Lady Paints The Blues

Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)


"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."

Frida Kahlo

"Frida Kahlo used the often traumatic and harrowing iconography of her Mexican heritage to paint herself and the pain which had become an integral part of her life after, at age eighteen, a streetcar accident left her crippled. From then on she underwent a series of operations and, because of her severely injured pelvis, a number of miscarriages and abortions. Her physical disability never inhibited Kahlo's flair for theatrics, and this, combined with the tempestuous relationship with her philandering husband, the mural painter Diego Rivera, established her as a tragically romantic and exotic figure. As a result, Kahlo's works have been exhaustively psychoanalysed and thereby whitewashed of their bloody, brutal, and overtly political content. Kahlo's personal pain should not eclipse her commitment to Mexico and the Mexican people. As she sought her own roots, she also voiced concern for her country as it struggled for an independent cultural identity. Her life and even her death were political.

. . .

Kahlo's representation of the skeletal figure and death can be understood only in relation to their iconography in Aztec work. The Coatlicue sculpture provides a clue to understanding their use in Kahlo's painting. Pasztory writes that Coatlicue "embodies the duality of Mexican consciousness...At the very centre of the figure is a contrast of quintessential opposites: breasts seen behind a skull, the two images of life and death." Although Kahlo seldom included an actual representation of Coatlicue in her work, the enigmatic goddess recurs in symbolic form in a number of Kahlo's self-portraits. For example, in Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, Kahlo's thorn necklace draws blood from her neck. Aztec priests performed self-mutilation with agave thorns and stingray spines, and Coatlicue's neck also bleeds. The dead hummingbird is sacred to the chief god of Tenochtitlan, Huitzilopichtli, the god of the sun and war. It also represents the soul or spirit of the warrior who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone."

From Culture, Politics and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo - Janice Helland


"Of course, the line between art and life is a particularly hard one to draw in Kahlo's case. The majority of her work is self-portraiture; her aesthetic concerns grew from her fascination with the falsity of appearance. Dressing up, role playing and masquerade form the conceptual basis of Kahlo's work."

From 'Her Dress Hangs There': De-frocking the Kahlo Cult by Oriana Baddeley

The Ballad Of Jack The Dripper

Jackson Pollock in his studio (1950) - p. Hans Namuth

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about...It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

Jackson Pollock

"Modern painting is the first complex style in history which proceeds from elements that are not pre-ordered as closed articulated shapes. The artist today creates an order out of unordered variable elements to a degree greater than the artist of the past.

In ancient art an image of two animals facing each other orders symmetrically bodies that in nature are already closed symmetrical forms. The modern artist, on the contrary, is attracted to those possibilities of form which include a considerable randomness, variability and disorder, whether he finds them in the world or while improvising with his brush, or in looking at spots and marks, or in playing freely with shapes - inverting, adjusting, cutting, varying, reshaping, regrouping, so as to maximise the appearance of randomness. His goal is often an order which retains a decided quality of randomness as far as this is compatible with an ultimate unity of the whole. That randomness corresponds in turn to a feeling of freedom, an unconstrained activity at every point.

Ignoring natural shapes, he is alert to qualities of movement, interplay, change and becoming in nature. And he provokes within himself, in his spontaneous motions and play, an automatic production of chance."

From Recent Abstract Painting (1957) by Meyer Schapiro

"[The] drip paintings are clearly implicated in a whole informing metaphoric of masculinity: the very concepts that seem immediately to apply to them - space, scale, action, trace, energy, 'organic intensity', 'being in the painting', being 'One' - are all, among other things, operators of sexual difference."

From Jackson Pollock's Abstraction by T. J. Clark

"The catalyst that brought to a head Pollock's self-consciousness of his masquerade was the film Hans Namuth made of the artist at work in the late summer and fall of 1950...After the completion of the painting-on-glass scene, Pollock, who had been sober for more than two years, walked into the house and poured himself a large drink. At the dinner that followed, a drunken Pollock repeatedly shouted at Namuth, "I'm not a phony, you're a phony," before overturning the dinner table. He never got back on the wagon; the drip paintings, and his career, were effectively over."

From Pollock and Postwar Masculinity by Andrew Perchuk

Reading:

This is My Body - Jan Avgikos

'Her Dress Hangs Here': De-frocking the Kahlo Cult - Oriana Badderley

Theory and Art Criticism - Terry Barrett

Of Sculpture and Painting - David Bachelor

Gauguin's Tahitian Body - Peter Brooks

New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism - Anna C. Chave

Gauguin: On Primitivism (in Theories of Modern Art) - Herschel B. Chipp (ed.)

Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism - Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Modernist Painting - Clement Greenberg

Culture, Politics and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo - Janice Helland

By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Hoch in Context - Maria Makela

Notes on Sculpture, Part 2 - Robert Morris

The Imaginary Orient - Linda Nochlin

Pollock and Postwar Masculinity - Andrew Perchuk

Picasso in the Light of a Marxist Sociology of Art - Max Raphael

Picasso and Braque: 1909-1911 - Robert Rosenblum

Orientalism - Edward Said

Recent Abstract Painting (1957) - Meyer Schapiro

Beautiful Beasts: The Call of the Wild (in Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time) - Marina Warner

Reluctant Brides: Beauty and the Beast I and Go! Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast II (in From the Beast to the Blonde) - Marina Warner

In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzales-Torres - Simon Watney

Viewing:

King Kong (1933) - d. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

RKO Production 601: The Making of King Kong: Eighth Wonder of the World (seven-part documentary series) - d. Phil Savernick (2005)


Listening:

Bleed Like Me - Garbage

beautifulgarbage - Garbage

Garbage Version: 2.0 - Garbage

Garbage - Garbage

The Lascivious Eye

Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

"Conventionally, both the act of painting and that of viewing have been described as phallic acts, acts of penetration performed on the passive receptacle, the blank field of the canvas. "I paint with my prick," Renoir supposedly boasted. "A painter has also to paint 'with [his] balls,'" bragged Picasso to his mistress, the painter Françoise Gilot. "I guess that even if a painter fucks a picture to a real climax once a year, it is quite a record," Mark Rothko later estimated. And the critic Jean Clair once pithily proclaimed, "The gaze is the erection of the eye."

From New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism by Anna C. Chave

Thus Spake Friedrich Nietzsche

A Clockwork Orange - d. Stanley Kubrick (1971)


"God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."

From Die fröhliche Wissenschaft by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Artful Savage

Paul Gauguin - The Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892)

"The Savage is decidedly better than us...I am a savage. And the civilised forsee it, for there is nothing surprising or confusing in my work except this savage-in-spite-of-myself. For that reason it is inimitable. The work of a man is the explanation of that man."

Paul Gauguin (from a letter to Charles Morice, 1903)

"If one views (as I do) Gauguin's Tahitian painting with sympathy - as marking a decisive break from current European representation of the nude - one may [say that] Gauguin produced new and compelling art even while his discourse remained hostage to primitivist myths because he turned this discourse to other uses, made his objects of representation call into question traditional kinds of looking. His construction of "the natural"...is a matter of the utmost artifice, aimed at disarming our traditional view of the nude and of the primitive, revising the space of our observation and the context of our looking. Gauguin's "exotic" continually refers us back - and is meant to refer us back - to the problem of the nude in Western art."

From Gauguin's Tahitian Body by Peter Brooks


"There is, in short, a darker side to primitivist desire, one implicated in fantasies of imaginary knowledge, power and rape; and these fantasies, moreover, are sometimes underpinned by real power, by real rape. When Gauguin writes in the margins of the Noa Noa manuscript, "I saw plenty of calm-eyed women. I wanted them to be willing to be taken without a word, brutally. In a way [it was a] longing to rape", we are on the border between the acceptable myth of the primitivist artist as sexual outlaw, and the relations of violence and domination that provide its historic and psychic armature."

From Going Native by Abigail Solomon-Godeau

The Big "O"

Eugene Delecroix - The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834)


"Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor it is a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural ( as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, tests, values), power moral (as with ideas about what "we" do and "they" cannot do or cannot understand as "we" do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is - and does not simply represent - a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to with the Orient that it has to do with "our" world."

From Orientalism by Edward Said


"[The] key notion of Orientalism itself cannot be confronted without a critical analysis of the particular power structure in which these works came into being. For instance, the degree of realism (or lack of it) in individual Orientalist images can hardly be discussed without some attempt to clarify whose reality we are talking about."

From The Imaginary Orient by Linda Nochlin


"A taste for simplicity cannot last for long."

Eugene Delecroix

Ophelia's Last Dance

John Everett Millais - Ophelia (1851-52)


Dance Me To The End Of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Leonard Cohen


Link:

Millais at The Victorian Web.

Spellbound

Anselm Kiefer - The Cauterisation of the Rural District of Buchen (1974)

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

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We Do Not Bleed, We Can Not Cry, We Must Not Feel

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Thinking of You) (1999-2000)


'Discredited by modern opinion, love's sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love's obscenity.'

From A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes

Reading:

Eroticism: Death and Sensuality - Georges Bataille

Bergson: Key Writings - Henri Bergson

Cindy Sherman: Retrospective – Amanda Cruz, Amelia Jones and Elizabeth A. T. Smith

Cindy Sherman: Photographic Work 1975-1995 – Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander

Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993 – Norman Bryson and Rosalind Krauss

Cindy Sherman: History Portraits – Arthur C. Danto

Cindy Sherman – Lorrie Moore and Rochelle Steiner

A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman – Laura Mulvey

A Piece of the Action: Images of ‘Woman’ in the Photography of Cindy Sherman – Judith Williamson

Viewing:

Night of the Hunter – d. Charles Laughton (1955)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season Six):

Ep1. The Bargaining: Part One - d. David Grossman
Ep2. The Bargaining: Part Two - d. David Grossman
Ep3. Afterlife - d. David Solomon
Ep4. Flooded - d. Douglas Petrie
Ep5. Life Serial - d. Nick Marck
Ep6. All The Way - d. David Solomon
Ep7. Once More With Feeling - d. Joss Whedon
Ep8. Tabula Rasa - d. David Grossman
Ep9. Smashed - d. Turi Meyer
Ep10. Wrecked - d. David Solomon
Ep11. Gone - d. David Fury
Ep12. Doublemeat Palace - d. Nick Marck
Ep13. Dead Things - d. James A. Contner
Ep14. Older And Far Away - d. Michael E. Gershman
Ep15. As You Were - d. Douglas Petrie
Ep16. Hell's Bells - d. David Solomon
Ep17. Normal Again - d. Rick Rosenthal
Ep18. Entropy - d. James A. Contner
Ep19. Seeing Red - d. Michael Gershman
Ep20. Villains - d. David Solomon
Ep21. Two To Go - d. Bill L. Norton
Ep22. Grave - d. James A. Contner

On The Threshold Of Death And Desire

Gian Lorenzo Bernini - The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1652)


'The desire to go keeling helplessly over, that assails the innermost depths of every human being is nevertheless different from the desire to die in that it is ambiguous. It may well be a desire to die, but it is at the same time a desire to live at the limits of the possible and the impossible with ever-increasing intensity. It is the desire to live while ceasing to live, or to die without ceasing to live, the desire of an extreme state that Saint Theresa has perhaps been the only one to depict strongly enough in words. "I die because I cannot die". But the death of not dying is precisely not death; it is the ultimate stage of life; if I die because I cannot die it is on condition that I live on; because of the death I feel though still alive and still live on. St Theresa's being reeled, but did not actually die of her desire actually to experience that sensation. She lost her footing but all she did was to live more violently, so violently that she could say she was on the threshold of dying, but such a death as tried her to the utmost though it did not cease to make her live.'

From Eroticism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille


'Affirming and denying, appreciating and depreciating, express the will to power just as acting and reacting express force... Affirmation is not action but the power of becoming active, becoming active personified. Negation is not simply reaction but a becoming reactive.'

From Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze


'I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.'

From Saint Theresa's autobiography: The Life of St. Theresa of Jesus

The Cinema Of Sorrows

The Age of Innocence - d. Martin Scorsese (1993)

You Came Late And Your Beloved Is Lost

I began work on this essay with the impulse to downplay things like acting, character, story, theme - usually assumed as the privileged vessels of emotion - and to look elsewhere, at purely formal, non-representational elements of film style and language. Like most categorical, schematic distinctions, this one turned out to be false and misleading. Ultimately, it is a waste of time to set abstract against concrete, form against content, signifier against signified. In the films that move us, that take us somewhere in the truest sense, there is no distinction between these levels, only the deepest, inseparable fusion. This is an economy of form and content, as equal partners, that we are not yet used to: every so-called 'device' can absorb and express feeling; can move and transform the impulses and concerns of the film; can carry us, frame by frame, through thick and thin, to some place we haven't quite been or seen or heard before.

The film is just about to end. It is a sad film where things turn out badly. A voluptuously melancholic film, a hushed, pained, romantic melodrama full of mutual misunderstandings, missed connections and masochistic stupidities. The world ends, drains away, in the concluding four-minute scene of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Poor Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis): he came late, and his beloved is lost. Newland is the sad anti-hero, so moving, but also so difficult and troubling, because he doesn't move much at all, in any sense: as the film draws to its magisterial ending, Newland takes refuge in cryptic statements of denial, lines like "she never asked me" and "just say I'm old fashioned, that should be enough".

So much flows in and out of this final scene, so much gathered and dispersed - even the birds who, in the final shot, circle up high and then gather in a spot on the ground which Newland, obliviously, walks through and disturbs. Most spectacularly, the centrepiece of the four minutes is a theatre of memory: Newland gets to replay, in his mind, and at last put right, the moment that once upon a time stymied him for the rest of his long and uneventful life. He wished for the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) to turn around before that Murnau-like boat passed and, if so, all would be well with the world, and between them as lovers. It didn't happen then, and now it happens with tremendous yearning but with no joy: Newland looks assaulted, wounded by that harsh, reflected light that causes him to blink, and sends him into fantasy-land with his eyes wide shut.

But these shots, while encapsulating a character and his destiny, also soar high and far from him; they constitute, like Almodóvar's apparition of a title, a gesture. Light, flicker, rapid montage, superimposition, a spectator and a vision: this is one of those privileged passages, also gone in less than sixty seconds, when the cinema all of a sudden bears witness to itself, reflecting on its powers of creation and destruction, as if to declare its hand at the dark or light heart of all our fantasy projections.

That constitutes the obvious fireworks in the scene. But its force is channelled and amplified by the more seemingly ordinary material on either side. Newland's son, Ted (Robert Sean Leonard), for instance, is the reality-principle in the scene. All he talks about and embodies are facts of place (on the third floor) and time (almost six o'clock), etiquettes of social reasonableness (she won't understand). Ted is a comfortably dressed, chipper guy; his jaunty walk and his movements briskly set-up a shot-reverse shot, low-high angle volley. That's his function and his form: to secure an orderly progression of elements. Newland on the other hand, walks slowly, in fact he's a log. For most of the scene, he barely moves more than a couple of feet's distance - and that's essentially in order to sit down.

Scorsese has a found a street setting here that can centre Newland perfectly in the frame, wrap around him, like he's one of those trees rooted to the spot; or maybe some insect, since we almost always view him here from above. In this setting, once again bodies become ritually like objects, and the non-human is invested with presence. All the sadness of the entire movie flows around Newland in this strangely truncated street space, of which we deliberately see very little. Again, this space has a static, solemn, church-like air. All it offers, finally, is a back exit: the exit into off-screen oblivion and anonymity that Newland will duly, gratefully take, as extras walk on by, as Elmer Bernstein's music finishes, and the film takes us to the sharply wrenching but also deeply satisfying void of a black and soundless screen for some long seconds - the only place we can bear to be right now, right here.

The voice-over narration (spoken by Joanne Woodward) is sparse, located only in the first moments of the scene. Appropriately, this narration speaks, in its few words, about the mystery, grace and pathos of being moved inexpressibly. At the very end, for Scorsese, there are only images and sounds, a gesture and a place, and then nothingness: things, feelings, that words (even the best chosen words) can no longer express. The duration of the final, long-held, static shot, the closing cadences of the music, the black screen - are these signs of an excess, a melodramatic overflowing? I don't figure so. They are the signs of an artistry and a richness, a hyper-saturation of mood, feeling and meaning taken to the point of ecstasy. A delirious enchantment.

From Delerious Enchantment by Adrian Martin

Indeed, one might conclude that the melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego and, hence, to evert the loss as a complete loss. Here we see that letting the object go means, paradoxically, not full abandonment of the object but transferring the status of the object from external to internal. Giving up the object becomes possible only on the condition of a melancholic internalisation or, what might for our purposes turn out to be even more important, a melancholic incorporation.

If in melancholia loss is refused, it is not for that reason abolished. Internalisation preserves loss in the psyche; more precisely, the internalisation of loss is part of the mechanism of its refusal. If the object can no longer exist in the external world, it will then exist internally, and that internalisation will be a way to disavow the loss, to keep it at bay, to stay or postpone the recognition and suffering of loss.

From Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification by Judith Butler

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Anatole France

Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)

Exhibit A:



Adolf Hitler - Flowers (date unknown)

'Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and a field blue should be sterilised.'

Adolf Hitler

Exhibit B:



Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night (1889)

'The night is even more richly coloured than the day...If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are citron-yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without expatiating on this theme it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.'

Vincent Van Gogh

The Discreet Agony of Impossible Intimacies: Part Five (Sexhibionists)

Andrea Fraser - Still from Untitled (2003)

'In the art world, especially over the last few years, Fraser has been known for flaunting her body. This time she went all the way. The Petzel show consists of an institutional-looking TV monitor resting atop a white waist-high pedestal in the otherwise empty gallery. By now, almost everyone in the art world (and “a half million viewers, probably not in the art world,” as a Scarborough staffer informed me) knows what’s on this monitor: Fraser’s unedited one-hour videotape, called Untitled, of her having what she calls “just regular sex” with an art collector who paid $20,000, “not for sex,” according to the artist, but “to make an artwork.”

I’m no sexpert but to me the sex looked far from “regular.” More accurately, it felt stilted and rote and detached and strained (although I must say it looks as if she gives an attentive blow job). She’s in excellent shape for a 39 year old (various resumes have her older, but no matter). The collector, co-artist, commissioner, John or whatever you want to call him is a sturdy-looking if hirsute, 30-or-40-something-year-old white man. They sit on a bed in what looks like a hotel room. They talk, and talk some more. He awkwardly touches her thigh. She kisses him. She then removes his trousers, then her dress. She pleasures him, he her. They have intercourse in a number of positions. There is no visible “money shot.” He apparently ejaculates inside her (which seems pretty intimate to me). Afterwards, the couple lays in bed, talks, cuddles, talks some more, then each partner leaves from either side of the frame. The camera, which is where the overhead light fixture might be, never moves. There is no sound, no gynaecological detail, or anything especially hardcore. People who love porn won’t get off on Untitled; those who abhor it may find the video improbably neutral.'

From Super Theory Woman by Jerry Saltz

'Since sexuality is as much a social fact as it is a human one, it will therefore change its nature according to changes in social conditions. If we could restore the context of the world to the embraces of these shadows [i.e. porn "actors"] then, perhaps, we could utilise their activities to obtain a fresh perception of the world and, in some sense, transform it. The sexual act in pornography exists as a metaphor for what people do to one another, often in the cruellest sense; but the present business of the pornographer is to suppress the metaphor as much as he can and leave us with a handful of empty words.'

From The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter


'But what can porn do in a world pornographed in advance?...Except bring an added ironic value to appearances? Except trip a last paradoxical wink - of sex laughing at itself in its most exact and hence most monstrous form, laughing at its own disappearance beneath its most artificial form?'

From The Perfect Crime by Jean Baudrillard

The Discreet Agony Of Impossible Intimacies: Part Four (Grotesqueries)

Production still from King Kong (1933)


'Like myths and fairytales, art and film encode cultural contradictions, moral dilemnas and dominant ideologies; they rewrite, re-vision and remake cultural fables, like that of Beauty and the Beast. In the period following the Enlightenment, the nature of aesthetic value and judgment changed. Modern art, literature and later film, illustrated the grotesque in order to define beauty, made monsters to delineate the bounds of normality, set beasts in opposition to humanity, and created racial others in order to construct a normative (white) subject.

When ideals of beauty were recognised as dependent on human appreciation, the grotesque emerged as a foil to beauty - and the thoroughly modern monster was born.

In 1927 Victor Hugo describes the grotesque and its relationship to beauty as the key to modern aesthetics: 'It is everywhere; on the one hand, it creates the deformed and the horrible, on the other the comic and the buffoon'. Serving as contrast to the sublime, the grotesque is placed at the vanguard of progress in the arts; it gives birth to a modern form of beauty made up of violent contrasts. On the grotesque he suggests further that: 'in the age of romaticism everything bears witness to its intimate and creative alliance with Beauty. Even the most naive popular legends explain at times with an admirable instinct this mystery of modern art. Antiquity would not have made Beauty and the Beast'. Precursors such as Apuleius's classical story of a divine lover mistaken for a monster do not rely in the same way on the visualisations of the grotesque and its contrast with beauty - Cupid is never really a beast.'

From 'It was beauty killed the beast': Modern Monsters from Frankenstein to King Kong by Kathryn Weir

The Discreet Agony of Impossible Intimacies: Part Three (Haptophobes)

Rene Magritte - The Lovers (1928)

'What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?'

Jacques Lacan

The Discreet Agony Of Impossible Intimacies: Part Two (Cyborganisms)

Giorgio de Chirico - Hector and Andromache (1917)


"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction...I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism...The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust...Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection - they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential."

From The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

Reading:

Andy Warhol Self-Portraits - (ed.) Dietmar Elger

Andy Warhol - (ed.) Annette Steiner

Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics - Paul Mattick

Cindy Sherman - Rochelle Steiner

The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist - Donald Kuspit

The Death of the Author - Roland Barthes

Doll Parts: Technology and the Body in 'Ghost in the Shell' - Susan Napier

Magical Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America - Annalee Newitz

Making Up People - Ian Hacking

Revisionary Film - Sean Cubitt

The Question of Lay-Analysis - Sigmund Freud

Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete - Kelly M. Cresap

Truth and Power - (interview with) Michel Foucault

Understanding Foucault - Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb

What is an Author? - Michel Foucault

The Work of Andy Warhol - (ed.) Gary Garrels

Would the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up? Encounters between Cindy Sherman and Feminist Art Theory - Michelle Meagher

Viewing:

The Celluloid Closet - d. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (1995)

Ghost in the Shell - d. Mamoru Oshii (1995)

Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) - d. Luchino Visconti (1960)

Tarnation - d. Jonathon Caouette (2003)

The Discreet Agony Of Impossible Intimacies: Part One (Synchrophiliacs)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Untitled (Perfect Lovers) - (1987-90)


'Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.'

Marcel Proust - Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896)

The Cosmic Clock

Gustave Dore - Illustration for Dante's The Divine Comedy: Paradisio (Canto 31)

'There is no doubt but that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially taken snapshots of the transition; and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration itself. It is memory, but not personal memory, external to what it retains, distinct from a past whose preservation it assures; it is memory within change itself, a memory that prolongs the before into the after, keeping them from being mere snapshots and appearing and disappearing in a present ceaselessly reborn. A melody to which we listen with our eyes closed, heeding it alone, comes close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of our inner life; but it still has too many qualities, too much definition, and we must first efface the difference among the sounds, then do away with the distinctive features of the sound itself, retaining of it only the continuation of what precedes into what follows and the uninterrupted transition, multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation, in order finally to rediscover basic time. Such is immediately perceived duration, without which we would have no idea of time.

How do we pass this inner time to the time of things? We perceive the physical world and this perception appears, rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time; in one way, it is a state of consciousness; in another, a surface film of matter in which perceiver and perceived coincide. To each moment of our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and of all environing matter that is 'simultaneous' with it; this matter then seems to participate in our conscious duration. Gradually, we extend this duration to the whole physical world, because we see no reason to limit it to the immediate vicinity of our body. The universe seems to us to form a single whole; and, if the part that is around us endures in our manner, the same must hold, we think, for that part by which it, in turn, is surrounded, and so on indefinitely. Thus is born the idea of a duration of the universe, that is to say, of an impersonal consciousness that is the link among all individual consciousnesses, as between these consciousnesses and the rest of nature.'

From Concerning the Nature of Time by Henri Bergson

I Am Doll Parts

Top: Ghost In The Shell - d. Mamorou Oshii (1995)
Middle: Cindy Sherman - Untitled #253 (1992)
Bottom: Matthais Grunewald - Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1515)

'The human body is the best picture of the human soul.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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