Showing posts with label picasso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label picasso. Show all posts

6 Jun 2023

I Don't Know as I Get What D. H. Lawrence is Driving at When He Writes of Bursten Bowels ...

Picasso: Gored Horse (1917) 
Graphite pencil on canvas with ochre primer 
(80.2 x 103.3 cm)
 
 
I. 
 
As readers of D. H. Lawrence are very well aware, he loves to write about the mysterious nether region of the human body known as the loins - i.e., that zone of libidinal intensity that lies somewhere between the ribs and the pelvis (or above the legs, but below the waist).
 
In fact, the only thing that excites his imagination more are the bowels ... 
 
 
II. 
 
Unfortunately, a bit like Frank O'Hara, I'm not quite sure I always understand what Lawrence is getting at when he uses this term [1]. On the one hand, it seems to be more than simply an anatomical reference to the gastrointestinal tract; indeed, for Lawrence, the bowels seem to be the seat of human compassion from which the deepest desires also spring. 
 
But, on the other hand, Lawrence likes to base his philosophical understanding of the body in biology where possible. So when he talks about the bowels, he is also referring us to the digestive system and those sausage-like organs known as the intestines or entrails. 
 
And, rather like Kenneth Williams, who described his daily bowel movements obsessively in his diaries, Lawrence seems to be plagued by a fear of things not working properly in this region, as we can see in the novel Kangaroo (1923), for example, when the marsupial-like fascist Ben Cooley is shot several times in his "'bloomin' Kangaroo guts'" [2], as one of his followers says.
 
Richard Somers - the book's Lawrentian avatar - visits Cooley in the hospital and can barely disguise his horror and disgust at the thought of ruptured bowels:
 
"Somers found Kangaroo in bed, very yellow, and thin [...] with haunted, frightened eyes. The room had many flowers, and was perfumed with eau de cologne, but through the perfume came an unpleasant, discernible stench. [...]
      Somers could not detach his mind from the slight, yet pervading sickening smell.
      "'My sewers leak,' said Kangaroo bitterly, as if divining the other's thought." [3]
 
Bruce Steele's explanatory note on this is spot-on:
 
"Jack's angry reaction to his leader's having been shot in the stomach and not killed outright probably reflects the First World War soldier's fear of abdominal wounds. In a pre-biotic age, peritonitis was a common and deadly complication of such wounds. While a ruptured bowel could be stitched, contamination of the abdominal cavity was frequently fatal; it would account for  the 'unpleasant, discernible stench' and Kangaroo's diagnosis 'My sewers leak'. If the sniper had deliberately aimed at his stomach rather than his head - which would probably have killed him instantly - it would have been in the knowledge that the victim would almost certainly die a slow and painful death." [4]
 
Of course, whilst being shot in the stomach can lead to a slow and painful death for a man, being disemboweled by the horns of an angry bull can be an equally horrific (and, arguably, even more obscene) way for an elderly horse to die.
 
And so to Mexico City ...   
 
 
III.
 
There are several disturbing scenes in Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), including the opening one set at the plaza de toros [5] - and I'm not referring to the fact that someone in the crowd thought it funny to throw an orange at the bald spot on Owen's sunburnt head.
 
Rather, I'm referring to the following incident involving a blindfolded horse ...
 
"The picador pulled his feeble horse round slowly, to face the bull, and slowly he leaned forward and shoved his lance-point into the bull's shoulder. The bull, as if the horse were a great wasp that had stung him deep, suddenly lowered his head in a jerk of surprise and lifted his horns straight up into the horse's abdomen. And without more ado, over went horse and rider, like a tottering monument upset.
      The rider scrambled from under the horse and went running away with his lance. The old horse, in complete dazed amusement, struggled to rise, as if overcome with dumb incomprehension. And the bull, with a red place on his shoulder welling a trickle of dark blood, stood looking round in equally hopeless amazement.
      But the wound was hurting. He saw the queer sight of the horse half reared from the ground, trying to get to its feet. And he smelled blood and bowels.
      So, rather vaguely, as if not quite knowing what he ought to do, the bull once more lowered his head and pushed his sharp, florishing horns in the horse's belly, working them up and down inside there with a vague sort of satisfaction." [6] 
      
As the novel's protagonist Kate Leslie rightly recognises, this shocking spectacle reveals nothing so much as human cowardice and indecency. She turns her face away in disgust. And when she looks again, "it was to see the horse feebly and dazedly walking out of the ring, with a great ball of its own entrails hanging out of its abdomen and swinging reddish against its own legs as it automatically moved". [7] 
 
But the sordid show isn't over: another horse is brought into the bullring so that it may be publicly disemboweled for the amusement of the crowd:
 
"Kate knew what was coming. Before she could look away, the bull had charged on the limping horse from behind [...] the horse was up-ended absurdly, one of the bull's horns between his hind legs and deep in his inside. Down went the horse, collapsing in front, but his rear was still heaved up, with the bull's horn working vigorously up and down inside him, while he lay on his neck all twisted. And a huge heap of bowels coming out. And a nauseous stench." [8] 
 
 
IV. 
 
I've never been (and wouldn't go) to a bullfight, and so would find it difficult (and disturbing) to visually imagine this scene were it not for the fact that Picasso - a lifelong bullfighting enthusiast - produced the image at the top of this post, after attending a bullfight in Barcelona during his stay in the city in 1917.
 
As the anonymous author of a piece describing this work on the Picasso Museum's website rightly notes:    
 
"In contrast to what he had mostly done on previous occasions, here the artist leaves aside the colourful and festive representation of the spectacle of bullfighting to focus his attention [...] on the solitary agony of the disemboweled horse, which collapses until it falls on its knees in a fetal position or prayer posture that has been compared to that of a fossilised crustacean or bird. Picasso manages to transcribe the animal's stabbing pain by means of its outstretched neck and raised head, looking upwards with a fixed gaze, as if asking for mercy to put an end to its cruel agony, once and for all." [9]
 
The author concludes: 
 
"The drama and cruelty of the scene reaches its zenith with the horn that sprouts from the ground and stands threateningly, waiting for the horse to finish collapsing to then finish it off." [10] 
 
I suppose, to end on a slightly more positive note, it might be mentioned that bullfighting was banned in Catalonia several years ago and the the last bullfight in the region took place in September 2011. [11]
 
However, there are still eight countries in the world where this ancient festival of gore still takes place - Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador - and every year around 180,000 bulls (and 200 horses) are slaughtered in the ring.
 
 
V. 
 
In sum, I might not get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at when he writes of bursten bowels, but I do know: 
 
(i) I wouldn't want to be shot in the stomach ...
 
(ii) I don't like cruelty to animals ...
 
 
Notes
 
[1] See Frank O'Hara, 'I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at', Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 167. The poem can be read online at allpoetry.com: click here
 
[2] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge Unversity Press, 1994), p. 317.
 
[3] Ibid., pp. 322-323.    

[4] Bruce Steele's explanatory note to 317:12 of D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo ... p. 406.

[5] In Lawrence's day, the main bullring in Mexico City was the Toreo de la Condesa. This ancient bullring was replaced in 1946 by the monumental Plaza de toros México, an arena that seats over 41,000 people.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, pp. 15-16.

[7] Ibid., p. 16. 

[8] Ibid

[9-10] See the text that accompanies Picasso's Gored Horse (1917) on the Museu Picasso de Barcelona website: click here

[11] The ban was officially annulled for being unconstitutional by Spain's highest court in October 2016. However, despite the overturning of the ban, no further bullfight has taken place in Catalonia. 
 
 

18 Dec 2022

On the Question of Quality Versus Quantity

 
   
I. 
 
Good people always insist: It's quality rather than quantity that matters [1].
 
You'll be a much happier and more authentic human being, they say, if you forget about numbers, stop being acquisitive, and focus instead on things that have real value and substance, such as meaningful relationships.
 
It's a kind of moral minimalism in which the related mantra less is more is used to justify a small circle of friends, or the fact that one hasn't read many books. 
 
Surprisingly, even D. H. Lawrence, who is usually quick to attack the base-born stupidity of proverbial wisdom, buys into this idea. But whilst he may be right to argue that it is better to read one good book six times rather than six bad books once [2], we feel obliged to point out the possibility of reading six good books six times.
 
That's a greater quantity of books - and many more readings - but surely that's better than simply reading one text over and over and insisting with monomaniacal intensity on its value. For that's precisely the error religiously-minded people fall into when they mistakenly decide that all they ever need read is a single holy text. 
 
Ultimately, it's not a binary choice: you can have quality and quantity. In fact, as we'll explain below, you can't have the former without the latter ...
  

II. 
 
Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, I can say that nature massively favours quantity over quality, which is why it can be so outrageously profligate. It's not necessarily the fittest who survive in this life, it's those who have the numbers to stake a claim on the future. 
 
And by modelling populations over long timescales, a recent Oxford study showed that the most important determinant of evolutionary success was not good genes, but the widest number of genetically available mutations [3].   
 
Brilliant individuals come and go like flowers; they simply don't have time to fix in the population or determine the evolutionary outcome of a race.   

And speaking as an artist, I can also confirm the fact that the creation of great works rests upon a large body of work. That's why, for example, it was necessary for Picasso to paint some 60,000 pictures in order to produce a small number of works - probably fewer than a 100 - that are considered masterpieces. 
 
This doesn't mean the vast bulk of the work is worthless or a waste of time; on the contrary, it was vital. For it was by producing works in such quantity that Picasso was able to learn, experiment, and evolve as an artist. Most importantly, it allowed him to make mistakes; for just as quality rests upon quantity, success rests upon repeated failure.   
 
 
Notes
 
[1] The saying is often attributed to the Roman philosopher (and proto-Christian) Seneca; see his Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter XLV: 'On sophistical argumentation', line 1. Click here to read online.    
 
[2] See Lawrence's discussion of books and reading in relation to this question of quality (or real value) versus quantity in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 60.  
 
[3] The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE and was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It's lead author is Dr Ard Louis, Reader in Theoretical Physics at Oxford University. For an interview with the latter discussing the key finding of the study - i.e., that  life's evolution is all about arrival of the frequent, rather than survival of the fittest - click here.
 
 

10 Dec 2022

Reflections on Heide Hatry's Rusty Dog

Heide Hatry: Rusty Balloon Dog (2015) 
Photo by Stan Schnier
 
 
I. 
 
Ask a metallurgist and they'll tell you that rust is an iron oxide, usually reddish-brown in colour, formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water. Which, of course, is true in as much as it's factually correct. 
 
But, when considered from a philosophical perspective, rust is a fascinating erotico-aesthetic phenomenon, which is why it has long appealed to artists; particulary those who see beauty in decay and believe in the ruins. 

 
II. 
 
Victorian writer and art critic, John Ruskin, for example, was a big fan of rust. Whilst conceding that you can't use a rusty knife or razor with the same effectiveness as a rust-free blade, rust, he says, is not a defect, but a sign of metallic virtue [1].
 
What's more, in a certain sense, "we may say that iron rusted is Living; but when pure or polished, Dead". Rusting, in other words, is a sign of inorganic respiration; the taking in of oxygen from the atmosphere by the iron.  
 
Further, it's iron in this oxidised, vital form which makes the Earth not only habitable for living organisms, but beautiful; for rust makes the world softer to the touch and more colourful to the eye - just think, he says, of all those "beautiful violet veinings and variegations" of marble. 
 
 
III.

I recalled Ruskin's lecture in praise of rust when seeing one of Heide Hatry's figures in the Rusty Dog series and whilst reading her thoughts [2] on what these figures represent. 
 
According to Hatry, the rusty dogs pose a challenge to the super-shiny, super-smooth aesthetic of Jeff Koons, exemplified by his mirror-polished stainless steel Balloon Dog (1994); and secondly, they call into question the commodification of art, exemplified by the sale of the latter in 2013 for a then record sum for a work by a living artist of $58.4 million.
 
Unlike Koons's balloon dogs - he produced five in all, each with a different transparent colour coating - Hatry's rusty dogs are small in size and made out of cheap 'n' cheerful material. I'm almost tempted to refer to them (affectionately) as mutts.
 
They remind one rather of the famous animal assemblages made by Picasso in the early 1950s, which incorporated found materials, magically transforming them into works of art. His she-goat, crane, and baboon were playful, certainly, but not just intended to be fun - a key term for Koons.       
 
Ultimately, however, for all his talk of fun and innocence, Hatry thinks Koons is cynical and that his works lack soul - by which she seems to mean depth, seriousness, and maturity, but which I would interpret (following Ruskin) as meaning they don't breathe; don't oxidise; don't rust
 
For it's rust which is the anti-Koonsian material - and rusting the anti-Koonsian process - par excellence
 
Rust challenges all forms of idealism, including the Koonsian dream of a super-smooth, super-shiny surface that perfectly reflects the viewer in all their narcissism and projects the promise of an everlasting, never changing world, free from corruption and death.       


Notes
 
[1] See John Ruskin, 'The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy', Lecture V in The Two Paths (1859). Click here for the 2005 eBook published online by Project Gutenberg from which I'm quoting. 
 
[2] These thoughts were expressed to me in an email dated 8 Dec 2022 and contained in an unpublished essay - 'Must We Abhor a Vacuum?' - written in collaboration with John Wronoski, in 2014.
      Although I am more favourably disposed to Jeff Koons and his work than Heide, I do have issues with his aesthetic of smoothness and, push comes to shove, I side with those who affirm dirt, dust, rust, and shit (what Bataille calls base matter) over the smooth, the shiny, the seamless, etc. 
 
 
 Readers who are interested, can click here to access the posts on (or with reference to) Jeff Koons on Torpedo the Ark.  
 
 

12 Nov 2022

On Art and Hippology (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Fig 1: D. H. Lawrence, Laughing Horse (c. 1924)
Fig 2: Josef Moest, Lady Godiva (1906) 

 
I. 
 
D. H. Lawrence had very definite ideas on most things, including the art of representation. 
 
Take a look fig. 1 above, for example, which he produced for a possible cover to an edition of Spud Johnson's two-bit literary magazine, The Laughing Horse [1].
 
It's arguable that what Lawrence is attempting here is to give us an impression of a horse that has something childlike about it. For Lawrence believed that a child sees things differently, more magically, than the average adult:
 
"When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does not see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is not the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't want him to see a proper horse. The child is not a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature." [2]
 
However, if an adult is passionate enough - like an artist - then they retain the ability to see things like a child; i.e., as a kind of vibrating blur in which nothing is fixed and final. They can still see the horse as a darkly vital presence composed of a mane, a long face, a round nose, and four legs.
 
 
II.
 
I remembered what Lawrence wrote here when recently re-reading a discussion about art in Women in Love (1920). Or, more precisely, enjoying the argument between Ursula Brangwen and Loerke over the latter's sculpted bronze figure of a naked young girl sat upon a horse [3].
 
Ursula doesn't care for Loerke - despite the fact her sister Gudrun is very much drawn to him. And so, when he produces a photogravure reproduction of a statuette signed with his name, she is more inclined to be confrontational than complimentary: 
 
"The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands. 
      Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse. 
      The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power." [4]
 
Gudrun, who is also present, is clearly affected by the work: she turns pale, "and a darkness came over her eyes" [5]. She finds the horse phallic and wishes to know its size. But also she was thinking "of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze" [6]
 
Ursula, however, hates it:  
 
"'Why,' said Ursula, 'did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.'" [7]
 
Somewhat affronted by this, Loerke merely repeats the word stiff, obliging Ursula to expand upon her accusation: 
 
"'Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.'" [8]
 
At this, Loerke "raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody" [9], before attempting to explain "with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice" [10], that the horse is not an actual living creature:
 
"'It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see - it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.'" [11]
 
That, of course, in one sense at least, is quite true. But the opinionated somewhat provincial Brangwen girl is having none of it and creates quite the scene:
 
"Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly de haut en bas, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face:  'But it is a picture of a horse, nevertheless.'
      [Loerke] lifted his shoulders in another shrug. 
      'As you like - it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.' 
      Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula's foolish persistence in giving herself away. 
      'What do you mean by "it is a picture of a horse?"' she cried at her sister. 'What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in your head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that your horse isn't a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.'
      Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came. 
      'But why does he have this idea of a horse?' she said. 'I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really -' 
      Loerke snorted with rage. 
      'A picture of myself!' he repeated, in derision. 'Wissen sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.' 
      'That is quite true,' cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. 'The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have nothing to do with one another. I and my art, they have nothing to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.' 
      Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured: 
      'Ja - so ist es, so ist es.' 
      Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both. 
      'It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,' she replied flatly. 'The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.' 
      He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge. Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But there - fools must be suffered, if not gladly. 
      But Ursula was persistent too. 
      'As for your world of art and your world of reality,' she replied, 'you have to separate the two, because you can't bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say "it's the world of art". The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that's all - but you are too far gone to see it.' 
      She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief." [12]
  
What, then, do we think of this? 
 
Well, I hate to say it - and don't want to sound like Clive Bell ecstatically singing the praises of significant form [13] - but I tend to agree with Loerke and Gudrun and think Ursula is being almost wilfully naive. 
 
Ultimately, it is irritating when individuals like Miss Brangwen insist that the plastic arts have to be representational; that a sculpture or painting must forever be referred back to a model in the real world; or that a horse is a horse of course of course ... 


 
 
Notes
 
[1] The Laughing Horse was irregularly published between 1921 and 1939 and celebrated the contemporary literary and artistic culture of the American West. 
      Willard ('Spud') Johnson was the principal editor and contributed much of the poetry, prose, and artwork himself. He also encouraged friends and acquaintances to submit material, including D. H. Lawrence, who had an entire issue devoted to his work in April 1926 (#13). 
      The laughing horse sketch by Lawrence was unused - perhaps because Lawrence got the price wrong; Johnson's magazine always sold for 25¢ (or two bits). It is reproduced in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, ed. Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 145. 
 
[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.
      Lawrence was not alone in the view that the child sees - and draws - in a manner that is difficult for the adult to replicate. As Picasso once famously said: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."  
 
[3] Lawrence was most likely thinking of a patinated bronze sculpture by the German artist Josef Moest (1873-1914) entitled Lady Godiva (1906); see fig. 2 above.
 
[4-6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 429.    
 
[7-11] Ibid., p. 430.

[12] Ibid., pp. 430-31. 

[13] Significant form was a theory developed by English art critic Clive Bell which specified a set of criteria for what qualified as a work of art. In his 1914 book Art, for example, Bell argues that art transports us from the actual world of existence to one of aesthetic exaltation. 
      Lawrence hates this kind of abstract idealism, so popular amongst the Bloomsbury elite of his time, and he openly attacks Bell in his own writings on art, which can be found in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For an excellent discussion of all this see chapter 4 of Anne Fernihough's, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Oxford University Press, 1993).   
 
 

6 Feb 2022

The Rich Can Buy Soap: Why I Find Shepard Fairey's Hope Poster Problematic

Shepard Fairey in front of his portrait of Barack Obama before its installation 
at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2009
Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
 
 
I. 
 
Someone has emailed:
 
'I was intrigued - and, if I'm honest, slightly irritated - by the fact that after praising Shepard Fairey's Hope poster as a work of art and defending his right to have transformed the original photo by Mannie Garcia on the grounds of fair use, you couldn't resist adding a line in a footnote to the effect that, actually, you didn't much care for the piece after all; branding it as an all-too-blatant example of political propaganda. Would you care to elaborate on this remark?' [1]

Well, although I hadn't planned on saying anything further about Fairey's work, I've decided to take this opportunity to do so, since I was asked in a such a sincere spirit of both intrigue and irritation ...
 
 
II. 
 
Just to be clear from the outset: I'm not suggesting that art should (or could) be pure in some manner or untainted by politics. And lots of great works are explicitly political; Picasso's Guernica (1937) would be an obvious example of such.
 
But I do feel a little uncomfortable when an artist produces a work that is endorsed by a presidential campaign team and which is, in effect, a piece of political advertising that doesn't only promote Barack Obama's candidacy, but attempts to fob us off with the untenable - and treacherous - ideal of hope.
 
One is reminded of something that D. H. Lawrence wrote about advertisements; no matter how clever, how beautiful, or how seductive their use of language and imagery, one can never quite forget they disguise a sharp hook with which to catch the consumer [2]
 
I'm not denying, therefore, that Fairey's Obama portrait is a genuine work of art that brings forth a number of powerful reactions, but I don't like feeling that I'm having my reactions pre-determined and manipulated - particularly when Fairey is doing so in a manner that suggests he is attempting to spiritualise politics and sell us not only his version of the American Dream, but inspire mankind with a promise of redemption.  
 
My main problem is not with the instantly iconic image of Barack Obama, heavily stylised by Fairey and displaying many features that belong to his distinctive aesthetic, it's with the slogan HOPE plastered across the bottom in capital letters [3]
 
As a pessimistic philosopher, I obviously have problems with this sentimental and morally optimistic ideal of hope. I never expect (nor particularly desire) positive outcomes; I certainly don't pray for such. 
 
Like Schopenhauer, I regard hope as a pernicious delusion or a folly of the heart that undermines the individual's appreciation of probability; like Nietzsche, I suspect the gods enjoy the spectacle of human suffering and so provide hope as a way of prolonging such (it is arguably, therefore, the most evil of all evils). 

I'm glad to see that, by 2015, Shepard Fairey was expressing his disappointment with President Obama and his administration, having lost a good deal of hope as evidence of increased military drone use and domestic surveillance came to light [4].
 
But one wonders just what Fairey - a self-confessed sex pistol - was thinking of back in 2008 by pledging his support of Obama so openly and promoting a theological virtue; had he forgotten the great slogan of punk: No Future ...? [5] 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] The writer is referring to a post of 4 Feb 2022 entitled 'Notes on Fair Use With Reference to the Case of Shepard Fairey and the Obama Hope Poster' - click here.
 
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 238. I comment further on the poetry and politics of modern advertising with reference to this essay by Lawrence (as well as Roland Barthes's take on the subject in Mythologies) in a post that can be accessed by clicking here

[3] Originally, the poster featured the word progress, but the Obama campaign team expressed concerns about the connotations of this idea and advised that the key terms that they were promoting were hope and change.  

[4] See the interview with Fairey by Matt Patches in Esquire (May 28, 2015): click here
 
[5] No Future was the original title of 'God Save the Queen', by the Sex Pistols, and the phrase is repeated throughout the song. One might also remind Fairey of something that Sartre once said: 'Voting is not a political act. It's an act of resignation.' Thus one should never vote for anyone or anything, only against.   


4 Mar 2020

Pablo Picasso is Back in Fashion

Moschino S/S 2020 Ready-to-Wear Collection


The American fashion designer Jeremy Scott has done many things in his time that have made me cringe and want to look away; and many that have made me sit up and take notice.

In the latter category, for example, one might place his debut show in 1997 based on Ballard's novel and Cronenberg's film Crash, as well as his sci-fi inspired A/W 2018 collection, featuring Gigi Hadid and friends looking fantastic in their neon wigs and fur-lined moon boots.

But I think his S/S 2020 ready-to-wear collection for Moschino - for whom Scott is creative director - is my favourite to date. Inspired by Picasso, it brilliantly reminds us of the permanent relationship between art and fashion and the crucial role played by the model acting as an intermediary between these two worlds.  

Of course, Scott's not the first fashionista to have been influenced by the great Spanish artist and to have incorporated his ideas into their work; Oscar de la Renta and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac are just two other designers we might name. And it's important to recall that Picasso himself was happy to get directly involved in the worlds of fashion and costume design; famously collaborating with the Ballets Russes on several productions (much to the horror of fellow Cubists) and, many years later, accepting a commision from Fuller Fabrics to produce patterns and designs for use as high quality prints on dresses.*

I've little doubt, therefore, that Picasso would have been delighted by Scott's sexy, stylish and often witty attempt to subvert the shapes of garments in the much the same way that he subverted reality (playing with notions of symmetry, experimenting with volume and proportion). 


Notes 

* The following year Fuller's Decorama Division introduced the Modern Masters print series for home furnishings. Aimed at a more exclusive market than the dress textiles - they were only available through approved decorators - Picasso again provided several designs, though was unhappy with the thought that these might be used on chairs, saying: 'People can lean on Picasso; but they can't sit on Picasso.' 

Readers interested in watching the Moschino Spring/Summer 2020 show can do so by clicking here.


1 Jun 2019

You Need Hands

Single release from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979)


I.

In his 1925 essay 'Why the Novel Matters', D. H. Lawrence challenges the mind/body superstition by musing on his hand in the act of writing. Why, he asks, should it be regarded as "a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it".  

Why indeed. For it is the hand which - animated with a life all its own - forms direct knowledge of the strange universe that it touches, grasps, and handles. And it is the hand which plays with a pen upon the page, slipping gaily along and jumping "like a grasshopper to dot an i".*

The hand, says Lawrence, is also capable of rudimentary thought and experiences boredom if obliged to engage in the same activity for too long. Ultimately, it has just as much ontological reality as the brain: "Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is?"    

Why indeed. In fact, the philosopher Martin Heidegger gives the human hand special significance, believing as he does that it is what distinguishes man from all other beasts, including the great apes. Thus, as noted in a recent post on simian aesthetics, whilst Heidegger would readily admit that a chimp possesses prehensile, multi-fingered appendages capable of holding and manipulating objects - including paintbrushes - he would not allow that a chimp has hands in the unique (Daseinesque) manner that human beings have hands.

For Heidegger, there's an ontological abyss between the hand of Picasso, for example, and the hand of Pierre Brassau, that is not simply based on evolved anatomical difference. Derrida, however, has interrogated Heidegger's thinking on the hand and animality and argues that his insistence that apes have no hands (only organs that can grasp) is simply dogmatic speciesism which, as with all such oppositional thinking (or dualism), serves to land him back in the metaphysical soup so to speak.    


II.

Those interested in knowing what Heidegger says in more detail are encouraged to read What is Called Thinking? (1951-52). In this crucial late text Heidegger addresses the question of the human and what defines our unique existence or way of being in the world (i.e., what puts the Da- in Dasein and sets man apart from all other species).

Not wanting to fall back into the ontotheology that sustains traditional humanism, his answer isn't the mind or anything to do with the soul, it is, rather, die Hand; man is a kind of signifying monster who seems to be desperately trying to articulate something and the hand is the organ par excellence with which he gestures, points, and indicates - as well as reaches, receives, carries and welcomes.

Or, as Max Bygraves once wrote:

You need hands 
To hold someone you care for 
You need hands
To show that you're sincere **

You also need hands, as Bygraves goes on to suggest, to wipe away a tear, to hold a new born baby, and to give thanks to God in prayer. I don't know if Heidegger knew this very popular song (a German version entitled Deine Hände by Gerhard Wendland was released in July 1959), but I think he may have liked it (then again, maybe not).   

Insisting that thought is not a disembodied or merely cerebral process, Heidegger argues that man only really thinks when he creatively engages with the world with his hands. If he (somewhat predictably) writes of carpenters and cabinet-makers working away in some hamlet on the edge of the Black Forest, we are surely encouraged to extend what he says to include all people - but not Koko the gorilla or Congo the chimp.

Apes lack hands because they do not dwell within language (and so can never sing along with Max), concludes Heidegger, displaying the same problematic anthropocentrism that has characterised so much Western philosophy.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 193. 

Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper and Row, 1968). Originally published as Was Heißt Deken? (Max Niemeyer Verlag,1954), the book consists of a series of lectures given by Heidegger in 1951-52 at the University of Freiburg. To read online as a pdf, click here.  

Jacques Derrida, 'Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis, (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 161-96. To read online as a pdf, click here

* Like Lawrence, Roland Barthes also liked to muse upon the physical act of writing - or what he termed scription - i.e., "the action by which we manually trace signs". Ultimately, for both men, writing is the hand and, in a wider sense, the body: "its impulses, controlling mechanisms, rhythms, weights, glides, complications, flights ..." It hardly needs to be said that Barthes had no time for the typewriter or word processor (in this he has much in common with Heidegger who believed it tore writing away from the essential domain of the hand and mechanically passed the word along, turning it into an element of commerce and communication). See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, (Northwestern University Press, 2009), p. 193.

** Max Bygraves, You Need Hands (Decca, 1958). Written by Max Bygraves (under the name Roy Irwin). Performed by Max Bygraves with The Clarke Brothers and Eric Rogers and his Orchestra. Lyrics © Lakeview Music Publishing Co. Ltd. Click here to play on YouTube. For me, the song has special interest due to the fact that Malcolm chose to record it for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and his performance of the song with Helen of Troy, in Highgate Cemetery, is one of the more touching scenes in Julien Temple's 1980 film: click here.


29 May 2019

Simian Aesthetics 1: The Case of Congo the Chimp

Congo and one of his more mature works


Everyone knows that monkeys make great copyists. We even have a verb in English, to ape, meaning to mimic someone or something closely (albeit in a rather clumsy, sometimes mocking manner). But what isn't so widely known is that they can also be original artists, producing works that have real aesthetic value and interest in and of themselves and not merely because they are produced by the hairy hand of a non-human primate.  

Take the case of Congo, for example, who, with the help of the zoologist and surrealist Desmond Morris, developed a lyrical style of painting that has much in common with abstract impressionism.

Congo first came to Morris's attention in 1956 when, aged two, he was given a pencil and paper. It was obvious the young chimp had innate drawing ability and a basic sense of composition. In addition, Congo had a very clear idea of whether a picture had or had not been completed: if a work was taken away that he didn't consider finished, he would scream and work himself up into a tantrum; but once he considered a work to be done, then he would refuse to work on it further, no matter what inducements were made.

Within a couple of years Congo had made several hundred sketches and paintings and during the late 1950s he made frequent TV appearances, showcasing his talents live from London Zoo alongside Morris. Congo became even more of a simian cause célèbre when the Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted a large exhibition of his work (along with that by other talented apes) in the autumn of 1957.

Discussing this event in a recent interview,* Morris explained that the importance of the show lay in the fact that it was the first time that zoology and fine art had come together in order to examine the evolutionary roots of man's aesthetic delight in images. Morris also recalls how originally nervous the ICA were about the exhibition, worrying, for example, that other all too human artists might find the idea absurd and insulting. Thankfully, it was decided by ICA founders Roland Penrose and Herbert Read that the show had to go on. 

And, as it turned out, critical reaction to the exhibition within the art world and wider media was mixed, but mostly on the positive side. Indeed, when Picasso heard about Congo, he immediately showed interest and hung one of the chimp's paintings on his studio wall. Later, when asked by a journalist why he had done so, Picasso went over and bit him.

Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí were also impressed by Congo's work. The former delighted in the intelligence of composition and the latter compared Congo's attempt to control his brushstrokes favourably to the random splashing of Jackson Pollock, saying that whilst Pollock painted with the hand of an animal, Congo painted with a hand that was quasi-human.**

Sadly, Congo's brief but glittering career as an artist ended with his death from tuberculosis in 1964, when he was aged just ten years old. His legacy, however, lives on, and in 2005 Bonham's auctioned a number of his paintings alongside those by Renoir and Warhol. Amusingly, whilst the works of these illustrious human painters didn't sell on the day, Congo's sold for far more than expected, with an American collector snapping up three works for over $25,000. 

We arrive, finally, at the obvious question: Is a picture painted by a chimpanzee really a work of art?

For me, the answer has to be yes and to argue otherwise does seem suspiciously like speciesism. Of course, as Desmond Morris acknowledges, this is not to say Congo was a great artist or that his work deserves the same critical attention as that given to work of the human artists named above. But neither does it deserve to be dismissed as rubbish. Ultimately, Congo's fascinating canvases are, as Morris says, "extraordinary records of an experiment which proves beyond doubt that we aren't the only species that can control visual patterns".    


Notes

*A transcript of this interview in which Morris discusses the controversial exhibition Paintings by Chimpanzees (1957) can be found on the archive page of the ICA website: click here. The transcript is the third of a three part series based on an interview by Melanie Coles with Desmond Morris at his studio in Oxford, 2016 (ed. Melanie Coles and Maya Caspari).

See also Desmond Morris's study of the picture-making behaviour of the great apes in relation to the art produced by humans; The Biology of Art, (Methuen, 1962). 

**Heidegger, of course, wouldn't allow this statement to pass unchallenged, believing as he did that the human hand is what distinguishes man from all other beasts, including the ape. Thus, according to Heidegger, whilst chimps possess prehensile organs capable of holding and manipulating objects, they do not have hands in the unique manner that humans being do. Indeed, for Heidegger, there is an ontological abyss between Pollock's hand and Congo's. I shall discuss this at greater length in a forthcoming post.


Readers interested in part two of this post on simian aesthetics - the case of Pierre Brassau - should click here.


29 Jan 2019

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.


2 Dec 2018

Intertextuality: Bert & Amy & Ted & Hannah



According to Hannah Roche, poor old Amy Lowell has been rather hard done by and her poetry unfairly neglected by readers and critics in the 21st century.

For according to Dr. Roche, not one but two of the great white males of English literature - Mssrs. Lawrence and Hughes - both borrowed imagery and ideas from her work. The latter in his much-celebrated poem Pike and the former in the sapphic bathing scene in chapter XII of his astonishing novel The Rainbow.
     
It's an interesting argument and anything that stimulates renewed interest in Lowell and her writing is to be welcomed. Having said that, I don't find the textual evidence Roche supplies in support of her argument particularly persuasive. There are certain similarities and echoes, but to speak of influence and an unacknowledged debt is, I think, going too far.

(Nor do I believe her being an overweight lesbian is the reason Lowell isn't considered a major figure within modernism; it has more to do with the fact that her talent was pretty slender.)   

Besides, even if Hughes and Lawrence - who exchanged many letters with Lowell* and considered her to be a very good friend, if a very bad poet - did plagiarise from Amy (and Roche is careful not to use this word and make such a strong claim), so what? 

To paraphrase Picasso, whilst good poets, like good painters, politely borrow from others and subscribe to a bourgeois etiquette founded upon property rights, great artists steal and make ideas their own without apology.

The critic Richard Ellmann sums this up nicely in a passage written in 1967:

"That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override."


Notes

Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3.

Hannah Roche, 'Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians: Amy Lowell's Haunting Modernism', Modernist Cultures, (Sept. 2017). Click here to go to the University of York Research Database from where you can download a copy of this essay.

For a journalistic spin on this issue, see Alison Flood's article 'Amy Lowell: Ted Hughes and D. H. Lawrence "owe unacknowledged debt" to "uncelebrated" poet', The Guardian, (29 Nov. 2108). Click here to read online. 

*See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, 1914-1925, ed. E. Claire Healy and Keith Cushman, (Black Sparrow Press, 1985). 

Thanks to Dr. Maria Thanassa for providing me with the quotation from Ellmann's book.


27 Apr 2017

Why I Love Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863)

Édouard Manet: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) 
Oil on canvas, 208 x 264.5 cm


Manet's controversial picnic scene, known in English as Lunch on the Grass, might seem fairly innocuous to a modern viewer, despite the nudity of the central female figure and scantily-clad bather in the background - and despite the high regard in which it's held by art-loving members of the dogging and CMNF communities respectively.

But, back in the day, it sparked outrage in the art world, breaking with academic convention in style, in subject matter, and in the size of the canvas. It also provoked a huge public scandal; not only was there a woman in the nip besides two fully-clothed men, but they appeared to be fairly indifferent to the fact - more concerned with their own conversation and appearance, like a couple of queers. What's more, she, the brazen hussy, is gazing directly at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall with a coquettish smile that is as knowing as it is obscene.       

Surprisingly, for such a famous work, there's still a good deal we don't know for certain about the painting; including, for example, when Manet first began the canvas, how he originally got the idea and what sort of preparatory work he carried out. Having said that, we do know that the female nude was Victorine Meurent, a famous model and accomplished artist in her own right, whom Manet loved to paint (she it was who sat for another of his notorious canvases belonging to this period, Olympia).

And we do know that Manet was playfully reworking an Old Master's depiction of a Greek mythological scene. For the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's celebrated engraving The Judgement of Paris (c. 1515), after a drawing by Raphael; an artist revered by the conservative members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, so Manet's très moderne take on this Renaissance treasure was bound to ruffle feathers. In fact, some members were said to be apoplectic, though others found the canvas simply laughable.

Émile Zola, however, thought it to be Manet's greatest work. So too did many other 19th and 20th century artists, including Picasso, who was so obsessed by Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe that he completed 27 paintings and 140 drawings inspired by it.

Punk impresario Malcolm McLaren also liked it so much that, when managing Bow Wow Wow, he commissioned the photographer Andy Earl to recreate the picture with members of the band, including 14-year-old Annabella Lwin taking on the Victorine Meurent role - much to the outrage of her mother, who called in Scotland Yard and had the image removed from the sleeve of the group's 1981 album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! 


Photo of Bow Wow Wow by Andy Earl 
49 x 38.5 cm colour print (1983) 
Given to the National Portrait Gallery by Andy Earl (1999) 


It's amusing to think that, almost 120 years after being rejected by the Salon, Lunch on the Grass could still upset the elderly authorities and those D. H. Lawrence terms censor-morons; i.e. individuals who attempt to circumscribe the pornographic imagination.


4 Apr 2017

Cut it Out - Reflections on Blue Nudes and Racial Fetishism in the Work of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse: Nu bleu IV (1952)


The Blue Nudes are a series of painted female figure cut-outs stuck to paper and then mounted on canvas, completed by Henri Matisse in 1952. They are - no matter what fanatic Lawrentians may think - very lovely works and have added poignancy when one recalls that they were produced very late in his life when Matisse was not in the best of health, having undergone surgery for abdominal cancer ten years earlier. 

Conventional painting and sculpture having become too physically demanding, Matisse turned in his final decade to a new medium and, with the help of his assistants, began creating artworks that defy genre, being neither paintings nor sculptures as such, but incorporating elements of both these disciplines. 

Initially, the cut-outs were fairly modest in size and ambition, but eventually included large pieces of great complexity and if, at first, Matisse thought of them as subsidiary to his earlier work, by 1946 he had started to appreciate the possibilities inherent to the technique and to realise the new freedom working with scissors rather than brushes allowed him: An artist, he declared, must never be a prisoner of any style, of the past, or of himself ... 

Blue Nude IV - shown above - took the elderly artist two weeks of cutting and arranging (and an entire sketchbook of preliminary studies) before it eventually satisfied him. The slightly awkward and uncomfortable looking pose of the figure was obviously one for which Matisse had a penchant, as it's similar to a number of nudes completed earlier in his career and can be traced back to Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06), one of the great masterpieces of modernism completed in his so-called Fauve period. 

Mention must also be made of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, painted shortly afterwards: 




This work scandalised the French public when first exhibited in 1907 and continued to provoke controversy six years later at the Armory Show in the United States, where it was burned in effigy - not least because of concerns about the racial origins of the female figure. 

There's an obvious and much discussed primitivism and Orientalism in Matisse's work; African sculpture fascinated and inspired him as much as it did Picasso and other European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Disillusioned with Western culture and searching for new values and new ways of seeing the world, Matisse and his contemporaries attempted to merge the highly stylized treatment of the human figure found in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness and vivid use of colour helped to define early modernism. 

Whilst these artists probably knew very little, if anything, of the history or meaning of the African sculptures they encountered - and probably didn't care all that much - they nevertheless recognized the magical and powerful aspects and adapted these to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Ultimately, one might suggest that the blueness in the works shown here signifies seductive Otherness and functions as a disguised form of blackness, revealing the fact that Matisse (like many white men) has something of a secret BGF ...