Lawrence Contra Matisse

 Henri Matisse: La Musique, (1939)

Whilst I share Lawrence's high regard for Cézanne, I do not share his loathing of Matisse whom he accuses of being nothing but a clever trickster in paint; one who admitted Cézanne as his master only so that he might betray and then bury him all the more successfully beneath a new form of abstraction that disguised drab cliché with gay colour.

For Lawrence, Matisse's very virtuosity is grounds for contempt. If he succeeds in producing "grand and flamboyant modern-baroque pictures" thanks to his supreme technical ability, nevertheless his skill means he needn't be humble or even honest as a painter. Instead, Matisse could falsely pride himself on being "a clever mental creature who is capable at will of making the intuitions and instincts subserve some mental concept ... in a sort of masturbation process". 

Whether this criticism is fair or even meaningful is open to debate. But the fact remains that I'd sooner have one of the Frenchman's lovely-looking - and, yes, intelligently conceived, skillfully executed - pictures hanging on my wall, than one of Lawrence's canvases which, whilst not hideous, are - to be fair to the prosecution - often gross as well as inept.           

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918). 

What I Believe

Paul Cadmus: What I Believe (1947-48)

I have always had a certain amount of respect and affection for E. M. Forster. Primarily because he had the decency and the courage to publicly say of Lawrence after the latter's death in 1930 that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation. This contrasts starkly with the often sneering and hostile verdicts of other friends and contemporaries - let alone Lawrence's enemies, of whom there were many.      

Lately, however, I have found myself enjoying again Forster's fiction (with the exception of A Passage to India) and even, dare I say it, some of his essays; such as What I Believe (1938), which opens with the wonderful lines:

"I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own." 

This is pretty much the position I find myself in today. To paraphrase Forster, postmodern irony and cool indifference are no longer enough in a world of religious fundamentalism wherein ignorance and superstition thrive, evolutionary scientists are forced to debate with creationists about the school curriculum, and cosmologists still have to convince many that the earth travels round the sun and is not in fact the centre of the universe.      

It would be nice to remain transpositional and forever defer meaning, but, unfortunately, one is no longer afforded the luxury. Rather, one has today to take up some kind of position - however reluctantly and provisionally - and say clearly what one means (and even mean what one says). This doesn't come easily and it represents something of a philosophical retreat. Insouciance remains I think the great word of tomorrow, but it is for the moment rendered impossible. For we live in the time that we do: extremely unpleasant and bloody in every sense of the word.

Forster thinks the key to surviving such a time is the forging of relationships between people based not on race, nation, or creed, but on fondness and friendship. I tend to agree with him here too. Starting from queer relationships founded upon trust and kindness between strangers, we may be able to build something worth protecting and cherishing. 

But such bonds are often despised today: we are encouraged to rediscover our roots and identify ourselves as members of ethno-tribal communities, or as the chosen followers of a supreme deity. Like Forster, I find this idea repugnant and, like Forster, if I had to choose between betraying my country, race, or god and betraying a friend, I only hope that I would have the guts to stick by the latter.       

So imagine my disappointment when someone I held dear emailed to say that, even at the price of love and friendship, she would sooner kiss goodbye to me or to any other individual with whom she had established a happy alliance, than compromise or abandon her ideals (including her slightly ludicrous fantasy of belonging to and representing a universal underclass to which she owes her ultimate loyalty).   

I should surely not have to remind someone who calls herself Beatrice that Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell precisely because they chose to betray their friend Julius Caesar, rather than Rome. 

In Praise of the Pig

Whilst the dietary injunction against eating pork first arose in primitive Judea, it is within the Islamic world where the pig itself has become truly taboo; i.e. both hated and feared. This horror of all things pig is often taken to ridiculous extremes in an attempt to eradicate all thought of an animal that is to the Muslim mind an abomination. 

This is, like all taboos, absurd and something of a shame. For pigs are extremely versatile and loveable creatures; intelligent, social, and, when living in natural conditions, fastidiously clean. They are also, of course, closely related to us. Indeed, according to the American biologist Eugene MacCarthy, who specializes in hybrid evolution, humanity is the result of interspecies breeding between chimpanzees and pigs. 

This is a sensational claim, obviously, which has received a good deal of criticism and scorn from the scientific community, but the fact remains that we do share a great deal of DNA with our porcine cousins and this has allowed for successful organ transplant between pigs and people.

Perhaps it is this closeness which lies at the heart of the religious belief shared by many millions that the pig is diabolical and that - in the words of Christopher Hitchens - heaven hates ham. In a provocative passage, Hitchens counters the modern 'secular' explanation of the original Jewish prohibition to do with health and safety: 

"According to many ancient authorities, the attitude of early Semites to swine was one of reverence as much as disgust. The eating of pig flesh was considered as something special, even privileged and ritualistic. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human. Porcophobia - and porcophilia - thus probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which the 'holy' texts often do more than hint. Nothing optional [like bacon sandwiches or sodomy] is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

- Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, (Atlantic Books, 2008), p. 40.

In sum, the pig is a noble beast, dear to the hearts and palates of Europeans, and we should ignore demands by Muslim zealots to remove all traces of the pig from our culture. We should also, however, seriously reconsider our own treatment of the pig and end the disgusting cruelty of factory farming. They deserve better than to be vilified by those who allow religious superstition to distort their relationship to the animal world and they deserve more than being confined, separated from their young, and forced to live in their own waste. 

Why Being Offended Doesn't Justify Bear Attacks on Children

Despite what Larry David argues with the neighbourhood cops in a classic episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E3), it's difficult to fully accept that being called a bald asshole by some local teenage girls constitutes a hate crime. It's impertinent, yes - and one can see that it might be hurtful to more sensitive members of the bald community - but it hardly warrants police action or being accorded the same degree of seriousness as the use of racial slurs for example, or homophobic abuse. 

Still, Larry's demand that a form of official reprimand be forthcoming - if only a stern word with the parents - is as nothing compared to what happens when the prophet and miracle-worker Elisha is also mocked for being a bald asshole in the second Book of Kings, 2:23-24. 

Making his way to the town of Bethel, about ten miles from Jerusalem, Elisha is accosted by a large group of youths who make fun of his baldness and challenge him to ascend unto heaven in a whirlwind like his master Elijah: Rise up baldy! they jeer. In response, Elisha calls down swift and savage retribution upon them: God bringing forth two she-bears from the woods who maul over forty of the youths.

It sounds insane and, of course, like most of the Bible, it is insane - not to mention morally indefensible; a divine act of psychotic overreaction and disproportionate cruelty at the behest of a delusional fraudster who is today venerated as a saint!

When will religious people learn that whilst they have the right to be offended, they don't have the right not to be offended; nor to extract violent and bloody revenge upon those who are deemed to have caused offence - be this in the form of suicide bombings or the unleashing of wild animals.

       

Women Who Hum Are the Hope of the Future

Un Colibri

The troubling thing about living in a fully digital age is that whilst technology has been consummated, men, women and children have all effectively been disqualified; they have lost not only their independence but also their imagination. For who dares to daydream or fantasise when they have movies on demand; who needs to whistle a happy tune when they are connected to an i-Pod which streams non-stop music into their ears? 

Baudrillard refers to this as a form of existential unemployment and fears that the obsolescence of our species is racing towards a terminal phase in which our fate will no longer be in our own hands, but determined exclusively by machines to which we have transferred decision-making in a symbolic act of capitulation:

"In the end, human beings will only have been an infantile illness of an integral technological reality that has become such a given that we are no longer aware of it ... This revolution is not economic or political. It is an anthropological and metaphysical one. And it is the final revolution - there is nothing beyond it. In a way, it is the end of history, although not in the sense of a dialectical surpassing, rather as the beginning of a world without humans."

- Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 80. 

This pessimistic conclusion contrasts starkly with the laughable idealism of those who retain their faith in the future and believe in the unlimited morphological adaptability of our species and its becoming-cyborg. Faced with an obvious inferiority to their own smart phones, transhumanists accept voluntary servitude; rather than disappear altogether, they choose to be biologically engineered and cloned. In other words, ashamed of their own mortal imperfection, the machine-ticklers are prepared to make themselves sexless and loveless; beings who pass through life knowing nothing of joy or sorrow and whose nights are no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy.  

At this point, as Nietzsche would say, I cannot suppress a sigh and one small hope; a hope that there might still be others in this world like the young French woman I met recently who, when sitting quietly and contentedly in the corner of a book-filled room, thinking her own thoughts, almost inaudibly started to hum ...          

On the Agony of Power II: The White Terror of World Order

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

www.artisopensource.net

According to Baudrillard, domination becomes hegemony when the slave internalizes the master. But for this to happen, power must also absorb the negative - and that's problematic. For whilst the negative can certainly be swallowed, it can never be fully digested; rather, it starts to eat away at power from the inside in a cannibalistic manner. Justice is served in the form of auto-liquidation.    

Meanwhile, the external remnants of negativity - those things which have not yet been swallowed by hegemonic power, or have perhaps already been spat out - mutate into forms of evil that include chaotic weather events and suicide bombers.

The victory of the New World Order is, therefore, only ever apparent. It is obliged to fight a continual war on terror; at a military level, but, also, on a symbolic level as it seeks to liquidate all remaining values and to achieve a humiliating and nihilistic final consensus in which all is revealed as equally worthless and there is literally nothing left to disagree on. Baudrillard writes:  

"The terrorist's potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture ... truth is always on the side of unveiling ... exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage."

"This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations', but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the West and Islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic ... a universal carnivalization ... against all the singularities that resist it." 

Obviously Baudrillard is not advocating the most violent and reactionary forms of singular resistance, but invoking rather the most poetic of possibilities. However, there's still something troubling about his critique of Western modernity; one which is clearly related to a Romantic and irrationalist tradition of German philosophy that would include Nietzsche at his most Dionysian and Heidegger at his most politically compromised.
          

Indeed, I feel compelled to say that I infinitely prefer a demoralized and disenchanted world to one of sacrificial violence and fundamentalism and would much rather live in a hyperreal and extraterrestrial zone that has devoured its own logic and values than in those primitive regions of the world still living under strict religious law and the mythological authority of God.

Better the euphoric banality of the last man than the stupidity and savage cruelty of those who have yet to even enter history, let alone pass through it.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'The White Terror of World Order', essay in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 67, 69.

  

On the Agony of Power I: From Domination to Hegemony

Design Office with Kim Gordon - Since 1980

I think Baudrillard was right to carefully draw a distinction between traditional types of domination - characterized by the master/slave relationship - and what he terms hegemony; the latter being the terminal phase of the former in which there are neither masters nor slaves, just cybernetic organisms who have internalized the operational rules of the New World Order and mistake this for their freedom and happiness:

"Caught in a vast Stockholm syndrome, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized are siding with the system that holds them hostage. They are now 'annexed', in the literal sense, prisoners of the nexus, of the network, connected for better or for worse."

Whereas classical forms of domination imposed a system of values, hegemony relies on the liquidation of all values, including the principle of the real; it is a virtual masquerade and a parody of power. As such, it is beyond criticism. But this doesn't mean we should just accept it. We can still offer what Baudrillard calls a double refusal - i.e. a form of resistance based upon the intelligence of evil. This doesn't involve class struggle or a fight for liberation, it is rather a new type of confrontation specific to the era of hegemony:

"In other words, a confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysical and symbolic in the strong sense. It is a confrontation, a divide that exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence."

   

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'From Domination to Hegemony', in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 37, 56. 

  

In Defence of Gwyneth Paltrow

The question is not why so many people find Gwyneth Paltrow irritating, but why so many people hate her with such violent and shameful ferocity.

Reading through some of the vile comments written about her this week following the announcement of her conscious uncoupling from husband Chris Martin, one predictably comes across not only misogyny and anti-Semitism, but what Nietzsche terms ressentiment and by which he refers to a poisonous will to revenge on behalf of the disprivileged and those who continue to advocate and enforce slave morality. 

Ms Paltrow is hated not because of any pretentious aspects to her character or quirky affectations of speech, but because she is a very wealthy, very successful, very talented, and very beautiful individual who, despite the deep sadness caused by her separation, dares to present the world with a healthy, happy face.

I may not wish to subscribe to her goop lifestyle, but better even that than living with scabies of the heart.        

Hello Dolly: On the Life and Work of Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer: Die Puppe (1936)

Despite the recent creations of the Chapman Brothers in this line, it seems to me that the dolls of German artist Hans Bellmer, constructed and photographed during the 1930s, still retain a greater power to disturb; they are somehow less comical and more creepy, more uncanny.

Opposed as he was to Hitler, Bellmer determined to make no work that could be appropriated by the Nazis or which might be interpreted in any way as supportive of fascist aesthetics. Thus his dolls, with their deformed and mutated bodies arranged in provocative poses, were consciously designed to challenge the prevailing idea of what constituted Aryan beauty and physical perfection.

This is not to deny, however, other sources of inspiration for his dolls project, both artistic and personal, including his love of pubescent girls and his pygmalionism. But it was undoubtedly his politics as much as his perversity which eventually brought him to the attention of the Nazis, who classified his work in a category designated degenerate art - i.e., work which insulted German sensibility and attempted to corrupt or confuse the forms of nature. To be fair, that's exactly what Bellmer wanted to do.

Forced to flee to France in 1938, Bellmer was welcomed with open arms by the Surrealists who had already published photographs of his dolls several years earlier. Briefly imprisoned as a German national during the early months of the war, he later aided the French Resistance during the occupation by making fake passports.  

Choosing to remain in France after the war, Bellmer lived in Paris until his death in 1975. Although he made no more dolls, he continued working into the 1960s, creating sexually explicit drawings, photographs, paintings and prints (mostly of young girls). Bellmer said of his own work during this period that it constituted an attempt to produce images that it would be impossible to think or describe in words.  

His place in 20th century art history is secured and his cultural influence has not been insignificant.

One final note: in 2006, the Whitechapel Gallery removed twelve of Bellmer's works from a retrospective exhibition. Ostensibly on the grounds of spacial consideration, the rumour persists that the action was due to the organizers concern that the pieces might be particularly offensive to the local Muslim population. Again, to be fair, Bellmer's work doubtless would upset Islamofascists for much the same reasons and in much the same manner as it did the Nazis, but one sincerely hopes there is no truth in this story ...