A still from Malcolm McLaren's Shallow 1-21 (2008)
showing a woman slowly eating some grapes in a sexy fashion
'What excites today - after the orgy as Baudrillard would say -
isn't explicit pornography, but very slow-moving portraits of people
thinking about, desiring, wanting, wishing for, and imagining having sex.'
I.
D. H. Lawrence famously equates sex with beauty, insisting that they are one and the same thing; "like flame and fire" [1] and that sex appeal is, therefore, the appeal of living beauty.
Barthes, however, isn't having any of this.
For Barthes, the sexiness of a body has nothing to do with its beauty. Rather, it "inheres in the fact that it is possible to discern (to fantasise) in it the erotic practice to which one subjects it in thought" [2].
That's a definition which would make Lawrence splutter in his tea. He'd accuse Barthes of having his sex in his head (to be fair, the above does very much lend itself to such a reading).
But it's a definition that I think Malcolm McLaren would have immediately understood and appreciated; for, in a sense, it provides the key with which to unlock the secret of his multimedia artwork titled Shallow 1-21 (2008).
II.
Consisting of a series of what he liked to call musical paintings, the work combines some of McLaren's favourite songs and pieces of music with appropriated video clips from vintage films of people just before they engage in sexual acts, looping moments of heavy breathing, the parting of lips, or the slow unbuttoning of a shirt [3].
By focusing entirely on the excitement of anticipation rather than explicit acts, McLaren conceptualised the 86-minute work as a subversion of pornography and hoped to demonstrate the truth of Casanova's famous claim that the finest of all moments in the game of love comes when one is climbing the stairs [4].
III.
Lawrence, of course, would hate McLaren's film.
But Barthes, I think, would have appreciated the work. Indeed, it might be argued that, in some manner, Shallow is a version of Barthes's projected work on sexuality.
Enchanted by a young couple sitting opposite him on the train - "the woman is blonde, made up; she is wearing big dark glasses, reads Paris-Match; she has a ring on each finger, and each nail on both hands is painted a different colour from its two neighbours" [5] - Barthes conceives the idea of a new book (or of a film).
In this work, there would be "nothing but secondary sex characteristics (nothing pornographic); in it one would grasp (would try to grasp) the sexual 'personality' of each body, which is neither its beauty nor even its 'sexiness' but the way in which each sexuality immediately lets itself be read" [6].
From this, one can see why Barthes once described himself as a homotextual.
He continues:
"For the young blonde with the harlequin nails and her young husband with his tight pants and warm eyes were wearing their couple-sexuality like the legion-of-honour ribbon in a buttonhole (sexuality and respectability relating to the same kind of display), and this legible sexuality [...] filled the compartment, by an irresistible metonymy, much more certainly than any series of coquetries." [7]
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 145. For a discussion of this piece, see the post dated 24 September 2018: click here.
[2] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac 1995), p. 164.
[3] McLaren developed the first eight videos for Shallow in 2007 for a New York group show. He completed the rest of the 21 musical paintings in 2008, officially premiering the entire collection at Art Basel in Switzerland in June 2008.
For those readers who might be interested, McLaren discusses the work on Artforum (16 July 2008): click here.
[4] Interestingly, Michel Foucault points out that whilst this may well have been true within an eighteenth-century heterosexual context, the reverse is probably the case within the world of homosexuality. Foucault claims that the modern homosexual would be more likely to say something along the lines of: The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
He explains: "It is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice. It is the recollection rather than the anticipation of the act that assumes a primary importance in homosexual relations. This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet, Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself, because the homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it."
This brilliant observation was made in the interview conducted by James O'Higgins titled 'Sexual Choice, Sexual Act'. It can be found in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (Semiotext[e], 1996), pp. 322-334. The lines quoted above are on page 330.
[5] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes ... p. 164.
The interview can also be read in the American quarterly magazine Salmagundi, No. 58/59 (Fall 1982 - Winter 1983): click here to read online.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
For a related post to this on the politics of accelerationism contra slowness with reference to Shallow 1-21, which was published on 11 April 2025, click here.
