Non-Racist Photo Sparks Mistaken Outrage

Photo of Dasha Zhukova copyright Buro 24/7

The above picture of fashion designer and magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, in which she sits looking somewhat awkward on an amusingly kitsch piece of human furniture by British pop artist Allen Jones, has, apparently, sparked outrage. 

Rather surprisingly, it's not the fact that the chair objectifies women by assigning them a sexually-submissive whilst decoratively functional role that has caused this storm of angry protest across various social networks and media outlets: it's the fact that the mannequin-sculpture happens to resemble a woman of colour.  

According to some, this makes the work not only misogynistic but racist and the photo of a privileged and extremely wealthy white woman sitting on the chair merely serves to emphasise this. The fact that it was published on Martin Luther King Day ironically - if unintentionally - adding further insult to injury.   

   

Should I bother to comment on this? I'm tempted to do so, obviously. Indeed, when I first glanced at the photo and the headline on the Yahoo news page I felt like a fish being offered bait on a hook.

But, to be perfectly honest, I'm tired today and my heart's simply not in it. So let me just say, for the record if you will, that of course racism, sexism and class hatred are realities that infect every aspect of our culture, society and politics. And of course these things should be questioned and critically challenged. But knee-jerk liberalism rooted in naive moral sentiment and humourless political puritanism rarely helps matters.

  

Welcome to Taiji Cove

Despite what I wrote in a recent post (Delphinophilia), some people neither wish to swim with dolphins, nor have sex with them. Rather, they wish to corral dolphins, kill dolphins, and eat dolphins: welcome to the blood-red waters of Taiji Cove.

Every year in this remote bay, thousands of wild dolphins are rounded up by fishermen. The cutest looking are sold into captivity and obliged to spend the rest of their lives performing in the entertainment industry. The rest are slaughtered with knives or by having a metal spike thrust into their spinal cord. When they have bled to death, they are then hauled to a harbour-side warehouse and prepared for exclusive Japanese dinner tables along with whale blubber and shark-fin soup.

This annual festival of cruelty came to public attention after the release of Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (dir. Louis Psihoyos, 2009). The film followed a group of eco-activists attempting to gain access to the the hunt. It met with predictable opposition in Japan from groups saying it was racist and an affront to an ancient way of life.  

And so, despite continuing international protest, the government of Japan staunchly defends the practice on the grounds of cultural tradition - a phrase that effectively functions as a moral release clause and which is used to justify all of those things which lack any other form of legitimacy, from badger baiting to female genital mutilation.

   

Taiji's mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, remains particularly defiant and almost belligerent as he reminds Western devils about the bombing of Hiroshima. This, of course, is insanely besides the point. But, on the other hand, it's certainly fair to question our eating of other warm-blooded and sentient mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs. 

For ultimately, as Morrissey says, all meat is murder and there's no easy way around the fact that the brutal and systematic exploitation and destruction of animals on an industrial scale (an aspect of what Derrida terms carnophallogocentrism) is a global phenomenon and not one peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun.    

Delphinophilia

A lot of people claim to love dolphins and dream of swimming with them so that they too might experience something of the sheer joy and underwater togetherness displayed by these fleshy, warm-bodied, and intelligent creatures.   

But for a small number of delphinophiles, to simply swim with dolphins is insufficient and they desire some form of overtly sexual relation. As with other other types of zoosexual contact, however, fucking with Flipper is far from straightforward and requires a good deal of patience, commitment, and knowledge of animal anatomy and behaviour: get it wrong and perving on porpoises might well prove fatal; get it right, and fins can be wonderful.

The key seems to be establishing a bond of trust and familiarity between yourself and your bottle-nosed partner. In other words, adopting a code of erotic etiquette and sexual ethics is as crucial within cross-species relationships as within human-human love affairs. Abuse has no place within zoophilia.

And so whilst it's true - as critics like to point out - that dolphins cannot give explicit verbal consent, they nevertheless can and do make themselves available and amenable to sex play with human beings and have been known to initiate such. Indeed, recent research has shown that they - like other higher mammals - are polyamorous opportunists who use sex as a form of social bonding.

Arguments that exchanging a few simple pleasures with dolphins is harmful to their welfare simply don't hold up; arguments that it is unnatural or immoral and degrades the uniquely special status of the human are laughable as well as untenable. Torpedo the ark means rejecting the naturalistic fallacy and the dogma of human exceptionalism; it means proliferating forms of contact, affection, and affinity with other species.

 
Note: for those who wish to know more about dolphin-oriented zoosexuality the following blogs might interest:

Delphinophile.blogspot.com

http://blog.wetgoddess.net

Delphigirlwrites.blogspot.com

In Praise of Invisible Artworks

Tom Friedman: Untitled (A Curse), 1992

One of the nice things about having English-Lit scholar and TV star Dr Catherine Brown as a friend is that she raises so many interesting topics for discussion: such as invisible artworks, which, until two nights ago, I was completely unaware of, but am now a little obsessed by having seen them (or, rather, not seen them) for myself.

In particular, I'm fascinated with an untitled piece by Tom Friedman in which he commissioned a witch to place a curse in the space above an empty pedestal, thereby creating an enchanted work that makes us think not merely about that old chestnut of what does and does not constitute art and what roles imagination and belief might play in our understanding and appreciation of an object, but also about how sacred or - as in this case - accursed space is divided off from the secular and commercial space which surrounds it.

But what I really like about Friedman's piece is that, like other invisible works, it lends itself to crime: for one could arguably steal it without anyone knowing; or, more amusingly, one could employ a witch of one's own to cast a spell that would lift the curse, thereby destroying the work in an act of magical vandalism.

Even Wounded Books Remain Complicit With Evil

Wounded Book XIII, Bullet Holes on vintage publication,
©mitrentse, courtesy Nadine Feront Gallery Brussels

There are many ways to display one's love of literature, but until I came across the very wonderful series of works entitled Wounded Books by Greek-born, London-based artist and bibliophile Christina Mitrentse, I must admit that the idea of shooting Penguin paperbacks with a rifle never occurred to me.

Initially produced in response to the bombing of a street in Baghdad famous for its bookshops, Miss Mitrentse has powerfully and yet rather poignantly emphasized the vulnerability of ideas and bodies of knowledge and, in more general terms, the fragility of material objects. Nothing serves better than a bullet hole, it seems, to remind us of this.

And yet, having said that, literature is certainly not innocent and whilst books can be subject to violence, so too can they often incite, sanction, and justify violence (often in the name of Love). Ultimately, books are as complicit with evil as any other assemblage of power-knowledge and we shouldn't revere them, accept their authority without question, or believe them to contain eternal truths.

And this is why I have trouble with Anna McNay's recent interpretation of Wounded Books, posted on her blog, art-Corpus, in which she reads the work in terms of religious metaphor to do with the incarnation of the holy spirit, thereby turning bullet holes into stigmata and the book into the body of Christ. It's a reading that is both unconvincing and peculiarly offensive in its theological musing and psycho-sexual idealism.

For books, being mortal things, are not without sin and, arguably, they have caused more suffering and death - precisely when accorded divine status as sacred works - than all the weapons in the world.

Indeed, I rather hope that Miss Mitrentse will one day dare to fire bullets through the Bible, the Quran and all the other founding texts which root themselves in our heads and in our hearts until we can no longer think or feel outside of the binary logic that is their spiritual reality. Shoot these root-books Christina and allow a little fresh air to circulate between their pages. You'll be doing us all a great service if you do.

Notes:

Those interested in the work of Christina Mitrentse should visit christinamitrentse.com
Those who want to read Anna McNay's post should go to http://art-corpus.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/christina-mitrentses-wounded-books

On the Art of Sensation

Natasha Gouveia: Ripped Canvas 1 (2011)  
natashagouveia.org

Just as it is mistaken to imagine that the whiteness of the canvas is a virgin surface, so too is it naive to think the blank page is a pure and empty space that a writer must only fill with words. Both surfaces are already invested (virtually) with all kinds of cliché and belief.

And this is why it's difficult to be a painter or a poet: one who knows how to wipe, to scrape, and even to shred the surface. For Lawrence, this requires a certain purity of spirit. By which he doesn't mean being moral in a conventional sense, but rather having the ability to release new forces and figures from old forms with violent delight.

If you don't know how to work with a certain innocent joy in destruction, then you'll never discover what Deleuze terms the logic of sensation: i.e., "the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliché - but also of the 'sensational', the spontaneous, etc."       

The young Canadian artist Natasha Gouveia seems to understand this and I smile everytime she uses the word gouge in the title of one her works.

Something Fishy

Lawrence wrote a very lovely poem about fish to whom so little matters as they live their wave-thrilled but essentially loveless lives in oneness with the water, beyond knowledge, beyond touch, beyond humanity. For fish move in other circles to our own and we are but many-fingered horrors of daylight in their strangely staring eyes.

Brilliantly coloured tropical fish, taken from amongst the coral reefs, are particularly fragile and ill-suited to aquarium life; drifting joylessly in a few cubic centimetres of water around toy divers and other plastic ornaments.

Over twenty million of these little splinters of sheer loveliness are captured annually to supply a multi-million dollar pet trade. Collectors stun the fish by dousing coral beds with cyanide, thereby making it easier to grab hold of them. Many die in the process and up to 40% who survive being captured fail to make it to their final destination. The poison, of course, also damages and eventually kills the coral.

Now, you might imagine that someone who passionately loved the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and raged against anthropocentrism and the crime against nature, would have abhorred the exotic fish trade. What a shock to discover, therefore, that recently deceased critic and scholar Keith Sagar once edited The World Encyclopaedia of Tropical Fish and had a collection of his very own!

Was he never tempted, like Lawrence, to ask his heart, who are these? and to admit that we can never know and thus never really own fish; even if we might catch them, kill them, or keep 'em in tanks - sulphurous sun-beasts of the upper-world that we are!

Panem et Pyrotechnics

To welcome in the new year, people all over the world like to watch fireworks, which, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, have one big advantage over the stars; namely, you always know precisely when they are going to appear in the sky.

But, having said that, public displays - no matter how spectacular - soon bore and disappoint and one can't help wondering at the politics of the event and the psychology of people who stand in the cold gazing upwards with their mouths open, fascinated by bright lights and loud bangs; content to obey their leaders for another twelve months thanks to the promise of panem et pyrotechnics.

New Year's Eve makes North Koreans of us all ... 

Happy New Year

In wishing for a happy new year I am hoping like Barthes for the absolutely new which disturbs and brings bliss; not for the mere stereotype of novelty.

The new is an escape route from the present into the future and a necessary precondition of jouissance. 

The stereotype that reigns triumphant within contemporary culture, is simply a form of humiliated repetition in which superficial forms are varied, but their meaning remains fixed and ever the same. In this manner, we are denied any chance of escape; robbed even of the possibility of dying. 

For me, Auld Lang Syne, sung at the stroke of midnight each and every new year's eve without enthusiasm or joy, is a form of curse via which we are once more burdened with bad conscience and memory of the past thereby undermining our resolve, shattering our dreams, denying our orgasm.    

Comrade Dawn

As day breaks, I often think of her ...

And as the moon flashes phosphorescent between night skies
I recall the whiteness of her flesh fitfully exposed between 
skirt and stocking-top. 

Stripped naked before the impersonal violence of the market place
whilst wearing a rubber crown of freedom, she succeeded only in 
becoming the favourite read of rapists.