André Masson and the Sex Pistols

The Surrealist and the Sex Pistol:

 André Masson and Malcolm McLaren

Photos by Man Ray (c. 1930) and Joe Stevens (1976)

 

 

I. 

 

When asked shortly before his death: Which living artist do you most admire? 

 

Malcolm McLaren answered: 

 

"When I was 18, I studied for three months under the automatist painter André Masson in France. Every day I would buy him tomatoes, a baguette and a bottle of côtes du rhône, but he never spoke. On my last day he bought me a drink and wished me well. He's dead now, but I remain haunted by him." [1]

 

I don't know how true that is, but it's an amusing story [2] and forms an interesting connection with an artist whose relation to surrealism is much discussed, but whose influence on punk is - as far as I know - rarely mentioned. 

 

 

II.

 

My knowledge of Masson is mostly limited to the period when he worked on the journal founded by Georges Bataille - Acéphale (1936-39). 

 

His cover design for the first issue featuring an iconic headless figure with stars for nipples and a skull where his sexual organ should be, has resonated with me ever since I first saw it in the mid-1990s and I'm disappointed that Malcolm didn't ask Jamie or Vivienne to adapt this pagan image on a design for the Sex Pistols.

 

To identify as an anti-Christ is an important start. But equally important is to declare oneself in opposition to the ideal figure of the Vitruvian Man embodying all that is Good, True, and Beautiful - and to repeat after Bataille: "Secrètement ou non, il est nécessaire de devenir tout autres ou de cesser d'être." [3]

 

Wouldn't that have made a great punk slogan? 

 

I think so.

And I think also that the sacred conspiracy involving Bataille, Masson, Klossowski and others, anticipates McLaren's idea for SEX as a place which might bring together those sovereign individuals who didn't belong to mainstream society or wish to conform to the dictates of fashion, but wanted to violently affirm their singular being above all else.

 

And so, again, I think it a pity that the dark surrealism of Bataille and Masson - which not only set itself in opposition to all forms of fascism but also all forms of humanism, including André Breton's surrealism - wasn't explored (and exploited) by McLaren; especially as, in Sid Vicious, punk rock had discovered its very own Dionysian superstar [4]; someone who, as Malcolm liked to say, never saw a red light and enacted the primordial powers of instinct and irrationality.  

And, like Masson's acéphalic figure, Vicious even had a penchant for carrying a (sacrificial) knife ... [5]

 

Notes

 

[1] Amy Fleming, 'Portrait of the artist: Malcolm McLaren, musician', in The Guardian (10 Aug 2009): click here. 

      This is an interesting short question and answer piece, which also reveals McLaren's favourite film to be David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). However, I don't think the description of McLaren in the title as a musician is one he would recognise. Sadly, McLaren died eight months after the piece was published (on 8 April 2010). 

 

[2] McLaren's biographer, Paul Gorman, tells us that prior to beginning life as a student at Harrow Technical College & School of Art, Malcolm was "sent by his mother to a summer school in the south of France" and that this (apparently) involved an internship with André Masson and not just enjoying life on the beach at Cannes. 

      See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 45.

 

[3] I would translate this into English as: "Secretly or not, it is necessary to become wholly other, or cease to be." Often the original French phrase tout autres is translated as 'completely different'.

      The line is from Bataille's essay 'The Sacred Conspiracy', which can be found in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 179. Masson's Acéphale can also be found in this book, illustrating the essay on p. 180.       

 

[4] See ' Sid Vicious Versus the Crucified' (3 Feb 2024) where I develop this idea: click here.

 

[5] See 'I'll Put a Knife Right in You: Notes on the Case of Sid and Nancy' (30 Dec 2020): click here. 

 

 

This post is dedicated to the Danish art historian and curator Marie Arleth Skov, author of Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023). Her paper at the Torn Edges symposium held at the London College of Communication (20 March 2024) - 'Berlin Calling: The Dark, Dramatic, and Dazzling Punk Art Praxes of a Divided City' - was inspirational.

Requiem pour un con (Was Jacques Prévert a Jerk?)

Jacques Prévert: Je ne suis pas un con!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the idiomatic expressions that I hate most is: It takes one to know one. 

 

Used by someone who wishes to point out that what they're accused of being is something which also characterises the accuser, it seems a particularly lame form of comeback; the sort of childish retort that only an individual lacking in wit or intelligence would say.    

 

However, I have to admit that when I first read the title of Michel Houellebecq's short piece 'Jacques Prévert is a jerk' [a] this was the first thing that came to mind, and, having now read the text, I'm still not convinced this is a fair thing to call one of France's most celebrated poets and screenwriters. 

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear: I'm not a devoted reader of M. Prévert, nor particularly knowledgeable about his life. But I do like some of the verses in Paroles (1946), particularly 'Déjeuner du matin' - Il a mis le café / Dans la tasse ...etc. [b] 

 

That certain intellectuals often looked down on Prévert (and his sentimentalité as they saw it) only makes me admire him a little bit more. As does the fact that he infuriated André Breton, by describing him as the high priest or pope of Surrealism after the latter expelled him from the group for not taking art seriously enough.    

 

Further, Prévert should be admired for writing against the collaborationist Vichy government during the War years, helping Jewish friends, and relaying messages for members of the Resistance, whilst never belonging to any political party himself, or feeling the need to posture like some of his contemporaries who trumpeted their own activities and commitments.    

 

 

III.

 

So, what exactly is Houllebecq's problem with Prévert? 

 

Well, in a nutshell, he seems to resent the latter's enormous success and blame him for the "repulsive poetic realism" which "continues to wreak havoc" upon French cinema. 

 

Houellebecq writes:

 

"Jacques Prévert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom [...] He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises [...] Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques Prévert - especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed."       

 

Nor does Houellebecq care for the optimism which Prévert displays in his work; "faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit" which is, he says, boundlessly stupid and nauseating at times. Better off, he suggests, embracing Emil Cioran's pessimism. 

 

Push comes to shove, I don't disagree with this, but that needn't prevent one from listening to Yves Montand sing 'Les Feuilles mortes'. For as even Houellebecq concedes, we all need something to relax to ...    

 

And if Prévert's lyrics are a bit sickly sweet and his pun-ridden poetry mediocre - "so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it" - surely that just makes him a bad writer, not necessarily un con as Houellebecq says. However, the latter is insistent on this point and so I shall give him the last word:     

"If Prévert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic cliché. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques Prévert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically an idiot."

Notes

 

[a] This text by Michel Houellebecq was first published as 'Jacques Prévert est un con' in Lettres françaises, No. 22 (July 1992). I am using the English translation by Andrew Brown that appears in Interventions 2020, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 1-3, even though I'm not entirely happy with the translation of the French term con with the (American-sounding) word jerk. 

 

[b] The English version of this poem, 'Breakfast', can be found in Jacques Prévert, Paroles, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (City Lights Publishers, 2001). Or click here to read on hellopoetry.com 

 

 

Musical bonus number one: Serge Gainsbourg, 'La Chanson de Prévert', from the album L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961).       One of Gainsbourg's most popular songs, it was inspired by 'Les Feuilles mortes', written by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma, for the film Les Portes de la nuit (dir. Marcel Carné, 1946). Click here for the 2014 remastered version.

 

Musical bonus number two: Serge Gainsbourg, 'Requiem pour un con', released as a single in 1968 from the soundtrack to the film Le Pacha (dir. Georges Lautner, 1968), it caused a good deal of fuss at the time, with censors judging the lyrics obscene and scandalous. 

      There's no reason to imagine that the track was inspired by Jacques Prévert, but the title of Michel Houellebecq's critique of the latter obvioulsy makes one think of this song. Click here for the original '68 version and/or here for the 1991 remix.    

 

 

Ce billet a été écrit avec l'aide de Sophie Stas à qui je suis reconnaissant. 

 

 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From Porn to The End of Theory)

Byung-Chul Han

 

IV. 

 

Whilst philosophe du moment Byung-Chul Han gives reference to the four great Bs of 20th-century French philosophy - Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, and Baudrillard - it's clear that The Agony of Eros (2017) is primarily written under the influence of Alain Badiou. 

 

Which means his defence of love is really just an excuse to stage a neo-Marxist assault upon techno-capitalism, developing his argument that the latter is responsible for creating a burned-out society in which an obscene (pornographic) ideal of transparency and self-disclosure is the cultural norm, compromising other values, including secrecy, silence, and shame, upon which eros (and mental health) depend.    

 

Writing in The Burnout Society (2015), Han describes a pathological landscape shaped by depression, attention defecit disorder, and exhaustion, all thanks to a 24/7 lifestyle of continuous positivity - a form of violence in his view - in which we are all expected to become entrepreneurs of the self. This leads not only to ever greater levels of self-exploitation, but to narcissism, and thus the extermination of Otherness, which, once more, is crucial for love and, indeed, society. 

 

For when subjects are concerned exclusively with themselves, then relationship with others becomes impossible - as does thought - and we end up living in l'enfer du même ruled over by the kind of painfully inferior and deeply stupid politicians presently posturing (and virtue signalling) on the global stage. 

 

Anyway, let's return to The Agony of Eros (2017). I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers given refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press. 

 

 

V.

 

Porn

Han opens his fourth chapter with the kind of concise statement that readers will either love or loathe: "Porn is a matter of bare life on display." [29] 

 

It's an attempt, I suppose, to distill Baudrillard's rather complex idea of porn as the hyperreality of sex (i.e. the more sexual than sex) into a kind of pithy observation that some will find profound and others see as a piece of shallow sloganeering. Of course, it could be both ... 

Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez le surréalisme, said André Breton [a]. But if you love Love, you're also going to hate porn, which, according to Han, is antagonistic to eros and spells the end of sexuality as he would have it; i.e., something authentic, something natural, something sacred. 

 

The pornographication of the world is, he says, "unfolding as the profanation of the world" [29] - and this is a very bad thing; presumably because some things, like love, should be reserved only for the gods and not made freely available for misuse and commercial exploitation by mortals. 

 

Men might be encouraged to play with love - one possible definition of erotics. But should not be allowed to debase love - one possible definition of porn, in which there is nothing playful, nothing sanctified, nothing mysterious: "In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy." [32]             

 

Again, all this interests, but it does seem to be going over old ground; do we really want to resurrect the tired opposition between eroticism on the one side and porn on the other? One recalls D. H. Lawrence's axiom: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." [b]  

 

 

Fantasy

 

In Why Love Hurts (Polity, 2012), Eva Illouz makes the fascinating claim that, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, desire is no longer determined by the unconscious mind, so much as conscious selection. 

 

What's more, she argues, we have had our imagination heightened by all the faces and bodies we encounter online, with the result that we are more often disappointed with those we meet in the real world; the flesh never shapes up.  

 

Han doesn't quite buy this though: 

 

"Counter to what Illouz assumes, desire is not 'rationalized' today by increasing opportunities for, and criteria of, choice. Instead, unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. [...] Today's ego [...] does not desire. To be sure, consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. But desire is something different from both wanting and needing. Illouz does not take the libido-economical particularity of desire into account." [37]

For Han, fantasy survives because it inhabits an undefined space that is outside the network of information-technology: 

 

"It is not heightened fantasy, but - if anything - higher expectations that are responsible for the mounting disappointment experienced in contemporary society." [ 38]

 

The high information density of social media is not conducive to the imagination. That's why, says Han, "pornography which maximizes visual information [...] destroys erotic fantasy" [38]. The secret of eroticism is that it forever withdraws the object of one's desire from view; it provides a glimpse, but never reveals all. Love - like horror - takes place in the shadows. Indeed, at its most extreme, love is blind and makes blind; a retreat into the "twilight space of dreams and desire" [40].        

 

Unfortunately, today, "faced with the sheer volume of hypervisible images, we can no longer shut our eyes" [40]. Compulsive (and compulsory) hypervigilance certainly makes it extremely difficult to do so and hypervisibility might be thought the "telos of the society of transparency" [40-41].  

 

The agony of eros thus involves not only a crisis of fantasy, but being forced like Alex in A Clockwork Orange to have our eyelids clamped open, so that we might see everything all of the time. 

 

The Politics of Eros

 

Oh dear, Byung-Chul Han and I are forced to part company once more; too much talk, right from the off, concerning the universal nature of love (Badiou) and beautiful souls guided by Eros (Plato) ... 

 

As for contemporary politics within a burnout society, well, according to Han, it's founded on pleasure-based desire (epithumia) and has no interest in either eros or thumos - the latter being something I have written about on Torpedo the Ark: click here and/or here, for example [c].

 

Whilst acknowledging that "a politics of love will never exist" [44], that doesn't stop Han dreaming of love stories unfolding against a background of political events and of a secret resonance existing between politics and love. For political action is "mutual desire for another way of living - a more just world aligned with eros on every register" [44]. 

 

Is it? That's news to me. I mean it could be that, but it could be something entirely different; a politics of evil, for example, which understands love to be an eternal part of life, but only a part: "And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease [...]" [d].      

 

That, in a nutshell, is my concern with Byung-Chul Han: that he turns a once healthy process of the human soul (love) into a diseased ideal and I suggest he read Lawrence's hugely important novels Aaron's Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923) to get an astonishing insight into this. Or some Nietzsche.      

 

 

The End of Theory

 

When not inspired by the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism, Heidegger was moved by the beating wings of the god of love; it was Eros who encouraged him as a thinker to venture along previously untrodden paths into the incalculable. At least that's what he told his wife. And Han believes him, because he also believes that:

 

"Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same." [47] 

 

Thinking not only becomes more powerful, but also more uncanny, when it's eroticised. Without erotic inspiration it just becomes dreary and repetitive: "Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere 'sensuality'." [48] 

 

This is why an artificial intelligence will never be able to produce a beautiful philosophical concept and why genuine thinking "transcends the positivity of given facts" [49] and data-analysis. Confronted with the "pullulating mass of information and data" [50], says Han, we need theoretical thinking more than ever. For theories, like ceremonies and rituals, "confer form on the world" [50] and keep things from breaking down into sprawling chaos.

 

In other words, information overload "massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise" [50]. And that's a problem, because thinking "as an expedition into quietness" [50] demands calm. We are faced with a spiritual crisis at top volume: "Rampant, massive information - an excess of positivity - makes a racket." [50] 

    

And just as we can't close our eyes, neither can we block up ears. Philosophy might be the "translation of eros into logos" [52], but when it speaks it does so in a seductive whisper, it doesn't shout or issue commands. And it still respects the importance of silence. 

 

And on that note, I'll shut up ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] No surprise that Byung-Chul Han eventually calls on André Breton for support, describing the surrealist reinvention of love as "an artistic, existential, and political gesture" which "ascribes a universal power to eros"; the power of poetic revolution and renewal. See chapter 6, 'The Politics of Eros', in The Agony of Eros. The lines quoted are on p. 46. 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Having said this, Lawrence does then go on to call for rigorous censorship of genuine pornography, which he says you can recognise "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit" [241]. Where Lawrence and Byung-Chul Han appear to significantly differ is on the question of secrecy. Whereas the latter thinks it fundamental to eroticism, Lawrence writes:

      "The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved." [243]

      Of course, Lawrence was writing in a different time. Today, pornography is not underworld or under the counter, it's freely and openly available online and the styles, values, and norms of the sex industry have been largely determine mainstream culture (this is what is meant by pornification). Still, what he writes in this essay is something that the author of The Agony of Eros might like to consider.   

 

[c] Whilst I don't expect Han to have read either of the above posts, I'm surprised he didn't refer to Peter Sloterdijk's work on thumos in his psycho-political study Zorn und Zeit (2006). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 328.

      See also Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) in which I discuss the politics of evil (as well as the politics of style, the politics of cruelty, and the politics of desire), with reference to the work of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. 

 

 

To read part one of this post - Melancholia to Bare Life - click here.       

 

 

Pornosurrealism: Autumn 1929

Ceci est une pipe

 

 

If there is one picture in which Surrealist art, nude photography, and porn all come together, it's a notorious image by Man Ray featuring his mistress and muse Kiki de Montparnasse displaying what Humbert Humbert would describe as the magic and might of her own soft mouth ... [1]

 

The picture - one of four sexually explicit images taken by Ray of himself and his lover - appeared in the avant-garde magazine Variétés, alongside equally explicit poetry written by Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon (two pioneers of literary Surrealism).

 

The story goes that when editor of the Brussels-based magazine, Edouard Mesens, complained he was having trouble paying the printers, Aragon suggested a special issue should be published in order to increase sales. Keen to contribute, Péret argued that nothing is more special - or sells better - than sex and he volunteered to provide some risqué verse (about little girls lifting up their skirts and masturbating in the bushes, for example).

 

Aragon explained the idea to Ray, who excitedly agreed to provide some photos - which, conveniently, he just happened to have hidden in a drawer of his desk. As one commentator notes:

             

"Even with the faces cropped, Aragon knew who'd posed for them. The male body, hairy and pale, was obviously Ray's. And everyone in Montparnasse would recognise as Kiki's the mouth, lipsticked in a Cupid's bow, clamped around his penis ..." [2]

 

André Breton edited the special special edition and called it 1929. He divided the poetry into four sections, named after the seasons, and each was illustrated with a tipped-in photograph by Ray. The initial print run of 215 copies were intended for private sale in Paris, but most were seized at the border by the authorities and destroyed. 

 

The few copies that escaped the clutches of the French customs offcials were sold (under the counter) at hugely inflated prices to art lovers, for whom the work embodied the freedom, dark humour, and daring eroticism that defined Surrealism. It has since become a collectors item; as has the first English edition published (somewhat belatedly) in 1996 [3].       

 

Notes

 

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr., (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 184. 

 

[2] John Baxter, 'Man Ray Laid Bare', Tate Magazine, issue 3 (Spring 2005): click here to read online.  

 

[3] 1929, by Benjamin Péret, Aragon, and Man Ray, (Alyscamps Press, 1996). Although the work is said to have been translated by Zoltan Lizot-Picon, it is actually a collaboration between the art scholar and critic Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno and André Breton's biographer Mark Polizzotti. 

      Whilst - predictably - HM Customs and Excise declared it pornographic and prohibited its importation into the UK, the book was, however, allowed to circulate freely within the United States as a work of art.         

 

 

Picture This: In Praise of the Photo Booth

 

Although we might trace the history of the photo booth back to the late 19th-century, I think it's fair to say that what most people understand to be a photo booth - coin-operated and complete with curtain - didn't debut until September 1925, on Broadway, in NYC. 

Known as the Photomaton, it was the patented invention of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Anatol Josepho, which would take, develop, and print a strip of eight snaps in under 10 minutes for just 25¢. 

 

In the first six months of operation, the Photomaton captured the images of 280,000 people and soon booths were being placed across the United States. So popular was the Photomaton, that white-gloved attendants stood by the machine during hours of operation in order to control the crowds (and provide any necessary maintenance).

 

In 1928, Josepho - who had arrived in America only five years earlier - sold the rights to his invention for $1,000,000 and guaranteed future royalties. 

 

The new master of the Photomaton, Henry Morgenthau Sr. - a lawyer and businessman who amassed a fortune from real estate and once served as the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire - told The New York Times that the Photomaton would enable him to do in the field of photography what Henry Ford had accomplished in the automobile industry.

 

When, in 1929, the Photomaton was introduced into the European market, many notable figures were keen to have their pictures taken, including the artists André Breton and Salvador Dalí. 

 

So perhaps it's not really surprising that Andy Warhol would later reveal himself to be a big fan of the photo booth, for whom the latter represented "a quintessentially modern intersection of mass entertainment and private self-contemplation" [1].  

 

I'm sure Warhol also recognised the erotic nature of such an intimate space; once squeezed inside a photo booth with someone on your knee, it's almost impossible not to cop a feel or snatch a kiss. 

 

But for him, as an artist, the real fascination was with the actual strip of single frame images produced: "The serial, mechanical nature of the strips provided Warhol with an ideal model for his aesthetic of passivity, detachment, and instant celebrity." [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from a text posted on the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to accompany a Photobooth Self-Portrait produced by Andy Warhol (c. 1963): click here. 

 

[2] Ibid.

 

See also: Jason Fate, 'The New Warhol Photobooth!' (2 August 2013), on the behind the scenes blog of The Andy Warhol Museum: click here.  

The 4-frame strip of images used to illustrate this post - featuring an anonymous young couple - was found in a photo booth in Ramsgate, in November 1986.

Walking the Lobster

A young female fan of French poetry in the 

1950s paying hommage to her hero Nerval

 

In urban slang, apparently, walking the lobster means to take a risk; to cross the line; to go too far ...

 

And, arguably, that's exactly what French Romantic poet and eccentric 19th-century dandy Gérard de Nerval did when he literally took his pet lobster, called Thibault, for a stroll round the Jardin du Palais-Royal on a leash made of bright blue ribbon.

 

Or at least that's what his friend and fellow poet Théophile Gautier would have us believe - and, who knows, perhaps it's true: I think I'd like it to be true ...

 

Though even if the author of Les Filles du feu (1854) - who would later have a significant influence on André Breton and the Surrealists - didn't in fact walk his lobster, he was nevertheless prepared to defend his choice of pet and right to exercise the creature:

 

'Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do.' [1]  

 

It's a perfectly reasonable defence and I'm surprised that more people haven't opted to keep crustaceans rather than canines on the basis of this. 

 

In recent times, however, the only person I can recall having a pet lobster and taking him for a walk is Homer Simpson who, unfortunately, ends up having to tearfully eat poor Pinchy after accidently cooking him in a hot bath [2]. 

 

Pass the butter ...

 

 

Homer and Marge walking Pinchy 

the lobster on the beach

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Quoted by Théophile Gautier, in Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires (1875).

 

[2] The Simpsons, 'Lisa Gets an "A"', S10/E7, (dir. Bob Anderson). First broadcast in November 1998. To watch the (distressing yet hilarious) scene described above, click here.

 

 

Thanks to David Brock for reminding me of Nerval and his lobster - and also for reminding me of the terrible suffering experienced by these intelligent, fascinating creatures when they are captured, traded, cooked, and consumed as part of the global food industry. Readers interested in knowing more about this and perhaps getting involved in the fight to afford lobsters (as well as crabs, prawns and crayfish) greater protection, should visit the Crustacean Compassion website: click here.

 

 

Couscous with Rancid Butter: Thoughts on Charles Fourier

François Marie Charles Fourier 

(1772 - 1837)

 

Le bonheur consiste à avoir de nombreuses passions 

et de nombreux moyens pour les satisfaire. 

 

I. 

 

Antisemitic pervert, feminist, and founder of utopian socialism, Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was - to say the very least - an odd duck. 

 

Nevertheless, he inspired a diverse range of thinkers and writers with a queer politics of desire that portrays heteronormative civilisation as inherently repressive and imagines some kind of libidinal revolution in which we can all be free to not only fuck whom we want, but when we want, where we want, and how we want.  

 

It's a politics that I subscribed to at one time and still find vaguely attractive even now, despite living after the orgy in a transsexual world of ambient pornography from which the illusion of desire is absent [1]. 

 

And despite the fact that we never did get the lemonade seas we were promised ... 

 

II. 

In the 20th century, Fourier's seminal importance was widely acknowledged amongst those searching for a form of radical politics outside of the Marxist mainstream; figures including André Breton, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse all sang his praises. 

 

It seems clear that Michel Tournier was also writing (to some extent) under Fourier's influence, adapting the latter's rhetoric of sexual liberation for his own purposes. Like Fourier, Tournier privileges non-reproductive forms of eroticism and sticks up for the sexually deviant and marginalised (those whom the world often thinks of as monstrous). And like Fourier, he decries the social restraints and prescriptive norms that seek to regulate love and penalise pleasure.  

 

As one critic notes, for both of the above, "it is on the experence of the 'deviant' that a tolerant and humane social order must be based" [2]. However, whilst Fourier "provided a fantastic blueprint for the whole enterprise" [3], Tournier left details of this nouveau monde amoureux deliberately vague.

 

One suspects that, like D. H. Lawrence, Tournier realised that his role, as a novelist, is to help bring forth new feelings, not to suggest practical reforms [4]. And one can't help thinking he was probably wise to realise this. For as David Gascoigne reminds us, Fourier's "massive and whimsical elaboration of the structures of his ideal community are often so preposterous and parodical that they subvert systematisation even while mimicking it" [5].      

 

 

III.

 

I think my favourite text on Fourier remains that written by Roland Barthes [6]. It's many years since I read this essay and have doubtless forgotten some of the finer points regarding Fourier as a logothete, but I do recall Barthes opening with some très amusant remarks about couscous served with rancid butter. 

 

According to Barthes, the goal of Fourier's project was quite simple: to remake the world (via an obsessive form of writing) for the sake of pleasure. Never mind justice and equality; it's pleasure that counts for Fourier. And not pleasure conceived in a eudaemonic manner (i.e., as a form of ethical behaviour that produces wellbeing), but sensual pleasure that results in actual happiness and what Fourier terms Harmony.

 

The kind of pleasure we find in amorous freedom, fabulous wealth, and those other delights that are often condemned as forms of vice. Fourier dreamed of a world of fine weather, perfect melons, and little spiced cakes; a world in which one can enjoy the company of lesbians and there is no longer any normality.

 

As Barthes points out, this coexistence of passions isn't simply another form of liberalism and Fourier doesn't wish to unite people in the name of humanism: 

 

"It is not a matter of bringing together everyone with the same mania [...] so that they can be comfortable together and can enchant each other by narcissistically gazing at one another; on the contrary, it is a matter of associating to combine, to contrast. [...] There is no noble demand to 'understand', to 'admit' the passions of others (or to ignore them, indeed). The goal of Harmony is neither to further the conflict (by associating through similitude), nor to reduce it (by sublimating, sweetening, or normalizing the passions), nor yet to transcend it (by 'understanding' the other person), but to exploit it for the greatest pleasure of all and without hindrance to anyone." [7].

Ultimately, I don't quite know what to make of M. Fourier - the original 24-hour party person, for whom no day is ever long enough for all the merry assignations and pleasures it promises ... 

 

Ultimately, his erotic utopia in which everyone fucks forever sounds exhausting and one thinks again of Baudrillard's story of the porn star on set who turns to one of the other actors and asks: What are you doing after the orgy? 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm using concepts developed by Jean Baudrillard. His argument is that signs and images have erased all secrets and ambiguity, making sex transparent and, at best, something that is simply acted out over and over again with a kind of ironic indifference, or a sense of nostalgia. Whilst we might perhaps challenge this, I think it certainly fair to say (as Michel Houellebecq says): We're a long way from Wuthering Heights.

      See Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy' and 'Transsexuality', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

     The line from Houellebecq is from his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), trans. into English as Whatever by Paul Hammond, (Serpents Tail, 1998) and refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and passions.       

 

[2] and [3] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, (Berg, 1996), p. 91.

 

[4] The passage in D. H. Lawrence that I'm thinking of is this one:

 

"As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern. The great social change interests me and troubles me, but it is not my field. I know a change is coming - I know we must have a more generous, more human system, based on the life values and not on the money values. That I know. But what steps to take I don't know. Other men know better."

 

See: 'The State of Funk', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge Universty Press, 2004), p. 221. 

 

[5] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, op. cit., pp. 92-93. 

 

[6] Roland Barthes's essay on Fourier can be found in the much underrated study, Sade / Fourier / Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), pp. 76-120.  

 

[7] Ibid., pp. 99-100. 

 

 

For another recent post on Fourier, click here.  

On Dalí's Queer Fascination with Hitler

Salvador Dalí: The Enigma of Hitler (1939)

Oil on canvas (95 x 141 cm)

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

I.

A lot of comedians find the figure of the Führer funny; from Charlie Chaplin to Mel Brooks there's a long tradition of laughing at Hitler and the Nazis. But some artists and aristocrats have a queer fascination with fascism and find the Führer rather sexy with his neat mustache and Aryan eye, bright blue.

This is certainly true of the great Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. He had a thing for Hitler, whom he identified with the misanthropic, misotheistic figure of Maldoror and wasn't shy about admitting so in openly erotic terms: 

"I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me..."
  

Such statements, along with his 1939 work, The Enigma of Hitler, were the final straw for André Breton and his fellow Surrealists: it was one thing Dalí airing his dirty laundry in public - including a pair of shit-stained underpants - but to confess an attraction for the German leader on the eve of war, that was beyond the pale.

Thus, Dalí was (finally) expelled from the group with whom he had been affiliated for a decade. His argument that Hitler was merely a manifestation of his own decadent aestheticism didn't really wash. Nor did his insistence that Hitler might himself be regarded as a kind of Surrealist, prepared to launch a war solely for the pleasure of losing and seeing the world in ruins - the ultimate act of gratuitous violence.


II.

Dalí would in later years paint two more pictures of Hitler: Metamorphosis of Hitler's Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958) and the charming watercolour entitled Hitler Masturbating (1973). But it's the Engima work, reproduced above, that shows Dalí at his best and most recognisable; many of his favourite themes, symbols and motifs are on display here.   

Critics who like to approach art from a psychoanalytic perspective suggest the picture is all about Dalí's fear of domineering authority figures, or his anxious concerns to do with impotence. And, who knows, maybe they're on to something. However, such readings don't exhaust the work and, intriguing as the psychosexual elements are, I think it's the political nature of the painting that most interests.

For whilst Breton and company insist it glorifies the German dictator, it seems to me far more ambiguous (as all art should be). Thus, one could just as reasonably argue that the painting seems humorously critical of the fact that Hitler threatens to land us all in the soup ...       

Note: readers interested in other recent posts on Dalí can click here and here.

Orwell Versus Dalí

You can tell a lot about a man by his moustache ...

I.

One of the things I like about Salvador Dalí is that, like Bataille, he really got under the skin of André Breton, who objected to his counter-revolutionary fascination (and flirtation) with fascism and his love of fame and fortune.

Another thing I like about Dalí, is that he also repulsed George Orwell; that talented mediocrity whom, as G. K. Chesterton rightly pointed out, is precisely the kind of person the English love best; a man of sound reason who speaks his mind in plain and simple language. 

We find this mixture of common sense and candour - not to mention splenetic moralism - in Orwell's essay Benefit of Clergy: a series of notes written on the great Spanish artist who had recently published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).

As we shall see, Orwell considered Dalí's text flagrantly dishonest, seemingly unable to grasp that it was a surreal and fictionalised version of his life, rather than an attempt to write a truthful and accurate account. Dalí was perverting the genre of autobiography and playing with language in a darkly humorous manner, just as he played with paint on canvas.

II.

Actually, to be fair to Orwell, he does seem to understand that Dalí's text has been "rearranged and romanticised" and is more a "record of fantasy" than a genuine autobiography - it's just that he doesn't like it. He thinks it's a narcissistic book and a form of exhibitionism: "a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight" - which is the worst kind of limelight there is in Orwell's homophobic imagination.

Its only value, says Orwell, is in revealing how far the "perversion of instinct" has gone within the modern world and he then lists several episodes from Dalí's life to illustrate this process of corruption: "Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do."

Well, maybe ... Or maybe it's the case that Dali writes these terrible things - like kicking his little sister in the head or throwing another young child off a bridge - not because they are what he secretly wanted to do, but so that he doesn't have to think of doing them any longer; maybe, as D. H. Lawrence suggests, we shed our sickness in books.   

Interestingly, Orwell places masturbation alongside animal cruelty on his spectrum of corruption, as if choking the chicken and biting a dead bat in half are one and the same thing. Two things, he says, stand out from Dalí's paintings and photographs: sexual perversity and necrophilia - "and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as well".

It's true, of course, that Dalí - again like Bataille - was pornographically fixated on heterogeneous matter and that one can find plenty of unpleasant and disturbing elements in his work: shit-stained underwear, decomposing corpses, dead donkeys, and mannequins with huge snails crawling all over them. But Orwell makes no attempt to ask why this might be and to examine the role of base materialism within Surrealism.

All he wants to do is hold his nose and look away and that's not what one expects of a critic - even a left-leaning critic to whom such things are simply signs of bourgeois decadence.   


III.

To his credit, however, Orwell does at this point in his essay spring something of a surprise on his readers by admitting that whilst Dalí is an antisocial flea who makes "a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and [human] decency", he is nevertheless "a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts". Orwell continues:

"Dalí is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings."

That, I think, is true. But it's admirable of Orwell to concede such of someone he clearly despises and in so doing differentiate himself from those reactionary philistines who "flatly refuse to see any merit in Dalí whatever" and are incapable of admitting that "what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right".

Orwell doesn't stop here though: he also takes a pop at those devotees of Dalí who refuse to hear a word said against him or his work. If you say to such people that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, "is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense."

Orwell concludes that this makes the question of obscenity almost impossible to discuss: "People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals." It's unfortunate, says Orwell: for one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously "the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other."


IV.

In effect, says Orwell, Dalí's defenders are claiming a kind of benefit of clergy. In other words, the artist is thought to be "exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people [...] So long as you can paint well enough [...] all shall be forgiven you".

Personally, I rather like this idea: as someone who doesn't subscribe to the equality of all souls and universal rights - who thinks that exceptional people with exceptional tastes and talents should be allowed a certain licence - it doesn't offend me in the manner it does Orwell. I don't think individuals of genius should be allowed to get away with blue murder or ought never to be questioned. But nor do I think they should be subject to the same petty morality of the slave. 


V.

In conclusion: I still dislike Orwell, but I agree with Jonathan Jones that his attempt in this essay on Dalí "to express the delicate possibility that art can be right and wrong, good and bad, a work of genius and a thing of shame", shows a certain courage and intellectual honesty on his part.

See:

Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, (Dial Press, 1942). 

George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944): click here to read online. 

Jonathan Jones, 'Why George Orwell was right about Salvador Dalí', The Guardian (9 June 2009): click here to read online.

For another recent post on Dalí, click here.

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

The Most Beautiful Streets of Paris (Notes on Surrealist Mannequin Fetish)

André Masson: Mannequin (1938)

Photo by Raoul Ubac (gelatin silver print)

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

If you love Love, you'll love Surrealism ...

Unfortunately, however, I don't love Love - certainly not as some kind of moral absolute - and so have never really much cared for Surrealism as conceived by André Breton, whom, despite his admirable anti-theism ("Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!") remained an idealist and a dogmatist at heart.

However, there are some aspects - the darker, pervier aspects - of Surrealism that do excite my interest. And one of these aspects is the erotic fetishization of mannequins; agalmatophilia being a major component of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, held in Paris at the beginning of 1938.

The exhibition, organised by Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, pretty much involved everyone who was anyone in the world of Surrealism at the time, including Duchamp, Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. It was staged in two main sections and a lobby area, displaying paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms which had been redesigned so as to create what would today be called an immersive environment or experience.

It was the first section - Les plus belles rues de Paris - in which a parade of surrealist mannequins was located, including, most dramatically, the one by André Masson pictured above.

The mannequin, or lay figure, has a long if relatively humble history within the world of art; as a tool it's pretty much on a par with an easel, a brush, or a palette knife, even though it served several purposes; from helping fix perspective and understand the fall of light and shadow, to acting as a support for drapery and costume.

Perhaps, in their loneliest moments, some artists looked affectionately - even longingly - at their mannequins as silent companions. But it was only from the 19th century, however, that the latter became the subject of the painting and, ultimately, an objet d'art in its own right. For the Surrealists, however, the mannequin became something else too: a sex object.

Upon entering the most beautiful streets of Paris, visitors encountered sixteen artificial female figures provocatively designed, dressed and posed by Masson and friends. These kinky mannequins were deliberately intended to disturb and to arouse strange (often illicit) desires.

Duchamp, for example, dressed the upper-half of his model in male clothing, but left the lower-half naked, thereby playing with notions of androgyny and obscene exposure. Max Ernst, meanwhile, had intended to place a glowing red light bulb in the underwear of his 'Black Widow' mannequin (revealed by looking up her conveniently raised skirt), but - ever the prude and policeman - André Breton prevented this. 

It was, as indicated, Masson's mannequin that attracted the greatest attention, however,  with its pretty head squeezed into a bird cage covered with red celluloid fish. The mannequin was gagged with a velvet ribbon and had a pansy placed in its mouth.

What this all means, I'm not entirely certain. But it surely isn't just about female objectification and misogyny masquerading as art, or the pornographic violence inherent in male sexuality. Those critics and commentators who exclusively discuss these works in such reductive terms are mistaken and being intellectually lazy, I think. 

This isn't to say that these things aren't realities or worthy of serious discussion. But simply that there are other considerations here; for example, the way in which objects became central within consumer culture - the mannequin in particular being the very embodiment of urban modernity, as Hans Richter pointed out. Or the manner in which fetishization can elevate an object from base utility, transforming it into something magical and seductive, with its own strange allure.         

For me, as a perverse materialist, mannequins, statues and sex-dolls need to be considered as things in themselves and not as mere substitutes for real women. And the men who choose to erotically privilege such over biological entities are deserving neither of ridicule nor condemnation.

The adult imperative to grow-up, stop touching yourself and get a steady girlfriend (i.e. one who is actual, rather than imaginary; human, rather than synthetic; alive, rather than dead) is one that at least some of the Surrealists dared to challenge and for that I admire and respect them.  

Besides, maybe Proust is right to argue that we are all forever isolate at some level; that reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection - whatever their ontological status - simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings ... 


Note: those interested in knowing more about the role and rise of the mannequin in Western art should see Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, (Yale University Press, 2014). 

Psychasthenia

Cover of the 1930 pamphlet produced by Georges Bataille and others 
in response to André Breton's attack upon them in the 
Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929)

The more I read about that castrated old lion and false revolutionary André Breton, the more I dislike him. Not loving love as a moral absolute and not believing that the marvellous can exist separately from the morbid and the monstrous, means I can't possibly embrace his concept of surrealism either.

Does this mean that I too suffer, like Bataille, from a form of decadence or that which Breton, with his clinical background, delighted in identifying as psychasthenia (a mental disorder characterized by irrational phobias, obsessions, anxieties and, apparently, a love of flies)? 

Maybe. 

But anyone who has read Nietzsche knows that these things are advantageous traits in an artist or philosopher (that whilst strength preserves, only sickness advances). Indeed, better death, as Deleuze says, than the good health we have been given and which is so valued by the bourgeois. 

And better even Bataille's excremental philosophy than Breton's angelic surrealism that is ultimately suited only to mystics, poets, and idealists.       

Everything Ends in Shit

Salvador Dali: The Lugubrious Game (1929)

Unlike Bataille, obsessed with making an all-out assault upon human dignity and aesthetics in the name of a base materialism, I don't feel compelled as a thinker to become-porcine and to dig deep into forms of heterogeneous matter with my snout in order to uproot everything with repugnant voracity.

I don't even want to toss rose petals like the Marquis de Sade into a madhouse latrine. In other words, I'm not what André Breton would describe as an excremental philosopher.

But, having said that, one is obliged to concede that everything ends in shit; life terminating as a shipwreck in the nauseous.       

Why Bataille's Work Remains Crucial

André Breton was not the last to describe and attempt to dismiss Bataille as an excremental philosopher. But such a characterization, whilst not entirely unfair or inaccurate, nevertheless fails to appreciate that it is precisely because the latter obsessively returns us to the idea that life is no more than a moment of temporary stabilization before the collapse back into the filth and chaos from which it arose, that his books say the essential and are essential.  

We need to have our noses rubbed in the fact that there is ultimately no difference between the magnificence and splendour of the sun and a coffin full of shit. Idealists like André Breton may not like it, but flies, dung-beetles, and base matter of every description belongs to the same general economy as all that he finds noble and elevated. 

In the end, what makes us beautiful and keeps us sane as human beings, is not the fact that we are capable of moral and aesthetic grandeur, but that we leave stains upon our underwear. It's the mind's inability to accept this fact and it's sense of disgust when faced with evidence of the body's physicality that is problematic and shameful. 

Like Heidegger, Bataille realised that thinking doesn't overcome metaphysics by attempting to transcend it in some manner; on the contrary, thinking overcomes metaphysics by climbing back down Pisgah and substantiating itself in the touch of bodies and the strangeness of objects. 

And so it's only when, like a young child, you can happily parade a lump of dog shit on a stick in the knowledge that here too the gods come to presence, that you'll be able to affirm the world as it is; with flowers that fade and corpses that rot.