Don't Put The Blame On Mame

Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) - Adam and Eve (The Sistine Chapel), 1509-1512


"Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall."

William Shakespeare

"Sin is geographical."

Bertrand Russell

"Praise is the bait of sin."

Plato

"To sin is a human business, but to justify sins is a devilish business."

Leo Tolstoy

"Other men's sins are before our eyes, but our own are behind our backs."

Seneca

One Species (January Special)

René Magritte (1898-1967) - Portrait d'Edward James (La Reproduction Interdite), 1937


'Over the last thirty or more centuries, many things have undoubtedly been said about human beings. Yet these were often the products of reflection. What I mean by this is that Descartes, when he wanted to know what man is set about subjecting the ideas which occurred to him to critical examination. One example would be the idea of mind and body. He purified these ideas; he rid them of all trace of obscurity and confusion. Whereas most people understand spirit to be something like very subtle matter, or smoke, or breath (consistent, in this regard, with primitive peoples), Descartes showed admirably that spirit is something altogether different. He demonstrated that its nature is quite other, for smoke and breath are, in their way, things - even if very subtle ones - whereas spirit is not a thing at all, does not occupy space, is not spread over a certain extension as all things are, but on the contrary is entirely compact and indivisible - a being - the essence of which is none other than to commune with, collect and know itself. This gave rise to the concepts of pure spirit and pure matter, or things. Yet it is clear that I can only find and, so to speak, touch this absolutely pure spirit in myself. Other human beings are never pure spirit for me: I only know them through their glances, their gestures, their speech - in other words, through their bodies. Of course another human being is certainly more than simply a body to me: rather, this other is a body animated by all manner of intentions, the origin of numerous actions and words. These I remember and they go to make up my sketch of their moral character. Yet I cannot detach someone from their silhouette, the tone of their voice and its accent. If I see them for even a moment, I can reconnect with them instantaneously and far more thoroughly than if I were to go through a list of everything I know about them from experience or hearsay. Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities. So the process of looking at human beings from the outside - that is, at other people - leads us to reassess a number of distinctions which once seemed to hold good such as that between mind and body.

Let us imagine what becomes of this distinction by examining a particular case. Imagine that I am in the presence of someone who, for one reason or another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shouting. But where is this anger? People will say that it is in the mind of the interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent's looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some other-worldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part of the room, that the anger breaks forth. I would accept that the sense in which the place of my opponent's anger is on his face is not the same as that in which, in a moment, tears may come streaming from his eyes or a grimace may harden on his mouth. Yet anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing voice . . . And if, for one moment, I step out of my own viewpoint as an external observer of his anger and try to remember what it is like for me when I am angry, I am forced to admit that it is no different. When I reflect on my own anger, I do not come across any element that might be separated or, so to speak, unstuck, from my own body. When I recall being angry at Paul, it does not strike me that this anger was in my my mind or in my thoughts but rather, that it lay entirely between me who was doing the shouting and that odious Paul who just sat there calmly and listened with an ironic air. My anger is nothing less than the attempt to destroy Paul, one which will remain verbal if I am a pacifist and even courteous, if I am polite. The location of my anger, however, is in the space we both share - in which we exchange arguments instead of blows - and not in me. It is only afterwards, when I reflect on what anger is and remark that it involves a certain (negative) evaluation of another person, that I come to the following conclusion. Anger is, after all, a thought; to be angry is to think that the other person is odious and this thought, like all others, cannot - as Descartes has shown - reside in any piece of matter and therefore must belong to the mind. I may very well think in such terms but as soon as I turn back to the real experience of anger, which was the spur to my reflections, I am forced to acknowledge that this anger does not lie beyond my body, directing it from without, but rather that in some inexplicable sense it is bound up with my body.

There is something of everything in Descartes, as in the work of all great philosophers. And so it is that he who draws an absolute distinction between mind and body also manages to say that the soul is not simply like the pilot of a ship, the commander-in-chief of the body, but rather that it is very closely united to the body, so much so that it suffers with it, as is clear to me when I say that I have toothache.

Yet this union of mind and body can barely be spoken of, according to Descartes; it can only be experienced in everyday life. As far as Descartes is concerned, whatever the facts of the matter may be - and even if we live what he himself calls a true melange of mind and body - this does not take away from my right to distinguish absolutely between parts that are united in my experience. I can still posit, by rights, and absolute distinction between mind and body which is denied by the fact of their union. I can still define man without reference to the immediate structure of his being as he appears to himself in reflections: as thought which is somehow strangely joined to a bodily apparatus without either the mechanics of the body or the transparency of thought being compromised by their being mixed together in this way. It could be said that even Descartes' most faithful disciples have always asked themselves exactly how it is that our reflection, which concerns the human being as given, can free itself from the conditions to which it appears to have been subject at the outset.

This leaves us with a very different view of the human being and humanity from the one with which we began. Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no 'inner' life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give them up.

It is understandable that our species, charged as it is with a task that will never and can never be completed, and at which it has not necessarily been called to succeed, even in realtive terms, should find this situation both cause for anxiety and a spur to courage. In fact, these are one and the same thing. For anxiety is vigilance, it is the will to judge, to know what one is doing and what there is on offer. If there is no such thing as benign fate, then neither is there such a thing as its malign opposite. Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstances, all manifest in their behaviour and their relationships that very same spark which makes us recognise them, which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate. It is simply that this modern form of humanism has lost the dogmatic tone of earlier centuries. We should no longer pride ourselves in being a community of pure spirits; let us look instead at the real relationships between people in our societies. For the most part, these are master-slave relationships. We should not find excuses for ourselves in our good intentions; let us see what becomes of these once they have escaped from inside us. There is something healthy about this unfamiliar gaze we are suggesting should be brought to bear on our species. Voltaire once imagined, in Micromégas, that a giant from another planet was confronted with our customs. These could only seem derisory to an intelligence higher than our own. Our era is destined to judge itself not from on high, which is mean and bitter, but in a certain sense from below. Kafka imagines a man who has metamorphosed into a strange insect and who looks at his family through the eyes of such an insect. Kafka also imagines a dog that investigates the human world which it rubs up against. He describes societies trapped in the carapace of customs which they themselves have adopted. In our day, Maurice Blanchot describes a city held fast in the grip of its laws: everyone is so compliant that all lose the sense of their difference and that of others. To look at human beings from the outside is what makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another.'

From 'Man Seen from the Outside' (in The World of Perception) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tears Are The Ashes Of Emotion

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paradise Is Not A Box Of Chocolates

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

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."

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

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

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

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

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) - Pickpocket, 1959

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prince of Pickpockets – Adrian Martin (2005)


Links:

Pickpocket - Rick J Thompson

Bressonian - Adrian Martin

The Narrative Cracks: Emotion in Robert Bresson - Bill Mousoulis

Bresson - Kent Jones

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


The Week in Review:

Films:

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

Television Series:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Series Seven

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

Take Me To My Reader

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

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

François Rabelais (1483-1553)

"The desire to write grows with writing."

Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536)

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

William Blake (1757-1827)

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

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Where Others Fear To Leap

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


"All sins are attempts to fill voids."

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

"I can, therefore I am."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Every separation is a link."

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

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

"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."

"Humility is attentive patience."

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

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

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

From Timeline of Art History

The Red Tower: Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Tower: Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Tower: Part One

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


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

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

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

Twelve Skulls (December Special)

Barthel Bruyn - Vanitas Still Life (early 1500s)

Willem Claesz Heda - Vanitas (1628)

Pieter Claesz - Vanitas Still Life (1630)

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

Harmen Evertz van Steenwyck - Vanitas (1640)

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

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

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

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

Philippe de Champaigne - Memento Mori (c. 1655)

Franciscus Gysbrechts - Vanitas (late 1600s)

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


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


Links:

Skull Symbolism

Memento Mori

Vanitas

For Those Days When Art Just Gives You The Shits

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

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

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

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

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

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

From This Is Modern Art by Matthew Collings

Not Being There - Or, We Like To Be Watched

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilbert and George

The Week in Review

Viewing:

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


Reading:

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


Listening:

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


Exhibitions:

Juan Davila - National Gallery of Victoria (International)

I Have Heard The Absinthe Singing

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


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

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

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

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

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

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk

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


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

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

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

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

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

Paul Klee

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

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

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

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

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

From The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes

Planet Of The Meat Puppets

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francis Bacon

The Man Who Painted Shoes

Vincent van Gogh - Shoes (1888)

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent van Gogh

Holy Doppelganger, Batman!

Roy Lichtenstein - Image Duplicator (1963)

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Lichtenstein

The Colours Of Ecstacy

Emile Nolde - Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910)


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

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

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

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

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

Emile Nolde (1867-1956)

Soulful, Sexy, And Very Spanish

Pedro Almodóvar - Talk to Her (2002)

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

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

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

Antonio Pasolini (kamera.co.uk)

Filmography:

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

Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions) (1982)

Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) (1983)

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

Matador (1986)

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

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

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

Tacones lejanos (High Heels) (1991)

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

Kika (1996)

Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997)

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

Hable con ella (Talk To Her) (2002)

La mala educación (Bad Education) (2004)

Volver (Return) (2006)

Links:

Pedro Almodóvar - Steven Marsh (Senses of Cinema)

The Guardian (interview)

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

Pedro Almodóvar, Guardian Unlimited (interview)

'All About Pedro's Women', The Observer

The Passion of Pedro (interview)

Pedro Almodóvar Official Website

Almodóvarlandia