Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly From an Old Bathtub

The Venus of Willendorf [1]

Image: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

nhm-wien.ac.at

 

 

I.

 

I recently reflected on how the figure of a woman emerging from the sea allows us to glimpse something of the goddess Aphrodite in her flesh; and how, in turn, this invites us to consider the relationship we have with our own bodies and the bodies of others (as well as the nature of the divine) [2]. 

 

Of course, such meditations are made easier when that woman is, for example, Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or Ana de Macedo skipping among the fishes and rock pools, like a Portuguese Venus; one could spend all day happily musing on lithe and lovely limbs and firm young breasts, etc. 

 

It is not so easy, or so pleasurable, however, to consider what we might collectively term vile bodies - i.e., old bodies, ugly bodies, obese bodies, deformed bodies, mutilated bodies, and, at the extreme, dead bodies (there is surely nothing more repulsive than a decomposing corpse, which is why necrophilia remains such a rare phenomenon).

 

The problem, as Nietzsche pointed out, is that everything ugly weakens and saddens the spectator [3]. Thus, reflecting upon vile bodies has a dangerous psycho-physiological effect; it actually depresses and deprives one of strength. 

 

Ugliness, like sickness, is therefore not only a sign and symptom of degeneration, but a cause of such; which is why healthy happy souls prefer to be surrounded by beauty and turn to art when such is lacking in reality; for art, as Nietzsche says, is the great stimulant of life - a counterforce to all denial of wellbeing [4]. 

 

However, having said all this, the philosopher, as Nietzsche understands them, is one who lives dangerously and who can not only embrace more of human history (in its entirety) as their own, but, like the artist or great poet, find beauty in those individuals, things, and events where most people would see only horror and look away in disgust. 

 

 

II. 

 

And so we come to Rimbaud's poem, Venus Anadyomène (1870); one that I think important, but which critics often overlook, or dismiss as less serious than his later (more mature) verses. 

 

For one thing, the poem - written when Rimbaud was just sixteen - challenges static and traditional ideals of feminine beauty [5] and dares readers to glimpse some aspect of the divine even in an ulcerated anus (which, admittedly, isn't easy). 

 

Wherever the poet might be taking us, we're a long way from Botticelli and moving towards Bataille territory; this hideously beautiful Venus in an old bathtub serves as the vehicle of love in much the same manner that a drunken woman vomiting - or a dog devouring the stomach of a goose - perform the role [6].   

 

Ultimately, not being a scholar of French literature or a Rimbaud expert, I'm unsure what he intended with this verse; is it a serious (slightly disturbing) attempt to revalue beauty, or simply an adolescent parody of the Venus myth - who knows? 

Anyway, readers can decide for themselves by clicking here to access Venus Anadyomène as found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a bilingual edition trans. Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Venus of Willendorf is a small figurine, carved from limestone tinted with red ochre, and believed to have been made almost 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic period (i.e., the Old Stone Age). It was found in 1908, during archaeological excavations at a site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. Anyone wishing to see it should get along to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'And Venus Among the Fishes Skips' (18 Feb 2022): click here. 

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Expeditions [or Skirmishes] of an Untimely Man', §20, in Twilight of the Idols.  

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), §853 (II), p. 452.    

[5] For more on the challenge to these ideals presented by Rimbaud's poem, see the essay by Seth Whidden, 'Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Æsthetics in "Vénus Anadyomène"', in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 333–45. This essay can also be accessed online via JSTOR: click here.

 

[6] See Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9. The lines I refer to are on p. 6. 

 

 

The Rape of Africa: David LaChapelle's Reimagining of Botticelli's Venus and Mars

Botticelli: Venus and Mars (c. 1483)

Tempera and oil on panel, 69 cm x 173 cm

Botticelli's Venus and Mars is an acknowledged masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, depicting the Roman goddess Venus and her divine lover, Mars, in a blissful post-coital scene.

The conventional interpretation is that she has left him powerless and exhausted; that her feminine charms have triumphed over masculine brute force and that in order to experience what D. H. Lawrence terms the peace of fucking, it's necessary for men to lay down their arms and make love, not war.

One might suggest, however, that what Botticelli playfully exposes is naked male conceit. Happy to lie back and sleep after doing the deed, Mars is as vainly content with his sexual prowess as with his virtues as a warrior. Venus, meanwhile, is left to look on unsatisfied and disappointed; for maybe when stripped of his weapons and his armour, Mars wasn't all she'd hoped him to be (the limpness of his right hand betraying all we need to know).

However we choose to read it, the painting is undoubtedly one of the jewels in the collection of The National Gallery, London, and I would encourage anyone who hasn't seen it to do so, should they be fortunate enough to have the opportunity. I would also encourage readers to view David LaChapelle's provocative reimagining of the work, entitled The Rape of Africa:

    

David LaChapelle: The Rape of Africa (2009)

Digital image ft. Naomi Campbell as Venus and Caleb Lane as Mars 

LaChapelle's picture, featuring Naomi Campbell in the role of a Black Venus (and rape victim), is a pomo-political allegory, which, like most of his work - both as a commercial fashion photographer and as a serious artist-cum-activist - is visually stunning, but lacking in subtlety for all its knowing sophistication and obsessive attention to detail.

As critics have noted, the work also leaves nothing to the imagination and is weighed down by its own aesthetic excess - crammed full as it is of various objects serving a crude symbolic function and a rich saturation of colours - and by its moral-political idealism. In the end, if you look at it for too long, you start to feel a tiny bit queasy; but it's only when you consider the latter that you seriously want to vomit.    

For this photo is not, alas, the visual equivalent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. At best, it simply repeats the refrain made famous by Edwin Starr and attempts to foster white guilt over the three evils of racism, imperialism and colonialism. Viewers might also notice the large piece of earth digging machinery working away at a gold mine, reminding us of the environmental cost of consumer capitalism (aka Western greed).    

I understand LaChapelle's ambition to create a more substantial, more socially aware body of work beyond the frivolous worlds of pop, celebrity, and fashion - and I wish him every success. But, really, David, we can do without the political posturing, the crocodile tears and the shameless hypocrisy.

Ultimately, The Rape of Africa is another example of that sentimental compassion which Pascal Bruckner rightly identifies as an insidious form of contempt.    

Anatomy Presupposes a Waxwork Venus

Clemente Susini: Venerina (1782)

Bella Italia! Terra d'amore! And home also to some of the most exquisite art works depicting the goddess of love, including, famously, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c.1486) and Titian's rather more risqué Venus of Urbino (1538). Less well known - although just as exquisite in its own macabre manner - is the life-sized wax sculpture made by Clemente Susini known as the Little Venus (1782).

Anatomically accurate in every detail and vividly displaying the internal organs, this and other disemboweled beauties were primarily used for teaching purposes at a special workshop within the Natural History Museum, Florence (La Specola). But they were also put on public display for those whose intellectual curiosity terminated in thanatological voyeurism.

Feminist commentators, keen to read these figures in terms of sexual objectification and what we might term necropygmalionism, find something profoundly unsettling about them. Indeed, for Zoe Williams:

"There seems to be something blasphemous, inhumane, in creating a corpse and trying to beautify it - or rather, in considering beauty to be a necessary trait in an anatomically accurate dead body. In taking beauty to be such a critical component of womanhood, it misses, and seals in wax its own misapprehension of, what beauty is."

But one might suggest that it's Ms Williams who, in this case, misunderstands; not what beauty is, but what its function is and why we need to lend to even the most revolting of all things - death, not womanhood - an element of aesthetic delight.

The unfortunate fact is, corpses don't look great: "Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch's The Scream. The colour drains from their faces" - and no one wants to see that; not even in wax replica. 

As Nietzsche wrote: We need art so that we don't perish from the truth ...


See: Zoe Williams, 'Cadavers in pearls: meet the Anatomical Venus', The Guardian, 17 May, 2016 - click here. 

Note: the description of the corpse and its horrific nature is by Caitlin Doughty; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016), p. 116. 

Those interested in knowing more about this topic might care to read Joanna Ebenstein's beautifully illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus, (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016).