Blue Balls (With Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons and D. H. Lawrence)

Jeff Koons with one of his blue gazing balls

Photo by Lucy Young

 

 

Like the American comedian Jena Friedman, I've long admired the artist Jeff Koons and so I would share her sadness at having to write something "even remotely negative about this purveyor of the shiny and provocative" [1] - we can leave this to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who loathes the aesthetics of the smooth and famously compared Koons's artwork to Brazilian waxing [2]. 

Fortunately, therefore - and unlike Ms Friedman - I have a rather more positive view of the blue gazing balls [3] that Koons has ingeniously placed on little shelves in front of various reproductions of classical and modern masterpieces, including works by Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso - he even stuck one in front of his enlarged version of the Mona Lisa (see below).   

According to Koons, these large glass baubles represent the vastness of the universe, whilst also giving us a sense of the intimacy of the here and now [4]. I'm not sure about that - and this isn't why I like the gazing balls. 

 

I like them, because they make me want to smash them; make me want like an excitable child to cup the little globe of magnificent full dark-blue in my hands and then toss it up in the air, allowing it to fall with a little splashing explosion on the floor; make me want to take one of the fragments and examine it closely in all its broken brilliance [5].   

 

More, I feel like taking one of the spheres and bringing it hard down on the head of the viewer who stands before it and admires their own reflection; they who only see themselves in each and every great work of art (their experiences, their desires, their lives); they who only want to know what an image means so they can explain it away.

 

This lust for knowledge is what Rupert Birkin describes as the conceit of consciousness: "'You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut'" [6] - isn't that what he says to Hermione the great lover of art and culture?  

   

And yet, ironically, it's she who brings a ball of lapis lazuli crashing down on his head five chapters later, achieving her voluptuous consummation:

 

"Her arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it around in her hand as she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious. 

      Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning, and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head." [7]

As I say, that's what I'd like to do with one of Koons's gazing balls, thereby transforming it from an object of narcissistic self-reflection into a weapon to be used against those who just have to put themselves into every picture.

 

 

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball (da Vinci Mona Lisa) (2015)

Oil on canvas, glass, and aluminum 

jeffkoons.com 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Jena Friedman, 'Why Jeff Koons's Blue 'Gazing Balls' Give Mona Lisa Something New to Smirk About', Artnet News (22 June 2017): click here. 

[2] See Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018). The opening sentence of the first chapter reads: "The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, i-Phones and Brazilian waxing." 

      For my discussion of the aesthetics (and politics) of smoothness with reference to the above text and the work of Jeff Koons, click here. 

 

[3] Gazing balls - or what Americans rather prosaically call yard globes - are mirrored spheres, ranging in size, and now mostly used as garden ornaments. Traditionally made of glass, they are now often stainless steel, ceramic, or plastic.

      The speheres originated in 13th-century Italy, where they were hand-blown by skilled Venetian craftsmen, but were popularised by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in the 19th-century and appear in a number of gardens designed in the modern period (particularly in the 1930s). However, they seemed a bit naff by the 1950s - only slightly more sophisticated than garden gnomes. 

 

[4] See the article by Alex Needham - 'Jeff Koons on his Gazing Ball Paintings: "It's not about copying''', The Guardian (9 November, 2015): click here.

 

[5] I'm recalling the scene from chapter I - 'The Blue Ball - of D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod (1922) in which a young girl (Millicent) breaks a Christmas ornament and her father (Aaron) then carefully examines one of the pieces. See pp. 10-11 of the Cambridge edition, ed. Mara Kalnins, (1988).   

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 42.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 105. 

 

 

Genitalpanik 2: On Valie Export and Her Action Pants

VALIE EXPORT: Aktionshose: Genitalpanik 

Photo by Peter Hassmann (Vienna, 1969)

The claim made by Deborah de Robertis that her new project, Ma Chatte Mon Copyright, is basically an act of homage to the Austrian artist Valie Export (often written in upper case as VALIE EXPORT), is certainly intriguing - though, I must admit, due to my somewhat limited knowledge of 1960s feminist performance art, I wouldn't have guessed this from her recent appearance at the Louvre where she cheerfully stripped off and displayed her cunt in front of the Mona Lisa.  

This recently tweeted photo, however, makes things explicit (in every sense of the word):

Deborah de Robertis Ma Chatte Mon Copyright

Posted on Twitter 29 Sept 2017:  

In the original image, we see Valie Export sitting on a wooden bench, back against the wall, wearing a tight black leather shirt and a pair of crotchless trousers (or, if you prefer, Aktionshose). Although it's a fairly aggressive and confident pose - and despite the fact she's holding a machine gun - Export's bare feet betray a feral vulnerability.

The hair on her head, backcombed in proto-punk fashion, is almost as wild and bushy as that displayed between her legs. There's nothing Summer of Love about this picture; Export looks more fleur du mal than hippie flower child and you can imagine her in The Slits, but not The Mamas and the Papas.

I like the reimagining of it by De Robertis - in particular I approve of her decision to replace the machine gun with a camera - but, visually, it's not as powerful, not as provocative, not as strangely disturbing; the fact that it has been taken within the safety of a studio and the bench replaced with a simple wooden chair that might have come from Ikea, robs it of menace and dirtiness. 

The set of identical poster prints that Export produced in 1969 commemorate an action she carried out a year earlier in Munich. Entering an art-house cinema where experimental film-makers liked to show their works alongside European porn movies, 28-year-old Export paced between the rows of seated viewers wearing her action pants, her exposed cunt at face-level.

(Reports that she also carried her machine gun and put it to the heads of several men threatening to shoot them if they didn't agree they'd like to fuck her, are, alas, apparently untrue).

Export was challenging the representation and, in particular, the sexual objectification of women in art and film, forcing male spectators to acknowledge her agency and flesh and blood reality by staging a public encounter with that part of the female body usually kept under wraps and only seen or experienced in a private space.   

Genius: an inspirational act of guerrilla art and genital activism.

And it's conceivable that her crotchless action pants influenced Malcolm McLaren's thinking when he designed his bondage trousers with a revolutionary zip that didn't come to a stop in its usual position, but, rather, went all the way round and half-way up the arse, thereby allowing full exposure of and convenient access to the sex organs, perineum and anus.


Notes

Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), by Valie Export, a series of six identical screenprints on paper, is on display at the Tate Modern (London), in the Feminism and Media Room (Level 4).

Now aged 77, Valie Export lives and works in Vienna and is internationally recognised as one of the most important pioneers in conceptual performance art, photography and film, influencing many younger artists, including Deborah de Robertis and Milo Moiré. Those interested in knowing more can visit her website, valieexport.at 

Those who would also like to listen to McLaren explain how to make a pair of subversive trousers, can click here for an episode of the French TV show Being Malcolm (2000), uploaded to YouTube by the Malcolm McLaren Estate, 30 Sept 2015. 

Finally, those interested in reading part one of this post on Deborah de Robertis and her Ma Chatte Mon Copyright project, should click here.

Genitalpanik 1: My Pussy My Copyright

Deborah de Robertis 

facebook.com

Some readers may remember that I expressed my admiration for the performance artist and vulva activist Deborah de Robertis after she initially came to public attention in 2014, by exposing her cunt at the Musée d'Orsay in front of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, L'Origine du monde: click here to read, or re-read, the post. 

It was, I thought, a courageous and amusing attempt to expose the hypocrisy of a phallocentric art world happy to stare into the abyss of a gaping vagina on a canvas or a screen, i.e., when framed by culture and offered as an image to be consumed, but uncomfortable with seeing such in the real world made of actual living flesh.   

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that Ms de Robertis is still continuing with her one-woman attempt to change the world by spreading her legs and declaring ownership of her own body: my pussy, my copyright; this time round obliging visitors to the Louvre to contrast the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa with the explicit display of her sex.

What Leonardo would have made of this, I don't know: for whilst he loved to paint beautiful women and possessed a detailed anatomical knowledge of their bodies, including their reproductive organs, his erotic fascination was clearly for young men and he drew many highly intimate studies of the male anus.

Nor do I know what the mostly bemused tourists who witnessed the event made of it; press reports that they were stunned and outraged seem exaggerated to me. What I do know is that the authorities weren't amused and the artist was held in custody for two days before appearing before a beak who ordered her to face trial on October 18 on charges of sexual exhibitionism and assault (she allegedly bit a security guard during her arrest).

Her defence, of course, will be that her goal was not to exhibit her genitals in a sexually aggressive manner, but to make people think about the role of women within art and, in this case, to remind them of the work of the Austrian artist Valie Export; the stunt at the Louvre being essentially an act of homage to the latter and her 1968 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, which I'll discuss in part two of this post ...

Notes

To watch Ma Chatte Mon Copyright (2017), by Deborah de Robertis, uploaded to YouTube on 29 Sept 2017, click here. 

To read part two of this post on Valie Export and her Action Pants, click here. 

On the Art of the Kiss 2: Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt: Der Kuß, 1907-08.

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm x 180 cm.

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Almost everyone is surely familiar with Gustav Klimt's gilded Art Nouveau masterpiece, The Kiss. Indeed, when I was a student back in the 1980s, it was almost obligatory to have a poster reproduction on the wall, purchased from Athena and placed alongside a work by his more daring, fiercely talented young protégé, Egon Schiele, who stripped away the prettiness and coyness of Klimt's gold leaf.

Looking at it now, however, I have to confess to finding its dreamy symbolism and romantic idealism all a bit too hippyish for my tastes (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). And, annoyingly, one also can't help thinking of Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat - and one doesn't want to think of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (or the tedious Hebrew scriptures upon which they based their musical) under any circumstances, but particularly when trying to discuss a work of erotic art rather than Christian rock. 

And, obviously, The Kiss is primarily an erotic painting; featuring as it does a pair of lovers lost in a moment of bliss, bodies entwined. But it's a subdued rather than scandalous eroticism, that lacks the perverted excess that belongs to the pornographic imagination and which characterised Klimt's notorious Faculty Paintings (1900-07), commissioned by the University of Vienna (none of which were ever displayed and all of which were destroyed by the retreating Nazi forces in 1945). 

It really is a lovely work, The Kiss; one that was enthusiastically received and which immediately found a buyer. But, in all honesty, it's simply not as challenging as some of his other great canvases. His public reputation damaged and his confidence severely shaken after the Vienna Ceiling Affair, Klimt was looking to win back favour and produce a successful picture; to demonstrate to himself, as well as his critics, that he wasn't too old, too nervous, or too stupid to do so.

Ultimately, The Kiss is a compromise; unlike the beautifully provocative Goldfish (1901-02), which mockingly invites his detractors to kiss his arse.

Today, retaining pride of place in the Belvedere Museum, Der Kuß is regarded as a national treasure by all proud Austrians, who boast it's not only more popular than Leonardo's Mona Lisa - and might even be more valuable if sold - but is a much bigger canvas to boot!