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