A Lacework Of Pleasure And Perversity

Del Kathryn Barton (b. 1972) - the whole of everything, 2007-08


'It's the details that entice me first. The lilac acrylic wash that bruises a pair of breasts. The turquoise paint splattered across the hundreds, the thousands, of meticulously marked dots and lines. The stretches of near-white monochrome that signify raw skin within that painstaking and almost painful expanse of throbbing ink. And the eyes: these watch from anxious animal faces, partly shielded from view; from women seemingly of another world. At once haunting and opaque, these staring eyes have sent seasoned writers into skittish reverie as they draw into the fantastical image-world of Sydney artist Del Kathryn Barton.

Standing back from one of Barton's newest paintings, or make myself a space to inhabit, 2007, this response is typical, or so I'm told, of the way most viewers find themselves lured into Barton's ever-swelling fan club. At first, an admiration for the decorative style of the painting as a whole, for Barton's blazing range of brazen colour, and for the 'surface that attempts to impart a quality of energy', as the artist herself calls it. Then stepping closer from a respectful distance, one is struck by the sheer amount of work involved in crafting this other space of life. And then, like moth to flame - or better still, curious Alice to cavernous rabbit hole - the detail-lured spectator is caught in a world of Barton's making.

It can be a very strange world indeed. The women she moulds into being - and they are always women, even when bearing a hefty penis or sprouting a fine sheen of fur - have, for the ten years of Barton's practice, been occasionally lascivious, often enigmatic, at once defiant and fragile. In some series - such as Barton's watercolour, gouache and ink drawings from 2002 - naked women recline, their legs splayed, fingers caressing their orifices, animals nuzzling at their breasts. In other works, like the exquisite dark beauty of 2005, young girls stare out through hand-embroidered frames, replicating so many film stills of women staring wistfully through window panes, their romanticism wrung with pathos. Some of Barton's women take the pose of contemporary catwalk models at their moment of full exposure, staring down at the audience from the runway's edge before they spin around and strut their way backstage; others, such as aranella, 2005, have an air of 1970s-style fashion shoots, all Farrah Fawcett hair and fey hand gestures.

It is not just pop culture quotations that peek through Barton's works; art-historical references equally abound. The folksy pussy cats and hermaphrodite children of the mid-twentieth century outsider artist Henry Darger mingle in Barton's portraits. An economy of inky lines recalls the work of Egon Schiele or Paul Klee, while the contortions and elongations of Barton's bodies echo Kiki Smith. The abstract and often abject eroticism - the sextet of breasts and the truncated body in her sculpture inquire within, 2006, for example, make for a curious lacing of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois. Even Barton's continual framing of her figures with guardians from nature - with kittens and koalas suckling at teats, with bunnies, Bambis and other ciphers of innocence sourced from personal associations and from particular Native American cultures - reveal a mystical world of symbolism that is as cultivated and cryptic as the film art of Matthew Barney and especially David Lynch.'

From Del Kathryn Barton: Paradox of Ecstasies by Anthony Gardner

Obituary: Lazare Ponticelli

'Lazare Ponticelli, the last French soldier to have endured the horrors of World War I, died at the age of 110 on Wednesday, President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

"Through him, I bow to the millions of 'poilus' who responded with exemplary everyday courage to the call of the invaded homeland," Sarkozy said, using the French word commonly used in France to describe the unshaven men on the front lines.

Sarkozy said there would be a national ceremony in coming days to honor all French soldiers who fought in the Great War, which broke out in 1914 and ended in 1918 and left about 1.4 million French dead and 4.5 million wounded.

The president's statement gave no cause or details of Ponticelli's death, but an official at the president's office said Ponticelli died at his home in Kremlin-Bicêtre, near Paris, on Wednesday morning.'

International Herald Tribune: Europe

Strange Meeting

by Wilfred Owen, poet and soldier (March 18, 1893 – November 4, 1918)

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

'I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now....'

(Owen died aged 25 - just one week before the war ended - at the Battle of the Sambre.)

The Skin Is Faster Than The Word, Or Towards An Erotics Of Art

Victoria Reynolds - Down the Primrose Path, 2003


'[It] may be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and affect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image's effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way. This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic. What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its sociolinguistic qualification. This indexing fixes the determinate qualities of the image; the strength or duration of the image's effect could be called its intensity.

...

The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence but rather of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening.

...

Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combinations, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the expression event - in favour of structure. Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory.

...

There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered. Frederic Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterised by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism.

...

An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativisable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognised. It is crucial to theorise the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognisable and is thus resistant to critique.'

From The Autonomy of Affect by Brian Massumi

Painting Posterity

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard Pass, 1800


'There are two ways of understanding portraiture - either as history or as fiction.'

Charles Baudelaire

Nature's Unimpeachable Arc

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - Moonrise Over The Sea, 1821


To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

Evicting The Soft Embalmer Of The Night

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) - Danae, 1907-08


'The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.'

Gustav Klimt

Because His Eyes Held Hands

Paul Klee (1879-1940) - Insula Dulcamara, 1938


'One eye sees, the other feels.'

Paul Klee

The Week In Review

Films:

Shadows in Paradise (Varjoja paratiisissa) - d. Aki Kaurismäki, 1986
Ariel - d. Aki Kaurismäki, 1988
The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö) - d. Aki Kaurismäki, 1990
Lust, Caution (Se, jie) - d. Ang Lee, 2007
No Country For Old Men - d. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007
There Will Be Blood - d. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007

Television:

Rome (HBO): Series One

Books:

Nineteenth Century European Art - Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu
Art In Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas - eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger

Art:

Benjamin Armstrong - Tolarno Galleries
Black in Fashion - National Gallery of Victoria
Resonant Visions - National Gallery of Victoria
Sidney Nolan - National Gallery of Victoria
Warhol - Queensland Art Gallery

Music:

Symphonies 1-9 - Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphonies 1-10 - Franz Schubert
Winterreise (Winter Journey) - Franz Schubert
Symphonies 1-4 - Robert Schumann

Tenebrous Tyrannies

Julius Ceasar (Ciarán Hinds) - Episode 4: 'Stealing From Saturn', Rome (2007)


'The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.'

Maximilien Robespierre

Art Is In The Imagination Of The Beholder

Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911) - Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), 1989-93


'Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can be the direct organisation of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.'

Angela Carter

The Wormholes Of History

Jules Girard (1839-1902) - Construction of the Paris Metro (commenced November, 1898)


'Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out what came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.'

Paul de Man

The Art Of Memories

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) - Souvenir of Mortefontaine, 1864


'All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.'

John Berger

The Past Isn't What It Used To Be

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe, 1863


'Until the nineteenth century, the word modern had negative connotations, conveying the loss of qualities associated with the Renaissance and ancient times. The positive values many people began to associate with change in the nineteenth century gave the word modern new meanings. Today, modernity is most often associated with some combination of:

• rapid social, economic, and technological change
• industrial, mechanized production and the growth of cities
• individualism as a basic source of cultural expression, political rights, and public and private identities
• struggles over popular sovereignty
• the power of states organized as nations and based on mass mobilization
• bureaucratic routinization and governmental interference in life
• tension between a worldview based on reason and science, and one based on feeling and religion
• nationalism as the primary source of public loyalty and cohesion

Nineteenth-century advocates of modernity often saw these developments as the inevitable results of human progress, as evidence of Europe's superiority, or as justification for European imperialism. This was a powerful perspective that continues to influence the way people think about modernity today. But it distorts the history of the nineteenth century by making modernity seem both preordained and uniform. It suggests that when modernity came, everything else immediately fled.

Recently the concept of modernity has been questioned by historians of European imperialism because it has been used to detract from the experience of non-European countries. These historians argue that when modernity is used as a yardstick with which to measure progress toward some Eurocentric standards of civilization (which European themselves often fail to meet), we miss the unique experiences of those countries and tend to ignore the ways in which Europeans sought to impose modernity on their colonies. This is a useful critique because we have the same problem within Europe itself if we see modernity as a finish line toward which all peoples were inevitably racing. Historians of German and Russia, using modernity in this way, once argued that those countries followed a "separate path", different from "western" Europe, in order to explain the rise of twentieth-century dictatorships there. But in fact, even in the "west" there was not a single country where the practices of modernity appeared in a pure, ideal form.

Two points need to be stressed here. First, there was no single, model "western" path from which some countries deviated to create "alternate" modernities. Second, whenever and wherever elements of modernity appeared, they conflicted with nonmodern or traditional ways of life. Every element of modernity was contested when it appeared and for years afterward among people in different sectors of society, in every society. Everywhere, even in England, which is often seen as the model of western development, some elements of modernity were chosen and embraced, others were imposed by force, and others appeared by accident or as unintended consequences. Continual conflict over modernity as a process is the one common feature shared by all peoples who encountered it in any form in the nineteenth century, whether in England, Russia, Bosnia, or Hungary, or China, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, or Kazakhstan. Modernity is defined by the conflicts it introduced between the old and the new, between the powerful and the powerless, between the privileged and the downtrodden, whether those pockets of modernity within a single country were sizable or small. Even in England where industrial capitalism and popular sovereignty appeared first, the beneficiaries of modernity lived across the street from bastions of tradition, and elements of premodern society coexisted with modernity well into the twentieth century.

...

To a large extent this definition of modernity differs from the way modernity was viewed by nineteenth-century Europeans. Proponents and admirers of change like Lord Palmerston would speak of modernity as "progress", conceiving of modernity as the capstone of human history. But even for its adherents, the positive values associated with modernity in Europe would always be shadowed by modernity's woes: mass poverty, the intrusion of noise and squalor in the modern city, the conflict over democracy, the instability of gender roles, the dark side of imperial conquest and nationalism, the intrusion of the state in individual life through bureaucratization and rountization. Prosperity and mass political mobilization created the new opportunities for self-expression, and self-determination and a dynamic society, in which all changes seemed possible. But in the absence or waning of the absolute power of kings, new modern forms of power emerged, which idealized self-discipline and constraint, bureaucratic controls, and the power of new professional and intellectual elites to categorize and restrict public behaviour and private values. These more diffuse forms of power had significant influences on everyday life in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout the century, and in ways that were increasingly apparent by the turn of the century and on the eve of the First World War, modernity meant stability and conflict, progress and poverty, civilization and savagery, self-expression and self-discipline.'

Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914 - Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger

Two Bob Portrait

Robert Cornelius - Self-Portrait, c. 1831


Allegedly the first photographic portrait ever taken.


When Beauty Was Virtue by Robert Hughes, 2001

The Heroic Gaze

Jacques-Louis David - The Oath of the Horatii, 1784


'To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Tragic Gaze

Jacques-Louis David - The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789


'No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.'

(Lady Anne, Richard III, 1.2 - William Shakespeare)

Black Roses (8 of 8)

Ray Caesar - The Burden of Her Memories (date unknown)

Black Roses (7 of 8)

Anthony Lucas - The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, 2005

Black Roses (6 of 8)

Tim Burton - The Corpse Bride, 2006

Black Roses (5 of 8)

Mike and Doug Starn - Attracted to Light 1, 1999-2004

Black Roses (4 of 8)

Jamie Caliri - Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, 2004

Black Roses (3 of 8)

Max Aguilera-Hellweg - Prosthetic Leg in Hallway, 2000

Black Roses (2 of 8)

Joel Peter Witkin - Anna Akhmatova, 1998

Black Roses (1 of 8)

The Quay Brothers - Street of Crocodiles, 1986

When Artists Flap Their Wings In A Gallery

The Little Artists - Damien Hirst's Butterfly Paintings

Damien Hirst - The Explosion - Exalted, 2006


'I am a deeply superficial person.'

Andy Warhol

Hotel Cornucopia

Joseph Cornell - Untitled (Hotel Eden), 1945


'Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.'

Joseph Campbell

The Chamber Of Insights

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare, 1781


'Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.'

Carl Jung

DIY Salvation

William Blake - Satan, Sin and Death, 1808


'If you meditate on your past sins long enough, you can get lost in your sins and not know what your virtues are. Why not meditate on the virtues? Foster the virtues and let the sins fall off.'

Joseph Campbell

Dragons Without Dungeons

Raphael - Saint George Fighting the Dragon, c. 1504


'The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.'

Joseph Campbell

Who Was That Masked Human?

Mask - Olmec (Mexico), 9th - 6th C B.C.


'Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.'

Carl Jung

The Stuart Davis Quartet

Stuart Davis - Egg Beater No. 4, 1928




Stuart Davis - New York Waterfront, 1938




Stuart Davis - The Mellow Pad, 1945-51

Stuart Davis - Colonial Cubism, 1954


'The act of painting is not a duplication of experience but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention.'

Stuart Davis

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (7)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("The Reward of Cruelty"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (6)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("Cruelty in Perfection"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (5)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("The Second Stage of Cruelty"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (4)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("The First Stage of Cruelty"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (3)

William Hogarth - Beer Street, 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (2)

William Hogarth - Gin Lane, 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (1)

William Hogarth - Marriage A-la-Mode: The Tête-à-Tête, 1735


'We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.'

Salvador Dalí

The Gee Gees

Gilbert & George cutout dolls, 2000

Gilbert & George (South Park-style spoof by Helen Bucknail)

Gilbert & George ("The Little Artists")

Gilbert & George - Son of a God, 2005

Tim Marlow with Gilbert & George, 2007

'Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.'

Oscar Wilde

N.B. Gilbert & George will be awarded the Lorenzo il Magnifico Prize at the Florence Biennale in December.

Groom Of Darkness

Rembrandt - Philosopher in Meditation, 1632


'Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.'

Arthur Schopenhauer

Bride Of Darkness

Bill Viola - Ocean Without a Shore, 2007


'When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure.'

Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography.

Radical Cheek

Paul Signac - Portrait of Félix Fénéon, 1890


'The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.'

Paul Signac