On the Portrait of Ms Ruby May, Standing

Portrait of Ms Ruby May, Standing 
Oil on canvas (2012) 
Leena McCall

I.

There is something of a tradition within the world of fine art for portraits of women standing.

Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, for example, completed his contribution to this genre sometime around 1610. Indeed, such a lover was he of upright women that he produced another portrait of a woman standing just a few years later (c.1618-20).   

Neither of these unidentified women, however, arouses my interest as much as the fabulous Ms Ruby May, pictured above, standing, hand-on-hip and pipe in mouth, by UK based visual artist Leena McCall.

The painting is obviously intended to be sexually provocative. There's that defiant look in the eye of the subject, returning and challenging the male gaze, for a start; clearly this is a woman who knows how to construct and express a playfully ambiguous model of sexual identity on her own terms.

And then there's the fact that her breeches are unbuttoned, exposing her lower body or loins such that her pubic hair is clearly visible ...


II.

I recently published a post reflecting on the issue of female pubic hair, referring to its representation within the world of art.* A woman kindly wrote to me afterwards to say that whilst she enjoyed the piece, she couldn't help thinking it was essentially a non-concern within what she insisted was a sexually liberated  - or, at any rate, sexually indifferent - age:

"Some women wax, some women shave and shape their bushes, and some just leave things to grow naturally; the point is no one really cares and it's not a big issue, even if it remains subject to changing fashion. Thankfully, the days when people freaked out at the sight of a pubic hair have long gone."

I wonder, then, how she explains the fact that McCall's painting was swiftly removed by the Mall Galleries from the Society of Women Artists' 153rd annual exhibition in 2014, following a number of complaints and the concern that perhaps children or vulnerable adults might view it ...?

According to McCall, the picture was branded as pornographic and disgusting precisely because it showed Ms May as an amorous subject proudly displaying her pubic hair as a sign of mature womanhood. Afforded the opportunity to provide a replacement work, McCall admirably refused on the grounds that to do so would be to concede there was something inherently offensive or obscene about the portrait (and/or the body) of her friend Ruby May.  

So, to my correspondent I say thank you very much for writing, but I beg to differ with your analysis of the times in which we live.

For if there's been a pornification of culture on the one hand, so too is this the age of safe spaces, trigger warnings, political correctness, censorship, and the new puritanism in which the greatest crime is to cause offence (either wilfully or inadvertently) to the easily offended, be they snowflake liberals, religious maniacs, or - apparently - London gallery owners worried about their trustees and sponsors, etc. ...


* See: Where the Turtle Doves Sing ... the post mentioned above that reflects on pubic hair.

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 2: Ethico-Political Considerations

Hiromi and Lisa by Photographer Hal

# 24 from the series Zatsuran (2013)

I illustrated in part one of this post how D. H. Lawrence's little read (and undervalued) 1922 novel Aaron's Rod anticipates the work of philosopher Graham Harman on the vacuum-sealed nature of objects. Here, I'd like to critically examine the latter's controversial and challenging notion in more detail ...

In a nutshell, Harman wants us to acknowledge something very obvious but not so easy to explain; namely, the fact that discernible, individual objects exist and that being isn't some shapeless, unified totality. Further, whilst these objects have relations with other objects, they aren't defined, determined, or exhausted by such. They always keep something of themselves withdrawn and in reserve; something hidden and untouchable, as Harman says, in the basement of being.

Ultimately, then, what gives to things their absolute distinctness is the fact that they are vacuum-sealed in perfect isolation and only ever have indirect (metaphorical) contact with one another; i.e., they only ever relate by translating one another (and in so doing generate difference).

This - if true - has interesting if not, indeed, crucially important ethical and political consequences; not least of all for any Lawrentians still hoping to establish a democracy of touch based on the interpenetration of bodies, the glad recognition of souls, and the re-establishment of the vital relations between objects which, according to Lawrence, were destroyed by the grand idealists.

Having said that, there is a positive aspect to Harman's thesis of withdrawal and isolation; namely, it allows objects to retain their volcanic integrity and thus to resist all attempts by external forces to control, coordinate, and exploit them. In other words, at some level, despite increasingly extended networks of power and surveillance, objects are essentially autonomous and ontological Gleichschaltung is an impossibility.

As Levi Bryant notes, nothing, for Harman, "is ever so defined, reduced, or dominated that it can't break free and be otherwise ... People, animals, minerals, technologies, and microbes are always threatening to erupt ..." In other words, all objects carry the potential for surprise, which is, of course, a revolutionary potential.

It's also a reason why we should treat them with caution and respect and attempt to see things from their perspective (Ian Bogost refers to this as alien phenomenology). This is more than simply a  question of exercising our human curiosity; it's about acknowledging that the world exists - and doesn't simply exist for us. Again, to quote Bryant here: "We live in a universe teaming with actants where we are actants among actants, not sovereigns organizing all the rest as the old Biblical narrative from Genesis would have it."

In conclusion: some commentators, I know, have little time for Harman and his object-oriented ontology; they aren't seduced by the speculative nature of his realism, nor charmed by the weirdness of his arguments. But, like Bryant, I still think that, at it's best, his work is original and engaging and does what all good philosophical writing should - i.e., encourage us to think outside the gate, even at the risk of losing our way or, perhaps, ending up on yet another foolish quest for that mysterious thing called the soul ...

See:

Levi Bryant, 'Harman, Withdrawal, and Vacuum Packed Objects: My Gratitude', posted on Larval Subjects (May 30, 2012): click here. 

Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

To read part one of this post - Egoism a Deux - click here. 

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 1: Egoism a Deux

Rem and Marina by Photographer Hal 

# 07 from the series Flesh Love

Japanese photographer Haruhiko Kawaguchi (aka Photographer Hal) has been vacuum-packing lubed-up couples since 2009. The idea, he says, is to bring two people as physically close as possible and then hermetically seal them in their own world; united in love, united in life, united in death. 

I know exactly how D. H. Lawrence would describe this - egoism a deux; two people self-consciously contained in their own idealism and obscene personal intimacy to the point they can no longer move freely or even breathe.*

For like Rawdon Lilly, his fictional mouthpiece in Aaron's Rod (1922), Lawrence hates couples who pose as one and stick together like two jujube lozenges. Ultimately, they must recognise the intrinsically singular nature of being and be able to stand apart; to know that, at the core, one is alone and the heart beats alone in its own silence:

"'In so far as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I ... I am inevitably and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self- knowledge.'" 

And so, whilst there's a time to love and to seek out others, so too is there a time to leave off loving altogether and recognise that two of the greatest things in life are fresh air and solitude. 

Now, as far as I remember, at this point in the novel someone tells Lilly that he's getting too metaphysical for anyone to understand. And, it's true, he is venturing onto philosophical ground - indeed, one might even argue that he's anticipating Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, which I shall discuss in more detail in part two of this post.

For one of the key - and most challenging - ideas of the latter is that all objects, including human beings, are essentially self-sealed or vacuum-packed, never to be known, never to be violated. That is to say, objects always keep some aspect of their being withdrawn in darkness and can never be fully defined or exhausted by their relations; they can never be touched, as Lawrence would say, on the quick.

I'm not sure that Harman would term this hidden element of the thing in itself, as Lilly does, the Holy Ghost or Godhead, but he's certainly not adverse to spooky language and I suspect he'd agree that it's the innermost, integral and unique element. Or, to put it another way, the object's singular destiny; that volcanic core of the self that can never be lost or surrendered - not even in the name of Love ...


See: D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lawrence uses the phrase egoism a deux in ch. 9.  The lines quoted from Rawdon Lilly are taken from ch. 18. and the words italicised in the last paragraph are taken from the final chapter, 21.

*Note: Social psychologist and theorist Erich Fromm famously discusses the concept of egoism a deux in The Art of Loving (1956). According to Fromm, it's a mistaken attempt to find refuge on the part of alienated individuals from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness, masquerading as true love - something which, according to Fromm, requires learning to care for all mankind. Obviously, this is anathema to Lawrence, who loathes the universal love ideal even more than he does a vain attempt at complete intimacy formed between two individuals.   

To read part two of this post on the ethics and politics of object-oriented ontology, click here.

Where the Turtle Doves Sing (Reflections on Pubic Hair with Reference to the Cases of D. H. Lawrence and Eric Gill)

Gustave Courbet: L'Origine du monde (1866)

Oil on canvas (55 × 46 cm)

Controversial D. H. Lawrence aficionado, David Brock, reminds us in his latest column for the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser that the young Lawrence was shocked and horrified to discover that women, like men, possess pubic hair on and around the genital area, as a secondary sexual characteristic.

When, after sketching a female nude that he believed to be full of life and the carefree promise of youth, Lawrence was told by a friend that he needed to add hair under the arms and to the lower body if he wished it to look like an actual woman, rather than an idealised figure, the future priest of love physically assaulted his friend whilst shouting 'You dirty devil! It's not true, I tell you!'   

This lack of knowledge regarding female anatomy was fairly widespread, of course, amongst young men in Lawrence's day, even though they were growing up long after Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray was annulled for non-consummation - so repulsed was he by the sight of her pubic hair on their wedding night - and after Gustave Courbet painted his voyeuristic masterpiece, revealing the hirsute origin of the world.

Indeed, even Eric Gill was surprised to find out - having seen photographic evidence - that women had hairy cunts. But whereas this realisation shocked Lawrence and tragically disconcerted poor Ruskin, it was, for Gill, a source of erotic excitement and soon established itself as one of his fetishistic delights; filling all the nooks and crannies of his pornographic imagination, both day and night, for the rest of his life.

As his biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, notes:

"Gill's fascination with the hair of the female, hair of the head as well as the belly, its waviness and density, its soft but springy texture, its symbolic use in both attracting and concealing, recurs all through his work, from his very early sculptures to the last of his nude drawings in the year in which he died."      

Of course, as David Brock also points out, Lawrence eventually overcomes his horror of pubic hair becoming something of a champion of the au naturel look and an exponent of such in his painting. And, in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), there's a famous scene in which Connie and Mellors examine and play with one another's pubes; he threading a few forget-me-not flowers in her soft-brown maidenhair.      

In sum, whilst I don't think Lawrence's pubephilia was ever as strong as Gill's, he was nevertheless partial to a bit of bush in his maturity, for sexual, aesthetic, and philosophical reasons and - somewhat ironically - one suspects he would react with reverse shock and horror at the thought of Brazilian waxing.


See: 

David Brock, 'Book revealed author's 'late development'', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (25 Aug 2017), p. 22. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 15.

Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 46-7. 

Blood, Sex, and the Inviolable Nature of Objects

Still from the video for the song Animals by Maroon 5 

Featuring Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo 

Dir. Samuel Bayer, (2014)

The amorous subject of John Donne's metaphysically conceited poem The Flea, cleverly attempts to persuade his beloved into consenting to a premarital sexual relationship by drawing her attention to a parasitic insect that has suck'd and sampled them both. His argument is that since their separate bloodstreams are united within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife and so may as well fuck without any further hesitation, embarrassment, or feeling of shame.  

It's a witty and imaginative argument, that rests on the religious idea that sex is a form of blood covenant or physical union consummated between two people. But, like most religious arguments, it's a fallacy; one that even D. H. Lawrence, for whom coition is a vital experience providing a crucial clue to existence, has to concede at last ...  

In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence describes how the blood of a man "acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity ... rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge" towards the polarized blood of a woman. Thus, the desire on the part of both parties to engage in genital intercourse. And, in the act of coition, says Lawrence, "the two seas of blood ... rocking and surging towards contact ... clash into a oneness", resulting in a great flash of interchange, before the two individuals fall separate once more, reinvigorated and tingling with newness in their blood and being.

Writing in A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (1930), however, Lawrence subtly qualifies his position; now, rather than talking about two seas of blood surging towards contact and clashing together into a oneness, he writes about marriage as a correspondence of blood and insists "the blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled ..." [my emphasis].

Thus, whilst the phallus may indeed be a column of blood that enters the valley of blood of woman, no matter how deeply the former penetrates the latter, neither breaks its bounds. In other words, there's a degree of communion, but there's no actual merging - and, if there were, it would be deadly to both parties; a horrible nullification of identity and singular being.

Ultimately, it's not only a fallacy but also a fatal form of idealism to posit the idea of two-becoming-one (even within the body of a flea). Whether we accept it or not, man, like all other objects, is limited, isolate and alone and all the penetrative sex in the world - be it oral, anal, or vaginal in character - doesn't change this. We are, if you like, unfuckable at last; that is to say, we never encounter or touch one another in our deepest being, which is forever withdrawn and vacuum-sealed.

See:

John Donne, The Flea, click here to read online at the Poetry Foundation and click here to read my analysis of this verse on Torpedo the Ark.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961).

Note: I am indebted to Graham Harman for the idea of vacuum-sealed objects existing in subterranean cellars of being beyond all relations - an idea that presents a serious challenge to the Lawrentian notion of touch as advanced in Lady Chatterley's Lover and elsewhere. 

See: Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

Notes on Shakespeare's Dark Lady

Jasmin Savoy-Brown cast as Emilia Bassano, 

believed by some to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady 
Photo: John Willy (2016)

I have written elsewhere on this blog about Baudelaire and his bi-racial mistress and muse, Jeanne Duval, whom he fondly (if rather predictably) termed his Vénus noire [click here]. The 19th century French poet and critic was not, however, the first European male to have a taste for brown sugar. Nor should the fetishization of non-white womanhood be seen as a trope that originated within the Decadent movement.

There are many instances of such to be found within Elizabethan and Baroque literature, including, for example, Edward Herbert's poem La Gialletta Gallante, or the Sun-burn'd Exotic Beauty and Giambattista Marino's Bella schiava ('Beautiful Slave-Girl').

And, of course, mention must also be made of Shakespeare's notorious Dark Lady, the subject of the openly erotic sonnets 127-52 and of ongoing speculation concerning her identity and whether her darkness should be understood literally or metaphorically (i.e., does it refer to her colouring and complexion, or to her character and the fact she's wrapped in mystery). Either way, we can assume she wasn't a typical English rose, or born on a Monday.

The majority of scholars believe she was more likely to have been from a Mediterranean background, rather than of black African descent. But the truth is we don't know; there is simply not enough evidence, either textual or biographical in nature. Amongst possible candidates for the role of the Dark Lady, three stand out:

(i) Emilia Lanier (née Bassano)  

In 1973, Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse claimed to have solved the mystery surrounding the identity of the Dark Lady, confidently asserting that it was Emilia Lanier - an attractive, independent-minded woman of Italian (and possibly Jewish) background who came from a famous musical family (the Bassanos).

Not only was she the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, but she was also the first woman to publish a full collection of original poetry under her own name in English - Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). As talented as she was, she probably didn't look like the lovely American actress Jasmin Savoy-Brown who plays her on TV in the TNT series Will (2017) ...

(ii) Aline Florio

Meanwhile, Dr. Aubrey Burl, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, piecing together whatever clues there are about the Dark Lady's identity in his own inimitable manner, insists that she is Aline Florio, wife of Italian translator, John Florio. She certainly had dark hair. And, like Shakespeare's heroine, was said to be self-centred  and sex-obsessed. And ... er, that's about it! (Though it might be noted that distinguished Shakespearean, Jonathan Bate, also came to the same conclusion as Burl - indeed, he arrived at it fifteen years earlier ...)

(iii) Black Luce (or Lucy Negro)

In August 2012, the Independent reported that it was possible that the Dark Lady was in fact a notorious London prostitute and madam called Black Luce or Lucy Negro. According to Dr. Duncan Salkeld - author of Shakespeare Among the Courtesans (2012) - not only did the Bard have associates and, perhaps, family in the Clerkenwell area where Lucy ran her brothel, but she was mentioned in the diary of Philip Henslowe, the theatre owner who built the Rose and one of Shakespeare's great contemporaries.

It seems highly likely, therefore, that she would have been known to Will and given her sexual reputation and charms - she was described by those who knew her as an arrant whore and bawde catering to men of all types - it's not unreasonable to assume she would have been the object of his interest and desire ... But, again, who knows?

Who knows - and, indeed, who really cares?

For it seems to me needless and naive to read a work of art in this manner; to reduce literature to a form of biographical confession; i.e., to regard Shakespeare's sonnets as an account of real events and real people. As Howard Jacobson rightly says, enough's enough already:

"Let the Dark Lady be whoever the Dark Lady was. It is not our affair personally, given that Shakespeare chose it not to be, and it is not our affair aesthetically ..."

He continues:

"Of the misconceptions that continue to bedevil literature, this is among the most obdurate: that it is a record, straightforward or otherwise, of something that actually happened. Even the most sophisticated readers will forget all they know of the difference between literature and life when biography perchance shows its slip."

Shakespeare, as an artist, creatively transforms the latter, life, into literature; poetry is a magical reality that exists in the unique space opened up by experience and imagination. When we forget this and read the sonnets merely as a form of lyrical reportage, says Jacobson, "we diminish thought, we diminish imagination, and we diminish art".


See:

Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans, (Routledge, 2012).

Werner Sollors (ed.), An Anthology of Interracial Literature, (NYU Press, 2004).

Note: the Howard Jacobson article in the Independent (11 Jan 2013) that I quote from, can be read by clicking here.  

On the Joy of Metaphysical Conceit (With Reference to John Donne's 'The Flea')

John Donne (1572-1631): The Flea 

(First published posthumously in 1633) 

Whilst it's true that I don't like conceited individuals, I do like writers who make use of conceits; i.e. literary devices that form extremely ingenious or fanciful parallels between apparently dissimilar objects. And I'm particularly fond of what are known as metaphysical conceits, associated - not surprisingly - with a loosely associated group of 17th century English poets known as the metaphysical poets, a term coined rather sneeringly by the critic Samuel Johnson.

These conceits, according to Johnson, violently yoke together in a clever but displeasing manner the most heterogeneous ideas and establish provocative analogies between spiritual qualities on the one hand and base matter on the other; such as, for example, the virgin purity of an unmarried woman and the vile body of an insect.

It's for this reason that John Donne's famous poem, The Flea, continues to delight. It's a comic and erotic verse that uses the conceit of a flea which has sucked blood both from the male speaker and the young woman he is hoping to seduce, as an extended metaphor for the amorous relationship between them.

The speaker attempts to persuade the woman to surrender her sex to him, not with sweet talk, or romantic flattery. Nor does he make an emotional appeal to her feelings. Rather, he uses his wit and his logic to appeal to her reason, arguing that if their blood mingles together within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife, so may as well fuck together without further delay.

Thus, as Dryden rightly says of Donne - and again, one can sense the disapproval in this remark:

"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."

However, despite the criticisms of Dryden and Johnson, there have been those, following T. S. Eliot, prepared to champion metaphysical poetry for its witty, cerebral style. Camille Paglia, for example, ranks The Flea as amongst the world's best - and queerest - love poems; a perfect illustration of Donne's effrontery and ostentatious use of conceits, in which, amongst other things, he satirizes the absurd arguments men will advance in the hope of getting laid.

As Paglia also points out, the three stanzas that compose The Flea are like scenes from a play; full of what she terms dramatic immediacy. This is in part due to the fact that there's no superfluous or old-fashioned lyricism; the reader feels as if they are listening to a genuine conversation between actual lovers, rather than the speech of those still earnestly clinging to the tired conventions of Petrarch.

Ultimately, perhaps what's most engaging about The Flea is the fact that the young woman is "serenely impervious to the poet's dazzling flights of rhetoric." So much so that, despite his desperate plea for clemency, she squashes the blood-swollen bug beneath her nail without a qualm. He may imagine that they are united as one within the body of the flea, but she's not buying into this holy trinity line of bullshit for a second.      

However, in protesting that the death of a flea is inconsequential and that her act of cruelty is not one that in any way morally dishonours or physically weakens her, she allows the man an opportunity to make his final, beautifully nihilistic point: nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Thus the sacrifice of her virginity means nothing more, nothing less, than the murder of an insect and her determination to maintain her maidenhead until her wedding night, based on groundless fear and superstition, is absurd.

(Whether this finally convinced her to take him into her bed, we sadly cannot know ...)  

See:

Helen Gardner (ed.), Metaphysical Poets, (Revised Edition: Penguin Books, 1966). The quote from Dryden is taken from this text. 

Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: The Divine Poems, (Second Edition: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Camille Paglia, 'John Donne, The Flea', Break, Blow, Burn  (Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 20-25.

Three Brief Extracts from a Study of Eric Gill

Photo of Eric Gill by Howard Coster (1927)

National Portrait Gallery

I: Two Men With Red Beards

Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).

This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.

To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.


II: It All Goes Together

A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.

Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.

As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.


III: Always Ready and Willing

Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*

Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.

The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:

He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.        


* Afterword on Gill's Diaries

Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.

MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.       

See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.  

Readers who are interested, might also like to see D. H. Lawrence's 'Review of Eric Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays' in Introductions and Reviews, ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is believed to be the last work written by Lawrence before his death on March 2nd, 1930. Frieda sent the MS to Gill in 1933.  

On Operational Whitewash

Mark Tansey 

Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981)

Oil on canvas with crayon

(182.9 x 183.4 cm)

Like many of his pictures, Mark Tansey's Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981), is a lot more interesting than it first appears and certainly shouldn't be mistaken for a work of banal realism or straightforward representation, even if it utilizes certain conventions and structures of figurative painting. To fully appreciate its philosophical importance requires an awareness of how art is essentially a symbolic medium; i.e., a space in which different meanings interact.

The first thing one notices upon closer inspection of the canvas is that the human figure is not simply a madman scrubbing any old objects lying about randomly in the desert. They are, rather, the ruins of the Sphinx and Stonehenge; the remains of formerly great civilizations and long-dead peoples, the spirits of whom still haunt the present.    

Robbe-Grillet isn't attempting to remove the dust and the dirt from these fragments of the past in the naive and vain hope of one day reassembling them, driven by ideals of Unity and Wholeness. He is, rather, trying to cleanse them of significance, of their markings and metaphors, to remove every trace of meaning from them.

It's the ultimate act of iconoclasm and forms part of what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the operational whitewashing of human history. Everything is cleansed of evil until nothing remains that might possibly upset or offend or trouble anyone of a liberal-snowflake disposition; it's political correctness gone retroviral - guaranteeing a more inclusive tomorrow by destroying the past and all memory of the past and its divisions.

Baudrillard also described this form of self-inflicted social leukemia as the perfect crime; the murder not only of the real, but also of the imaginary until all that remains is a kind of aseptic whiteness (free of all shadow and every dark glimmer of fate and negativity).

I thought of all this - of Baudrillard's operational whitewash and of Mark Tansey's 1981 painting - when reading about those activists, anti-fascists, and assorted social justice warriors in America intent on smashing statues, tearing down monuments, burning books, and censoring images that don't correspond with how they want the world to be and to have been.

Not that this is limited to the US: the writer, broadcaster and Oxford graduate, Afua Hirsch, has recently called for Nelson's column to be pulled down on the grounds that Nelson was "what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist", who used his power and influence to vigorously defend slavery and thus "perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation" of black people.  

Ms Hirsch continues:

"It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials - more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas - have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past."

Just to be clear: (i) I'm not entirely unsympathetic to those who advance this line of argument; (ii) I really don't give a shit about those historical figures who are immortalised as the great and the good; (iii) I think a lot of the vile abuse directed at Ms Hirsch for simply expressing her view is absolutely shameful.

However, the concern remains - as Heine recognised almost 200 years ago - that where cultural and historical artefacts are destroyed one day, human beings will be murdered the next ... For if you really want to wipe out all trace of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, then it follows with a certain genocidal logic that you have to get rid of the descendants of the slave owners too; every white face becomes a provocation.

Indeed, even that might not do the trick. Because the descendants of the peoples who were enslaved also carry this history within them; they are, if you like, in their rage and resentment and inability to forget, living monuments to a terrible past. Thus they would ultimately have to abolish themselves.

And this is why peace on earth isn't accomplished until the last man kills the last but one and then tops himself, leaving behind a smiling corpse ...  


Notes 

Jean Baudrillard, 'Operational Whitewash', The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 44-50. 

Afua Hirsch, 'Toppling statues? Here's why Nelson's column should be next', The Guardian (22 Aug 2017): click here. 

This post is for Thomas Bonneville.

Nice to See You, to See You - Dead!

Bruce Forsyth Death Mask  

Treating life as a good game, good game and always putting his best chin forward (a gesture some found comic, but which struck me as an act of narcissistic self-assertion), enabled Bruce Forsyth to have a career of great longevity in a business which, purportedly, is unlike any other. 

For over seventy years he was on our TV screens - longer than any other male entertainer - proving that, if nothing else, the Mighty Atom was a monster of stamina, popular with producers and the public alike. 

However, I have to confess to a wicked feeling of glee when I heard the news that he had died. Because Brucie belonged to that golf club of performers whom my parents loved when I was growing up, but I despised. As a child, the words light entertainment, royal variety, and London Palladium were anathema and he was associated with all these things.            

But now he's dead. Gone to that great green room in the sky, where angels and demons bid for his eternal soul and the right to decide wherein it shall reside: Higher, higher! Lower, lower!    

It seems that one of the few genuine pleasures of getting older is that one starts to outlive those who blighted the airwaves during one's childhood; the sinful pleasure of morose delectation and spitting on graves ...