On the Art of Crucifixion

Horace Roye: Tomorrow's Crucifixion (1938)

Images of a crucified figure have a long history; one that it may surprise some readers to discover pre-dates the Christian era, although, of course, most such images are of Jesus hanging on the Cross and thus belong to a particular religious tradition of art.*   

Whilst crucifixion art had its heyday in the Middle Ages, when increasingly gruesome and realistic representations of suffering became de rigueur, modern artists have nevertheless continued to find inspiration in the subject matter.   

Dalí, for example, famously gave us his version in 1954: Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus); a surreal or, more accurately, nuclear mystical painting in which Christ is crucified not to a simple wooden cross, but to the unfolded net of what is termed within geometry a tesseract (i.e. the four-dimensional analogue of the cube). Some critics regard it as one of Dalí's most successful works, uniting science and religiosity in an ingenius manner.   

Francis Bacon was another 20th-century artist fascinated by all forms of physical torment and violent death in general. In 1965 he painted a triptych entitled Crucifixion that follows (in mood, colour and form) two earlier works: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962).

What I love about these works is - in contrast to Dalí's picture - the fact that there's nothing spiritual about them; in fact, they are obscenely material and treat human flesh as if it were butcher's meat on display. As Bacon confessed to the critic and curator David Sylvester when discussing the above works:

"I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses [...] There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of man's behaviour to another."

Finally, mention must be made of an extraordinary photograph from 1938 by Horace Roye, who is perhaps most fondly remembered today for his thousands of female nude portraits (or Eves without leaves as he jokingly referred to them).** Entitled Tomorrow's Crucifixion, it depicts a naked woman wearing a gas mask whilst nailed to a crucifix. Unsurprisingly, it caused a huge amount of controversy at the time, but is now rightly regarded as one of the most striking images from the pre-War period, anticipating the horrors to come.   

Notes

* Interestingly, in the first three centuries of Christian iconography the crucifixion was rarely depicted. It's thought that any such images were viewed as heretical by early church leaders who regarded the subject as unfit for artistic representation and preferred to focus the attention of believers on the miracle of resurrection.

** A bit like D. H. Lawrence three decades earlier, Roye was prosecuted in the 1950s for obscenity after refusing to airbrush out pubic hair from photos of his models. Defending himself in court, Roye successfully challenged the absurd idea that nudes were only acceptable if made to look as smooth and lifeless as marble statues, or as impersonal as dead fish. 

See: David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1987).

All Aboard the Good Ship Greta

I. 

I don't know who invented carbon fibre; nor do I know where and when it was developed into the light-weight, super-strong (though very expensive) wonder material that is increasingly used in the manufacture of all kinds of things today - including, as we shall see, multi-million dollar yachts. 

Some environmentalists embrace CF technology as it promises to make planes and cars ever-more fuel efficient and it also plays a significant role within the wind power revolution (turbine blades made from carbon fibre are longer, more rigid, and more resilient than traditional fibreglass models). 

Unfortunately, however, carbon fibre is wasteful to manufacture, difficult to recycle, and results in a toxic by-product. And whilst there's talk about being able to eventually mass produce it from plant material, at the moment it's made from oil and acrylonitrile - so it's really not as eco-friendly as some might like to pretend.


II. 

At first, when I read of Greta Thunberg's announcement on Twitter that she'll shortly be sailing across the Atlantic in a high-speed, carbon fibre, multi-million dollar racing yatch owned by a German property developer in order to attend a UN climate summit in New York, I thought her account must have been hacked by a prankster. But, apparently, that isn't the case; she is genuinely that detached from reality that she fails entirely to see the absurd comedy of the situation.

Wishing to make a point about the climate impact of aviation, Greta refuses to fly. But - as she helpfully reminds us - America is "on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean" and there are no trains to take you there. Thus, going by boat would seem to be the only other option - though maybe she could've taken a yellow submarine. 

However, Greta being Greta - an extremely privileged and over-indulged teenager who has apocalyptic visions of the future and the superhuman ability to see carbon dioxide - she's not going by raft made from recycled oildrums and driftwood; nor is she sailing across the sea singlehandedly.

The Malizia II is a hi-tech 60ft craft fitted with sails, solar panels and underwater turbines to generate zero-carbon power (note: it has a diesal engine for emergencies). Based in Brittany, the admittedly beautiful-looking boat is proudly sponsored by the Yatch Club de Monaco. Greta will be accompanied on the voyage by the skipper, her father, and the grandson of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly.

Oh, and the obligatory film crew ...    

One hesitates in describing this as a ship of fools, but the sheer vanity of the super-rich posing as environmental activists - and the contempt displayed for the rest of us - is as vomit-inducing as the enormous waves Thunberg is about to encounter.  

I would like to wish bon voyage to this happy crew of eco-warriors - but I also damn them all to hell.

Notes on the Case of Bettie Page

Image via Bettie Page on Facebook

According to Hugh Hefner, who featured her in Playboy as the January Playmate of the Month in 1955, Bettie Page was an iconic figure who significantly influenced American society. I don't know to what extent that's true, but she has certainly secured her place within both the popular cultural and pornographic imaginations (helping, in fact, to blur the distinction between the two).     

It seems that almost everyone knows - and almost everyone loves - Bettie, with her shoulder-length jet-black hair and amazonian figure (amazonian in the camp Russ Meyer manner rather than in the classical Greek sense). Indeed, over sixty years since her modelling heyday and eight years after her death, her estate still continues to rake in the millions and she continues to exert her charm. 

So I suppose the question is ... why? 

According to one commentator, the answer is because Page appeals to a large female fan base as a sexually liberated body positive role model. She may have been abused as a child and suffered serious mental health problems after she stopped modelling, but she's not regarded as a tragic figure or as a victim. On the contrary, for many women she embodies vibrancy, self-confidence, humour, and intelligence.

Again, I don't know to what extent these claims are true, but I'm inclined to accept that many women - particularly those who identify as sex-positive feminists or in some sense queer - feel a strong emotional bond to Bettie Page in much the same way - and for many of the same reasons - they do to Betty Boop in her pre-Hays Code prime [click here].*

The argument is that Page puts the rrr into pinup girl and that there's something a bit punk rock about her look and her attitude - something that I'm also happy to concede. Her imperfections and unconventional looks offer an alternative to the cultural ideal of beauty and she encourages us to challenge stereotypes and affirm our own individual quirks. 

Page also subscribed to a punk ethos in that she styled her own hair and makeup for photo shoots and handmade most of the clothes she wore when modelling. Not that she wore many clothes, of course, and usually they were worn only so that might teasingly be removed.

For Bettie was a gal who liked to be naked and challenged the idea that there was anything indecent or shameful about the body - a view which, interestingly, didn't seem to conflict with her devout Christian faith. As she told one interviewer who challenged her on this: 'I don't believe God disapproves of nudity. After all, he placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden naked as jaybirds.' 

In sum, Page is a fascinating case study who combines contradictory elements and playfully subverts not just ideas of beauty and morality, but also the awful seriousness of the sex industry; she was what Nietzsche would have called a comedian of the ascetic ideal - a knowing parody of the pinup rather than the queen of such. Thus, those who speak of her authenticity have misunderstood her appeal, which is that of the fraud who is always mocking everything and everyone with her performance.

Notes 

* I'm not trying to denigrate Miss Page by comparing her to an animated character. I'm perfectly aware that Betty Boop is a 2-dimensional fictional figure whilst Bettie P. is a fully-rounded actual woman. Nevertheless, there's something wonderfully cartoonish about the latter and it's surely not coincidental that illustrator Dave Stevens based a character on her in his successful 1980s comic book The Rocketeer.  

See: Tori Rodriguez, 'Male Fans Made Bettie Page a Star, but Female Fans Made Her an Icon', The Atlantic (6 Jan 2014): click here. 

Watch: Bettie Page Reveals All, a documentary film dir. Mark Mori (Single Spark Pictures, 2012): click here for the official trailer.

And for five minutes of joy, click here.

Reflections on a Forgotten Umbrella

Banksy: Nola (Girl with Umbrella) (2006)

Hexagon Gallery

Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen: I have forgotten my umbrella.

This five word sentence from one of Nietzsche's notebooks, neatly enclosed in quotation marks but without any contextualising information that might help us understand it, has intrigued many readers - not least Derrida, who attempted to deconstruct it in typically exhaustive fashion.

We could, of course, just take its meaning literally: we know that Nietzsche owned a red umbrella which, when in Turin, he liked to carry with him in order to shield his eyes from the bright Italian sun. So it's perfectly possible that he might, in fact, have one day forgotten it - just like all those other people who do so each and every day in towns and cities around the world; it's nice to sometimes imagine Nietzsche not as an anti-Christ or Übermensch, but just a slob like one of us. 

Some scholars, however, are convinced that these words have greater significance; that perhaps the word umbrella refers not to an everyday object, but to something far more mysterious and important - i.e., that umbrella is used here metaphorically. Again, that's certainly possible. But, personally, I prefer to think of Nietzsche's umbrella as an actual thing which is in itself of great interest, as the writer Marion Rankine illustrates in her amusing book Brolliology (2017).     

Rankine reminds us that whilst umbrellas play only a minor role within philosophy and literature, there have nevertheless been several writers and thinkers - including Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson - who turned their attentions to these curious hand-held devices that can open and shut like artificial flowers and afford us protection from the elements. Or, indeed, from tigers and assailants; for many a person has used their brolly as a weapon, as well defensively as a shield. 

Sadly, as Rankine also reminds us, umbrellas are, today, often degraded objects; mass-produced in Chinese factories and no longer treasured by their owners. Once upon a time, they were carefully made by craftsmen using beautiful materials and expensive models were a sign of social status (one of the ways that Robinson Crusoe distinguished himself from Friday was by making himself an umbrella which, when not in use, he carried with him under his arm like a gentleman).

In fact, an umbrella revealed not only an individual's class, but served as a reliable indicator of their taste, style and personality. Today, their construction is so poor and flimsy that umbrellas can hardly even be relied upon to keep you dry; the first gust of wind and they flip inside out like a giant bat's wing or collapse entirely, to be thrown away with an angry curse, but without concern.

One hardly dares to think what this says about us as a culture ... It's as if we've forgotten ourselves.

See:

Leslie Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin (Picador, 1996).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (The University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Marion Rankine, Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella in Life and Literature (Melville House, 2017).  

See also:

Charles Dickens, 'Please to Leave Your Umbrella', in Household Words Vol. XVII, Issue 423 (May 1858), pp. 457-59. Click here to read as a pdf via Dickens Journals Online.   

Robert Louis Stevenson, 'The Philosophy of Umbrellas', in Collected Works (Edinburgh Edition 1894-98), Vol. 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Vol. IV. Click here to read on the NLS website.

Play: Rihanna, 'Umbrella', single release from the album Good Girl Gone Bad (Def Jam, 2007): Orange Version Ft. Jay-Z: click here.

Never Mind the Selenites, Here's the Moon Pigs

Tardigrade (aka water bear, aka moss piglet)

Picture: eyeofscience / science source images

According to excited news reports this week, the Moon may be inhabited - not by Selenites - but by thousands of tardigrades, transported there aboard an Israeli spacecraft that crashed on the lunar surface back in April. 

Tardigrades - for those who don't know - are incredibly resilient, micro-creatures that have fascinated scientists ever since their discovery, in 1773, by German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze who, rather Romantically, called them kleine Wasserbären.

Found virtually everywhere, even in the most extreme conditions, these eight-legged wonders would stand a pretty good chance of surviving in space for many years in a state of deathly hibernation or cryptobiosis; again, for those who don't know, tardigrades have the ability to expell nearly all bodily fluid and shrivel into a seed-like pod, reducing their metabolism to almost zero.        

Of course, in order to become active again and feed and reproduce as normal, they would need to be rehydrated and there's no possibility of that on a celestial body that lacks atmosphere and liquid water. And so they'd have to be brought back to Earth in order to be brought back to life. But, presently, they're stranded on the Moon, and it's kind of nice to look up at night and think of them.   


Thanks to Thom B. for suggesting this post.

To Think on One's Feet

Horst P. Horst: Barefoot Beauty (1941)

Feet: some people find them very beautiful and sexually attractive; others think them repulsive and shameful.

But, love 'em or hate them, the fact remains that plates are not without evolutionary, cultural and philosophical importance. Whilst Heidegger makes a huge fuss about the human hand, Bataille is more interested in the foot, particularly le gros orteil, which he regards as the defining feature of man; i.e., that which distinguishes us from other apes.

I don't know if that's true, but the fact that we can stand up and walk tall on our own two feet is certainly crucial. Freud argues that civilization begins with man's fateful decision to adopt an upright posture, with his nose in the air (this latter fact leading directly to the decline in his sense of smell and, subsequently, his association of bodily dirt and odours with shameful animality and base materialism).

Our habitual bipedalism developed rather belatedly in evolutionary terms and the human foot with its unique anatomical structure is a comparatively recent assemblage of bones, joints, tendons, muscles, etc. which might help to explain why our feet are so susceptible to all kinds of problems (from flat feet to swollen feet; from blisters to bunions).

Other maladies - including dodgy knees, bad backs, and hernias - are also associated with the fact that man likes to stand erect. Perhaps this is why in so many cultures feet are held in such low regard; the fact that they are often dirty and prone to sweat also adds to their perceived baseness. Arguably, only the sexual organs have a more degraded status within the heirarchy of the body.

Living as we do, we moderns, from the spiritual upper centres, we dream of becoming angels; i.e., heavenly creatures who have feet that never touch the ground. But, as a Lawrentian and as something of a podophile, I would challenge such idealism. I think we should overcome our secret horror for our terrestrial origins in mud and learn to value the naked reality of feet that are intensely alive with the desire for touch - as well as great centres of resistance with which to kick! 

See: Georges Bataille, 'The Big Toe', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (The University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 20-23. Click here to read this essay on line. 

This post is for Mimi.  

Operation Werewolf

Meine Werwolfzähne beißen den Feind

Werwolf was the brilliantly sinister codename for a plan to create a resistance force operating behind enemy lines that would strike terror into the hearts of the Allied forces as they advanced into Germany, similar - in the Nazi imagination - to the way in which their barbarian forefathers had struck terror into the hearts of the Romans who dared venture into the dark forests north of the Rhine only to find the skulls of their dead comrades nailed to the trees.

Who came up with the codename is unknown, although Hitler clearly had a penchant for names containing the word wolf and regarded the creature as his totem animal. It's also possible that Werwolf alluded to a novel by Hermann Löns, popular with figures on the far-right, including the Nazis.
          

What we do know is that in the late summer of 1944 Himmler ordered the formation of an elite force of volunteers drawn from the SS and Hitler Youth and trained to engage in clandestine activities and guerrilla warfare. The Allies soon got wind of this and Time magazine ran an article speculating on how the Nazis would attempt to prolong hostilities indefinitely by going underground and establishing sleeper cells.

Seeking to heighten and exploit such fears - whilst obviously realising that the game was up - Goebbels gave a speech on 23 March, 1945, in which he urged every German citizen to fight to the death and effectively become a werewolf. This would later cause problems for the Allies when seeking to identify those responsible for attacks; were they coordinated and carried out by trained fighters as part of a commando unit, or by lone wolves acting independently.  

Shortly afterwards, Radio Werwolf began broadcasting from outside Berlin. Each transmission would open with the sound of a wolf howling and when not encouraging every German to stand their ground and offer total resistance, it issued threats of revenge upon those who collaborated with the enemy.

These broadcasts further spooked the occupying forces, particularly the Americans, who were encouraged by their commanders to believe that every German was a monster in disguise. Unfortunately, this resulted in unnecessarily draconian measures being introduced and atrocities committed against German civilians by Allied troops during and immediately after the War.

Ultimately, like so much else about Nazi Germany, Werwolf was essentially a potent mix of medieval myth and modern propaganda; a mad fantasy which lacked any real bite or strategic value (not to mention material resources). The German people were all too willing to work with the Allies and there was no serious resistance, even if there were a handful of Nazi fanatics hiding here and there in forest huts - much as there were a few old Japanese soldiers holding out on tiny Pacific islands long after the War had ended. 

That's fascism ... fascinating - but fraudulent (and, who knows, perhaps fascinating because fraudulent).

Mazophilia (With Reference to the Case of Russ Meyer)

Eve Turner displaying her charms

I.

Located on the upper ventral region of the female torso, the breast, biologically speaking, is essentially a network of milk-producing ducts covered in subcutaneous fat. In other words, just a swollen gland that varies in size, shape and weight.  

But, of course, no one is really interested in hearing about breasts in purely biological or functional terms. They might provide nutrition for infants, but they also have social, sexual, and symbolic significance and possess a long and fascinating cultural history - not just in the plastic arts, but also in comedy, fashion, and advertising.      

The key thing, as feminist author and historian Marilyn Yalom notes, is that competing conceptions of the breast change the way it is seen and represented and any cultural history of the breast is constructed as much in male fantasy as it is in female biology.     

II.

Whilst it's true that the ancient Greeks were more interested in male nudity as a symbol of perfection and power, Western culture hasn't exactly been shy in portraying the female form, with a particular fascination for the breasts as morphologically diverse objects that have both a maternal function and an erotic allure.
 

Thus, during the Renaissance, for example, depictions of Mary as a nursing Madonna dominated the cultural imagination; not only did she suckle the infant Jesus, but, by implication, she provided the milk of human kindness and spiritual nourishment to all mankind. 

Within the modern period, in contrast, the bared female breast has become a symbol of radical political protest (think Marianne or Femen), a staple of bawdy comedy (think Barbara Widsor or Benny Hill), and a culturally-sanctioned distraction for heterosexual men who like to begin the day staring at a pair of tits (think Page 3). 

Some individuals, however, take their erotico-aesthetic interest in female breasts to a fetishistic extreme, invariably subscribing to the belief that bigger is always better. And here, we have to think Russ Meyer ...

III.

The American filmmaker Russ Meyer had - both as an artist and as a man - a lifelong love of naturally large-breasted women and would repeatedly feature such in his movies.

These women included Lorna Maitland, Darlene Gray, Kitten Natividad, Tura Satana and, personal favourite, Erica Gavin (as Vixen) - though, arguably, none were more lovely than Meyer's second-wife, the 1950s pin-up model Eve Turner, who produced thirteen of his films and played a significant role in helping Meyer establish a career.

Whilst large breasts are not really my cup of tea, these cantilevered actresses certainly appeal far more than the cosmetically-enhanced porn stars of today, suggesting as they do an entirely different aesthetic and female archetype; not necessarily more natural - although certainly less plastic - but more charismatic and amazonian in spirit.

This helps explain why some feminist critics now find something valuable and liberating in Meyer's movies, particularly Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), which is more psychotronic thriller and an ode to female aggression than simple sexploitation and described by John Waters (a master of transgressive filmmaking himself) as quite simply the best movie ever made.

See: Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

To view a trailer for Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! (dir. Russ Meyer, 1965): click here. 

The Shape of Felines to Come: Brief Notes on the Speculative Evolution of the Cat

I.

Speculative evolution is a genre of hard science fiction with a firm basis in biology, even if the future scenarios it imagines are hypothetical.

It may sometimes stretch the limits of possibility, but by retaining a concern with real-world processes and building on our knowledge of how things actually work, it retains a level of plausibililty that distinguishes it from pure fantasy.   

II.

One thing is for sure, a posthuman world - in the sense of a world in which Homo sapiens have become Homo extinctus - would not present any difficulties for the cat.

Even the most domesticated of breeds is never more than a whisker away from happily returning to the wild, as the feral populations successfully breeding and assuming their place as apex predators in many types of environment demonstrate.

With or without us, these natural born killers will survive and prosper. But the interesting question is how they might evolve ...

Not only might they increase in size, for example, but some commentators have put forward the idea of semi-aquatic cats evolving to exploit tide pools, mangrove swamps, or even coral reefs. Others, meanwhile, like to imagine flying cats, gliding from one tree (or one ruined skyscraper) to the next with the aid of a patagium, their long tail helping to provide in-flight stability. 

Thankfully, because cats cannot digest plant matter and need to eat meat to survive, it's extremely unlikely they'll evolve into some kind of boring herbivore.

Note: those interested in this topic are encouraged to read After Man: A Zoology of the Future (1981), by Dougal Dixon - the Scottish writer and geologist often credited as being the founder of speculative evolution (though he admits to being inspired by H. G. Wells). 

Athenian Street Dogs

Two Athenian street dogs outside McDonald's near Syntagma Square

Photo by Matt Cardy / Getty Images

When the Little Greek told me that - as a result of The Crisis - Athens had gone to the dogs, I thought she was speaking figuratively. But, as it turns out, she was giving literal reference to the problem of street dogs - or free-ranging urban dogs as they are known in the scientific literature - whose numbers have grown enormously in the city during the last decade.   

Of course, what is true of Athens is true of many other cities and dogs can be found living in any urban area where the human population is prepared to accept them roaming about the streets and searching through garbage for food. Some are pets that have strayed or been abandoned, others are the descendents of feral animals; some are pure breeds, others are true mutts.

Obviously, they can be a real nuisance and pose genuine health and safety issues; pissing, shitting, fighting, fucking, barking, biting, as they do. However, the dogs seem to understand that in order to survive they have to keep conflict with humans to a minimum. And so, mostly, they're surprisingly well-behaved and extraordinarily well-adapted to an urban lifestyle; happily using the pedestrian crossings on busy roads, for example.  

Even I have to admit - and I don't like dogs - their intelligence, adaptive behaviour and sociality is pretty impressive and as long as they don't give me any trouble when I'm wandering around Plaka, I'm perfectly happy to share space with them. Indeed, there are plenty of people I'd sooner see neutered or rounded up and shot than these dogs.

Notes

Anyone interested in donating to a charity that provides food, shelter and veterinary care for stray cats and dogs in Greece can click here. 

Thanks to Katxu for inspiring this post.