The Author Has Left The Text

Erica Baum - Mr. 5 17 37 (2004)

1. “To this day, the “author” remains an open question…”

2. “Beckett supplies a direction: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.” . . . [Writing] as an ongoing process [that] slights our customary attention to the finished product . . . [The] writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of expression”; it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we recognise it in its exterior deployment. This reversal transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier. Moreover, it implies an action that is always testing the limits of its regularity, transgressing and reversing an order that it accepts and manipulates. Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of the subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.”

3. “Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. . . If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his links to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing.”

4. “It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should re-examine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance.”

5. “Yet - and it is here that the specific difficulties attending the author’s name appear - the link between a proper name and the individual being named and the link between an author’s name and that which it names are not isomorphous and do not function in the same way; and these differences require clarification . . .

Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationship among texts . . . Finally, the author’s name characterises a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, this status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author, defining their form, and characterising their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. The author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which give rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence. Consequently, we can say that in our culture, the name of the author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others . . . In this sense, the function of an author is to characterise the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society.”

6. “In dealing with the “author” as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its difference from other discourses.

First, they are the objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago.

Secondly, the “author-function” is not universal or constant in all discourse.

The third point concerning this “author-function” is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we can call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a “realistic” dimension as we speak of an individual’s “profundity” or “creative” power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in the writing. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned.”

7. “The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their various modifications (and this through an author’s biography or by reference to his particular point of view, in the analysis of his social preferences and his position within a class or by delineating his fundamental objectives). The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralise the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is the belief that there must be - at a particular level of an author’s thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire - a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental; and originating contradiction. Finally, the author is a particular sources of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and so forth.”

8. “However, it would be false to consider the function of the author as a pure and simple reconstruction after the fact of a text given as passive material, since a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author. . .

[All] discourse that supports this “author-function” is characterised by this plurality of egos.”

9. [The] “author-function” is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.”

10. “[There] undoubtedly exist specific discursive properties or relationships that are irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic and to the laws that govern objects. These properties require investigation if we hope to distinguish the larger categories of discourse. The different forms of relationship (or nonrelationships) that an author can assume are evidently one of these discursive properties.

This form of investigation might also permit the introduction of an historical analysis of discourse. Perhaps the time has come to study not only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its mode of existence: the modifications and variations, within any culture, of modes of circulation, valorisation, attribution and appropriation. Partially at the expense of themes and concepts that an author places in his work, the “author-function” could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships.

Is it not possible to re-examine, as a legitimate extension of this kind of analysis, the privileges of the subject? Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis of a work (whether it be a literary text, a philosophical system, or a scientific work) and in delimiting psychological and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its interventions in discourse, and its system of dependencies. We should suspend the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate the density of things and endow them with meaning; how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the course of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse.

The author - or what I have called the “author-function” - is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.”

From What is an Author? by Michel Foucault.

Deadwood: David's Inferno

Deadwood (2004-2006) - created by David Milch

"Trust. Hell of a way to operate, huh?...Then all the ins and outs of gettin' killed...Every fuckin' beating I'm grateful for. Every fuckin' one of them. Get all the trust beat outa ya...Then you know what the fuckin' world is."

Al Swearengen (Ian McShane - above, far right)

(Deadwood, Episode Three - 'Reconnoitering the Rim': w. Jody Worth, d. Davis Guggenheim)

Al Swearengen

The proprietor of The Gem Saloon was six months ahead of everyone else in Deadwood, and he runs the town like a corrupt riverboat captain. He knows every move that every person in town makes, anticipates problems and eliminates them. His girls aren't exactly the class of the town, but he controls the most successful bar and whorehouse in all of Deadwood - bringing in $5,000 a day in 1876 - and anybody that threatens his sources of income may well end up fed to Mr. Wu's pigs.

Tim Driscoll, who helped facilitate Al's swindle of the city dude Brom Garret, met such a fate, as did Persimmon Phil, who deeds as a road agent brought too much attention to Al's enterprise. Garret himself was killed at Al's behest, though Swearengen eventually abandoned his efforts to retake the Garret claim. And when Mr. Wu came to Al to avenge a murdered opium courier, the saloon boss took care of things by personally drowning the guilty junky.

But Al's hands-on approach has earned him some enemies, and his main commercial rival, Cy Tolliver - proprietor of the more upscale Bella Union - is exploiting the Wu situation to fuel a full-on race war in Deadwood. Al suspects Tolliver of trying to expand his turf.

With outsiders expressing an interest in the wealthy outpost and government soldiers threatening to bring civilization to town, Al is under siege from several directions. And when the territory's magistrate threatens him with an outstanding murder warrant from Chicago, Al decides that the official is not to leave Deadwood alive.

For all his Mephistophelean qualities, Swearengen does have a soft spot for certain people, including the whore Trixie, Jewel, his handicapped house servant, and the brain-addled Reverend Jim, whom Al was forced to euthanize.

From HBO's Deadwood web site.

The Monster's Bride: Part Six

Pompeo Batoni - The Marriage of Eros and Psyche (1756)


"Apuleius' tale is the earliest extant forerunner of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in Western literature, and a founding myth of sexual difference. It includes episodes the fairy tale 'La Belle et la bête' has made famous, from children's versions to films: the mysterious menacing lover, the jealous sisters, the enchanted castle where disembodied voices serve every wish and 'nectarous wines and appetising dishes appeared by magic, floating up to her of their own accord.' It echoes stories of Pandora and Eve when it relies on female curiosity as the dynamic of the plot, and the overriding motive force of the female sex. Punished for her disobedience, Psyche then has to prove her love through many adventures and ordeals; pregnant by Cupid, she struggles through one test of her loyalty after another until, finally, this Beauty is reunited with her Beast and adapts him, the god of Love, to the human condition of marriage, and they have a daughter, called Voluptas - Pleasure."

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Monster's Bride: Part Five

Simon Vouet - Psyche Discovering Cupid's Identity (early 1600s)

'Psyche is forbidden to look at [Cupid]. When she can resist no longer and breaks her prohibition, lighting a candle to look at her lover while he sleeps, he vanishes, and with him all her enchanted surroundings. But Eros, mysterious, unknown, feared, exceeds all imaginable degree of charm when Psyche sees him in the night:

There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures . . . his golden hair, washed in nectar and still scented with it, thick curls straying over white neck and flushed cheeks and falling prettily entangled on either side of his head . . . soft wings of purest whie . . . the tender down fringing the feathers quivered naughtily all the time. The rest of his body was so smooth and beautiful that Venus cold never be ashamed to acknowledge him as her son.

Psyche's failure to trust, and to obey, has cost her his adorable presence.'

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Week in Review

Reading:

Immortal Monster: The Mythical Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film - Joseph D. Adriano

Interpreting the Moving Image - Noel Carroll

Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture - Cynthia Erb

Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong - Tedd Gott and Kathryn Weir

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film - (ed.) Barry Keith Grant

The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle - Fatimah Rony

From the Beast to the Blonde - Marina Warner

Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time - Marina Warner

Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism - Thomas E. Wartenberg

Viewing:

Rebecca - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1940)

Shadow of a Doubt - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1943)

Rear Window - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1954)

The Wrong Man - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

Vertigo - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

North by Northwest - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1959)

Psycho - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

Listening:

Murder Ballads - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Boatman's Call - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Good Son - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Monster's Bride: Part Four

Antonio Canova - Amor and Psyche (1796)

I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever apprehends . . .
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitations and a name . . .

A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, 1 - William Shakespeare

'The first beast of the West was Eros, the god of love himself. In the romance of Cupid and Psyche, Eros/Cupid makes love, unseen in the dark, to a mortal Beauty - Psyche - who rivals his own mother Venus in seductiveness . . .'

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Monster's Bride: Part Three

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"After his involvement with the Museum d'histoire naturelle, Frémiet was surely familiar with the research of Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868). In the successive volumes of his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes (1847, 1857 and 1863), Boucher de Perthes argued that the peculiarly shaped stones he had found among the bones of extinct mammals in the Abbeville region of France were actually primitive cutting and hunting implements fashioned by antediluvian peoples. At the time of their first publication, his theories were ridiculed by many, since they did not concur with the Christian Church's religious notions of the beginnings of mankind dating no earlier than 4000 BC. By 1887, however, Boucher de Perthes' discoveries were thoroughly vindicated. It is interesting to consider whether the ape's possession of a chiselled cutting tool in Frémiet’s Gorilla Carrying off a Woman depicts a pure gorilla or an ape that has evolved in intelligence one step towards the human condition. Certainly, the critics of the day were divided as to whether his new work promoted or argued against Darwinian theory.

In 1887, the state authorities were faced with acknowledging the celebrity of Frémiet’s life-size plaster and immediately acquired it; yet they were also confronted by its highly controversial subject matter. Frémiet himself had written to the chief arts administrator of the day, pleading that 'with your dual interest in the fine arts and in science, it is to be hoped that you will decide to acquire my sculpture, which really belongs in the Museum d'histoire naturelle'. This was not to be and despite Frémiet’s many entreaties, the work was stowed away until 1895 when it was consigned to the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, where it remains today. The sculptor was able to bring the work back to Paris briefly some years later, when he received a commission from an American collector for a life-size bronze to be cast from it. This enabled the sculpture to be once again exhibited to a huge audience, at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

Its exile in Nantes failed to make Frémiet’s composition disappear as he had permission from the French State to edition bronze versions of the work in a reduced size, and these proved to be highly popular collectables. The ambiguous but compelling Gorilla Carrying off a Woman was also reproduced widely, by both engraving and photography. By all these means, Frémiet’s sculpture entered the public consciousness as one of the defining images of the time."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Monster's Bride: Part Two

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"The 'Gorilla wars' of the 1860s and the entire weight of evolutionary debate attendant upon the theories of Darwin, Huxley and others lay behind Emmanuel Frémiet’s decision to revisit the gorilla in 1887. As Bartlett recounted in 1891:

Always seeing a plaster cast of a gorilla at the Garden [the Jardin des Plantes of the Museum] and regretting the destruction of the one he had made in 1859, decided Frémiet to make another group of the same subject, but differently and more compactly treated. Its appearance in the Salon of 1887 created an immense sensation and, as usual, a wide division of opinion. The few best artists and art lovers pronounced it, independent of subject, a great masterpiece, while many wholly condemned it, because of its subject.

Frémiet’s life and career had also changed significantly in the three decades that lay between his first and second versions of the Gorilla. From the 1860s Frémiet had become fascinated with creating meticulously accurate reconstructions of the appearance and armour of military figures from Roman times to the Middle Ages. His St George and the Dragon 1891, for example, casts the Christian saint in the guise of a medieval warrior, whose armour is based on actual examples of the period that the artist studied in France's Imperial Army Museum. A deep interest in the sciences of prehistoric archaeology and palaeontology also ran alongside Frémiet’s fascination for medieval reconstructions, leading him to create a number of sculptures depicting the struggles of Stone Age peoples. In July 1875, a month after the death of the esteemed animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, Frémiet was named as Barye's replacement to the post of Master of Zoological Drawing at the Museum d'histoire naturelle.

When Frémiet created the 1887 version of the life-size Gorille enlevant une femme (Gorilla carrying off a woman), it carried the same power to shock audiences as its predecessor of 1859. The immediacy and solidity of its depiction of a wounded primate locked in mortal combat with a living, struggling woman was far removed from the passivity of even the best taxidermists' efforts then on display in the world's museums. While gorillas had by now become familiarised within both scientific and public discourse, living specimens of the great ape were still highly prized and exotic items for those zoos lucky enough to possess one. The life-size Gorilla carrying off a woman was another controversial triumph for Frémiet, who had last received a medal at the Salon in 1851. He now carried off the Salon's coveted prize, the Medal of Honour.

Whereas the 1859 sculpture had depicted a female gorilla dragging away an arguably 'naturally selected' dead trophy, Frémiet upped the ante in 1887. The woman was now Caucasian and very much alive, even presaging an art nouveau nymph in her curvaceous struggle with a visibly male primate. Frémiet no longer made his viewers play mute witness to the triumphant swagger of a murderous beast, but took them right into the heart of a much more ambiguous battle, set in the Stone Age.

The 1887 sculpture further muddied the waters by alluding to controversial new archaeological discoveries. Rather than being an innocent victim, the woman wears part of a gorilla's jawbone as a hair adornment, indicating her status as a Stone Age predator. She is part of a prehistoric hunting party that has been attacking the gorilla as edible prey. Moreover, it is her companions at whom the beast grimaces and snarls - those who have hurled the lance that pierces the left shoulder of the gorilla. The chiselled rock which the ape grabs in self-defence might well have belonged to his attackers, for it resembles a cutting tool from the Palaeolithic era."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Monster's Bride: Part One

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1859)

"In 1859, the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910) alarmed the jury of the Paris Salon by submitting a greater than life-size plaster composition, Gorille enlevant une negresse (Gorilla Carrying off a Negress). The jury found it to be too confronting for both its graphic violence and for its proximity to current debates about evolution. In that same year, Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a work that acted as a flashpoint for evolutionary theory. For decades prior to the appearance of Darwin's landmark text, scientists and theologians struggled to reconcile a barrage of new discoveries in the fields of archaeology, geology and comparative anatomy with traditionally held beliefs concerning the world's and humanity's creation.

By 1859 Frémiet had already established a national and international reputation as a master sculptor. He had caught the imagination of visitors to the annual Paris Salon in 1843 with his life-size plaster sculptures of both wild and domestic animals that were astonishing for their faithfulness to nature and lifelike qualities. Frémiet’s three-dimensional evocations of domestic pets proved especially popular in his early career, bringing him increasing critical acclaim and the financial reward of official patronage. He seemed, however, to have seriously blotted his copybook with the Gorilla Carrying off a Negress, at least in the eyes of the more conservative controllers of the art world. Frémiet himself recalled:

At a time when a lot of noise was being made about mankind and apes being brothers, it was an audacious idea; and my work proved even more aggravating since, the gorilla being the ugliest of all the primates, the comparison was hardly flattering for humans ... The jury's condemnation was unanimous. My work was declared to be seriously offensive to public morality, and it was banished pitilessly from the Salon.

Alfred, Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the chief arts administrator, quickly intervened and a place was found for the artist's sculpture, despite its official rejection from the items accepted into the Salon proper. The Gorilla was installed towards the entrance of the Salon's sculpture section, set back in a niche behind heavy green velvet curtains. While the conservative jury surely hoped to marginalise the work, this special treatment - or maltreatment - served only to create a cause celebre around Frémiet's sculpture. Parting these curtains to obtain a glimpse of the censored work became de rigueur for adult visitors to that year's Salon. According to the artist, women were especially titillated by the piece, whose composition was certainly confronting. The sculpture not only depicted a murder, but also seemed to allude to ravishment, visualising the worst fears of many about the planet's largest and most human-seeming primate. Reading the sculpture in this way, the critic Charles Baudelaire took exception to its subject matter:

Why are we not given a crocodile, a tiger, or any other wild animal that might eat a woman? Because this is not about eating, but rape! It is the ape alone, this gigantic ape at once so much more and less than a man, which has at times shown a human appetite for women ... To be honest, such subjects are beneath the dignity of so talented an artist, and the jury has done well to reject this sordid topic.

It is perhaps not surprising that Gorilla Carrying off a Negress, which was destroyed in 1861 and is now known only from a handful of photographs, was disturbing to viewers in 1859. The gorilla itself was still a newly discovered and much misunderstood species, and this added scientific and speculative weight to the frisson produced by Frémiet's sculpture."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Light Of The Mind

Georges de La Tour - Woman Catching Fleas (1630s)

"Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds colour. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard


"When the silent vision falls into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up a field of the nameable and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its truth - in short, when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and makes itself a gaze of the mind, intuitus mentis - this is always in virtue of the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech."

From The Visible and The Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"'I was going to say...'- You remember various details. But not even all of them shew your intention. It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen...And now it is as if we knew quite certainly what the whole picture respresented. As if I could read the darkness."

From Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

These Lips Were Made For Talking

Salvador Dali - Mae West (1934)


"When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better."

"A hard man is good to find."

"It's not the men in my life that counts, but the life in my men."

"I go for two kinds of men: domestic and imported."

"I generally avoid temptation - unless I can't resist it."

"It's better to be looked over than overlooked."

"To err is human - but it feels divine."

"I used to be Snow White...but I drifted."

"I like my clothes to be tight enough to show I'm a woman but loose enough to show I'm a lady."

"When choosing between two evils, I like to try the one I've never tried before."

Mae West

The Music Of Chance

Pablo Picasso - Three Musicians (1921)


"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth."

"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun."

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

"I do not seek. I find."

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

"Everything you can imagine is real."

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

"It takes a long time to become young."

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

Pablo Picasso

Eleven Mirrors (November Special)

Hans Memling - Earthly Vanity (c. 1485)

Giovanni Bellini - Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror (1515)

Parmigianino - Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (c. 1524)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Narcissus (1598-99)

Peter Paul Rubens - Venus at a Mirror (c. 1615)

Georges de la Tour - The Penitent Magdalen (1638)

Diego Velasquez - Venus at her Mirror (1649-51)

Jean- Baptiste Greuze - The Broken Mirror (1763)

Rene Magritte - Dangerous Liaison (1926)

Pablo Picasso - Girl Before a Mirror (1932)

Barbara Kruger - Who's the Fairest of them All? (date unknown)

"The mirror reflects all objects without being sullied."

Confucious

The Serenity Machine

Georges Seurat - Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86)

"Let's go get drunk on light again - it has the power to console."

Georges Seurat

"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is."

Thomas Szasz

"There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up
when fallen."

From The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Oh, Nothing

Lucio Fontana - Spatial Concept, Attesa (1966)


"God made everything out of nothing but the nothingness shows through."

Paul Valery

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

Blaise Pascal

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

Samuel Beckett

What You See Is What You'll Be

Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-1943)


"In art the search for a content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual."

Piet Mondrian

"Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."

Albert Camus

"The foundation of one's thought is the thought of another; thought is like a brick cemented in a wall. It is the simulacrum of thought if, in his looking back at himself, the being who thinks he sees a free brick and not the price of semblance this freedom cost him: he doesn't see the waste ground and the heaps of detritus to which a sensitive vanity consigns him with his brick.

The work of the mason, who assembles, is the work that matters. Thus the adjoining bricks, in a book, should not be less visible than the new brick, which is the book. What is offered the reader, in fact, cannot be an element, but must be an ensemble in which it is inserted: it is the whole human assemblage and edifice, which must be, not just a pike of scraps, but rather a self-consciousness.

In this sense, the unlimited assemblage is the impossible. It takes courage and stubbornness not to go slack. Everything invites one to drop the substance for shadow, to forsake the open and impersonal movement of thought for the isolated opinion. Of course the isolated opinion is also the shortest means of revealing what the assemblage really is - the impossible. But it has this deep meaning only if it is not conscious of the fact.

This powerlessness defines the apex of possibility, or at least, awareness of the impossibility opens consciousness to all that it is possible for it to think. In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who realises cohesion realises that there is no longer any room for him."

From Theory of Religion by Georges Bataille

After Philosophy

Joan Miró - Nocturne (1940)

"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me."

Joan Miró

"The problem with philosophy is the passage from the knowledge of limited objects to the knowledge of the entirety of what is."

From Aphorisms for the "System" by Georges Bataille

"A multiplicity is, in the most basic sense, a complex structure that does not reference a prior unity. Multiplicities are not parts of a greater whole that have been fragmented, and they cannot be considered manifold expressions of a single concept or transcendental unity."

From The Deleuze Dictionary - (ed.) Adrian Parr

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