Lobsterfuck: Notes on Marine Biology and Art Porn

 Video still from Masshole Love (2013)

dir. by and starring Rebecca Goyette as Lobsta Blue

rebeccagoyette.com

 

 

I.

 

Marine biologist Marah J. Hardt has a particular fascination with the wet and wild sex lives of sea creatures, including lobsters, which, apparently, are more promiscuous than prawns and far kinkier even than crabs ...*

 

For example, in order to seduce a larger male lobster - which is an aggressive and territorial loner by nature - a female lobster will first moult her shell, releasing pheromones into the water as she does so, and indicating by her display of naked vulnerability that she represents no threat, but is only looking for a good time. 

 

As the male comes closer to get a better look, the female lobster will then piss in his face, her urine acting as a potent aphrodisiac. 

 

After playing this erotic game over a period of several days, the male lobster is completely smitten and the female lobster's scent has a transformative effect on his behaviour, turning him into an amenable lover desperate to get her back to his place - usually just a hole in the sand - so that they might mate in oceanic bliss. 

 

During coition, the male lobster turns the soft-bodied female over, mounts her, and inserts a modified first pair of pleopods (known as gonopods) into the receptaculum seminalis of the lucky lady. Having double-dicked the object of his affection, the male then uses a hardened structure located on a second pair of pleopods to help push gelatinous globs of sperm into her semen-storing structure. 

 

The male then deposits an additional gooey material to the outside of the female's receptacle which hardens within a few hours and effectively forms a plug, thereby ensuring no sperm will dribble out (this spunk plug falls off after several days).  

 

Once the deed is done, the female flips her tail out from under the male and he releases her from his tender embrace.       

 

 

II.

 

Inspired by the reproductive activities of our deep sea friends, New York based interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Goyette (aka Lobsta Girl) has produced an interesting body of work that she terms Lobsta Porn and which explores human sexual fantasy (and sexual violence) in light of the love lives of lobsters and from a feminist perspective.   

 

In Masshole Love (2013), for example, a short film shot primarily in Provincetown (MA) - a favourite coastal destination of artists and members of the LGBT+ community - Goyette plays the role of Lobsta Blue, a woman who confronts a past history of sexual abuse by dedicating her life to erotic performance art whilst dressed in a bright blue lobster costume. 

 

In this work, as in others, Goyette offers a magical mix of burlesque, street theatre, psycho-sexual therapy and lobstasexcitation, in order to encourage audience members to discover their own marine sexual identities within the deep blue sea (the latter imagined as a polymorphously perverse space or queer universe).

 

 

III.

 

Unfortunately, I have the same kind of concerns, philosophically speaking, with Goyette's lobsta porn as I have with the ecosexual project devised by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: click here and here, where I express these concerns in some detail.

 

In short, I fear that her sex radicalism, like theirs, is ultimately just another form of moral idealism and remains - no matter how you dress it up, be it with flowers or lobster claws - human, all too human ...

 

Having said that, if it makes Ms Goyette happy to produce and exhibit this faux-transgressive work and other people pleased to view and to buy it - and if no actual lobsters are harmed - then what do I really care? 

 

I would like to know, however, what she plans on doing after the aquatic orgy ...?    

 

 

* See: Marah J. Hardt, Sex in the Sea, (St. Martin's Press, 2016). Readers interested in listening to her 2019 TED talk on this topic can do so by clicking here. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Arts: An Initial Reaction Written Under the Influence of Sour Grapes and Baudrillard

Edinburgh University Press, (2020)

 

 

This new collection of essays on D. H. Lawrence, edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, probably didn't feature on many people's Christmas wish-list. 

 

But for those who feel obliged to keep up with recent developments in Lawrence scholarship, it's obviously required reading. Indeed, one feels duty-bound to break bread with the authors who have contributed to this Companion, even if the bread that is offered is, occasionally, just a bit stale round the edges and showing signs of mould.      

 

Why should that be? Why can't we have an entire loaf of freshly baked bread? 

 

Well, that's difficult when you commision all the usual suspects to write about art primarily in terms of aesthetics and discuss Lawrence's work with more references to philosophical and cultural trends rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, than to ways of thinking that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries [1]. 

 

So it is that whilst the editors of this volume clearly understand the need for a "re-evaluation of existing critical positions" [2], they at no time pause to consider if the very idea of art as a distinct sphere of activity in an era of transaesthetics [3] hasn't - like sex - become merely a nostalgic fantasy.

 

Art, in other words, has lost its specificity and is now indistinguishable from everyday life. It no longer represents anything - no longer means anything - and art no longer possesses the aesthetic power to transfigure or transcend the world; we have realised our own utopia and illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible [4]. 

 

And, unfortunately, not even D. H. Lawrence can save us ...

 

Notes

[1] You will find more references in the index to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts to Friedrich Schiller, for example, than to Jean Baudrillard. In fact, there are no references to the latter, despite his being one of the most important (and provocative) cultural theorists of the last forty years.

 

[2] Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, 'Introduction' to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 1.

 

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, 'Transaesthetics', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 14-19. Readers who are interested in this idea should also see also Baudrillard's The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2005).

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss and Paul Patton, (Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 38.

 

 

Hey Look, It's Me!

Do you see yourself on the T.V. screen?

  

D. H. Lawrence has a real problem with self-seeking in the negative sense identified by St. Paul. He particularly despises those men and women who stare into the eyes of their lovers only for the opportunity to see themselves reflected and who degrade sex (a flow of feeling) into sexuality (a will to sensation):

 

"The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. [...] But today, [...] sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic [sic], normal or incest, it is all the same thing. It is just sexuality, not sex. It is one of the universal forms of self-seeking. Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience." [1]

 

To be honest, this doesn't bother me as much as it does Mr. Lawrence. For unlike the latter, I don't subscribe to the metaphysical notion of sex as some sort of ontological anchorage point residing deep within us and possessing its own intrinsic properties etc. I'm just a bit too Foucauldian for that [2]. 

 

And whilst there may be an element of self-seeking in the various forms of sexual expression, so too are there many other elements. For love is not just one-sided or always rejoicing with truth; sometimes, it does involve falsehood, impatience, cruelty, envy, pride, rudeness, anger, and resentment; sometimes it does delight in evil and is a means of destruction; sometimes, sadly, love fails [3].          

 

What does irritate me, however, is when people self-seek within works of art; i.e., when they look or listen out for themselves in every image, song, or text, identifying either with the subject or the author of the work. It's very depressing. And, surprisingly, even some readers of Lawrence fall into this trap, despite his explicit warnings about the dangers of self-idolatry. 

 

I know people who only really enjoy his works based in or around the East Midlands so that they might better locate themselves and feel an intense sense of belonging. They thrill to imagine characters speaking with accents like their own and walking down streets they themselves have walked along. They turn Sons and Lovers, for example, into a giant mirror reflecting their own history and childhood memories. 

 

It's not so much parochialism, as a mix of narcissism and nostalgia. Either way, the result is the same; artworks which are intended to facilitate a radical becoming-other and deterritorialization, are made self-reassuring and all-too-familiar. If only people bristled like cats when they saw themselves reflected!     

 

    

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 335-36.   

[2] See the post entitled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2013) where I discuss Lawrence contra Foucault: click here. 

 

[3] In giving this more negative - yet more rounded and more honest - portrait of love, I am suggesting the opposite of what St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13. Of course, it should be noted that the latter, writing in Greek, used the word agape [ἀγάπη] and that he was not referring to sexual love or érōs [ἔρως].     

 

 

On Eric Gill's Illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover

Eric Gill: Lady C. (1931) 

Early version of a wood engraving intended for 

D. H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover

 

  

I. 

 

A recent post on the D. H. Lawrence Society blog features an amusing exchange between Kate Foster and John Worthen on the merits (or otherwise) of a pair of drawings by Eric Gill originally intended as illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928): click here.

 

Having previously written on the Lawrence-Gill connection - click here and here, for example - and being a fully paid-up member of the DHL Society, I figured neither of the above would object if I added my tuppence ha'penny worth to the discussion ...     

 

II. 

 

The piece opens by declaring that Gill's sexual inclinations - which included incest, paedophilia, and bestiality - shouldn't affect our appreciation of his work. He may have been a monster of perversity, but hey, his drawings were rather lovely and, we are assured, they are "not in the least pornographic".

This last claim made me smile: such is the continued horror of smut amongst followers of Lawrence, that they can't bear the thought that works that they happen to find beautiful might be anything other than the innocent laughter of genius, free from any "intention to titilate". 

    

I also smiled when, having gone to the trouble to separate the work from the man, the post backtracks and decides that maybe we cannot exclude the figure of the artist from the drawings after all, as they belong to a single history and the latter are, in a sense, portraits of Gill. 

 

To be fair, I understand this ambivalence and it certainly doesn't trouble me in the same way as the earlier refusal to consider the possibility that art and pornography are not always mutually exclusive. However, push comes to shove and for the record, I think it perfectly reasonable to judge a work without any reference to (or interest in) the biography of the artist.        

 

Moving on, we arrive at the $64,000 question: Would Lawrence have liked the drawings? First to answer is John Worthen and he seems in little doubt that the pictures are un-Lawrentian:

 

"I suspect he would have found them pornographic, in the way he spelled out in his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', where he noted that 'In sexual intercourse, there is give and take.' In the drawings, it is all take (on the man's side), give on the woman's."

 

I have to confess, I have problems with this. For one thing, I cannot see how Worthen can possibly tell who is giving or taking what to or from whom in Gill's pictures. 

 

And, although Lawrence does indeed talk about give and take in the essay mentioned [1], he's not referring to some kind of conscious or consensual exchange between lovers. The reciprocity is, rather, inherent to the act of coition itself, be it between a man and a woman, two men, or one man and his dog; it's a flash of interchange between two blood streams and the question of who is active or passive, giving or receiving, is irrelevant (as well as a little tedious). 

 

We might also note that this is why Worthen's liberal concern that one party in an act of coition may serve in a purely functional and objectified manner as a machine à plaisir is also not really the issue here. For according to the logic of Lawrence's own position, any act of sexual intercourse is radically different from an act of masturbation (his real bête noire); even an act of violent rape results in a new stimulus entering as the old surcharge departs and only masturbation causes deadening. 

 

Just to be clear on this: Lawrence does object (vehemently) to pornography - and he may well have found Gill's drawings pornographic - but not on the grounds Worthen suggests above. 

 

Perhaps realising he needs an additional (more tenable) argument, Worthen now shifts ground slightly and implies that the pictures are the product of an obsessive (and presumably oppressive) male gaze and illustrate what is meant by the Lawrentian phrase sex in the head:        

 

"The drawings are, perhaps, examples of almost exactly what Lawrence was trying not to do in his novel: make the sex something to be looked at. He wanted it to be something felt. Gill is deeply, deeply fascinated by looking, I would say, and his gaze is obsessed; and that (oddly enough) is his limitation as an artist." 

 

This may or may not be true, but it's worth pointing out that Lawrence himself says the purpose of Lady C. was not to stimulate sexual feeling or incite illicit sexual activity, but, rather, help men and women think sex: "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" [2]. Surely this conscious realisation requires us to keep our eyes open ...? 

 

Other criticisms of the drawings made by Worthen just seem a little strange. For example, the fact that the female bottom is made the focus of the pictures. As Kate Foster asks, "isn't Gill just trying to capture what Mellors wouldn't shut up about: 'Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is!'"    

 

I agree with Foster that one of the interesting things about the drawings is that the woman is positioned on top of the man and that "she appears strong and healthy, it's the male figure who looks thin and rather weak" and in need of support. Her body is not simply put on passive display for an appreciative male spectator and, again as Foster points out, there's a real tenderness about these images; the couple do appear to be cradling one another, despite Worthen's denials of this. 

 

Ultimately, there's a delicious irony here in a man explaining to a woman why the pictures are sexist and phallocentric (and trying to do so from a Lawrentian perspective).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 233-253. The section relevant to our discussion here is on p. 245, lines 26-36. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"', in Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 308. 

Three Great Liars 3: Oscar Wilde

Portrait photo of Oscar Wilde 

by W. and D. Downey (1889)

I.

Ultimately, all studies of lying and great liars lead to Wilde and his observational essay published in Intentions (1891): 'The Decay of Lying' - a work many years ahead of its time ...

The essay is structured in the form of a Socratic dialogue between Vivian and Cyril and serves to promote Wilde's view that Aestheticism is superior to Realism. Vivian informs Cyril of an article he is writing which defends the former and blames the decline of modern literature upon the triumph of the latter, with the subsequent decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.

According to Vivian, if the monstrous worship of facts is allowed to continue unabated, then all art is done for - and without art, life will have nothing to imitate. It is vital, therefore, that lying - defined as the telling of beautiful untrue things (and the proper aim of art) - be revived as soon as possible.   



II.

The dialogue opens with Cyril attempting to convince Vivian to leave his library and sit outside in order to enjoy the lovely afternoon. The latter is less than enthusiastic however and reveals himself to be the very opposite of a nature lover. For not only is nature imperfect in its design - "her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition" - but it's also uncomfortable: "Grass is hard and dumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects."  

That's amusing, but the merits and disadvantages of nature are not my concern here: I'm interested, rather, in the fine lie as spoken by the true liar; i.e., a statement that requires no proof of any kind but is its own evidence. Such lies transcend the level of misrepresentation and are more than the base falsehoods and half-truths offered by politicians, lawyers, and journalists. Such lies belong to art - particularly to poetry, which, as Plato recognised, is not unconnected to lying:     

"'As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute."

Today, continues Vivian, the young man who would have once developed into a gifted liar (and perhaps a magnificent novelist), now often falls into careless habits of accuracy or develops "a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling". Literature requires distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power; in other words, it rests upon the ability to tell stories; in a word, to lie.

The modern novel - realistic in form and subject matter - is all too horribly true; true to life and true to nature - but false to art and ultimately such works become not only vulgar, but boring. It was not always thus. But, today, facts are not merely dominant within history, but are "usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance".

Fortunately, says Vivian, poets - with the exception of Wordsworth - have remained faithful to their high mission and are still "universally recognized as being absolutely unreliable". But, in every other domain and genre, the obsession with truth is dominant. If things are bad enough within European life and letters, they are even worse in the United States:

"The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature."

Vivian, however, is far from despondent. In fact, he is extremely hopeful for the future and, in a crucial passage that ends with a profoundly Nietzschean remark (that I have italicised for emphasis), he says:

"That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. [...] Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party [...] is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society [...] Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prisonhouse of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style [...]" 

Notes

Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions, (1891). Click here to read online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. This essay was a much revised version of an article that first appeared in a literary periodical in January 1889.

To read the first entry in this series of posts - on Nietzsche - click here.

To read the second entry, on Mark Twain, click here.

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 2: Chapters 1-2

Cover design by Charlotte Daniels
(Bloomsbury, 2020)

IV.

As Poly Styrene once said: Identity / Is the crisis, can't you see?

And it remains so, even in a world that likes to pretend to be posthuman and fantasises about becoming transhuman. So MacCormack is probably right to start with this question as it whirlpools within contemporary politics and to argue: "It is time for humans to stop being human. All of them." [65]

But that's easier said than done; you can't tell someone who has the flu to just get over it and neither can we just shake off our humanity. What's more, the demand is controversial because there are many who are still waiting for their humanity to be fully recognised and are keen to assert themselves as subjects. As MacCormack notes:

"Identity politics has long been critical of posthuman philosophy's forsaking of identity for metamorphic becomings and transformative post-subjectivity, while posthuman philosophy's many critiques of identity [...] still struggles with how to acknowledge dark histories of oppression without perpetuating the identities to which they were victims." [36]

This conflict, between those who champion identity politics and those who subscribe to poststructuralist philosophy, is a dilemma alright. Though MacCormack claims it's actually a false conflict and to see "no impasse at all" [36]. For we can all move forward (into darkness) and ahumanity as long as we all agree to abandon our anthropocentric conceit and exit the phallo-carnivorous realm of the malzoan. And look! Here's Sistah Vegan to show us the way ...

Ultimately, MacCormack doesn't care about "arguments humans have between themselves" [51] over identity, social justice, or even animal rights; she cares about the "reduction in individual consumption of the nonhuman dead" [51]. If she retains a notion of equality, for example, she acknowledges that it is "as much of a myth as the humanist transcendental subject" [51].   

But better even this myth of equality than structured inequality; hierarchy is always a life-denying form of categorisation that restricts freedom and the potential of the individual to develop. Having said that, MacCormack is contemptuous of the idea that inanimate and inorganic objects might also be accorded a degree of agency; "a tedious inclination in certain areas of posthuman philosophy, where a chair is no different to a cow or a human" [56].

Now, I'm no objected-oriented ontologist, but I'm pretty sure that's an unfair characterisation of their work. Contrary to what MacCormack says, I think those working in this area argue not that all objects are equal, but that they are all equally objects upon a flat ontological field, or what Levi Bryant terms a democracy of objects.

And, as a Nietzschean, I'm very tempted to remind Patricia that being alive is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead and that to discriminate between living beings (cows) and inanimate objects (chairs) is, therefore, a form of prejudice. She'll betray her species (particularly the white male members of such) for the sake of all other organisms, but she'll not go to the wall for objects.

And I can't help seeing that as the point at which her moral vitalism triumphs over her own model of queerness; triumphs over and, indeed, infiltrates: "Queer in my use is [...] about the death of the human in order for the liberation of all life ..." [60] That's one definition, I suppose. And, in as much as queer means rare and unusual, then yes, life is queer - but that surely then includes human life; hasn't she heard that there's nowt so queer as folk?

MacCormack closes her opening chapter with a rather lovely paean to the philosopher and their vulnerability, which, she says, is as crucial as care of the world in its fragility is central to philosophical activism and creativity. The philosopher is also defined by their ever-changing and becoming-other:

"Enhancing or preserving our identities, no matter how minoritarian, may be useful and tactical, but if they are our goal then we are not philosophers. We are anthropocentric humanists ..." [62]

You've got to love sentences like that ...

V.

"This chapter explores ways in which art can be redefined to enhance the ethical nature of all action as expressive, affective, from personal actions to larger-scale activisms." [67]

I have to admit, whenever I hear the word art whilst I don't quickly reach for a gun, I do roll my eyes. Baudrillard was right; at best, all we can do in this era of transaesthetics is act out the comedy of art, just as we keep acting out the comedy of sex after the orgy.

I fear that poor Patricia is going to be disappointed if she pins her hopes on art as something that occupies a "privileged space of knowing/unknowing that separates it from science and philosophy" [69], no matter how she redefines it. I also think she'll ultimately be disappointed by activism - which she believes to be "the most urgently needed action in the world" [69].  

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the ahuman will encourage new forms of art and activism, with the latter becoming increasingly creative and thus an art in its own right; maybe the two will collapse into a vital symbiosis and engage with power, without object or aim, "ephemerally remaking [and unmaking] the world to cause beneficial territorial shifts" [75].

Maybe. But probably not. And - for the record - I'm appalled to see this described in the religious terms of hope, faith, and belief - what MacCormack calls non-secular intensities. I mean, c'mon ... I can accept an ethics of care, compassion and even grace (defined by Serres as a letting be and a stepping aside), but I'm not about to embrace the virtue of hope - and it's ironic to see MacCormack affirming something that only serves to prolong human existence.

As for faith, MacCormack writes:

"Like hope, which is never explicitly a set hope 'for' something, faith is not a faith 'in' something but rather a faith that there can be a world that does not behave this way forever [... that] there is more than the anthropocene and anthropocentrism." [77-78]

In other words, MacCormack's ahumanism demands trust in the possibility of an alternative future of which we have no knowledge and for which she cannot provide any persuasive arguments or evidence. That's fine for some, but I'm afraid I'd need a bit more than this sketchy promise before pledging myself to her cause and becoming a believer (or even giving up my sausage and egg McMuffin for breakfast).

But perhaps I just lack imagination (a key term for MacCormack), or the necessary courage to dream and "rise up against the anthropocene and its malignant destructive expressions of political violence and apathetic semiocapitalism which deny the materiality of the organisms who suffer" [86] ...

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 1 of this post (notes on the preface and introduction), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here. 

Enchanted Clothing 2: Dali's Aphrodisiac Jacket

Le veston aphrodisiaque (1936)

© Salvador Dalí / Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

As I pointed out in a sister post to this one, the belief in the power of enchanted clothing has deep roots in magic, mythology, and the popular imagination. Everyone has something that they like to wear for luck or to feel good about themselves; or something designed to capture the admiration of strangers.

And that includes artistic genius and showman Salvador Dalí who, in a 1936 Paris exhibition of Surrealist Objects (designed to transfigure and transform everyday things), submitted his veston aphrodisiaque or, as it is known in English, Aphrodisiac Jacket. 

The jacket - which reinforces me in the view that the most interesting Surrealist works were not those confined to the canvas - came with over six dozen shot glasses filled with crème de menthe (believed to be a mild aphrodisiac as well as a digestif). Each drink also had a dead fly floating in it. Nice.

Dalí instructed that the jacket should ideally be worn for outings on evenings when the weather was calm, but pregnant with human emotion; "provided that the person wearing it be transported in a very powerful machine travelling very slowly (in order not to upset the liqueurs)".

Visitors to the exhibition were invited to take a drink if they wished (straws were supplied by the artist) and also encouraged to top up the glasses, thereby making it not only a wonderfully wearable work of art, but an amusingly interactive one (provided you didn't swallow the fly).  

Note: readers interested in the sister post to this one - on Icelandic necropants - can click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post (though I suspect he might have wished for more details on the paranoiac-critical aspects of the jacket).

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 1)

Henry Rayner: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (1929)

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and its future possibilities. No surprise, therefore, that he wrote several short essays on the subject ...

I. The Future of the Novel

Is the novel still in its infancy as an art form - or is it on its death-bed? 

It was a question in 1923 and it's still a question now, almost 100 years later; albeit no longer a question that many people care about (which perhaps says more about us rather than the contemporary novel).

The answer, for Lawrence, is that the "pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel which you have to take seriously" [151] is senile precocious. That is to say, it's childishly self-absorbed: I am this, I am that, I am the other.    

One assumes that Lawrence is not referring to his own works here, though heaven knows his novels can be so sincere and intense at times, that one might fairly describe them as earnest and overwrought. Lawrence, though, is taking a pop at the novels by writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust; authors who "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" [152]. 

He doesn't think much of the smirking popular novel either; just as self-conscious and also written by those who think it funny to drag their adolescence into middle age and even old age.

The novel, declares Lawrence, has got to grow up: by which he means stop with the played out emotional and self-analytical stunts and find the "underlying impulse that will provide the motive-power for a new state of things" [154].

Interestingly, this requires that fiction and philosophy come together again: reuniting into a new form of myth and a new way of understanding. The novel has got a future, concludes Lawrence, providing it has the courage to "tackle new propositions without using abstractions [and ...] present us with new, really new feelings [...] which will get us out of the old emotional rut [155].    

II. Morality and the Novel

What is the business of art?

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." [171]

That's a succinct and interesting definition: one that might be said to anticipate actor-network theory, even whilst remaining anthropocentric in that it posits man as the centre of a universe about whom all things revolve. 

And morality?

"Morality is that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness." [172]

That's another concise definition: one that allows us to understand why it is Lawrence values the novel above all else. For whilst works of philosophy, religion, or science are all of them busy trying to nail things down with laws and fixed ideals in order to establish stability, the novel insists on difference and becoming.

Lawrence writes:  

"The novel is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." [172]

And immorality?

Immorality is the attempt by an author, for example, to impose themselves upon a text and tip the balance one way or the other, thus bringing to an end the tembling instability upon which everything in the social and natural world - including the world of fiction - depends. They might not even intend to do this; often the immorality of the novel is due to the novelist's unconscious bias or predilection.  

For an artist to remain moral, he or she must affirm a general economy of the whole in which all things, all ideas, and all feelings are admitted and none are thought to be supreme or exclusively worth living for:

"Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to.
      All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two [actants ...] If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, for tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship [...] and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction." [173]

This helps explain why Lawrence often brands seemingly pure and innocent works false and obscene and why he famously advises readers to always, always trust the tale, not the teller.

If the novel reveals or helps establish vivid relationships that gleam with a fourth dimensional quality, then it is a moral work, no matter how the relationships may be judged from the perspective of conventional morality. And if these relationships also happen to be new and displace old connections, then even better - no matter how much pain they cause, or what offence they may give:

"Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music" [175] - but who wants art that only makes comfortable and complacent?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 149-155 and 169-176. 

See also the first version of 'Morality and the Novel' which is published as an appendix in the above, pp. 239-245. It ends with the following two lines that essentially summarise Lawrence's thinking on the novel: "The novel is the one perfect medium for revealing to us the changing glimmer of our living relationships. The novel can help us live as no other utterance can help us. It can also pervert us as no other can." [245] I have to admit - as a perverse materialist - the latter notion intrigues and I wish Lawrence had said more about it. 

Readers interested in part two of this post on Lawrence's essays 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', should click here. 

Art, Sex and Dolphins (with Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons)

Jeff Koons: Antiquity 2 (2009-2011)
Oil on canvas (102 x 138 inches)

I.

Inhabiting as they do all the world's oceans, it's not surprising that dolphins have long played a role within human culture and appear in the stories of many sea-faring peoples, including the ancient Greeks, who regarded them as benevolent beings and symbols of good fortune.

Indeed, the modern name, dolphin, derives from the Greek δελφίς (delphís) and is related to the word δελφύς (delphus), meaning uterus. It might therefore be interpreted as meaning a fish born of a womb. For many Greeks, the deliberate killing of a dolphin was an immoral act that rendered the perpetrator unclean before the gods. 

This isn't surprising, as the Greeks not only regarded these intelligent and friendly marine mammals as messengers of Poseidon, but associated them with several other deities, including Apollo and Aphrodite; the latter of whom was often depicted riding on the back of a dolphin - which brings us to the painting by Jeff Koons shown above ...

II.     

I've been interested in Jeff Koons and his work ever since Malcolm McLaren told me about him (and Julian Schnabel) in the mid-1980s and one of my happiest memories is of seeing his monumental sculpture Puppy (1992) at the Guggenheim Bilbao (I don't like dogs, but I do love flowers).   

Thus, I was naturally excited to learn that the Ashmolean - the world's oldest university museum of art and archaeology - was putting on an exhibition of his work, curated by the artist himself (in collaboration with Norman Rosenthal).

The show features seventeen pieces - fourteen of which have never been exhibited in the UK before - spanning his entire career and selecting from some of Koons's most important series of works, including Antiquity, in which, via a clever use of montage, he blurs the distinction between popular contemporary culture and the art of the classical world - always a fun thing to do.      

For Koons, ultimately, there is nothing different between what he does now and what the artists of the past were doing then: honouring those who have gone before and extending an aesthetic tradition that reaches back to prehistory.

But, it seems to me, he's also interested in what turned the ancients on; to see how modern ideas of sexuality compare and contrast with those from the Graeco-Roman world. Thus Gretchen Mol (in full Bettie Page mode) is transformed into Aphrodite, riding an inflatable dolphin, and holding tight to a toy simian incarnation of Eros.*   

Now, before the usual objections are raised, it's worth remembering that Aphrodite was continually being reimagined by Greek artists themselves; each vision of loveliness "drawing on subjective compositional fantasies", as Norman Rosenthal puts it. Art, no matter how hard some may pretend otherwise, has always been a bit pervy.

Indeed, according to D. H. Lawrence, half the great artworks of the entire world "are great by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal" and we should be grateful for this fact. For sex is "a very powerful, beneficial and necessary stimulus in human life". Only the grey Puritan finds this objectionable. The rest of us "rather like a moderate rousing of our sex" by visual imagery, music, and literature. 

 
Notes

Norman Rosenthal, 'Jeff Koons and the Shine and Sheen of Time', essay in the exhibition catalogue, (Ashmolean Museum / University of Oxford, 2019), p. 26. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 239-240. I very much doubt that Lawrence would like the work of Jeff Koons. I suspect, rather, that he would brand it as pornography; an attempt, according to his definition of the term, to insult sex and degrade human nudity.   

*Interestingly, it was only some time after Koons had photographed the actress in 2006 that he discovered images of Aphrodite astride a dolphin and made the mytho-aesthetic - or what some would term archetypal - connection that inspired the Antiquity series. 

For more information on the exhibition Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean (7 Feb - 9 June 2019), click here. 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for her help with this post.

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.

The Surreal Resurrection of Salvador Dalí

Still from a promotional video for Dalí Lives (2019)

© Salvador Dali Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL.

If someday I die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people will say: 'Dali is dead - but not entirely'.

I.

I have to admit: I've never been a great fan of Dalí.

Having said that, I did once make a trip to Figueres, his hometown, in order to visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum, that's famously topped with giant eggs.

And I do love the fact that the railway station at Perpignan, which Dalí declared to be the centre of the universe after experiencing a moment of cosmogonic epiphany there in 1963, has a large sign proclaiming the fact.  

What's more, Dalí is also responsible for inspiring the title of Serge Gainsbourg's infamous love song, having once declared: "Picasso is Spanish ... me too. Picasso is a genius ... me too. Picasso is a communist ... moi non plus."

So, whilst not a fan, there are elements of his work and aspects of the man and his life that I nevertheless greatly admire. Not least of all his attitude towards death: a biological fact that he refused to believe in. Indeed, in his final public appearance (until now), Dalí made a brief statement to the effect that, because of their vital import to humanity, a genius doesn't have the right to die. 

This idea amuses me and, as someone who - despite the evidence - doesn't quite accept their own death as a future certainty, I'm sympathetic to it. That is to say, whilst I understand it's a possibility - and, since my own father died, death could even be said to run in the family - I also think that, as a writer, as long as I still have something to say, then this affords me protection.


II.

Thirty years after his death, aged 84, in January 1989, Dalí is back - proving once more that Nietzsche was right to assert that some individuals are born posthumously and that the day after tomorrow belongs to them.  

I don't know how Jesus pulled off his final stunt, but Dalí has achieved his uncanny resurrection with the assistance of the curators at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, working in collaboration with the clever people at San Francisco ad agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners, using the very latest AI-based digital technology.

Visitors to the exhibit, which opens in April, will be able to interact with the artist via a series of screens, as well as enjoy the collection of his works. For those who can't wait or those who, like me, can't go, here's a taste of what can be experienced: click here.  

Thanks to Kosmo Vinyl for tipping me off about the exhibition and suggesting this post.

Übernatürlich: Jason DeMarte's Augmented Reality

Jason DeMarte: Invasive Apathy

(Photo Assemblage / Pigmented Ink Print, 2018)

I.

The idea of art as an innocent imitation of nature is, of course, a very old one. Indeed, despite everything that's happened during the last 150 years, there are people who still subscribe to this ancient Greek concept of mimesis.

Personally, however, I tend to agree with Nietzsche on this question and view art more as a metaphysical supplement to the reality of the natural world; one that transforms rather than merely represents the latter.

Art is thus a way of either enhancing or diminishing nature; perfecting or perverting reality. And the most interesting artists - artists like Jason DeMarte - understand the ambiguous character of this game; how nature can paradoxically appear more-than-natural and less-than-natural (even unnatural) at one and the same time.        

It's been said that DeMarte's cleverly composed works combining images of flora and fauna with artificial objects and sugary treats would make Mother Nature blush - though whether that would be with pride, passion, anger, embarrassment or shame, isn't clear. His playful yet sophisticated juxtapositions call into question the relationship of nature and culture and what it might mean for man to be translated back into the former, or to conceive of culture as a form of transfigured physis.  


II.

Unlike many visual artists, DeMarte has a clear conceptual insight into his own project, as can be seen from the following statement found on his website that he has very kindly granted me permission to reproduce here in full:


"I am interested in modern understandings of the natural world and how that compares to the way western society approaches its immediate consumer environment. It’s important for me to compare established idealist utopian ways of representing the landscape to the hyper-perfect way products and modern consumer life are represented in media. I’m particularly interested in the idea of disillusionment through false or misleading representation. I’m interested in creating photographs that merge simulated forms of life and colorful processed foodstuffs with idyllic pop material goods, in an effort to create a dialog of consumption, duplicity and homogenized ecstasy.

I work digitally combining images of fabricated and artificial flora and fauna with commercially produced and processed products. I look at how these seemingly unrelated and absurd groupings or composites begin to address attitudes and understandings of the contemporary experience. I represent the natural world through completely unnatural elements to speak metaphorically and symbolically of our mental separation from what is 'real' and compare and contrast this with the consumer world we surround ourselves with as a consequence. Ultimately this work is an investigation into the manipulation of truth.

My process draws from a long history of constructed narratives in photography, artist like Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margret Cameron, were early pioneers in manipulating truth with the medium, while later artists like Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall and Anthony Goicolea made the ordinary surreal with their highly choreographed stills. My process aims to simultaneously embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper exaggerating the ordinary and to also work within a kind of truth by utilizing the inherent believability of the photographic medium.

Like the early tableau photographers I draw inspiration from painting, specifically naturalist painting from movements like the Hudson River School. I’m interested in rekindling the romantic notions of nature while simultaneously subverting those romantic notions by juxtaposing pop consumption and visual gluttony."


III.

I find all of this fascinating: particularly his confession that at the heart of his project (or process as he calls it) is the question of truth - something which Nietzsche decouples from goodness and beauty and provocatively describes as that from which we would perish were it not for the skilful and deceptive reworking to which it is subjected by the artist.

Only art, says Nietzsche, has the power to make experience bearable by providing us with vital illusions. And for that we should be grateful ...  

Notes

Jason DeMarte's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, both in the US and abroad, and featured in numerous journals, books, and other publications. He is currently represented by Rule Gallery in Denver Colorado and is part of the Photographers Showcase at Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe. 

He is also an Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University and Assistant Professor of Photography in the College of Architecture, Art and design at Mississippi State University. 

Those interested in knowing more can visit his personal website by clicking here.

Nietzsche was preoccupied with the question of truth in relation to art throughout his writings. He does not reject the importance of the former as a will expressed in science, for example, but does question whether such might prove nihilistic and harmful to life. He proposes that the untruth of art might ultimately be more conducive to human wellbeing. The lines to which I refer above are found in The Will to Power, section 822, and The Gay Science, section 107.   

Further Thoughts on the Art of Translating Man Back Into Nature (with Reference to the Work of Orly Faya)

Image by Orly Faya 
orlyfaya.com 

Italian sculptor Willy Verginer - whom I recently wrote of here - isn't the only artist to have made an all-too-literal interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of translating man back into nature ...

Orly Faya, for example, is a body-painting visionary, ecotherapist, and activist from Down Under who also wishes to facilitate some sort of healing of mankind by reminding us that the source of all wellbeing and creativity is the Earth itself.

How does she aim to do this?

By asking models to strip so that she might then merge* them into the natural environment with a clever use of colour; a process she describes as a transformation into the transpersonal - which sounds like fun and philosophically quite intriguing, until we realise this simply means affording individuals the opportunity to discover themselves as authentic human beings via an experience of otherness.

In other words, Ms Faya encourages us to lose ourselves so that we may at last find our true selves; become-other so that we may broaden - not shatter or dissolve - our intellectual and cultural horizons. There's no real abandonment of identity or becoming here - and no real translating of man into nature, which, for a Nietzschean, means rather more than camouflaging subjects into the landscape, be it a forest, desert, or beach.**

Ultimately, rather than transport us beyond good and evil, Orly offers us the same old hippie idealism - born of anthropocentric conceit and middle class privilege - that we encounter all too often in the art world. And that's disappointing to say the least ...   

Notes

*According to Ms Faya's website:  "Merging Ceremonies are a Unique Opportunity to become ONE with yourself and the earth in a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory way [...] to experience ourselves beyond the physical body, unified with nature [...] internalised with light and love and eternalised via photographic art." So it's not just about getting naked, having a quick paint job and then posing for a slightly saucy snap.   

**It's important to understand that when Nietzsche writes of translating man back into nature he is not advocating a Romantic or reactionary return to some primal and pristine state of being, so much as the future overcoming of man as interpreted within modern history and society. In other words, it's a call for a creative rescripting of the self via a becoming-woman rather than a becoming-animal or becoming-plant - for, paradoxically, homo natura is ultimately a question of style. See Beyond Good and Evil, section 230.

Traducendo l'uomo nella Natura: Thoughts on the Work of Willy Verginer

Willy Verginer: Komm, lieber Mai, und mach ... (2015)

Lindenwood and acrylic colour (147 x 107 x 60 cm)

The carved wooden works of Italian sculptor Willy Verginer, with their often dramatic zones of colour, certainly arouse my interest, but, not knowing very much about him, I hesitate to say what his philosophical project is.

It seems, however, to involve translating man back into nature, if I might borrow a phrase from Nietzsche. That is to say, he wishes to show how human being and human culture and society - even at its most technologically advanced - remains part of the natural world.

Verginer does this by demonstrating how vibrant colour can be born from industrial grayness and how, as Lawrence writes, even iron can put forth. Further, Verginer imagines a future in which young bodies begin to (quite literally) blossom in new and different ways, forming delicate contacts between themselves and evolving an intuitive sensitivity, as they become plant.

This idea of a floral or botanical becoming perhaps explains why the faces of Verginer's figures look so blank; for whilst plants have passions and desires, they're not human passions and desires and, as Wilde noted, the beauty of flowers is ultimately rooted in the fact they have no souls. 

Of course, there will be those who will not only find the idea strange and insane, but point to the paradox of translating man into nature via a series of unnatural participations.

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, such queer nuptials and unholy alliances are in fact fundamental to nature; for nature should not be thought of as a united kingdom, but rather a perverse multiplicity made up of heterogeneous terms and combinations (or interkingdoms).

verginer.com

Notes

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 230.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Almond Blossom', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 259.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

For a follow up post to this one, click here.