On the Origins of a Solar-Phallic Landscape

S. A. von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

Someone very kindly emailed to say how intriguing and strangely affecting they found my solar-phallic landscape painted sometime in the mid-1980s and featured on a recent post [click here]. They also requested that I provide some background to the work which, as they rightly assume, wasn't merely imaginative ...

Primarily, the picture has its origins in the work of the writer and artist D. H. Lawrence, who once confessed in a letter to a friend:

"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.

Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.

The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below. 

Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...    

One of Jung's favourite stories concerned a paranoid-schizophrenic patient with suicidal tendencies named Emile Schwyzer, who had spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions; a man who believed that stars were composed of dead souls and that the Earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas.

One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.   

At the time - i.e., in the mid-1980s, when I thought Jung was a genius rather than a crank - I was happy to buy into all this, despite numerous problems with the actual details of the story and with Jung's celebrated theory (a theory that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese, as James Hillman acknowledges).

What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.       

Notes 

The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.  

(E. G. Records, 1984) 

Andy Warhol's Decorated Penis

 Andy Warhol: Decorated Penis (c. 1957)

According to the critic Michael Moon, much of the revisionary queer power of Warhol's art proceeds from its ability to "invoke and to a considerable degree to celebrate the phallic and also to subvert it comically". It's this latter aspect that I so admire and which helped me to overcome neo-pagan and Lawrentian earnestness with reference to the question of the phallus (both as organ and as symbol).

Warhol liberates us all by liberating the phallus from its phallogocentric and phallocratic pretensions. And he does so not by an act of castration, but by gaily bringing out the vulnerable side of the phallus in all its erectile and ejaculatory glory.

In other words, he develops a rather sweet and touching model of what Lawrence terms phallic tenderness that isn't exclusively tied to heterosexual desire or the subordination of women - nor, indeed, to some grand metaphysical vision. As one friend remembered, Andy simply had a great passion for drawing cocks - be they erect, or in a flaccid state. And he would often add decorative details to these images.

Thus, in Decorated Penis (c.1957), we see a phallus that has been feminised via the amusing addition of hearts and flowers and a ribbon tied round it in a neat bow. As Richard Meyer points out, this transforms an object that is regarded by some as an oppressive symbol of masculine pride and authority - and by others as a symbol of cosmic potency - into an ornamental gift.

By playfully blurring lines between masculinity and femininity - as well as gay porn, popular culture and fine art - Warhol's penis pictures offer a queer challenge to all those who like to keep things cleanly distinct and clearly determined.                   

See:

Michael Moon, 'Screen Memories', essay in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Esteban Munoz, (Duke University Press, 1996).

Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, (Oxford University Press, 2002). 

See also the excellent essay by Australian artist and writer Steve Cox, 'Andy Warhol: Killing Papa', which can be found on his website: click here.

This post is for James Walker.

Notes on Herb Brown's Party

Herbert L. Brown: Party (1966)

Overpainted subway poster (60" x 90")

When I first saw the above work by the American artist Herb Brown, I immediately smiled and thought of something that Lawrence once confided to a friend with reference to his own erotic canvases and artistic intent: "I put a phallus in each one of my paintings somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality."

For there's no place at which people parade their cultivated personal selves and castrated social spirituality more blatantly than at a semi-formal drinks party. I don't think I've ever enjoyed such a gathering - no matter how gracious the host, how splendid the cocktails, nor how interesting the guests are said to be. As Dorothy Parker once wrote: I hate parties; they bring out the worst in me.

I love the way that Brown allows bits of lettering and illustration from the original posters to show through, although it is their inert neatness that seems superimposed on the explicit nakedness of the figures. It's an amusing (and provocative) aesthetic juxtaposition.

Unsurprisingly, Brown's paintings - like Lawrence's - were branded gross, coarse, hideous and obscene and he found it difficult to exhibit them. Worse, in 1966 he lost most of his work in a huge blaze (by his own estimation, around 900 pieces were destroyed). To his great credit, however, Brown started again and kept on working right up until his death, aged 88, in 2011.

Finally, we might ask in closing whether Lawrence would have liked Brown's Party ...?

I very much doubt it: probably too raunchy and not reverential enough for his tastes. Despite his phallic bravado, Lawrence remained a bit of a prude; easily offended by those who, in his view, had their sex in their heads.

But I like it. And I would hang it on my wall and leave it there - even when the grandkids came to visit.    

Notes 

Dorothy Parker's poem Parties: A Hymn of Hate (1916) can be read online by clicking here. 

For a post on one of Lawrence's phallic paintings - Boccaccio Story (1926) - click here. 

Phallic Pictures 2: L'Origine de la Guerre by Orlan

ORLAN: L'Origine de la Guerre (1989) 

Aluminium backed cibachrome 88 x 105 cm 
orlan.eu

For all his phallic bravado, I wonder what D. H. Lawrence would have made of Orlan's reimagining of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, The Origin of the World (1866), now retitled The Origin of War (1989) and featuring a close-up of the indecently exposed lower-body of a naked male - including an erect penis - rather than centring on the hairy, gaping cunt of a woman ...?

I suspect he wouldn't like it; that he would condemn it as a pornographic example of sex in the head, even though, arguably, it's a work that invites comparison with his own canvas, Boccaccio Story (1926), featuring the exhibitionist Masetto caught snoozing with his cock out before some passing nuns.

I suspect also he would be troubled by the fact that the work is by a woman and thus subjects the male body to an ambiguous female gaze that just might be derisive more than desirous; scornful, rather than reverential. For whilst Lawrence wants women to worship the male body in all its phallic beauty and potency (as Connie worships the body of her lover Mellors), he seems full of anxiety that they should find the male sex organ foolish and imperfect; a little disgusting in its unfinished clumsiness.

And then there's the title chosen by Orlan for her work; a title which implies the phallus is a symbol of violent masculinity and lies at the root of armed conflict. Lawrence would absolutely deny this. For him, whilst the penis as a physiological organ obviously belongs to an individual male agent, the phallus is something that rises into being between lovers, forming a bridge that brings people into touch and enables the post-coital bliss that he terms the peace that comes of fucking.

Thus hatred of the phallus - seen here rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair - is uncalled for and betrays perhaps the great modern horror of being in touch; what Lawrence insists is the root-fear of all mankind.

And so, without suggesting readers get on their knees before the phallus and subscribe to Lawrence's phallocentric mystery religion, I do think an attitude of queer wonder that mixes a little awe and excitement is preferable to any lazy attempt to denigrate, belittle and nullify the erect cock, or, indeed, the small soft penis, which is really just another little bud of life as Connie says, rather than a potential source of evil.

When, as it must, the phallus inexorably penetrates the body of another, it might indeed come with the thrust of a sword and bring suffering and death. But, more often than not, it comes with "a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning" ...


Notes

Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte is a French artist, born in 1947. She adopted the name Orlan (which she always writes in capitals) in 1961, aged fifteen. She's primarily an artist who works with and on the flesh (usually her own); more of a carnal artist, as she says, than just an artist concerned with the body.

Her 1989 work, L'Origine de la Guerre, which uses a photograph of the actor Jean-Christophe Bouvet taken by Georges Merguerditchian, is surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) little-known. For an interesting discussion of her work, see Cerise Joelle Myers; 'Between the Folly and the Impossibility of Seeing: Orlan, Reclaiming the Gaze' (2006) - click here.

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence (including those that I have recalled from memory and put in italics) are taken from chapters 12 and 14 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).   

Those interested in reading a related post to this one on D. H. Lawrence's painting Boccaccio Story, should click here.

Phallic Pictures 1: Boccaccio Story by D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Boccaccio Story (1926)

Oil on canvas (72 x 118.5 cm)

Boccaccio Story (1926) is one of Lawrence's most charming and amusing canvases. It depicts a scene from Boccaccio's tale of a horny Italian peasant named Masetto, who feigns mutism in order to obtain a gardener's job at a local convent so that he might be afforded the opportunity to fuck the young women therein.  

In the painting, Lawrence shows Masetto asleep - or possibly pretending to be asleep - under a large almond tree on a hot afternoon with his clothes in a state of dramatic disarray, exposing his lower body to the view of some passing nuns who, it might be noted, stare intently at his genitalia, rather than averting their eyes in embarrassment as one might have expected.

For Lawrence, it was great fun discovering that he could paint his ideas and feelings and not just articulate them in his poetry and prose. Keith Sagar insists that the picture is not designed to shock and that it's a perfectly wholesome portrayal of the sexual impulse. But this is rather disingenuous.

For Sagar knows perfectly well that Lawrence's paintings from this period are part and parcel of his provocative project of phallic tenderness, via which, like Nietzsche, he hoped to trigger a revaluation of all values, enabling man to storm the angel-guarded gates and return victorious to Eden.   

In a letter to his American friend Earl Brewster - which Sagar himself refers us to when discussing the late paintings - Lawrence confides:

"I put a phallus ... in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

So, Lawrence knew very well what he was about and it's puzzling that Sagar should wish to play down the scandalous aspect of Lawrence's paintings. Puzzling also that Lawrence should react with such (seemingly genuine) distress when Boccaccio Story, along with a dozen other works, was seized by the police after being exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London in the summer of 1929.     

Boccaccio Story may very well be a painting of real beauty and great vitality, as one critic (Gwen John) wrote at the time. But so too is it quite obviously obscene in its subject matter of sexual exhibitionism and the carnal desire of nuns; what would be the point of it - and of Boccaccio's tale - were it otherwise? 


See: 

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, (Penguin Books, 2003). Note that the story of Masetto and the nuns is the first tale told on the third day. 

D. H. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, with an Introduction by Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003). The letter by Lawrence to Earl Brewster is quoted by Sagar on p. 43 of this work. It can be found in full in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), where it is numbered 3967.

Note that Boccaccio Story is part of the D. H. Lawrence Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Accession Number 65.242). 

Those interested in reading a related post on Orlan's The Origin of War, should click here.

Thoughts on the Proposal for a New Lawrence Statue

Greek terracotta statue of Priapus, Hellenistic period 

(c. late 4th-3rd century B.C.)

There's already a life-size bronze statue of D. H. Lawrence, by Diana Thomson, standing in the grounds of Nottingham University; a barefoot figure with his trousers rolled up (don't ask me why) and rather awkwardly holding a blue flower. In addition, there's a bronze bust of Lawrence, also by Thomson, situated in the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery. 

However, increasingly proud of their local boy - or, rather, increasingly hopeful that such works attract visitors and that they might capitalize on his controversial reputation and continuing popularity - plans are being made for a new work to be erected in his hometown of Eastwood.

Lawrence scholars, members of the D. H. Lawrence Society, and staff at the Lawrence Heritage Centre, all met recently with representatives of the borough council to discuss ideas. Also present - and spearheading the campaign for a new statue - was super-glamorous local MP, Gloria De Piero, who, according to a press report, thinks it ridiculous that the Lawrence name isn't being exploited to the maximum; never mind what he contributed to English letters, just think what he can do for jobs and business!       

My own view on this matter is rather closer to that of Lawrence activist David Brock, who argues that if there's to be a new statue, then it needs to be a creatively challenging work that isn't there simply to attract tourists and amuse the locals. If it were up to me, I would go for a Classical style nude terracotta figure, sans fig-leaf, but with an erection of priapic proportions from which hung a sign saying: The phallus is the bridge to the future.  

This, I think, would be true to the Lawrence who wanted to shock what he described as people's castrated spirituality and remind us that the phallus is a great sacred symbol of potency and the active life which has been denied to us within Christian moral culture.