting of London, the Hull-born artist Thomas Hornor climbed to the top of the cross on the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, and built a crow's nest. From here, where Hornor bivouacked for the time it took, he made a 360-degree picture of London. He used a telescope to examine details, and calculated the perspective to position the viewer convincingly in the scene.

In Edinburgh in 1835, Maria Theresa Short, daughter of an optical instrument maker, created one of the very first popular public camera obscuras. It is still there, on Castle Hill, and it captures through a periscope and angled lenses the thronged scenes of the streets below, projected by light rays alone onto a white convex dish. The projection is still an astonishing effect, and it brings into being, with no more magic than a series of angled lenses, ancient dreams of summoning absent sights through gazing into a bowl of water or an oracular mirror.

Optical media of communication available today have opened paths to new forms of beauty in reflection and projection, distortion and illusion. When Tony Oursler, on display in the exhibition, projects lopsided spectral faces uttering messages from the ether, or angels ascend through streaming water in Bill Viola's films, or Gary Hill materialises eerie apparitions that loom and then fade, they are claiming this territory for art in our era, and pressing optics into the service of a new metaphysics.

The taming of illusion through deeper understanding and ever more ingenious techniques of simulation has only been partial. There has remained something stubbornly weird about the images optical devices can create, especially with the advent of cinema when they became so clever at producing the appearance of the real.

Werner Nekes's collection plays a range of effects as if on a giant organ of visual phenomena, from profound investment in the objective truth of vision to an equally strong engagement with radical subjectivity. However, as we move nearer our era, his artefacts and devices reveal how the media of visual trickery, deception and illusion move away from scientific scrutiny towards distraction, leisure and entertainment. At the same time, the perfection of visual technologies has destabilised experience until we cannot be sure if we are not the dreamers but the dreamed, as in a recursive fable by Jorge Luis Borges. On television in the US, footage sometimes carries the heading "Metaphorical Images" to warn that the film does not communicate what is actually occurring. As The Matrix films dramatise, illusion has turned us into wanderers in "the desert of the real".

The world accessible to the senses began to fall away a very long time ago, perhaps in Plato's cave; it began turning into an insubstantial pageant of optical illusion, placing the observer in the dislocating yet oddly pleasurable situation of not knowing where reality begins and ends."

Marina Warner, The Guardian, Saturday September 25, 2004

Note: Eyes, Lies & Illusions, drawn from the Werner Nekes collection - and based on an exhibition originally devised by the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London - is now on show at at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) until 11 February 2007.