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.

Forgotten Faces

Funerary Portrait Painting of a Man from the Roman Period. (This portrait dates from the third to the fourth centuries AD. The narrow stripes on the man's tunic identify his rank as equestrian, and he holds a glass of red wine and a rose petal wreath.)


"Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations that thou bear'st
Are nursed by baseness. Thou'rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even."

Duke Vincentio from Measure for Measure (III, i) by William Shakespeare


"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."

Claudio from Measure for Measure (III, i) by William Shakespeare


"Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality"

Emily Dickinson

"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad."

Marcel Proust

"For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."

Isaac Asimov

"Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe."

Denis Leary

"A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own."

Thomas Mann

"Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other."

Francis Bacon

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

Woody Allen

Links:

Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roma Egypt (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Fayum Portraits Website

Proportion and Personality in Fayum Portraits by A. J. N. W. Prag (PDF)

The Grammar Of Becoming

André Kertész - Underwater Swimmer (1917)


"To learn is to enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities. The idea of the sea, for example, as Leibniz showed, is a system of liaisons or differential relations between particulars and singularities corresponding to the degree of variation among these relations - the totality of the system being incarnated in the real movement of the waves. To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field."

From Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze


"What does learning consist in? Here is a traditional view: learning is a matter of memorising something that somebody else knows. It sounds simplistic, if we put it that way. But who among us has not attended high school and college and has not been subjected to this view of learning? A teacher, a professor, stands before the class, chalk or transparencies in hand. There are things you need to learn, items you need to know. Before the class period is over, these things will be transferred from the teacher's lecture notes, the professor's transparencies, to your notebook. From there, these things will be transferred to your brain. When those transfers are successful, you will be said to have learned what the teacher, the professor, has taught you.

It is a meager model of learning. It is also the most common one. It is a model that operates on some surface assumptions and a slightly deeper one. Its surface assumptions are, first, that the teacher knows what there is to know about a subject and you do not. Second, there is the assumption that the way that you learn what the teacher knows is to listen to the teacher and commit to memory what he or she has to say. Last, on the teacher's side, there is the assumption that by talking or using other media to substitute for talking, the teacher can impart to the student what needs to be known.

The slightly deeper assumption has to do with the dogmatic image of thought. It is the assumption that what is to be learned comes in discrete packets of identities. There are particular somethings that need to be known. These somethings may be related to one another or they may not. In either case, they are independent enough from one another to be isolated each to a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter. These somethings are then represented by the sentences spoken by the teacher or professor, and then arrive at your ear or on your paper. If the learning us successful, there will have been no alteration, no damage, of any of these somethings along the way. Their identities will retain their integrity. And if you do your job you will be able to repeat or manipulate these identities when test time comes around.

There is another view of learning that does not start with the assumption that what is to be learned has the character of an identity or group of identities. It starts instead from the assumption that what there is to be learned has the character of difference rather than identity. If what is to be learned does not have the character of identity, then the learning itself is not a project of transferring identities from the knower to the one who seeks to know. It is instead a project of experimentation.

Swimmers do not learn facts about the water and about their bodies and then apply them to the case in hand. The water and their bodies are swarms of differences. In order to navigate their bodies through the water they will need to acquire a skill: to "conjugate" their bodies with the water in such a way as to stay on its surface. This skill involves no memorisation. It involves an immersion, a finding one's way through things, coming through one's body to understand what one is capable of in the water. There is no one way to do this, and different ways may lead to different kinds of success. There are also failures; water may be composed of differences, but not every path through those differences will keep one afloat.

Swimmers apprentice themselves to the water. They get a feel for the water, for how it moves and what possibilities it offers them. They get a feel for their bodies in the water. And they conjugate one against the other. The couplet body/water is a problematic field...Particular ways of swimming are solutions within that problematic field. They do not solve the problem of swimming. For there is no single problem of swimming. There is instead a problematic field of body/water, of which particular ways of swimming are solutions. They are experiments in conjugation of this problematic field, much of which takes place below the level of conscious thought, beneath the identities representation offers us: "'learning' always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing a profound complicity between nature and mind." [Deleuze, Difference and Repetition]

What does learning how to think consist in? Unlike learning how to swim, it first requires the abandonment of bad habits. These habits are the ones instilled in all of us by the dogmatic image of thought and its representational view of language and the world. We must discover this image and this view; we must see what roles they play in preventing us from really thinking.

But that is not all. That is only the negative task, the clearing of the ground. Alongside this abandonment we must also experiment in ways of thinking. We must conjugate our thought and our world, our thought and our language.

There are those who have gone before us, who have swum in this water before: Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche among them. They may help ease us into the water, teach us some of the strokes, so we don't drown before we get started. We can apprentice ourselves to them. Sooner or later, however, we must push off from the shore and conjugate things for ourselves...[We] must do it for ourselves, each of us...

There are two mistakes we might make in considering the prospect of learning to think. The first mistake would be to assume that thinking, unlike swimming, is a purely conscious activity, that thinking is a manipulation of thought. That mistake is our inheritance from the dogmatic image of thought. We feel our way into thinking in much the same way as we feel our way into swimming. Thinking is at least as unconscious as it is conscious, and it is no less an experiment...The second mistake would be to assume that each of us must face this task alone. In fact, we can face it in groups, conjugating ourselves with one another as well as with the world. Thinking does not need to be a solitary activity, and it surely does not take place in a world which we do not share with others...[We might] consider our place among others in the world, to think about it, or with it, or in it."

From Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction by Todd May


"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Fragile Afterlife Of Images

Edouard Manet - Gare Saint-Lazare (1873)

"It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling."

Edouard Manet

"The young man will smile on the canvas for as long as the canvas lasts. Blood throbs under the skin of the woman's face, the wind shakes a branch, a group of men prepare to leave. In a novel or film, the young man will stop smiling, but he will start to smile again when we turn this page or that moment. Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It preserves and is preserved itself (quid juris?) , although it actually lasts no longer than its support and materials - stone, canvas, chemical colour, and so on (quid facti?) The young girl maintains the pose that she has had for five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it. The air still has the turbulence, the gust of wind, and the light that it had that day last year, and it no longer depends on whoever was breathing it that morning. If art preserves it does not do so like industry, by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became independent of its "model" from the start, but it is also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting breathing the air of this painting. And it is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who only experience it after, if they have the strength for it. What about the creator? It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved - the thing or the work of art - is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.

Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exits in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

From What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri


". . . the differences which exist between every one of our real impressions - the differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to reality - derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflection of, things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which - here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, a desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; there the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs - the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres."

From Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Beastly Bonking

Indian - Horse Pursuing a Peacock

"The orgy was not the farthest point reached by eroticism in the pagan world. The orgy is the sacred aspect of eroticism in which the continuity of beings beyond solitude is most plainly expressed. Only in one way, however. In the orgy continuity cannot be laid hold of; individuals lose themselves at the climax, but in mingled confusion. The orgy is necessarily disappointing. Theoretically it is the complete negation of individual quality. It presupposes, it even demands equality among the participants. Not only is individuality itself submerged in the tumult of he orgy, but each participant denies the individuality of the others. All limits are completely done away with, or so it seems, but it is impossible for nothing to remain of the differences between individuals and their sexual attraction connected with those differences.

The final aim of eroticism is fusion, all barriers gone, but its first stirrings are characterised by the presence of a desirable object.

In the orgy this object does not stand out by itself, for sexual excitement occurs through an uncontrolled urge, the opposite of habitual reserve. But everybody has this urge. It is objective but it is not perceived as an object; the person who perceives it is at the same time animated by it. On the other hand, excitement is normally roused by something distinct and objective. In the animal kingdom, the odour of the female often sets the male after her. The songs and displays of birds bring into play other kinds of perception that tell the female that the male is near and sexual shock is at hand. Smell, hearing, sight and even taste are objective signals distinct from the activity they incite. They are signals to announce the crisis. In the world of man these messages have an intense erotic value. A pretty girl stripped naked is sometimes an erotic symbol. The object of desire is different from eroticism itself; it is not eroticism in its completeness, but eroticism working through it."

From Eroticism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille


The Week in Review

Viewing:



Deadwood: First Season

Ep. 1: 'Pilot - Deadwood' (w. Ted Mann, d. Mark Tinker)
Ep. 2: 'Deep Water' (w. Malcolm MacRury. d. Davis Guggenheim)
Ep. 3: 'Reconnoitering the Rim' (w. Jody Worth, d. Davis Guggenheim)
Ep. 4: 'Here Was a Man' (w. Elizabeth Sarnoff, d. Alan Taylor)
Ep. 5: 'The Trial of Jack MacCall' (w. John Belluso, d. Ed Bianchi)
Ep. 6: 'Plague' (w. Malcolm MacRury. d. Davis Guggenheim)
Ep. 7: 'Bullock Returns to the Camp' (w. Jody Worth, d. Michael Engler)
Ep. 8: 'Suffer the Little Children' (w. Elizabeth Sarnoff, d. Dan Minahan)
Ep. 9: 'No Other Sons or Daughters' (w. George Putnam, d. Ed Bianchi)
Ep. 10: 'Mr. Wu' (w. Bryan McDonald, d. Dan Minahan)
Ep. 11: 'Jewel's Boot Is Made For Walking' w. Ricky Jay. d. Steve Shill)
Ep. 12: 'Sold Under Sin' (w. Ted Mann, d. Davis Guggenheim)

Grave of the Fireflies - w. & d. Isao Takahata (1988)




Porco Rosso - w. & d. Hayao Miyazaki (1992)




Princess Mononoke - w. & d. Hayao Miyazaki (1997)




Steamboy - w. Sadayuki Murai & Katsuhiro Omoto, d. Katsuhiro Omoto (2004)




Tokyo Godfathers - w. Keiko Nobumoto & Satoshi Kon, d. Satoshi Kon (2003)




Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend & Legend of the Demon Womb - w. Noboru Aikawa, d. Hideki Takayama (1989 & 1991)




Wicked City - w. Kisei Choo, d. Yoshiaki Kawajiri (1987)

Reading:

Deleuze: An Introduction - Todd May
Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (catalogue essays) - ed. Philip Brophy
Gillian Wearing: Proof (catalogue essay) - Juliana Engberg

Listening:

The Complete String Quartets - Joseph Haydn
The Complete Symphonies - Joseph Haydn

Exhibitions:

Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga - NGV (International)

Six Good Reasons To Stay at Home: Hiraki Sawa (video works) - NGV (International)

Howard Arkley - NGV (Australia)




Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund - NGV (Australia)

Living Proof: Gillian Wearing - ACCA

Intimate Immensity: Part Three

René Magritte - The Listening Room (1958)

"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

René Magritte

"The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is where the inner and outer worlds meet.' "

Joseph Campbell

"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we becomes motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of the motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.

And since we are learning philosophy from poets, here is a lesson in three lines, by Pierre Albert-Bireau:

And with a stroke of the pen I name myself
Master of the World
Unlimited man."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Intimate Immensity: Part Two

René Magritte - Personal Values (1952)

"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."

René Magritte

"The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth."

Joseph Campbell

"When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings, that is, when it is not lodged in the houses of the past, it is immense. And one might say that daydream is original contemplation.

If we could analyse impressions and images of immensity, or what immensity contributes to an image, we should soon enter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenology - a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stablised and completed images. In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomonology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analysing images of immensity, we should realise within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being.

This being the case, in this meditation, we are not "cast into the world", since we open the world, as it were, by transcending the world seen as it is, or as it was, before we started dreaming. And even if we are aware of our own paltry selves - through the effects of harsh dialectics - we become aware of grandeur. We then return to the natural activity of our magnifying being."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Intimate Immensity: Part One

René Magritte - La Chateau des Pyrenees (1959)

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question: "What does it mean?" It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either. It is unknowable."

René Magritte

"Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear. There is more reality in an image than a word."

Joseph Campbell

"One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this completion of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn't imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of fact, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

The Author Has Left The Text

Erica Baum - Mr. 5 17 37 (2004)

1. “To this day, the “author” remains an open question…”

2. “Beckett supplies a direction: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.” . . . [Writing] as an ongoing process [that] slights our customary attention to the finished product . . . [The] writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of expression”; it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we recognise it in its exterior deployment. This reversal transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier. Moreover, it implies an action that is always testing the limits of its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it accepts and manipulates. Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of the subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.”

3. “Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. . . If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his links to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing.”

4. “It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should re-examine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance.”

5. “Yet - and it is here that the specific difficulties attending the author’s name appear - the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an author’s name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way; and these differences require clarification . . .

Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationship among texts . . . Finally, the author’s name characterises a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, this status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author, defining their form, and characterising their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. The author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which give rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence. Consequently, we can say that in our culture, the name of the author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others . . . In this sense, the function of an author is to characterise the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society.”

6. “In dealing with the “author” as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its difference from other discourses.

First, they are the objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago.

Secondly, the “author-function” is not universal or constant in all discourse.

The third point concerning this “author-function” is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we can call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a “realistic” dimension as we speak of an individual’s “profundity” or “creative” power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in the writing. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned.”

7. “The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their various modifications (and this through an author’s biography or by reference to his particular point of view, in the analysis of his social preferences and his position within a class or by delineating his fundamental objectives). The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralise the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is the belief that there must be - at a particular level of an author’s thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire - a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental; and originating contradiction. Finally, the author is a particular sources of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and so forth.”

8. “However, it would be false to consider the function of the author as a pure and simple reconstruction after the fact of a text given as passive material, since a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author. . .

[All] discourse that supports this “author-function” is characterised by this plurality of egos.”

9. [The] “author-function” is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.”

10. “[There] undoubtedly exist specific discursive properties or relationships that are irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic and to the laws that govern objects. These properties require investigation if we hope to distinguish the larger categories of discourse. The different forms of relationship (or nonrelationships) that an author can assume are evidently one of these discursive properties.

This form of investigation might also permit the introduction of an historical analysis of discourse. Perhaps the time has come to study not only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its mode of existence: the modifications and variations, within any culture, of modes of circulation, valorisation, attribution and appropriation. Partially at the expense of themes and concepts that an author places in his work, the “author-function” could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships.

Is it not possible to re-examine, as a legitimate extension of this kind of analysis, the privileges of the subject? Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis of a work (whether it be a literary text, a philosophical system, or a scientific work) and in delimiting psychological and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its interventions in discourse, and its system of dependencies. We should suspend the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate the density of things and endow them with meaning; how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the course of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse.

The author - or what I have called the “author-function” - is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.”

From What is an Author? by Michel Foucault.

Deadwood: David's Inferno

Deadwood (2004-2006) - created by David Milch

"Trust. Hell of a way to operate, huh?...Then all the ins and outs of gettin' killed...Every fuckin' beating I'm grateful for. Every fuckin' one of them. Get all the trust beat outa ya...Then you know what the fuckin' world is."

Al Swearengen (Ian McShane - above, far right)

(Deadwood, Episode Three - 'Reconnoitering the Rim': w. Jody Worth, d. Davis Guggenheim)

Al Swearengen

The proprietor of The Gem Saloon was six months ahead of everyone else in Deadwood, and he runs the town like a corrupt riverboat captain. He knows every move that every person in town makes, anticipates problems and eliminates them. His girls aren't exactly the class of the town, but he controls the most successful bar and whorehouse in all of Deadwood - bringing in $5,000 a day in 1876 - and anybody that threatens his sources of income may well end up fed to Mr. Wu's pigs.

Tim Driscoll, who helped facilitate Al's swindle of the city dude Brom Garret, met such a fate, as did Persimmon Phil, who deeds as a road agent brought too much attention to Al's enterprise. Garret himself was killed at Al's behest, though Swearengen eventually abandoned his efforts to retake the Garret claim. And when Mr. Wu came to Al to avenge a murdered opium courier, the saloon boss took care of things by personally drowning the guilty junky.

But Al's hands-on approach has earned him some enemies, and his main commercial rival, Cy Tolliver - proprietor of the more upscale Bella Union - is exploiting the Wu situation to fuel a full-on race war in Deadwood. Al suspects Tolliver of trying to expand his turf.

With outsiders expressing an interest in the wealthy outpost and government soldiers threatening to bring civilization to town, Al is under siege from several directions. And when the territory's magistrate threatens him with an outstanding murder warrant from Chicago, Al decides that the official is not to leave Deadwood alive.

For all his Mephistophelean qualities, Swearengen does have a soft spot for certain people, including the whore Trixie, Jewel, his handicapped house servant, and the brain-addled Reverend Jim, whom Al was forced to euthanize.

From HBO's Deadwood web site.

The Monster's Bride: Part Six

Pompeo Batoni - The Marriage of Eros and Psyche (1756)


"Apuleius' tale is the earliest extant forerunner of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in Western literature, and a founding myth of sexual difference. It includes episodes the fairy tale 'La Belle et la bête' has made famous, from children's versions to films: the mysterious menacing lover, the jealous sisters, the enchanted castle where disembodied voices serve every wish and 'nectarous wines and appetising dishes appeared by magic, floating up to her of their own accord.' It echoes stories of Pandora and Eve when it relies on female curiosity as the dynamic of the plot, and the overriding motive force of the female sex. Punished for her disobedience, Psyche then has to prove her love through many adventures and ordeals; pregnant by Cupid, she struggles through one test of her loyalty after another until, finally, this Beauty is reunited with her Beast and adapts him, the god of Love, to the human condition of marriage, and they have a daughter, called Voluptas - Pleasure."

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Monster's Bride: Part Five

Simon Vouet - Psyche Discovering Cupid's Identity (early 1600s)

'Psyche is forbidden to look at [Cupid]. When she can resist no longer and breaks her prohibition, lighting a candle to look at her lover while he sleeps, he vanishes, and with him all her enchanted surroundings. But Eros, mysterious, unknown, feared, exceeds all imaginable degree of charm when Psyche sees him in the night:

There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures . . . his golden hair, washed in nectar and still scented with it, thick curls straying over white neck and flushed cheeks and falling prettily entangled on either side of his head . . . soft wings of purest whie . . . the tender down fringing the feathers quivered naughtily all the time. The rest of his body was so smooth and beautiful that Venus cold never be ashamed to acknowledge him as her son.

Psyche's failure to trust, and to obey, has cost her his adorable presence.'

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Week in Review

Reading:

Immortal Monster: The Mythical Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film - Joseph D. Adriano

Interpreting the Moving Image - Noel Carroll

Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture - Cynthia Erb

Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong - Tedd Gott and Kathryn Weir

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film - (ed.) Barry Keith Grant

The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle - Fatimah Rony

From the Beast to the Blonde - Marina Warner

Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time - Marina Warner

Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism - Thomas E. Wartenberg

Viewing:

Rebecca - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1940)

Shadow of a Doubt - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1943)

Rear Window - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1954)

The Wrong Man - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

Vertigo - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

North by Northwest - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1959)

Psycho - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

Listening:

Murder Ballads - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Boatman's Call - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Good Son - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Monster's Bride: Part Four

Antonio Canova - Amor and Psyche (1796)

I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever apprehends . . .
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitations and a name . . .

A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, 1 - William Shakespeare

'The first beast of the West was Eros, the god of love himself. In the romance of Cupid and Psyche, Eros/Cupid makes love, unseen in the dark, to a mortal Beauty - Psyche - who rivals his own mother Venus in seductiveness . . .'

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Monster's Bride: Part Three

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"After his involvement with the Museum d'histoire naturelle, Frémiet was surely familiar with the research of Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868). In the successive volumes of his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes (1847, 1857 and 1863), Boucher de Perthes argued that the peculiarly shaped stones he had found among the bones of extinct mammals in the Abbeville region of France were actually primitive cutting and hunting implements fashioned by antediluvian peoples. At the time of their first publication, his theories were ridiculed by many, since they did not concur with the Christian Church's religious notions of the beginnings of mankind dating no earlier than 4000 BC. By 1887, however, Boucher de Perthes' discoveries were thoroughly vindicated. It is interesting to consider whether the ape's possession of a chiselled cutting tool in Frémiet’s Gorilla Carrying off a Woman depicts a pure gorilla or an ape that has evolved in intelligence one step towards the human condition. Certainly, the critics of the day were divided as to whether his new work promoted or argued against Darwinian theory.

In 1887, the state authorities were faced with acknowledging the celebrity of Frémiet’s life-size plaster and immediately acquired it; yet they were also confronted by its highly controversial subject matter. Frémiet himself had written to the chief arts administrator of the day, pleading that 'with your dual interest in the fine arts and in science, it is to be hoped that you will decide to acquire my sculpture, which really belongs in the Museum d'histoire naturelle'. This was not to be and despite Frémiet’s many entreaties, the work was stowed away until 1895 when it was consigned to the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, where it remains today. The sculptor was able to bring the work back to Paris briefly some years later, when he received a commission from an American collector for a life-size bronze to be cast from it. This enabled the sculpture to be once again exhibited to a huge audience, at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

Its exile in Nantes failed to make Frémiet’s composition disappear as he had permission from the French State to edition bronze versions of the work in a reduced size, and these proved to be highly popular collectables. The ambiguous but compelling Gorilla Carrying off a Woman was also reproduced widely, by both engraving and photography. By all these means, Frémiet’s sculpture entered the public consciousness as one of the defining images of the time."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Monster's Bride: Part Two

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"The 'Gorilla wars' of the 1860s and the entire weight of evolutionary debate attendant upon the theories of Darwin, Huxley and others lay behind Emmanuel Frémiet’s decision to revisit the gorilla in 1887. As Bartlett recounted in 1891:

Always seeing a plaster cast of a gorilla at the Garden [the Jardin des Plantes of the Museum] and regretting the destruction of the one he had made in 1859, decided Frémiet to make another group of the same subject, but differently and more compactly treated. Its appearance in the Salon of 1887 created an immense sensation and, as usual, a wide division of opinion. The few best artists and art lovers pronounced it, independent of subject, a great masterpiece, while many wholly condemned it, because of its subject.

Frémiet’s life and career had also changed significantly in the three decades that lay between his first and second versions of the Gorilla. From the 1860s Frémiet had become fascinated with creating meticulously accurate reconstructions of the appearance and armour of military figures from Roman times to the Middle Ages. His St George and the Dragon 1891, for example, casts the Christian saint in the guise of a medieval warrior, whose armour is based on actual examples of the period that the artist studied in France's Imperial Army Museum. A deep interest in the sciences of prehistoric archaeology and palaeontology also ran alongside Frémiet’s fascination for medieval reconstructions, leading him to create a number of sculptures depicting the struggles of Stone Age peoples. In July 1875, a month after the death of the esteemed animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, Frémiet was named as Barye's replacement to the post of Master of Zoological Drawing at the Museum d'histoire naturelle.

When Frémiet created the 1887 version of the life-size Gorille enlevant une femme (Gorilla carrying off a woman), it carried the same power to shock audiences as its predecessor of 1859. The immediacy and solidity of its depiction of a wounded primate locked in mortal combat with a living, struggling woman was far removed from the passivity of even the best taxidermists' efforts then on display in the world's museums. While gorillas had by now become familiarised within both scientific and public discourse, living specimens of the great ape were still highly prized and exotic items for those zoos lucky enough to possess one. The life-size Gorilla carrying off a woman was another controversial triumph for Frémiet, who had last received a medal at the Salon in 1851. He now carried off the Salon's coveted prize, the Medal of Honour.

Whereas the 1859 sculpture had depicted a female gorilla dragging away an arguably 'naturally selected' dead trophy, Frémiet upped the ante in 1887. The woman was now Caucasian and very much alive, even presaging an art nouveau nymph in her curvaceous struggle with a visibly male primate. Frémiet no longer made his viewers play mute witness to the triumphant swagger of a murderous beast, but took them right into the heart of a much more ambiguous battle, set in the Stone Age.

The 1887 sculpture further muddied the waters by alluding to controversial new archaeological discoveries. Rather than being an innocent victim, the woman wears part of a gorilla's jawbone as a hair adornment, indicating her status as a Stone Age predator. She is part of a prehistoric hunting party that has been attacking the gorilla as edible prey. Moreover, it is her companions at whom the beast grimaces and snarls - those who have hurled the lance that pierces the left shoulder of the gorilla. The chiselled rock which the ape grabs in self-defence might well have belonged to his attackers, for it resembles a cutting tool from the Palaeolithic era."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott