Time/Flies

dobrador.com 

Like most normal people, I hate flies; particularly that universal pest Musca domestica and its slightly larger relative, the bluebottle (Calliphora vomitoria). Only lunatics and Satanists find these carrion-loving, shit-eating, disease-spreading creatures genuinely attractive.

Having said that, my pteronarcophobia doesn't prevent me from conceding that flies are fantastic little machines of great scientific interest and ecological importance. And the fact that they have been buzzing about in huge numbers in almost every terrestrial habitat since the Middle Triassic period (i.e. for about 240 million years) is certainly something; for that's not only way prior to man, but long, long before there were even flowers.

Arguably, it's even more impressive when one realises that what is an almost inconceivable amount of time for man, is even longer for a fly. For research suggests that perception of time is not something universally shared across species and that for flies time passes far slower than it does for humans.

As an evolutionary rule, it seems that the smaller an animal is and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower time passes for it - and flies are very small with a very high metabolic rate. Because their large compound eyes can perceive light flickering up to four times faster than ours, they essentially see the world moving in slow motion.

Which is why, of course, the little fuckers so often manage to evade being swatted; being able to perceive time differently to a lumbering ape with a rolled up newspaper, is, in this case, literally the difference between life and death.

Of course, as one of the researchers into this area points out, having eyes that send updates to the brain at much higher frequencies is only of value if that brain can process the information just as quickly and lead to good decision making. Hence, we have to admit that even the tiny brains of flies have mighty capabilities and that - for now at least - insect intelligence remains far more astonishing than even the most advanced AI.

They may not be deep thinkers, but they're not so mindless after all ...                  

Note: those interested in knowing more about the current research into the eyes of flies and their perception of time, should visit the BBC science and environment web page and read the recent article by Rory Galloway: click here. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post and providing the link.

Reflections on The Bat 2: Germaine Richier and Her Art of Becoming-Animal

Germaine Richier: La Chauve-souris (1946) 

Dimensions: 89 x 91 x 59.5 cm

Theodore Roethke's uncanny verse, The Bat, brings to mind many things; D. H. Lawrence's own poetic encounters with bats; Dick Kulpa and Bob Lind's journalistic fiction, the Bat Boy; and, of course, Germaine Richier's terrifying sculpture from 1946, also entitled (in English) The Bat.

Having written about Lawrence's chiropteran poetry and the Bat Boy elsewhere on this blog, it's Richier and her work I wish to discuss here ...     

Germaine Richier was a highly individual 20th century French sculptress. Whilst she had a rather classical approach - preferring, for example, to work from a live model before then reworking the finished piece - her work was often anomalous in theme; she loved to model spiders and insects, as well as monstrous human-animal hybrids. After the War, her style became less conventionally figurative; the bodily deformations that often characterized her work became ever-more accentuated and extreme in an attempt to convey her ever-greater sense of existential angst.

Her Christ figure, for example, although originally commissioned by the Church and designed for the Chapel of Assy, caused outrage and was eventually removed by order of a bishop, who objected not only to the fact that the body of Christ was indistinguishable from the Cross on which it hung (the wood and flesh having fused into one object), but that the figure was also faceless (readers of Deleuze and Guattari will understand why this is so profoundly problematic).

Interesting as this work and the controversy surrounding it are, it's her experimental 1946 piece, La Chauve-souris, that fascinates me most, however, created shortly after returning to Paris from Zurich, where she and her husband had spent the war years. In making The Bat, Richier employed a new technique of dipping rope fibre in plaster, before then draping it over a metal frame.  

As indicated, Richier had a real penchant for portraying (usually female) figures with insect or arachnoid characteristics. But this work was the first time she'd attempted to produce a mouse with wings wearing a human face. Just looking at the small, recognisably human head atop the elongated neck of this creature gives me the willies, in the same way that Roethke's poem creeps me out.

For like her American contemporary, Richier seems to have a great love for things belonging to the natural world, but it's a love that goes way beyond nostalgia for her childhood in rural southern France that some critics insist upon. Richier, like Roethke, appears to have discovered an unsettling, Lovecraftian truth about the latter - what we might term the perverse immorality of nature; the fact that nature is paradoxically invested with elements that are unnatural and preternatural (just as we also contain within our humanity aspects that are nonhuman, inhuman and, perhaps, overhuman).    

What excites Richier as an artist, I think, is not the fact that things naturally evolve, but that they are also subject to a process of becoming, with this latter understood not as the slow unfolding of an essence towards fixed identity, but the affirmation of difference conceived as a multiple process of transformation and an opening up of the self to outside forces (be they animal, alien, or daemonic in character).

And this, of course, is what excites me about her ...


Notes

The version of The Bat shown above was cast in bronze in 1996; the fifth in a posthumous edition of six created under the direction of Francoise Guiter (the artist’s niece) by L. Thinot, Paris, the foundry responsible for casting Richier’s sculptures during her lifetime. It is on long term loan to the Tate (Ref. Number: L02176). 

To read part one of this post on Theodore Roethke and the unheimlich, click here. 

To read the post that anticipates or prefigures this one on Roethke and the Bat Boy, click here. 

To read the post on D. H. Lawrence's becoming-bat, click here. 

To read Roethke's poem The Bat, click here. 

Thanks to Diana Thomson for suggesting this post by pointing me in the direction of Germaine Richier.

Reflections on The Bat 1: Theodore Roethke and the Unheimlich

Germaine Richier: Bat (1948-51)

Etching and aquatint on paper (385 x 536 mm)

Several days after first reading and I'm still haunted by Roethke's magnificent poem The Bat ...

It's not the bat by day who disturbs me; the bat who is cousin to the mouse and likes to hang out (literally) in the attic of an aging house and whose fingers make a hat about his head. I'm perfectly fine with the thought of such a creature, whose heart beats so slowly we think him dead.

Indeed, I don't even fear the bat who loops in crazy figures half the night. Just so long as he keeps his distance and, more importantly, keeps his own countenance. It's only when he comes too close and reveals that something is amiss or out of place that I'm disturbed; when, as Roethke writes, it becomes apparent that even mice with wings can wear a human face.

In my mind, such an image is uncanny to the nth degree. So much so, that one is tempted to use the more ambiguous (and thus more troubling) German term, unheimlich, which Roethke, as the son of a German immigrant, might appreciate. For unheimlich means more than outside of one's normal experience and familiar frame of reference (or beyond one's ken, as our friends north of the border might say).

Roethke's human-faced bat is not just a bit creepy or queer: it is that which should have remained forever in the shadows and never been spoken of, but which has - thanks to him - come to light and to language; it is thus the un-secret (and here we recall that heimlich doesn't just mean homely, but also that which is hidden or concealed).

In a proto-Freudian sense that looks back to Schelling, the unheimlich is, we might say - and I'm going to have to consult with my friend Simon Solomon on this - the obscene intrusion of the occult into the known world in such a manner that it curdles the milk and violates the natural order of things.


Notes

To read The Bat, by Theodore Roethke, please visit the Poetry and Literature page of the US Library of Congress: click here.

To read part two of this post on French sculptress Germaine Richier and her 1946 piece La Chauve-souris, click here.

To read the post that anticipates or prefigures this one on Roethke and the Bat Boy, click here.

Germaine Richier's brilliant artwork seen here can be viewed by appointment at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms (Ref. number P11286) .

Of Contrails and Chemtrails (with Reference to the Case of Kylie Jenner)

Kylie Jenner reflecting upon chemtrails 

I have to admit that I make very little effort to keep up with the Kardashians and their extended family network. But it's been brought to my attention that one of their number, Kylie Jenner, recently tweeted her concern about the issue of so-called chemtrails ...

"It's heartening to discover", said my correspondent, "that when not revealing her charms, this talented young model, actress, entrepreneur and media personality, is courageously attempting to expose the truth about those mysterious white lines across the sky that the authorities pretend are perfectly harmless ..."

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

Because those mysterious white lines are in fact nothing more than water vapour in the form of ice crystals and, as such, are of course entirely innocuous. In other words, chemical trails don't really exist; they are simply condensation trails (known as contrails) produced by aircraft engines burning hydrocarbons at cruise altitude, as re-imagined within the paranoid world of conspiracy theory. 

Depending on the ambient temperature and humidity, contrails may be visible for only a brief few moments, or they may persist for hours and spread to be several miles wide, coming to resemble natural cloud formations. Either way, they do not contain unknown bio-chemical agents deliberately sprayed for sinister purposes by secret government agencies.

Such claims - originating in the late 1990s - are often based on mad fantasy and shocking scientific ignorance. However, despite repeatedly being shown to be absurd, they still persist and attract followers; including, it seems, glamorous celebrities such as Miss Jenner. It's an unfortunate fact that when experts and officials deny the existence of chemtrails, believers interpret this as further evidence of a cover-up.

Lunatics, it seems, have always been prone to lifting up their eyes and looking to the heavens for signs; if not of God's greatness, then of man's inherent wickedness ...

Notes

Anyone interested in the latest research into this by a large number of atmospheric scientists might like to see an article by Christine Shearer, Mick West, Ken Caldeira and Steven J. Davis entitled 'Quantifying expert consensus against the existence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program', in Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, Number 8 (10 Aug 2016), IOP Publishing Ltd. Click here to read online, or here to view as a PDF.

And if anyone is interested in Kylie Jenner's tweet from 25 May 2015 on chemtrails, here it is:

Roethke and the Bat Boy (A Post on American Poetry and Popular Culture)

And when he appears upon a TV screen,

We're afraid of what our eyes have seen.

The highly-regarded American poet, Theodore Roethke, grew up surrounded by natural beauty subject to German discipline in a giant greenhouse. The perfect conditions in which a sensitive young boy's Romanticism might flourish ...

However, as Camille Paglia points out, there was always something queer about Roethke's lyricism; his "portraits of nature are often eerie or unsettling", particularly when he attempted to connect the world of the greenhouse to his own (often profoundly disturbed) inner experience.

Perhaps this explains why the last lines of his poem 'The Bat' have been haunting me for days: 

For something is amiss or out of place

When mice with wings can wear a human face.

Either that, or they caused me to reflect once more upon the terrifying case of the Bat Boy, discovered living in Hellhole Cave, West Virginia, by Dr Ron Dillon, as reported in the pages of the Weekly World News back in the summer of 1992, and now established as an iconic figure within the popular imagination ...

See: 

Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn (Vintage Books, 2006), p. 146. 

Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems, (Faber and Faber, 1968).

To read 'The Bat', please visit the Poetry and Literature page of the US Library of Congress: click here.  

The Strange Case of Ray Comfort: Banana Man

Ray Comfort Wallpaper by Dobbed

deviantart.com 

The amusing story of Ray Comfort, aka Banana Man, isn't new, but it's always worth retelling ... 

Comfort is a Christian and a creationist, famous for putting forward the so-called banana argument which claims that this particular fruit provides irrefutable proof of intelligent design and God's benevolence. For not only does the banana have great nutritional value, but it's easy to hold in the human hand, comes ready-wrapped in a convenient to peel skin, and is colour-coded in a manner that accurately reveals its degree of ripeness.

Indeed, so perfect is the banana in form and function, that Comfort describes it as the atheist's nightmare. How, he asks, could a natural object so perfect just evolve - there just has to be an intelligence behind this fruity miracle ... Which, ironically, there is; though it's human in origin and not divine. The same scientific intelligence, in fact, that lies behind much of the cultivated produce we enjoy. 

For regardless of what environmentalists, organic farmers, and alarmists in the media like to believe about the inherent dangers and evil of Frankenstein food, the truth is man has been selectively breeding and genetically modifying what he eats for millennia. Comfort entirely ignores this fact and says nothing of the banana's agricultural history (the fact it was first domesticated around 9,000 years ago in SE Asia is of course doubly embarrassing for a Christian and a young Earth creationist).        

Ultimately, the modern banana is neither natural nor supernatural; it's a pure piece of artifice, far removed from its wild and almost inedible predecessors; an asexual clone, vulnerable to a range of diseases due to its lack of genetic diversity, that is entirely dependent upon human cultivation for its survival.

Whether Comfort likes to admit it or not, this tropical, sugar-rich fruit - much loved by monkeys as well as man - was something unbeknown to the authors of Genesis and never once tasted by Jesus or his disciples.    

Reflections on Hassan Hajjaj and His 'Kesh Angels

Hassan Hajjaj: Rider (2010)  

'Kesh Angels exhibition (2014) 

Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York

Moroccan-born, London-based artist and photographer Hassan Hajjaj has a new exhibition opening at Somerset House next month, as part of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. And this, I think, is a good thing ...

Because Hajjaj produces work that is not only visually exciting to look at, but philosophically interesting to discuss, reflecting as it does his deterritorialized existence spent not simply hip-hopping between two very different countries and cultures, but oscillating, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, between two poles of delirium, struggling to be free and to reinvent each and every gesture, invoking in the process a people to come whose identity is aesthetically styled from diverse elements in a Pop-Punk fashion and who pride themselves on belonging to a race that is impure and illegitimate.

Hajjaj is perhaps best known for a colourful and provocative series of portraits depicting traditionally dressed Arab-Muslim girls on motorbikes, as in the image above; not so much angels with dirty faces, as imagined by Rowland Brown and Jimmy Pursey, as 'Kesh Angels with hidden faces.

However, I don't think he should be defined by these images alone - anymore than he should be obliged to labour under the ridiculous idea that he's the Andy Warhol of Marrakesh. Hajjaj has far more to offer as an artist than such a lazy comparison allows. He is a man who - after much hard work - is finally able to say and do something in his own name, without asking permission or referencing the past from which he flees.


Notes

For details of the Somerset House exhibition, La Caravane, by Hassan Hajjaj, beginning October 5, 2017, please click here. 

For details of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, also in London next month, click here. 

For a related post to this one on Pop Art from North Africa, click here. 

To see more images from the 'Kesh Angels exhibition, please visit the Taymour Grahne Gallery website by clicking here.

Thanks to Kosmo Vinyl for suggesting this post.

Pop Art from North Africa (with Images of Marilyn Veiled and Unveiled)

Libyan Marilyn 

Alla Abudabbus

This just in from dear friend and fellow blogger, Nahla Al-Ageli, over at Nahla Ink (a site that chronicles the adventures of an independent Arab woman and freelance journalist living in London, with particular reference to events happening within the world of Arab art and culture) ...

September 21st sees the launch of the Pop Art from North Africa exhibition at the P21 Gallery (London), featuring work by fifteen artists from the region, who have all been inspired by a movement that first emerged in Britain and the United States in the mid-late 1950s, but which has since expanded into a global phenomenon, challenging the art traditions of numerous countries with imagery drawn from the worlds of mass media, commerce, and popular culture.

The exhibition, curated by Najlaa El-Ageli and Toufik Doubi, will examine how Pop Art's postmodern irony plays out within the social, political and cultural environments unique to North Africa. For more details, please go to the P21 Gallery website by clicking here, or visit nahlaink.com

Personally, I would think this exhibition worth attending if only to see the beautiful image by Alla Abudabbus shown above.

Of course, it's not the first time that Marilyn has been depicted pop art style in a veil; the Iranian artist, Afshan Ketabchi, produced her work Marilyn Monroe Undercover in 2008, for example.

But I think it's my favourite such picture, reminding me as it does of Douglas Kirkland's famous series of photographs of Marilyn from 1961, in which she poses naked in a white sheet and shows that - veiled or unveiled - she was one of the most fascinating women of the twentieth century ...

A New Entry in the Big Book of Little Girls: Alma Deutscher (The Prodigy)

Photo of Alma Deutscher 
By Anna Huix (2016)

I.

One of the books I would still like to write, is my Big Book of Little Girls - a work dedicated to all of those fantastic creatures who are so much more than merely young females destined to grow up to be women in a conventional bio-cultural manner.

At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal and inhuman - little girls are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. They are defined, thus, not by their age, sex, or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

I already have an index of possible candidates for the book, both living and dead, actual and fictional. And now I have another name to add: Alma Deutscher ...   


II.

Born in February 2005, Alma is a highly celebrated and much-loved composer and performer. Starting her musical career early - she began playing the piano aged two, followed by the violin at three - this wunderkind has already written sonatas, concertos, and operas.

For some, she's an angel sent to redeem the world through melody and she herself contrasts the simple beauty of her music with the ugliness and complexity of the times. Anyone wanting to see people in jeans or hear works that deal with social issues, should probably stay away from her recitals: Let them look at passersby in the street or watch TV, she says, with the regal disdain perfected more by Marie Antoinette than by Mozart.

And suddenly one recalls that the term prodigy refers not only to a young person with exceptional gifts, but - as her own mother reminds us - to a monstrous being who violates the natural order and brings with them something more troubling than a nice tune; something unbidden and unexpected ...

At the very least, I think it reasonable to regard this young girl as genuinely inspired, if not, indeed, one possessed; a witch who whirls a magical skipping rope about her head and allows strange forces to work through her. Whether these forces be divine or daemonic in nature is debatable; but it's surely worth remembering that the Devil has all the best tunes and that the positing of Beauty as the highest of all high ideals has, in the past, put dreamy Romantics on a path to Hell ...

But then I'm just one of those whom Robert Schediwy characterises as an advanced culture-theorist, suspicious of any attempt to steer contemporary classical music back to the 18th and 19th centuries with their "uninhibited love of melody", before those decidedly ungalant, 20th century composers dared to experiment with dissonance and require listeners to develop new ears.

As for Alma, obviously I wish her well. But I also hope that, as she matures, she rethinks her relationship to the present, to reality, and to popular culture and sees how even beauty can become an ugly impediment to genius ...


See Robert Schediwy, 'Alma und die gefährliche Liebe zur Melodie', Der Standard (13 Jan 2017): click here.

To listen to Alma play, or to read numerous other press reports and interviews with her and her parents, go to her website by clicking on the link already given. Alternatively, there are plenty of videos available to watch on YouTube, including this one, in which Alma not only performs her own piano and violin compositions, but speaks about her work before an invited audience at the WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium (2016).

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.