The Immaterial Girl

Andy Warhol - Marilyn (1964)

"Searching for Marilyn: the very title suggests not merely that Marilyn Monroe is now gone, but that she was never really there to begin with. Pop mythology has enshrined her as that poor, unfortunate woman stranded between two identities: Norma Jean and Marilyn, the real person and the fabricated Hollywood icon, the flickering candle and the imperishable myth. But the poignancy of Marilyn's story comes from the fact that she was as lost to herself as she would forever be to her idolaters. The modern pop ethos is as suspicious of pristine, innocent origins as it is in awe of transcendent, incandescent stardom. Through telemovies, songs and a flood of biographies both elevated and trashy, we rehearse the primal division of Marilyn from Norma, but we finally believe in the humanity of neither figure; both are mere creations, images. And these images consumed, to the point of death, the individual who fragilely incarnated them.

Marilyn was double, and she was also - even in her lifetime - ceaselessly redoubled. When tales of her decline began to circulate in the early '60s, ingénue Stella Stevens played a blonde, showbiz wannabe eaten away by self-doubt and hitting the barroom skids all the way to prostitution in John Cassavetes' Too Late Blues (1962). Stag movie loops from the 1950s fool even modern viewers with their naked, tawdry, look-alike Marilyns lolling about in an alcoholic, sexed-out, drug-induced haze - footage that, once recycled in Bruce Conner's 'found footage' avant garde '60s classic Marilyn Times Five or the Jennifer Jason Leigh erotic thriller Heart of Midnight (1988), now merges in the public consciousness with the latest revelations about suppressed photographs of a dissipated, partying Marilyn at some celebrity hideaway. In the '80s there was Madonna as Marilyn, the Material Girl recreating the staging of the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) - but also, more on the independent/underground circuit, Australia's own Linda Kerridge in American movies including Mixed Blood (1984) by Warhol's ex-collaborator Paul Morrissey, a blonde bitch left alive just long enough after being shot in the head to be able to gaze on her blood-stained, white dress and laconically drawl: "I look like shit".

More than just about any another pop figure, Marilyn (like Elvis) is a mythic continuum holding together staggeringly diverse scenarios, associations and images: her early innocence and her late degradation; her inner naturalness and her prefabricated craft; her childlike charm and her 'bombshell' sexuality. She comes over as both domesticated and wild, guileless and predatory, scheming and dumb. All her most memorable movies, including Niagara (1953), Bus Stop (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Misfits (1961) and Monkey Business (1952), play on the thrilling and ambiguous oscillation between these extreme possibilities contained in her persona.

Marilyn was born to cinema as a composite image in an era when - with the help of Widescreen and Technicolour - pop culture revelled in its own exaggerated artificiality and makeshift nature. Even in those years, the myth of Marilyn could scarcely be separated from the paroxysms of inspired infantilism offered by the likes of Mad magazine and Jerry Lewis comedies. It was only a small step from Marilyn to her grotesque parody, Jayne Mansfield (seized on gleefully as a screen icon by Lewis' mentor, Frank Tashlin, in The Girl Can't Help It [1956] and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? [1957]). Among her legion of serious commentators, Norman Mailer saw Marilyn as a forerunner (after Mae West) of camp irony, 'femininity as a masquerade'; just as Raymond Durgnat slipped easily from a study of her physical and facial mannerisms to a rumination on "the joke in female impersonation"."

Adrian Martin

"By comparing the primary effects of the Other's presence and those of his absence, we are in a position to say what the Other is. The error of philosophical theories is to reduce the Other sometimes to a particular object, and sometimes to another subject...But the Other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a subject who perceives me: the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not function as it does. That this structure may be actualised by real characters, by variable subjects - me for you and you for me - does not prevent its pre-existence, as the condition of organisation in general, to the terms which actualise it in each organised perceptual field - yours and mine."

Gilles Deleuze

"I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else."

Marilyn Monroe

Flesh And Fantasy: Part Two

Rene Magritte - The Rape (1934)

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."

Rene Magritte

"This book [The Order of Things] first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things...This passage quotes 'a certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing that...is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

Michel Foucault

"Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."

Marquis de Sade

Ten Kisses (October Special)

Khajuraho Temple, India (c. 9-10th C. AD)

"Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last." Remy de Gourmont

Bronzino - Venus, Cupid and Time (1545)

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." Ingrid Bergman

Kitagawa Utamaro - Lovers (1788)

"A man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves." Albert Einstein

Jean Fragonard - Stolen Kiss (c. 1788)

"That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow." George Eliot

Edvard Munch - Kiss (1895)

"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air!" Franz Kafka

Auguste Rodin - The Kiss (1896)

"The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer." Oliver Wendell Holmes

Gustav Klimt - The Kiss (1907-8)

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." Marilyn Monroe

Max Ernst - Une Semaine de Bonte (1934)

"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil." Victor Hugo

Roy Lichtenstein - Kiss V (1964)

"Before you find your prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs." Anon

Amelie - d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (2001)


Kiss (lyrics) by Prince

U don’t have 2 be beautiful
2 turn me on
I just need your body baby
From dusk till dawn
U don’t need experience
2 turn me out
U just leave it all up 2 me
I’m gonna show u what it’s all about

U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

U got to not talk dirty, baby
If u wanna impress me
U can’t be 2 flirty, mama
I know how 2 undress me (yeah)
I want 2 be your fantasy
Maybe u could be mine
U just leave it all up to me
We could have a good time

U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

Yes
I think I wanna dance
Gotta, gotta
Little girl wendy’s parade
Gotta, gotta, gotta

Women not girls rule my world
I said they rule my world
Act your age, mama (not your shoe size)
Not your shoe size
Maybe we could do the twirl
U don’t have 2 watch dynasty
2 have an attitude
U just leave it all up 2 me
My love will be your food
Yeah

U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

Flesh And Fantasy: Part One

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Bather, 1808

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Roland Barthes

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

John Berger

Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.

Angela Carter

Resources

Ingres' Character and Personality (Grove Art Online):

Ingres was the staunchest, most conservative defender of the classical tradition, preaching an inflexible, if sometimes contradictory, doctrine of ideal beauty and the absolute supremacy of line and pure form over colour and emotion. He described himself as generally affable but with a ‘white hot’ temper if he felt himself wronged. His personality, like his art, was marked by a preference for the order of a familiar universe. He adjusted slowly to changes in daily habits and remained the worst sort of provincial traveller, comparing everything that was new to him unfavourably with the home equivalent.

According to Charles Blanc, Ingres’s friend and biographer, ‘Here was a man for whom invention was painful, but who bent his faults by a prodigious love of the beautiful’. In times of stress, Ingres was likely to react with a whole variety of physical symptoms, for example boils and atrocious headaches during the last few months of 1833, while he was working on the Apotheosis of Homer. There were times, however, when the pleasures of work were sweeter than ever before: ‘Every day I am shut away in my studio from morning to night. I am love struck by painting, I don’t possess it, it possesses me’. He was not at all the 19th-century bohemian artist; he loved every bourgeois comfort and expected his wife to look after his domestic needs.

In a letter of 7 July 1862 to Hippolyte Fockedey Victor Mettez described ‘le Père Ingres’ as ‘choleric, impatient, obstinate, good, naive, righteous, lazy . . . by moments eloquent and sublime...an incredible mélange’. This ‘mélange’ was echoed in an intimate sketch of Ingres by the composer Charles Gounod: ‘He had an enthusiasm which sometimes approached eloquence. He had the tenderness of a child and the indignations of an apostle. He was naive and sensitive. He was sincerely humble before the great masters, but fiercely proud of his own accomplishments’ (Mémoires d’un artiste, Paris, 1896).

Ingres’s passions for music (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), for literature (Plutarch, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Vasari) and the visual arts (Raphael and Michelangelo) were deep and lifelong. His friends were friends for life, unless they crossed him, and nothing pleased him more than his favourite music in the company of a select circle of friends. As a student, he was seen as too serious, intolerant of the usual studio antics; as a teacher, although he often acted as a father figure to his favourite students, he brooked no opposition: ‘Discussion was, unfortunately, not possible with M. Ingres’. And M. Ingres he remained, even to his family and closest friends.

More images by this artist can be accessed at:

http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

Reading:

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

The Female Nude - Linda Nead

Visual and Other Pleasures - Laura Mulvey

This Is Not A Paint(h)ing: Part Three

Tony Oursler - Clump (2006)


"Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no, which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative. Logicians draw circles that overlap or exclude each other, and all their rules become immediately clear. Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being. Thus profound metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry which - whether we will or no - confers spatiality upon thought; if a metaphysician could not draw, what would he think? Open and closed, for him, are thoughts. They are metaphors that he attaches to everything, even to his systems. In a lecture given by Jean Hyppolite on the subtle structure of denegation (which is quite different from the simple structure of negation) Hyppolite spoke of a "first myth of inside and outside". And he added: "you feel the full significance of this myth of outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these two terms. Beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition becomes tinged with aggressivity. Formal opposition is incapable of remaining calm. It is obsessed by the myth. But this action of the myth throughout the immense domain of imagination and expression should not be studied by attributing it the false light of geometrical intuitions.

"This side" and "beyond" are faint repetitions of the dialectics of inside and outside: everything takes form, even infinity. We seek to determine being and, in so doing, transcend all situations, to give a situation of all situations. Man's being is confronted with the world's being, as though primitivity could be easily arrived at. The dialectics of here and there has been promoted to the rank of an absolutism according to which these unfortunate adverbs of place are endowed with unsupervised powers of ontological determination. Many metaphysical systems would need mapping. But in philosophy, all short-cuts are costly, and philosophical knowledge cannot advance from schematised experiments."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Further resources:

Tony Oursler Online

Tony Oursler on artnet

Tony Oursler: Projecting the Psyche - Pravin Sathe

Hallucinating with the Ears - Andrew Clifford

NGA (New Aquisitions) - Incubator (Tony Oursler, 2003)

Tony Oursler: The Presence Project - Gabriella Giannachi

This Is Not A Paint(h)ing: Part Two

Hiraki Sawa - (still from) Going Places Sitting Down (2004)

"Psychologists - and more especially philosophers - pay little attention to the play of miniature frequently introduced into fairytales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer is merely amusing himself when he creates houses that can be set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that places the tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasy precludes the writer from entering, really, into the domain of the fantastic. Indeed he himself, when he develops his facile inventions, often quite ponderously, would appear not to believe in a psychological reality that corresponds to these miniature features. He lacks that little particle of dream which could be handed on from writer to reader. To make others believe, we must believe ourselves. Is it worthwhile, then, for a philosopher to raise a phenomenological problem with regard to these literary "miniatures", these objects that are so easily made smaller through literary means? Is it possible for the conscious - of both writer and reader - to play a sincere role in the very origin of images of this kind?

Yet we are obliged to grant these images a certain objectivity, from the mere fact that they both attract and interest many dreamers. One might say that these houses in miniature are false objects that possess a true psychological objectivity. Here the process of imagination is typical, and poses a problem that must be distinguished from the general problem of geometrical similarities. The geometrician sees exactly the same thing in two similar figures, drawn to different scales. The plan of a house drawn on a reduced scale implies none of the problems that are inherent to a philosophy of the imagination. There is even no need to consider it from the general standpoint of representation, although it would be important, from this standpoint, to study the phenomenology of similarity. Our study should be specified as belonging definitely under the imagination.

Everything will be clear, for instance, if, in order to enter into the domain where we imagine, we are forced to cross the threshold of absurdity, as in the case of [Bean Treasure] , Charles Nodier's hero, who gets into a fairy's coach the size of a bean. In fact, he gets into it with six "litrons" of beans on his shoulder. There is thus a contradiction in numbers as well as in the size of the space involved. Six thousand beans fit into one. And the same thing is true when Michael - who is oversize - finds himself, to his great surprise, in the house of the [Beggar Fairy], which is hidden under a tuft of grass. But he feels at home there, and settles down. Happy at being in a small place, he realises an experience of topohilia; that is, once inside the miniature house, he sees its vast number of rooms; from the interior he discovers interior beauty. Here we have an inversion of perspective, which is either fleeting or captivating, according to the talent of the narrator, or the reader's capacity for dream. Nodier, who was often too eager to be "agreeable", and too much amused to give full reign to his imagination, allows certain badly camouflaged rationalisations to subsist. In order to explain psychologically this entry into the tiny house, he recalls the little cardboard houses that children play with. In other words, the tiny things we imagine simply take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys.

But the imagination deserves better than that. In point of fact, imagination in miniature is natural imagination which appears at all ages in the daydreams of born dreamers. Indeed, the element of amusement must be removed, if we are to find its true psychological roots.

. . .

Representation becomes nothing but a body of expressions with which to communicate our own images to others. In line with a philosophy that accepts the imagination as a basic faculty, one could say, in the manner of Schopenhauer: "The world is my imagination." The cleverer I am at miniaturising the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Sawa's work is currently on display at the National Gallery of Victoria until 3rd December in the New Media Gallery, Level 3, and admission is free.

Other resources:

Hiraki Sawa - Gregory Volk (UCLA Hammer Museum)

James Cohan Gallery

Artfacts.Net

Hiraki Sawa - (ed.) Katherine Wood

This Is Not A Paint(h)ing: Part One

Andres Serrano - Piss Christ (1987)

"A philosopher of the imagination, therefore, should follow the poet to the ultimate extremity of his images, without ever reducing this extremism, which is the specific phenomenon of the poetic impulse. In a letter to Clara Rilke, Rilke wrote: 'Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.' But is it necessary to go and look for "danger" other than the danger of writing, of expressing oneself? Doesn't the poet put language in danger? Hasn't the fact that, for so long, poetry has been the echo of heartache, given it a pure dramatic tonality? When we really live a poetic image, we learn to know, in one of its tiny fibres, a becoming of being that is an awareness of the being's inner disturbance. Here being is so sensitive that it is upset by a word. In the same manner, Rilke adds: 'This sort of derangement, which is peculiar to us, must go into our work.'

. . .

If, through poetry, we restore to the activity of language its free field of expression, we are obliged to supervise the use of fossilized metaphors."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard


Two of the many articles spawned by the above photograph:

Sacrifice, Piss Christ and Liberal Excess: Part 1 - Damien Casey (Arts and Opinion, 2004)

Sacrifice, Piss Christ and Liberal Excess: Part 2 (The Rebuttal) - Michael Casey, Anthony Fisher and Haydan Ramsey (Arts and Opinion, 2004)

Reading:

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (ed. Allan Stoekl) - Georges Bataille

The Three Ecologies - Felix Guatarri

Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm - Felix Guatarri

The Deleuze Reader (ed. Constantin V. Boundas) - Gilles Deleuze

The Last Days Of The "Idiot Box"?

Ren and Stimpy - (from the episode) Altruists!

"The argument, then, is that television produces the conditions of an ironic knowingness, at least as a possibility...[which] may offer a way of thinking subjectivity free of subjection...Most of all, it opens identity to diversity, and escapes the notion of cultural identity as a fixed volume...But if it does all this, it does not do it in that utopia of guaranteed resistance which assumes the progressiveness of naturally oppositional readers who will get it right in the end. It does, rather, with terms hung in suspension. . .tactics of empowerment, games of subordination with neither term fixed in advance."

From Playing at Being American:Game and Tactics by John Caughie (1990)

The Skin Of The Screen

Gloria Swanson (as Norma Desmond) in Sunset Boulevard (1950) - d. Billy Wilder


"What does it mean to think of glamour as a mask? It means apprehending the body beautiful - and especially a beautiful face - as a special, heightened metaphor of the human being who possesses it. Edgar Morin in his 1957 book The Stars once grumbled over the historical tendency that has led us to invest so much in the face - the eyes are the window of the soul, and all that - a tendency given absolute aesthetic form in our rapture before the screen close-up of a gorgeous movie star. Morin's worry is valid: something of the full, earthy body - and that body in motion - is surely lost in those ethereally frozen, twilight moments of the supremely beautiful human face, images wrought from movies into that even more impossibly perfect art of the Hollywood still photographer's glamour portrait.

But there is another way to dream in front of images of glamour. Here's an example: the generation of surrealists who excavated the imagery of popular culture with such passion in the 1950s was also deeply into glamour. Inspired by the aphorisms of Malcolm de Chazal - a visionary philosopher of the human face who saw all the forces and systems of the natural world reflected there - these surrealists grasped beauty not as an objective, frozen commodity, but as a private revelation, an amorous fantasy that must endlessly be recreated in words and homages, dreamed out aloud. The reveries of the surrealists may strike us as rather perverse inversions of conventional beauty codes - Andre Breton, for instance, was given to extolling his wife's 'sexual organs of seaweed and old sweets' - but these reveries were more like mad hallucinations. It is as if everyone, on screen or off, had been touched by the dreamlike magic made possible by the luminous magnifications of the camera lens."

From Glamour: The Confession Of A Mask by Adrian Martin

Portrait Of The Artist As An Ageing Imbecile

Andy Warhol - Self Portrait (1986)

"Stupidity is contemplated: sight penetrates its domain and becomes fascinated; it carries one gently along and its action is mimed in the abandonment of oneself; we support ourselves upon its amorphous fluidity; we await the first leap of an imperceptible difference, and blankly, without fever, we watch to see the glimmer of light return. Error demands rejection - we can erase it; we accept stupidity - we see it, we repeat it, and softly, we call for total immersion.

This is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his series of advertising smiles."

From Language, Counter-Memory, Practice by Michel Foucault

Furniture Of The Mind

Jan Vermeer van Delft - The Art of Painting (1665-67)

Other works by this artist can be accessed at: http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

"The things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolises or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions which are either favourable or unfavourable. This is why people's tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt in the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround themselves, their preferences for certain colours or the places where they like to go for walks...The objects which haunt our dreams are meaningful in the same way. Our relationship with things is not a distant one: each speaks to our body and to the way we live. They are clothed in human characteristics (whether docile, soft, hostile or resistant) and conversely they dwell within us as emblems of forms of life we either love or hate. Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these are invested in it. To use the language of psychoanalysis, things are complexes. This is what Cezanne meant when he spoke of the particular 'halo' of things which it is the task of painting to capture."

From The World of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Make 'Em Smile

Cindy Sherman - Untitled # 412 (2003)


"In her most recent work,...[Cindy] Sherman has created a group of images of clowns that were initially inspired by an article of clothing - pyjamas with fur-like buttons - which she had purchased at a yard sale a decade earlier. Sherman has commented that she wanted to make new characters that were 'intense, with a nasty side or an ugly side, but also with a real pathos about [them] - and [clowns] have an underlying sense of sadness while they're trying to cheer people up. Clowns are sad, but they're also psychotically, hysterically happy.' In light of Sherman's career-long interest in artifice and masquerade, this subject mirrors her self- transformation through costumes, make-up, wigs and prosthetics. What is strikingly similar between Sherman's creative process and the way clowns create personas is the hermetic approach they take: like the artist in her work, 'a clown is their [sic] own writer, director, costumer, make-up artist, and prop-man.'"

From Cindy Sherman - (exhibition catalogue with text) by Rochelle Steiner and Lorrie Moore

The Truth Is Rarely Pure And Never Simple

The Boy I Was (and hope to be again some day)


"As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were "perfectly natural", quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we "possess" this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilisable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves.

Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world."

From The Cruel Practice of Art by Georges Bataille (1949)

The Incarnate Tartuffery Of Morals

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"All psychology has hitherto remained anchored to moral prejudices and timidities: it has not ventured into the depths. To conceive it as morphology and the development-theory of the will to power, as I conceive it - has never yet so much as entered the mind of anyone else: in so far as it is permissible to see in what has hitherto been written a symptom of what has hitherto been kept silent. The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deep into the most spiritual world, which apparently is the coldest and most free of presuppositions - and, as goes without saying, has there acted in a harmful, inhibiting, blinding, distorting fashion. A genuine physio-psychology has to struggle with unconscious resistances in the heart of the investigator, it has 'the heart' against it: even a theory of the mutual dependence of the 'good' and the 'wicked' impulses causes, as a more refined immorality, revulsion to a conscience still strong and hearty - and even more a theory of the derivation of all good impulses from wicked ones. Supposing, however, that someone goes so far as to regard the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and lust for domination as life-conditioning emotions, as something which must be fundamentally and essentially be present in the total economy of life, consequently must be heightened further if life is to heightened further - he suffers from such a judgement as from seasickness. And yet even this hypothesis is far from being the strangest and most painful in this tremendous, still almost unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge - and there are in fact a hundred good reasons why everybody should keep away from it who - can! On the other hand: if your ship has driven into these seas, very well! Now clench your teeth! Keep your eyes open! Keep a firm hand on the helm! - We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither - but what do we matter! Never yet has a deeper world of insight revealed itself to daring travellers and adventurers..."

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Can You Say What I'm Seeing?

Caspar David Friedrich - The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809-10)

This and many other images by Friedrich can be accessed at: http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

'Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendour, images effect a very simple communion of souls.'

Gaston Bachelard

What Is A Book?

Anselm Kiefer - The Secret Life of Plants (2002)

"What, in short, is the strange unit designated by the term, work? What is necessary to its composition, if a work is not something written by a person called an "author"?...If an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or communicated to others? Is this not properly a work? What, for instance, were Sade's papers before he was consecrated as an author? Little more, perhaps, than roles of paper on which he endlessly unravelled his fantasies while in prison.

Assuming we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work?...If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line? Certainly everything must be published, but can we agree on what "everything" means? We will, of course, include everything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the drafts of his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal notations and corrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not?...Such questions only begin to suggest the range of our difficulties, and, if some have found it convenient to bypass the individuality of the writer or his status as an author to concentrate on a work, they have failed to appreciate the equally problematic nature of the word "work" and the unity it designates."

From What is an Author? by Michel Foucault

Dead Man Carving: Part Two

Ricky Swallow - Come Together (2002)

“Sculptural realism's paradoxical power is to conjure presence in absence, lightness in weight, the softness of flesh or fabric in stone or wood. Come Together (2002) is Swallow's hard-core homage to Baroque realism and its apparitions of the soft in the hard. Rudolph Wittkower's big book on the Baroque master Gianlorenzo Bernini is never far away in Swallow's studio, and Come Together is a knee-high tribute to the meeting of skull and baldachin in Bernini's Tomb of Pope Alexander VII. Call it a rec-room entombment. The bag sits there in a frozen slump, on initial viewing no more than a banal, 1970s suburban object, and you need to get close to see the embedded skull. You don't see it, though, so much as take its weight; it's an indisputable object. The first impression of a plummeting impact- the skull winding the bag like a meteorite - is pushed back by the illusion of a geologically slow entrapment from below, as if the bag grew into shape around the skull.

In this, the second carving he made, Swallow seems torn between the attempt to renovate the vanitas still life in all its pathos, and the impulse to mock the seriousness of that attempt by burying the skull in its own plinth. Since the seventeenth century in Holland, a time and place newly glutted with objects, still life has been used to calibrate the life of things and the lives of those who own them - to measure shelf-life against after-life. Four hundred years since the genre's heyday, in a period so design drunk and object-fetishising that it makes gilded-age Amsterdam look frugal, Swallow began to import his cargo of lifestyle objects into wood’s peculiar time-zone.”

From Ricky Swallow: Field Recordings by Justin Paton

Dead Man Carving: Part One

Ricky Swallow - Everything is Nothing (2003)


'Everything is Nothing...is a portrait of the artist as a dead man. All that sets this skull apart from all the others in the world is a nick in its front tooth. It replicates a chip in Swallow's. All that pins the skull to our time is an adidas ski-hat. The skull wears it like a second skin.

Everything is Nothing began its life as a stump not much bigger than a football. It was strange to watch as the artist slowly worked toward his head with his hands. Early on, the object looked muffled and gnawed-at, as if fashioned by an impatient beaver. Swallow took back the wood with scoops and chisels, boring into its surface and creating chunky ridges and valleys. Then he brought out rasps and scrapers to reduce the ridges to scars, which in their turn got worn toward smoothness by sheet after sheet of sandpaper. From 320 grains per sheet to 600, then from 1000 to 1600, the advance through the wood grew slower. At some point carpentry became manicure, and the steady fall of chips and shavings slowed into occasional drifts of powder. There at last, its surface polished smooth as marble, was Ricky Swallow's grinning skull - toppled from its body, one ear to the ground, softly wrapped in its fabric helmet.

The sculpture puts us face-to-face with a paradox. Its emergence is also a disappearance. It gives absence an absolutely vivid presence. Less a producer than a reducer - an un-maker, a subtraction artist - Swallow has given time to the wood, and the result shows what time will take from him. Of course, every carving makes something by taking something away, and every self-portrait is haunted by its maker's absence. But, by sculpting himself from the future's point of view, Swallow puts that absence at the heart of the matter. The result is a self-portrait, 'finished' in both senses, which seems to wait for the artist to catch up. In the meantime the object makes an irresistible offer to onlookers. The raised edge of the ski-hat is a sly, beckoning detail. As if gingerly lifted by an invisible finger, it invites queasy, contemplative inspection of the skull inside - its crenellations, fault-lines and crumple zones, the blade of its septum, the empty air of its orbits, and above all its lock-jawed grin. Through its wooden silence, this sculpture has something to tell us about the tests of time, the patience of objects, and the ratio of loss to gain.'

From Ricky Swallow: Field Recordings by Justin Paton

Where Have All The Children Gone?

Pieter Brueghel - Children's Games (1559-60)

This image can be accessed at: http://www.wga.hu/index1.html


The Echoing Green

The sun does arise
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
And welcome the spring;
The skylark and thrush
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around
To the bell's cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the Echoing Green.

Old John with white hair,
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
And soon they all say:
"Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth time were seen
On the Echoing Green."

Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry;
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mothers,
Many sisters and brother,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest,
And sport no more seen,
On the darkening green.

William Blake (1757-1827)

The Muff Manifesto: Part Two

Vanessa Beecroft, VB 45, 2001 (detail)

“The shaved, waxed, trimmed and otherwise depilated female pubis that has become a cultural norm might be called a Pandora's box of conflicting fears and desires. On the one hand, there's the fear of hair or chaetophobia. Hair is a sign of maturity and strength, which far too many men find scary in women. Removing pubic hair may be a wish to infantilise women - to make them look more like little girls. Which, if taken further, comes uncomfortably close to paedophilia.”

From Pudenda Agenda by Jerry Saltz (Artnet Magazine Features)


Reading:

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and Their Tellers - Marina Warner

Razor Wire Pubic Hair - Carlton Mellick III