The Fight Between Utility, Pleasure, Morals and Desire in Mlle De Maupin and Its Preface

Using the popularity of History novels in 1830s Paris, Theophile Gautier wrote a book that was ostensibly about the historical figure Mlle de Maupin, a seventeenth century Opera star known for dressing as a man, fighting duels, and generally making a sensation. Not at all a banal starting point, and even if the novel had attempted to faithfully recreate the epic narrative of that woman’s life, playing off of its swashbuckling shock-value, it would have been far from normal.

Illustration of Mlle de Maupin by Aubrey Beardsley

Instead Gautier took the potentials embedded within the thrill that is elicited by a woman successfully occupying the role of a man, potentials which up until then had lain dormant, hidden behind the scandalous excitement and/or moral opprobrium surrounding the tale, and drew them out, unrolling each of them, giving them body through the unique structure, the independent voices, the confused desires, and almost unbearable atmospheres of the book.

He did precisely the opposite of what would have been expected from an author in those times to make money in publishing, and with a hero who could have offered just the right pitch of marching plot, duels and spectacular encounters and fights and related moral conclusions that would have got Parisians’ eye’s flying, thoughtlessly, through the pages. Nothing really happens in it. A young man gets a mistress, then meets the mistress’ friend, with whom he falls in love, and eventually beds, once. Everything happens in the grounds and interiors of the same country house. But the intensity of each page consumes far more than could any amount of flashing knives, with the author forever keeping us unsure of who exactly is who, what they are feeling, what is real and what is not, as everything we are told is in letter form, deeply transfigured by the intense, confused passions of the person writing. Underneath the sensational nature of a woman taking on the role of a man, Gautier falls down a magical hole of his own making and discovers a shifting and anxious world of protean identities, indefinite boundaries, emotional, intellectual, and sensual desires that have no respect for binary oppositions. He discovers (I refer to this as a discovery since, like all the best writing, he manages to illuminate parts of our natures that simply lay undescribed, but which were always there) a place in which there is no defined way for each of the characters, and by extension the reader, to know how to judge themselves, their actions, and even how to know what is right and what is wrong. Judgements arise from the solid ground of morally imbued categories (like promiscuous, chaste; active, contemplative), with their various interactions being frowned upon or celebrated; but when these positions become unstable, when male becomes entirely indistinguishable from female, innocence from supposed corruption of the flesh, earnest passion and ingenuousness from a libidinous worldliness, then the reader, and the characters, are left completely on their own as arbiters of an entirely personal judgement. Like the characters with their necessarily continuous and acute insights, and their long, agonising self analyses, we find ourselves as readers having to analyse and carefully consider our own responses to the impassioned and daring situations set up by Gautier, in order to feel –even slightly- as if we know how to see what we are being shown. Like descending into a world of supposed sin and debauch, only to find deeper good, and more profound forms of humanity than we had known before, there is a need to constantly re-evaluate ones position and viewpoint amongst the homosexual confessions, the serial sexual exploits, and the confused minglings of affection and passion between pubescent and adult.

Mlle de Maupin is apparently the Romantic novel par excellence, and lays out many of the tropes that came to define the romantic atmosphere, from the power of androgyny (although after this mostly kept as feminine attributes in a male character), to the free appeal of sensual liberation coupled with a nostalgia for gallantry and pre-industrial chivalry, and the ultimate impossibility of lasting love. Romantic in the best sense of the word, the book is stifling in its desire to break free of any moral straightjacket, any outside force that may exert pressure on the novel itself, and the content within it, to serve any specific purpose, any moral good. It serves itself and sets us a little bit freer because of it, a little bit freer and a lot more desirous. It is almost a system of libidinous reconfiguration, somewhere in between Sade and Masoch, in which uncertainty, introspection and acting create a tense fever-pitch of speculation and amplified desires, heightening the potency of every physical description, every possible point of contact between characters.

Either way, Gautier was explicit and self conscious in his construction of the book’s world, intending it as a rallying cry against the critics of the time who were demanding that art either “serve” the Republican cause, be “morally uplifting” for the people, be “virtuous”, or be “useful” and help further “progress”. Below are some extracts from the Preface to the book, which is long, aggressive, eloquent, quite devastating, and aimed as a riposte to those very critics, all demanding that literature serve what they saw as necessary causes, with Gautier standing up and, daggers of sarcasm in hand, spectacularly managing to reclaim his own ground. As an architect, I was set alight by the preface (which has been called a manifesto for Romanticism, and art for art’s sake), since, like the way in which the book triumphantly describes and celebrates things which were considered somehow shameful, he takes an attitude to art production seen as contemptible, one rooted in pleasure and elegance, whose system of value is based entirely upon stimulation, and propounds its transcendence, explains how for him it was the very essence of literature. I am also fascinated by, and hold most dear, everything that comes after the point of appeased necessity, and while I have only respect for those who make their business the solving of problems, the furthering of causes, or the alleviation of physical poverty, I have always wondered why the production of pleasure and the celebration of life through art, and architecture, always either gets mistaken (how?!) for the pompous showmanship of wealth in search of signs of differentiation, or else is attacked for being unnecessary and wasteful.

Enough for now, the extracts from this manifesto of manifestos (1837…):

Page 3

In the glorious age in which we have the good fortune to live nothing is more ridiculous than the efforts being made by every journal, of whatever political hue be it red, green, or tricolour, to re-establish morality. Morality is of course greatly to be respected, and, heaven knows, we shouldn’t want to treat her discourteously. She is a good and worthy woman. We are indeed of the opinion that behind her spectacles her eyes are brilliant enough; that her stockings are properly adjusted; that from her gold snuff box she takes her snuff as elegantly as can be; that her lapdog bows like a dancing master. That is our opinion. We shall even concede that she is in pretty good shape for her age and carries her years very well. For a grandmother she looks fine, but she is nevertheless a grandmother… It would seem quite normal, especially when you are twenty, to prefer some immoral, pert, coquettish and feminine little thing, with tumbling curls and a skirt somewhat on the short side, with provocative eyes and feet, a flush on her cheek, laughter on her lips and her heart on her sleeve. Even those journalists who are monstrously virtuous would not argue with that. And if they say the opposite, more likely than not they do not believe it. Thinking one thing and saying another is something that people, especially the moral ones, do every single day.

Page 20

You fools, you imbeciles, you goitrous idiots, a book does not make jellied soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots nor is a sonnet a vaginal syringe; a drama is not a railway; all of these things that are essential to civilisation and to the advancement of humanity along the path of progress.

By the bowels of all the popes past, present and future, no, two hundred thousand times no.

You cannot make a cotton bonnet out of a metonym and you cannot put on a comparison as you do a slipper; you cannot use an antithesis like an umbrella; you could not, more’s the pity, wrap a few multicoloured rhymes round your middle by way of a waistcoat. It is my deep conviction that an ode is too light for winter wear and that you would be no better clothed with a strophe, antistrophe or epode than was the cynic’s wife who made do with her virtue for a chemise and went stark naked, or so the story goes.

People who claim to be economists, and who want to rebuild society from scratch, seriously suggest such nonsense.

P21

I should like to know first of all the precise meaning of the great gangling fellow of a noun they pepper their vacuous columns with every day, and which they use as a shibboleth or a sacred word. Utility. What does it mean and what is its application?

There are two sorts of utility and the meaning of this word is only ever relative. What is useful to one person is no use to another. You are a cobbler, I am a poet. It is useful for me that my first line rhymes with my second. A rhyming dictionary is very useful to me; but you don’t need one to mend a pair of old boots; and it is fair to say that a shoe-maker’s knife would be no good to me for writing odes. Then you will object that a cobbler is far superior to a poet, and that you can more easily do without the one than the other. Without wishing to disparage the noble profession of cobbler, which I esteem equal to that of constitutional monarch, I humbly submit that I should prefer to leave my shoes unstitched than my verses badly rhymed, and that I should rather do without boots than poems. As I almost never go out and since I make better progress with my head than my feet, I get through fewer pairs of shoes than a virtuous republican who does nothing but run from one ministry to the next, in the hope of landing a job somewhere.

I know some prefer windmills to churches, and the bread of the body to that of the soul. I have nothing to say to them. They deserve to be economists in this world, and in the next.

Does anything exist on this earth of ours, in this life of ours, which is absolutely useful? In the first place there is very little use in our being on earth and alive.

P23

Nothing that is beautiful is indispensable to life. If you did away with flowers, the world would not suffer in any material way. And yet who would wish there not to be flowers? I could do without potatoes more easily than roses and I think there is only one utilitarian in the world capable of tearing out a bed of tulips to plant cabbages. What use is the beauty of women? Provided a woman is medically fit and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough for the economists. What is the good of music? What is the good of painting? Who would be mad enough to prefer Mozart to M.Carrel, and Michelangelo to the inventor of white mustard? The only things that are really beautiful are those which have no use; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the lavatory.

Whether these gentlemen like it or not, I belong to those for whom the superfluous is necessary. And I prefer things and people in inverse proportion to the services they render me. Instead of a certain useful pot, I prefer a Chinese one decorated with dragons and mandarins, which is no use to me whatsoever. I should be quite happy to renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a Citizen to see and authentic picture by Raphael, or a beautiful naked woman.

P24

I would sell my trousers for a ring, and my bread for jam. The most appropriate occupation for a civilised man seems to me to be to do nothing, or to reflect upon life as he smokes his pipe or cigar.

Pleasure seems to me to be the aim of life and the only useful thing in the world. God has designed it thus. He who created women, perfumes, light, beautiful flowers, good wine, thoroughbred horses, greyhounds and angora cats; Who did not say to his angels “Be virtuous”, but: “Be loving”; and who has given us a mouth more sensitive than the rest of our skin for kissing women; eyes which can look up to see the light; a subtle sense of smell to breathe in the souls of flowers; strong thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and fly as fast as thought without railway or steam engine; delicate hands to stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety backs of cats, and the satin shoulders of creatures with very little virtue; God who, in short, who has given to us alone the threefold glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of striking a light, and of making love all year round, which distinguishes us from the animals much more than does the custom of reading journals and making charters.

Extracts From Cezanne-Picasso Exhibition

These are two extracts taken from the Musee Granet's exhibition about Cezanne's influence on Picasso, showing now in Aix-En-provence. The first was written from L'estaque, a small fishing village at the time, near Marseilles, when Cezanne first discovered its charms, and was placed next to the painting of L'estaque from the same period, pictured below. I find the tenuously presentated, but hugely forceful conclusion quite remarkable. The second text, by Picasso, was placed in a room full of quite sketchy paintings of apples by him, so I instead picture here the epic still life by Cezanne that so luckily for us Londoners is in this city, hanging in the Courtauld galleries.

Cezanne, written in a letter to Pisarro 2^nd July 1876 from L’estaque:

“It is like a playing cards. Red roofs on the blue sea […] There are olive trees and pines which never lose their leaves. The sun is so terrible there that it seems that the objects advance from the background in silhouette, and not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown and violet. I might be wrong, but to me it is the opposite of volume.”

Picasso said to Francoise Gilot

“If we concern ourselves with what is solid, that is to say the object as a positive form, the surrounding space is reduced to virtually nothing. Are we more interested in what happens inside or outside a form? When we look at the apples of Cezanne, we see that he has marvellously painted the weight of the space on this circular form. The form itself is a hollow volume, on which the exterior pressure is such that it produces the appearance of an apple, even if this apple doesn’t exist really. It is the rhythmic thrust of space on this form that is important.”

Interview for the Exhibition "Parallel Cases" at the Rotterdam Biennale 2009

I was kindly Invited by Karel Wuytack to be interviewed by two of his students, in order to take part in a textual exploration of the theme of 'Open City', all the texts of which will be exhibited in the "Parallel Cases" Exhibition -curated by Ralf Pasel- of this year's Rotterdam Biennale, as well as being published retrospectively in a themed publication.

......................................................................................................

Michael Callant

What is the role of the city in the 21st century for you? What are the biggest threats for the open city in your opinion? Do you agree with the ideas of the open city? (everybody can coexist with everybody and should do so…) Do you believe in the open city and are you in that context rather positive or rather negative about the future?

Adam Nathaniel Furman

Cildo Meireles -a Brazilian artist- recently had a retrospective at the Tate, in which there was an installation exhibited that consisted of a space created out of a range of boundary objects that we traditionally use to divide space up into demarcated zones that relate to an individual, activity, or group, these objects being banal units of separation ranging from wooden fences to metal grilles, bead walls, plastic shower curtains, railings and perforated walls, all united by the fact that their physical disposition would not allow you to pass over them, but would allow you to see through them: indeed the exhibit was called “Through”.
More After The Break...

Bad Taste: Applied, Reflexive and Camp

There is Taste that is bad because it is defined by people who conform to or are active within a given taste (taste here being distinct from sensibility, since many tastes can together form an epochs overall sensibility), and define their taste as good in opposition to an antithetical taste which they call bad (such as the successions of nouveau-rich aesthetics from New York to Houston to Dubai and Moscow which are dogmatically classed as bad taste by those who posit their own styles as being all moderation, restraint and hence “good taste”).

This type of bad taste is externally applied to an uncapitulating group and I guess I would call ‘Applied Bad Taste’.

Then there is Taste that is entirely aware of the boundaries of a particular given group that defines in one place and time what constitutes Good Taste, and defines itself entirely within a liminal zone around these boundaries. Unlike Applied Bad Taste -which exists on its own and only has judgements projected on it externally from Good Taste, this form of Bad Taste is self conscious of its relationship to Good Taste and controls the way it is seen by carefully controlling the distance it goes towards the outer reaches of what Good Taste considers a part of itself… but the key is that it will always return either to the boundary line or back within, because this form of bad taste (which is the one which can handle shock and horror so effortlessly) is internal to Good Taste, is a part of it and performs the role of constantly checking where it ends, and so maintaining its integrity as a unit as it changes through time. These arbiters of Bad Taste are Aristocrats and have a privileged Aesthetic role in society.

This type of Bad Taste acts internally on its own group and I guess I would call it ‘Reflexive Bad Taste’.

Then of course there is that field full of earnest and overabundant inventiveness that is something like the fecundity of nature coming out in plastic, velvet, rhinestone and lace. Namely a taste which is entirely the opposite of the Aristocratic and controlling role of Reflexive Bad Taste, but which also performs at the edges; here Good Taste is not tested to breaking point, but rather multiple tastes are grown in a fecund profusion of uncategorisable inventions and styles which surround good taste like fields or forests used to surround cities, providing unending material for any future alterations or innovations within Good Taste itself. This Taste is precisely too heterogeneous to be a taste at all, and is therefore looked at but not seen in its entirety by Good Taste’s homogeneity, and can only be understood in tiny parts at any one time.

This type of Bad Taste is Nature coming out through our hands and in our Garages, is by necessity heterogeneous, self-sufficient and EARNEST, and is obviously ‘Camp’.

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These areas that are often dismissed when encountered visualy as being in Bad Taste, and when they are present in the work of an artist or architect who uses them knowingly is always assumed to be intended ironically, these three realms of creativity are always present in everything I do –to varying degrees- and interest me greatly: from the vast, explosive, and joyous release of Camp genius when it encounters vast wealth, from Versace to Cavalli, all the way to the shit-eating murderous sexuality of Salo, and back again to the suburban streets of outer london and all the innumerable “minimalist”, “roman”, and “classic” living rooms occupying the train-set terraces and semis. I want Camp to be present because for me it is the effusive joy of creation, the human instinct to multiply itself and its beauty out into the space around it in a celebration of existence… unquestioningly taking flight in the pleasure of doing; Applied Bad Taste (for me here refering specificaly to the Nouveau Riche aesthetics whose ends is luxurius differentiation. There are many others but I am interested in this instance) is the saturation of art with money and power, and it is glittering, dangerous and full of overripe potential. I am interested in it… when I saw Cavalli’s boat day after day in the harbour, while making all the right sounds with my mouth to my friends about how vulgar it all was so that we were all in communal agreement, my head was furiously imagining what was going on on board, what kind of conversation were happening, what did it look like, how dearly I would have loved to be on it! And Reflexive Bad Taste is like a touch of Tabasco… there is no need to smother all the other flavours by shocking the palate with an overtly unpleasant taste, but it adds so much to the whole if there is that piquant kiss, that cheeky and unexpected position.

Extracts from "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriaud

These are from a wonderful collection of essays/articles, of which "Towards a policy of forms" was the one I found the most arresting. More Bourriaud extracts to follow in the coming months.

P20
Gordon Matta-Clarke or Dan Graham’s work cannot be reduced to the “things” those two artists “produce”; it is not the simple secondary effects of a composition, as the formalist aesthetic would like to advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs, objects, forms, gestures… the contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. An artwork is a dot on a line.

P26
Transitivity is as old as the hills. It is a tangible property of the artwork. Without it, the work is nothing other than a dead object, crushed by contemplation. Delacroix wrote in his diary that a successful picture temporarily “condensed” an emotion that it was the duty of the beholder’s eye to bring to life and develop. This idea of transitivity introduces into the aesthetic arena that formal disorder which is inherent to dialogue. It denies the existence of any specific “place of art”, in favour of a forever unfinished discursiveness, and a never recaptured desire for dissemination.

P36
So through little gestures art is like an angelic programme, a set of tasks carried out beside or beneath the real economic system, so as to patiently re-stitch the relational fabric.

P67
On the other hand, we can say that art creates an awareness about production methods and human relationships produced by the technologies of its day, and that by shifting these, it makes them more visible, enabling us to see them right down to the consequences they have on day-to-day life. Technology is only of interest to artists in so far as it puts effects into perspective, rather than putting up with it as an ideological instrument.

P78
The future of art, as an instrument of emancipation, and as a political tool aimed at the liberation of forms of subjectivity, depends on the way artists deal with this issue. For art, no technique or technology is a subject. By putting technology in its productive context, by analysing its relations with the superstructure and the layer of obligatory behaviour underpinning its use, it becomes conversely possible to produce models of relations with the world, heading in the direction of modernity. Failing which, art will become an element of high-tech deco in an increasingly disconcerting society.

P95
And what if real style, as Deleuze and Guattari write, were not the repetition of reified “making” but “the movement of thought”? Guattari contrasts the homogenisation and standardisation of types of subjectivity with the need to involve the being in “heterogenetic processes”. This is the primary principle of mental ecosophy: articulating particular worlds and rare life forms; cultivating per se differentness, before moving it over into the social.

P103
Based on Oscar Wilde’s formula, modernity is the moment when “it is not art imitating life, but life imitating art”… Marx is headed in the same direction, by criticising the classical distinction between praxis (the act of self-transformation) and poesis (the necessary, servile action aimed at producing and transforming matter). Marx thought, on the contrary, that “praxis moves constantly into poesis, and vice-versa”.

For “the only acceptable end-purpose of human activities,” writes Guattari, “is the production of a subjectivity that is forever self-enriching its relationship with the world.”

P104
The poetic function, which consists in re-forming worlds of subjectivisation, possibly would not have any meaning if it, too, were not able to help us to negotiate the “ordeal of barbarity, mental implosion, and chaosmic spasm which are taking shape on the horizon, to turn them into riches and unforeseeable pleasures”…

P107
Aesthetics
An idea that sets humankind apart from other animal species. In the end of the day, burying the dead, laughter, and suicide are just the corollaries of a deep-seated hunch, the hunch that life is an aesthetic, ritualised, shaped form.

P111
Form
Structural unity imitating a world. Artistic practice involves creating a form capable of “lasting”, bringing heterogeneous units together on a coherent level, in order to create a relationship to the world.

Image
Making a work involves the invention of a process of presentation. In this kind of process, the image is an act.

Inhabiting
Having imagined architecture and art of the future, the artist is now proposing solutions for inhabiting them. The contemporary form of modernity is ecological, haunted by the occupancy of forms and the use of images.

P114
Style
The movement of a work, its trajectory. “The style of a thought is its movement” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)

Text Written For "Text Fields" installation "TF002"

Text Fields SITE

TF002 is an exploration of the liminal zone that lies between the kind of quotidian space through which one walks everyday, the sort of enclosure that captures our habitual trajectories -a corridor, a staircase- and the words, the name, the noun, the ‘text’ which denotes that space, signifies it, and categorises it in our minds. Between the thing that denotes, and the experience of what it represents.

‘The Corridor’ is an emphatically mental construct of a definite article and a name, it is an open container of 11 letters which has the ability to encapsulate any number of individual associations, from the memory of hospitals, to the endless labyrinths of nightmares, to -in this case for those involved in the gallery- warm conversations and grandiose discussions about art, and the curation of small exhibitions. The space itself, with its awkward little skylights and concrete floor, is a resolutely physical construct, a passive collection of impressions of cold and warmth, light and dark, echoes and silences, and dirt and colour, all of which are taken up and sensually experienced in any number of ways by each person who passes through it; whether it is the concrete sucking the warmth out of the thin soles of their plimsolls, freezing their feet, or the light from the sunny day outside as it slices the path into pieces through the skylights, and leaves the space disorientating and difficult to navigate.

It is the subjective apprehension of those letters which is a concern of typography. The delicate and calibrated adjustment of the form of the word, of the text, that subtly manoeuvres the tone in which the associations which the word conjures up are received; a form of design in which the scope of subjective mental impressions to which a word may lead – whether hospitals and labyrinths or drinks and openings- are decorated, coloured and unified by a typeface. Where the typographer deals with the subjective experience of the ‘text’, the spatial designer deals in the analogous act of organising the elements of enclosure, in order that they provide a framework for similarly indeterminate, and individual experiences of the object of design -whether they frame and unify the feeling of freezing feet and the disorientation from shafts of blinding light, or the annoyance of having to crouch underneath something and squeeze past people in the impossibly tight space.

TF002 is an act of design precisely positioned between these two complementary practices, an act in which those involved have explicitly attempted to draw the cerebral and associative qualities inherent in the nature of typefaces and text, out into the physical and material space of architecture; and inversely to draw the sensual and impressionistic nature of designed space into the arena of the partially constructed thought. These qualities from the two practices -the qualities from the two which were closer to a relationship of mutual reciprocality between the experience and reading of the space, and its design- were extracted, leaving behind any approach which formed an overtly explicit description of how the space should be read, or experienced. This meant that embodied in the process through which the group arrived at the form of the installation (the formulation of a three dimensional font, the writing of the name of the gallery in space, and the subsequent simulation of that name’s explosion within the gallery, and its freezing and materialisation at a moment of ambiguous eloquence) is a critical distancing from any form of declamatory object-hood on the side of the architecture, and a positioning away from any conclusive declamation of meaning by text from the side of typography. The fact that the research project is called Text Fields and not Text Space or Built Text, is precisely because the group want to create immersive environments of indeterminate origins and ambiguous meaning, in which the usual roles of the various design professions lose their central, fixed functions and roles, and begin to bleed into one another in a field of uninterrupted mental and physical figures and impressions, whose valification lies dually in the freedom of the subject from dictated readings (more towards fields of connotation), and the liberation of the designer from isolated categorisation.

The goals are broad and ambitious, and TF002 is the first built step in the exploration of these themes. It is the first 1:1 physical manifestation of the group and its discussions, and through its realisation has helped to summarize and bring together the issues, and how those issues might be transfigured into a spatial field, something which through the feedback the group has received from the installation, TF002 seems to be doing well.

Next step TF003

Extract from Proust's "The Fugitive"

p535
"When I wrote them, the sentences of my article were so weak compared to my thought, so complicated and opaque compared to my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that reading them caused me to suffer, they had only accentuated my feelings of impotence and an incurable lack of talent. But now in forcing myself to become a reader, if I delegated to others the painful duty of judging me, I was at least able to wipe the slate clean of what I had intended to do, by reading what I had done."

Opinion, and Extracts From Erwin Panofsky's Idea, A Concept In Art Theory

In true Panofsky fashion the book hops in and out of Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, and many of their recombinations and reformations from the high renaissance through to Neo-Classicism, in search of the chain of transformations undergone by the notion of the Idea in art, from its restriction of art to the world of shadows, to its glorification of art as matter enlivened by thought, to its role as weapon in the battle between the subjective and the objective, and even its use in the overcoming of such an opposition in the chasing of its origins back to the groundlessness of divinity. His narrative chain is impressive and fun, however I cannot help but be disappointed that after his recounting of all the fights and debates and dialectics over the centuries which have invigorated artists and artistic production, from the squabbling camps of the Caravvagisti naturalists and the Mannerist stylists, to the oppositions of the Impressionists and Expressionists, that after citing so much colourful material and debate that has arisen from the cyclical return of these recurrent themes, he seems to draw a line under the whole investigation, under all those themes, placing his narrative in the trash-heap of futility, as if it were a failed scientific experiment whose very subject had proven itself worthless and unsuitable for investigation. He wrote that “To recognize the diversity of these solutions and to understand their historical presuppositions is worthwhile for history’s sake, even though philosophy has come to realize that the problem underlying them is by its very nature insoluble”, and in so doing once again brings down philosophy’s heavy and blunt axe onto the nape of art’s soft neck, paternalistically pointing out to art that its energetic dialogues are pointless, that all they need to do is to look at the divine Kant and see that there can be no ground for artistic perception outside of itself, that there can be recourse neither to a pure nature nor to a transcendental “thing-in-itself”, that oppositions like that between “idealism” and “naturalism” are illusions of illogic, dialectical antinomies that have arisen from a misunderstanding of the origins of artistic perception; and so the debate is closed. The oppositions of subject-object, nature-style, systematization-intuition, etc are all passionate phantasms over which so much intellectual energy has been wasted, the interesting residue of which just so happens to be the voluminous and eminently inexplicable mass of sculpture and painting that silently sits in its museums, tormenting the likes of Panofsky in their wordlessness, but which he cannot ignore, and so after convicting the reasons behind their production as being guilty of epistemological inadequacy, he must simply catalogue the sculptures and the ideas behind them like a good botanist cataloguing a species doomed to extinction, and so having noted their existence, having marked their irrelevance, he closes the book on the vainness of art.

How would a writer feel if a theorist came and declared that philosophy had discovered the insolubility of the problem underlying the nature of literary invention? That all the discussions between writers as to the nature of factual history and fictional representation, of style and content, of reality and truth, were all silly disagreements based on their inability to see that the problems themselves had been misplaced, that they were locked in endlessly circling dialectical antinomies? I would think that he might be rather perplexed at the nature of ideas in writing being posed as a problem that should be solvable, that such a notion was as laughable and arid as being told that while people can discuss as much as they like about whatever they so please, it is all pointless because the sum of all their debates cannot be resolved into a proof that concludes a philosophically framed problem. There seems to me to be a misunderstanding about the oppositions in art-production, in that I do not think their value lies in their ability to compose in aggregate an elegant answer to any of the problems they present (which is what many an art theorist seems to look for), or even that their connections in time should be logical enough to form a coherent history, rather it seems to me that their value lies in the quantity and quality of the artistic phenomena they engender; that the amount of investigation they demand be justified not by their quality as resolvable equations, but by the strength and vigour of the pursuit after an unachievable goal which they inspire in the artists pre-occupied with their ideas. And the reason that certain oppositions and questions keep coming back in various forms, and keep inspiring generation after generation of artists to produce, is not that they are logically interesting and eminently given to discursiveness, but that they are representative of various facets of human nature, perfect mirrors and justifications of all the various shades of character-types in the pool of humanity (the ‘rigorous’ types disposed first to systematization and then ‘the scientific’, and the ‘spiritual’ types first to the idealistic and later the absolute, etc etc); and just as (I pray) the diversity of civilisation will never implode to a point where all is in agreement with all else, but will rather remain abundant in human archetypes which subtly shift in combination from person to person and generation to generation, so artistic discourse will continue to be rich in discussions and disagreements which are as rich and inspiring, but also as repetitive and unchanging, as the nature of human character itself.

P31
Plotinus says:
For he who contemplates physical beauty must not lose himself therein, but he must recognise that it is an image and a vestige and a shadow, and he must flee to that of which it is a likeness. For if one were to rush forth and to grasp for truth that which is only a beautiful reflection in the water, then the same thing will happen to him that happened to the one about whom a meaningful myth tells how he, wanting to grasp a mirrored reflection, vanished in the depths of the waters; in the same way, he who holds on to physical beauty and will not let go of it, will sink, not with his body but with his soul, into the dark abysses, horrible for the mind to behold, where he will languish blindly in Orcus, consorting with shadows there as he did here.

Thus the Platonic attack accuses the arts of continually arresting man’s inner vision within the realm of sensory images, that is, of actually obstructing his contemplation of the world of Ideas [relevant passage not included in this extract, see p30]; and the Plotinian defence condemns the arts to the tragic fate of eternally driving man’s inner eye beyond these sensory images, that is, of opening to him the prospect of the world of Ideas but at the same time veiling the view. Understood as copies of the sensory world, works of art are divested of a more elevated spiritual or, if you will, symbolic meaning; understood as revelations of Ideas, they are divested of the timeless validity and self-sufficiency which properly belongs to them.

P39
Scholasticism in general, just like Plato, showed far less interest in the problem of art than in the problem of the beautiful, much more compelling because of its amalgamation with the problem of the good.

P50
[Alberti’s Treatise] differs from earlier literature of art by no longer answering the question “how to do it?” but the quite different and thoroughly unmedieval question “what abilities and, above al, what kind of knowledge enable the artist to confront nature with confidence whenever he is required to do so?”
In its attitude toward art the Renaissance thus differed fundamentally from the Middle Ages in that it removed the object from the inner world of the artist’s imagination and placed it firmly in the “outer world”. This was accomplished by laying a distance between the “subject” and “object” much as in artistic practice perspective placed a distance between the eye and the world of things –a distance which at the same time objectifies the “object” and personalizes the “subject”.

P63
It is clear from what has been said that the “subject-object problem” was now ripe for a basic clarification. For as soon as the “subject” is given the task of obtaining the laws of artistic production from reality by his own effort instead of being allowed to presuppose them above reality (and above himself), there necessarily arises the question of when and for what reasons he is justified in claiming to have these laws correct. Yet –and this is particularly significant- it was only the definitely “Mannnerist” school of thought which first achieved a basic clarification of the problem, or at least consciously demanded it.

P65
The concept of the “Idea” was already transformed into the concept of the “ideal” during the renaissance. This stripped the Idea of its metaphysical nobility but at the same time brought it into a beautiful and almost organic conformity with nature: and Idea which is produced by the human mind but, far from being subjective and arbitrary, at the same time expresses the laws of nature embodied in each object, achieves basically the same thing by intuitive synthesis that Alberti, Leonardo, and Durer had tried to achieve by discursive synthesis when they summarized and systematized a rich material, gained by observation and approved by expert judgement, into a theory of proportion: the perfection of the “natural” by means of art.

P79
[Mannersists] rejected both the flowing freedom of baroque space and the lawful order and stability of Renaissance space, and created instead even severer restraints precisely by means of planarity. In a similar way the avowals of artistic freedom co-existed –not too peacefully- with the dogma that artistic creativity could be taught and learned, that is, that it could be systematized. Perhaps this dogma received very special stress precisely because it was feared that otherwise art might be threatened by subjective arbitrariness.

P88
At the end of his book Zuccari interprets the term disegno interno as an etymological symbol of man’ssimilarity to God (disegno = segno di dio in noi), and he celebrates it as the “second sun of the cosmos”, the “second creating Nature”, and the “second life-giving and life-sustaining world spirit”

P123
Durer:
He who has done much measuring will develop his own Augenmass (ie intuitive sense of proportion); he who “has filled his mind full” by much Abmachen (ie reproducing nature from life), will accumulate a “secret treasure of the heart”, from which he can pour forth what he “has gathered in from the outside for a long time”.

P124
Ideas normally provide a guarantee of objective validity and beauty in the work of art; with Durer however, their proper function is to ensure originality and inexhaustibility in that they enable the artist to pour forth “always something new” from his mind. The theory of Ideas, which here almost take on the character of inspirations, serves to support that romantic conception of genius that recognizes the mark of true artistry not in correctness and beauty but in an unending plenitude that always creates things unique and things that never existed before.

Positive and Negative Creativity

The post in which I revisited an old text talked about a form of heaviness, a solid presence which I often feel weighing down from somewhere just antecedent to my thoughts, a presence which, when it has coagulated a certain amount of units of pure subjectivity around itself, forms a dense intuitive singularity of a ripeness which is impossible to ignore, a pungent and pendulous fatness which imposes itself on every waking thought like the distinct and material urge to empty one’s bowels, except insisting on its release through the hands via the intellect rather than the anus via the intestine. This urge to release what has been metabolised in the mysterious organ that is the brain is the result of the bodily digestion of external reality, the by-product of the process by which the brain consumes that which is external to itself and assimilates it as part of its being, a necessarily continuous nourishment that keeps the mind full of a fresh sense of reality as it loses the present to the vagaries of memory in an uninterrupted stream, forming a mental analogue to the materially essential and unceasing replenishment of our cells by consuming physical matter from the world around us. The processes themselves are metabolic and vital, one for physical health and the other mental, and while both continually replenish their respective realms they conversely create superfluous material which must be excreted as it does not constitute a functioning part of the body, superfluous material which makes its presence felt in the gut, and the mind. The build-up of this by-product of existence and engagement with the surrounding world might have become intolerable for me, might have been a great source of pain if I had not been fortunate enough in life to have had my hands and thoughts introduced to -and trained in- the transubstantiation of mental figure to physical matter, a skill which has allowed me to not only rid myself of these accumulations, which I imagine would otherwise have clogged up my primary apprehension of things outside of myself, but to even begin refashioning small segments of the world around me in consonance with the intuitive and internal process of mental metabolis, in other words the release of this superfluous material now brings me not just the relief of excretion, but also the pleasure of creation.

I have become somehow intimate with the exigencies of the natural functioning of both the stomach and the mind, and have become relatively adept at procuring both food and stimuli that will make me at once feel reasonably healthy and adequately engaged and productive, rendering these biological systems generally predictable, predominantly stable, verging on the habitual. Unfortunately, permeating every stage of the metabolism of both my mind and body, there is an unstable element, a tenacious and inscrutable presence which destabilises the placid equanimity that would be so pleasantly balanced without it. I hadn’t thought about it much recently, preferring to stare into the wine-glass rather than into its entirely specular face, but a brief conversation on the terrace at the AA, and my attempt to be truthful rather than phatic, led me to think a little about its impact on my production, and by association my life. Asked how (or why, I cannot remember which) I was so continuously ‘creative’, I replied phatically that it was because ‘I enjoy it’, vaguely justifying the ease and emptiness of the response to myself via the narrow connection of its positive verb to the slow, quiet and broad pleasure to be extracted from the metabolic, biological creativity I enjoy so much; and while usually such vague justifications are satisfactory this one was clearly insufficient in that the question had been asked about the quantity of my creativity, its incessancy rather than about any quality, and the slow form of production with its occasionally heavy moments of fecundity which I was referring the ‘I enjoy it’ to is not one that produces anything in great quantities at all, it is something entirely else that fills in the gaps between those moments of weight and substantiality, something totally different in kind that forces a certain pace to hands that would otherwise perhaps be helping others or working to make money. It is that other thing which needed to be referred to, and I could not reconcile it to ‘I enjoy it’ because –and this struck me rather heavily at that moment- there was no pleasure contained within my recollection of it whatsoever, it was entirely devoid of delight, or of enjoyment. Rather than emerging painlessly from within me, than being products of a harmony between body and intent, the majority of works I produce are artistic palliatives; not independent sources of joy or pride, but manifestations of a repeated and desperate desire to be rid of an implacable, vicious and mercurial substance which corrupts and agitates every part of my nature that it touches. When I am trying to rest and relax it inserts itself into the gap between the silence and my enjoyment of it, disrupting any germinal relationship between the two by taking the form of an immaterial and shapeless anxiety, an anxiousness which drives me into the arms of books and drink in search of other forms of silence; when I am trying to enjoy an entirely innocent and enjoyable meal it sinks into the delightful union of nature and pleasure that is the transcendental heart of dining, and corrupts it, distorting the balance between hunger and enjoyment so that hunger grows so frantically unstable, so hysterically nervous, that the best that can be hoped for from meals becomes not delight, but relief from a monstrously enlarged hunger; and when I am trying to work, trying to do anything that is not within the orbit of a creative activity, the greater the time spent away from making things, the more items of artifice that I feel I should have made in the preceding interval, the smaller the value that seems appended to me, the further my internal self-estimation falls towards the crushing point of worthlessness, and it is the feeling of proximity to that point of nothingness which agitates a yawning terror and drives me wildly back into production, clawing feverishly drawing by drawing, design by design back from the brink of nothingness. Works produced under these circumstances are definitely not positives, not items of pleasure with value in themselves, they are instead negatives, momentary reliefs from the terror of worthlessness whose value lie in the absence of an unpleasant feeling, the lack of a troubling agitation. They are artistic analgesics, and form a potent medicine in the cabinet of calmatives that habit has developed to give me respite from that one same devilish toxicity, that selfsame noxiousness that is always there in the smooth integers of my personality, ready to crack them into unrelated and selfish fractions; that unitary disruptor which is the ticking heart of that terrible anxiety I always find in silence, that monstrous starvation I have to face in meals and the awful descent into worthlessness I cannot avoid if I am not producing.

It would not be true to say that everything I do is tainted in this way, since there is always the genius of that silent metabolic process which continues to consume reality, reaffirm existence and excrete singular beauty; it is a genius which resides in a place that lies behind and before the areas where anxiety and agitation inject themselves, a position which allows those positive, natural and pre-neurotic creative acts to develop and occur simultaneously with those negative ones whose aim is palliative. And the two have even fed each other’s ability for self-realisation, in that the relentless drive to assuage the ego’s perpetually diminishing self-worth through production has always had the positive consequence of forcing the hands to learn new techniques, hone old ones, and broach new mediums, skills which in turn have helped in the creative excretion of the residual build-up of mental metabolis, helped in the formation of natural, positive, complete, and joyful objects of creation.

And so if asked the question again of how or why I am so constantly creative, while I cannot in good faith reply that it is because ‘I enjoy it’, I equally would not be able to say that it is only because ‘I want to avoid torment’, my reduced and lazy reply would simply have to be ‘because it pre-occupies me entirely’.

Extracts from 'The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays' by Charles Baudelaire

These are all taken from ‘The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays’. Reading them was easy and enjoyable since most of the ideas set out and discussed by Baudelaire in this book overlap with my own prejudices to the point where the reading of it was like spending an evening with an artist friend who is passionate, repressed and indignant about all the same things as you, and the time you spend together flies past in discussions containing only varying insights around consonant opinions, never a disagreement whether fundamental or contingent, just enraptured complicity…

P3
In contrast to the academic theory of an unique and absolute beauty; to show that beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition, although the impression that it produces is single -for the fact that it is difficult to discern the variable elements of beauty within the unity of the impression invalidates in no way the necessity of variety in its composition. Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.

Stendhal [] approached the truth more closely than many another when he said that ‘Beauty is nothing else but a promise of happiness’

P8
The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and colour. I am prepared to go even further and assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussion in the very core of the brain. The man of genius has sound nerves, while those of a child are weak. With the one, Reason has taken up a considerable position; with the other, Sensibility is almost the whole being. But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will –a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.

P9
The genius of childhood –a genius for which no aspect of life has become stale.

That only too difficult art –sensitive spirits will understand me- of being sincere without being absurd.

The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

P12
By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the first woman before the fall of man.

P13
In short, for any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it.

P32
Evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally; Good is always the product of some art. All that I am saying about Nature as a bad counsellor in moral matters, and about Reason as true redeemer and reformer, can be applied to the realm of Beauty. I am thus led to regard external finery as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul.

P33
Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation. And so it has been sensibly pointed out (though the reason has not been discovered) that every fashion is charming, relatively speaking, each one being a new and more or less happy effort in the direction of Beauty, some kind of approximation to an ideal for which the restless human mind feels a constant, titillating hunger.

P49
The whole visible universe is but a store-house of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform. All the faculties of the human soul must be subordinated to the imagination, which puts them in requisition all at once.

P51

I spoke a moment ago of the remarks of certain bricklayers. By this word I wish to categorize that class of heavy and boorish spirits (their number is legion) who appraise objects solely by their contour, or worse still, by their three dimensions, length, breadth and height –for all the world like savages and rustics. I have often heard people of that kind laying down a hierarchy of qualities which to me was unintelligible; I have heard them declare, for example, that the faculty that enables one man to produce an exact contour, or another a contour of supernatural beauty, is superior to the faculty whose skill it is to make an enchanting assemblage of colours. According to those people, colour has no power to dream, to think or to speak. It would seem that when I contemplate the works of one of those men who are specifically called ‘colourists’, I am giving myself up to a pleasure whose nature is far from a noble one; they would be delighted to call me ‘materialistic’, reserving for themselves the aristocratic title of ‘spiritual’.

P66
‘I remember very well (he [Eugene Delacroix] used to say sometimes) that when I was a child, I was a monster. The understanding of duty is only acquired very slowly, and it is by nothing less than pain, chastisement and the progressive exercise of reason that man can gradually diminish his natural wickedness.’

P107
Truth has nothing to do with Song. Everything that goes to make up the charm, the grace, the irresistible fascination of a Song would only take away from Truth her authority and power. Cool, calm and unimpassioned, the demonstrative mood rejects the gems and flowers of the Muse; it is thus the absolute opposite of the poetic mood. Pure intellect has as its goal Truth, Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the Moral Sense teaches us Duty.

P124
To find a critic turning into a poet would be an entirely new event in the history of the arts, a reversal of all the psychical laws, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great pets naturally and fatally become critics. I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics.

Poetry exists and asserts itself first, and then gives birth to the study of the rules.

P137
As far as art is concerned I admit that I am no enemy of extravagance; moderation has never seemed to me to be a sign of a robust artistic nature.

P150
Observe also that it is with his tears that man washes the afflictions of man, and that it is with his laughter that he sometimes soothes and charms his heart; for the phenomena engendered by the Fall will become his means of redemption.

P153
Laughter is satanic: it is thus profoundly human. It is the consequence in man of the idea of his own superiority. And since laughter is essentially human, it is, in fact, essentially contradictory; that is to say that it is at once a token of an infinite grandeur and an infinite misery –the latter in relation to the absolute Being of whom man has an inkling, the former in relation to the beasts. It is from the perpetual collision of these two infinities that laughter is struck.

As humanity uplifts itself, it wins for evil, and for the understanding of evil, a power proportionate to that which it has won for good.

P195
Those artists who are the most inventive, the most astonishing and the most eccentric in their conceptions are often men whose life is calm and minutely ordered. Several of them have had the most highly-developed domestic virtues. Have you not often noticed that there is nothing more like the perfect bourgeois than the artist of concentrated genius?

P200
The toy is the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same sense of convictions.

Revisiting An Old Text

I wrote this a couple of years ago as a cathartic exercise through which I wanted to give form to, while also venting some frustrations, questions and feelings that I was struggling with. Every few years I reach a point at which, after slowly making my way through a few important experiences in life, and digesting their lessons; a few books that in time have proven to be sufficiently consonant with my character for them to be penetrated by my understanding, but differing in class from my habitual thought by a distance of enough extent to broaden my view of things; and a few sensual encounters of such immediacy and thoroughness, such full and uncontrollable occupation of my sensibilities, that they seem to indicate an undeniable predilection residing somewhere in the very material of my nature; after a few such moments, after these events have begun coalescing into one intermingled entity, pressing into each other with complete disregard towards contradictions and differences, the point is reached at which they together develop a mass, a weight and heaviness whose presence imposes itself on me in the form of an agitation, an anxiousness, an awareness of an uncomfortable presence that is not a part of the routine pattern of my thoughts, and that can only be lightened by attempting to describe it in words. And when a moment of fullness like this happens to arrive at a time when I am deeply frustrated, unable to actively pursue any ideas because of some external obligation or restriction, which was what happened at the time I wrote the text below, on its way out the thought tends to get mixed up with a quantity of desperation which lends it a pompous air, delivered through sweeping statements and vast generalisations. I usually try to avoid large and exposed abstractions, preferring to focus on small slices of reality, a significant minority of whose factors can at least be partially described, but I guess that when I am feeling confined and claustrophobic there is something terribly liberating about the incredible openness, the huge and vague and arrogant imprecision of the strident, but ungrounded declamation. At any other time the idea below would probably have unrolled itself through the description of a specific incident, or two, the nature of which would be comfortably analogous to the thoughts I wished to convey; but here the incident became the entire narrative thread of my life, and the thought was forced into the role of analogue for that thread, effectively imbuing a simple idea (the desire to design along the edges of sincerity, authenticity, tastefulness etc) with the rather heavy job of carrying me forward, of continuing the thread of my narrative into some exciting and open future, a role which looking back looks implausible, and clearly required the backing of all the fiery imagery that the text is so full of. But whether it is a plausible text now isn’t at issue, in fact reading it after all this time it seems very flimsy and transparent. What struck me, and where the text’s relevance lies, is in the disparity between its apparent puerility (a quality I find in most of what I write when re-visiting it), and the massive effect it had on my creative production over the two years that followed. I wrote a lot of things after this text, many of which were clearer, more grounded, more precise; many of which were formed in that same strange way in my mind, synthesizing out of a nebulous cloud of experiences; many of which led to the creation of interesting works; but none of which had a part to play in the genesis of every single piece of work in that entire time-span in the way this one did; none of which held an energy which could propel me to take up the pencil, mouse, camera or brush to a degree so opposite to the objective quality of the writing itself. But as I see it -and the reason why the work had such an long half-life- the causal relationship does not lead from the strength and quality of the text as detached object to the amount of creative energy released; but rather directly from the amount of singular emotional investment, and the level to which that investment has embedded itself within the birth of the idea to the amount of creative energy released. Sometimes an idea happens to be piggy-backed-on by a moment of personal re-orientation, and regardless of the inherent value of the idea, the chance union of the two (inflammatory language, vast abstractions an all) creates a constructive engine, a kernel of energy which can feed the flame of many following activities. I have only passed through three such chance unions, the first being an awfully long –and just awful- poem through which I faced a certain unwanted orientation of mine, and set the ground for three years of paintings and drawings; the second being a story through which I acknowledged the comfortable tyranny of habit, and set the scene for two years of stories and spaces which searched for a calibrated balance between the fearful grip of routine and the beauty of the quotidian; and this, the third, in which I adumbrated the edges of the topics of authenticity, sincerity and meaning, topics which I am still teasing out in whatever I do. Together they form a sort of ‘cloud of points’ that define the edges within which I roam.

More After The Break...

Extracts From Dave Hickey's "The Invisible Dragon, Four Essays On Beauty"

These are taken from Hickey's Four Essays on Beauty, his other masterful collection "Air Guitar, Essays on Art and Democracy" seems to have either flown from my shelves or been eaten by one of my beastly proportioned Architecture tomes. If I find it I will post some extracts. Click here for a great talk he gave at Frieze 2007.

When he writes "Therapeutic Institution" Hickey is refering to art institutions that are usualy government funded and do not have to negotiate in any way with the market.

P57
"I would suggest that, far from ameliorating the artist’s radical, infantile wishes, the rhetoric of beauty politicizes them, makes them publicly available, and proposes them in fact as social options. Further, I would suggest that Reichsminister Goebbels understood this, as did Alfred Barr, and Stalin –and that none of them was particularly sanguine at the prospect.
This is not to say, of course, that art is just advertising, only that art, outside the institutional vitrine of therapeutic mystery, is never not advertising and never apolitical. Commodity advertising and pornography only define the limiting conditions of art’s project, its objective and somatic extremes, but they participate, just like the real thing, in that accumulated shifting, protean collection of tropes and figures that comprise “the rhetoric of beauty”."

P58
"We can, for instance, distinguish between the “the most beautiful image” that simply enfranchises the most people, and the “most effective beautiful image” that valorises the most preposterous (oops, problematic) content to the most people for the longest time. Raphael’s Maddona of the Chair would qualify here, for its having exquisitely valorised the “iffy” doctrines of the incarnate word and the virgin birth to generations of Catholics worldwide who should have known better."

P61
"Our relationship to images authorised by beauty is now distinct to our relationship to images authorised by the therapeutic institution, and radically so. And this is no less the case when a single image undergoes a shift of authorisation, as anyone who has loaned work to a museum exhibition can tell you. Visiting that work can be like visiting an old friend in prison. It is a distinctly different image, hanging among a population of kindred offenders, bereft of its eccentricity and public franchise, yet somehow, on account of that loss, newly invested with a faintly ominous kind of parochial power."

P62
"Sadism is about nature and power. Masochism is about culture and, ironically, the law. Finally, sadism deals with the imposition of “formal values” and the cruel affirmation of “natural law”, and masochism focuses on deferred sublimity and the vertiginous rhetoric of trust. As a consequence, Deleuze notes, “the sadist is in need of institutions,” and “the masochist of contractual relations.”
The analogy I wish to draw here is blatant. The rhetoric of beauty tells the story of the beholder who, like Masoch’s victim, contracts his own submission –having established, by free consent, a reciprocal, contractual alliance with the image. The signature of this contract, of course, is beauty. On the one hand, its rhetoric enfranchises the beholder; on the other hand, it seductively proposes a content that is, hopefully, outrageous and possible. In any case, this vertiginous bond of trust between the image and the beholder is private, voluntary, a little scary, and since the experience is not presumed to be an end in itself, it might, ultimately, have some consequence.
The experience of art within the therapeutic institution, however, is presumed to be an end in itself. Under its auspices, we play a minor role in the master’s narrative –the artist’s tale- and celebrate his autonomous acts even as we are off-handedly victimised by their philosophical force and ruthless authority. Like princes within the domain of the institution, or jailhouse Mafiosi, such works have no need of effeminate appeal. And we, poor beholders, like the silly demimondaines in Sade’s Philosophy of the Bedroom, are presumed to have just wandered in, looking for a kiss, so Pow! Whatever we get, we deserve –and what we get most prominently is ignored, disenfranchised and instructed. Then told that it is “good” for us."

P64
"Nothing redeems but beauty, its generous permission, its gorgeous celebration of all that has previously been uncelebrated."

"As Shaw pointed out, institutions collapse from lack of funding, they do not die from lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning."

Mark Leckey, Carey Young, A Couple of Juries and Nicolas Bourriaud

I wrote the extract below (after the dotted line) for another blog-thing about a month ago after having been to see Mark Leckey (last year’s Turner Prize winner) give a ‘performance’ at the ICA.

I didn’t post it here because it was only meant to be a springboard for a discussion about the uses of narrative within the unit I am attending at the AA, but Ive been thinking alot about the performance, and the thoughts it brought up, since reading about the aggressive responses that Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhibition (and accompanying theory) on the Altermodern at the Tate (Alter?)Modern have been receiving from the British press. He is apparently being called everything under the sun (thank you Momus for the lowdown), but a lot of the criticism seems to revolve around his stance supposedly 'not being subversive', and the quality of not being subversive seems to be being unquestioningly allied most often with adjectives like ‘boring’, ‘conservative’, ‘passé’, ‘flaccid’, ‘indulgent’ and ‘meaningless’, which I guess means that if you are subversive you are exciting, rebellious, fresh, erect/vigorous, tough and meaningful.

More After The Break...

Fragments from a Sketchbook

A couple of things I quite like that I found on skipping through an old sketchbook:

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We don’t shatter, we foam our edges away
and retreat inwards to our pencils,
pens, keyboards and brushes.

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When paragons proliferate, paradigms federate,
and something distinctly human begins to emerge.

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In certain places, objects made by man over the centuries have the quality of geography. In these places architectural-tectonics acquire the nature of the residue of plate-tectonics: namely they achieve that state where in total stillness, inanimate material embodies the exertion of force on colliding matters. In the public steps by San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (which make their way under a large group of buildings), there is such an instance, one felicitously reached through a process of aggregation and demolition: a process which usually ends in collage-like spaces but there, in the distorted, broken, replaced and remade strata of its ceiling and walls, something entirely more massive is at work.

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[about the Campidoglio]
Sometimes things are crushed too close together, others merge, still others are simply too big or too small. Boundaries are used as expressive foils against which elements can react to create impressions of solidity, hyperactive syncopation, compression etc etc

Character II

I should probably mention, after my brother thought that I was both a girl who sees animals everywhere and an insanely finnicky aesthete who has no real friends, that these characters are not me... I just wrote them for some background to a short film Im doing. Ill post that on HandBin when its done.

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Having lived on his own since leaving the home of his parents as a teenager he had become somewhat fastidious in his habits, a tendency only exacerbated over the past few years as the orbit encompassing his daily environment had been intentionally reduced, flat by flat, job by job, supermarket by supermarket, until the range of all potentially unexpected inconveniences was contained within a comfortably restricted radius of ten walking minutes from his place. He had trimmed the frayed edges of his activities in a similar manner, controlling their number by excluding those whose content involved a high proportion of unpredictability; whether that be the innumerable and often unavoidable encounters that occur in nightclubs, or the too often inadequate, and quite randomly bestowed attentions paid to hygiene in the hotels and bed and breakfasts of this world; it was these moments which saw the volatility of chance scratch violent marks on the pristine surface of a life he had been busily polishing, perfecting and preening down to its smallest details, down to the meticulous pairing of complementary shades of gray and their fabric’s subtly contrasting weaves, down to the diaphanous aroma of Polianthes Tuberosa scent and Bergamotte oil that filled the space immediately around him, down even to the pruning of his friends and colleagues into a small but vigorous collection, which neither cared too much to be any imposition on his privacy, nor was entrepreneurial enough to seek out and search for more interesting and rewarding relationships. This scrupulous and highly developed aesthetic sensibility with which he diligently governed his life had also taken the form of a system of ethics based on the precedents of his own experience, a moral code of unquestioned value against which he would mercilessly judge his own every action and decision; he never spared himself the harshest of self imposed verdicts and their punishments of ever increasing habitual and aesthetic sedulousness, punishments which sunk him further and further into the tyranny of a regimen so uniquely structured that he soon reached a point where everybody else, every other person he came across -no matter how clean or polite or well turned-out- was nothing but a seething hoard of flagrantly ill-considered mistakes, a living manufacturer of repulsive flaws. His entire method of judgment meant that when spending time in the theatre, the cinema, a lecture, or any other intimate environment with other people, the upturning of a collar, the odour of cheap fabric softener, the uncontrolled wispiness of a haircut, the unwieldy handling of a gaudy shade of mascara, the continuous twitching of an errant lip, the maker’s label flipping out the neckline at the back of a t-shirt, the red and dripping nose of someone with a cold, all shocked him as fully as would someone masturbating in the auditorium for anyone else: he rarely managed to pay attention to what was happening on screen or on stage as his agitated gaze was inevitably pulled through the crowd’s flagrant rudeness, its total lack of decorum, and while he would have instantaneously purged himself of any such deviant ugliness as that which surrounded him, deep inside, under a sharp line of righteous indignation, lay the fascination of a voyeur, the unthought envy of the man who sees that other person masturbating in the aisles, and although full of horror, nonetheless wishes at his very core to be able to cast aside his values and be in that person’s place. Without his realizing it, in the flawless excellence of his routine, it was the appended and entirely un-excellent anomalies of the stuffy and jumbled atmospheres of West-End theatres and the closeness of underground Odeons that maintained a tether attaching him unconsciously, vicariously, voyeuristically, but surely, to the rest of humanity.

Character I

She has long since stopped spending entire weekends at what were once called squat raves, but she has nevertheless retained from these events a slight perspectival obliquity, an instinctive way of seeing things, in this case animals, that are not inherent in the people she is looking at and talking to, as if they were actually innate within them somehow. A precocious consumer of amazingly human-looking animal cartoon characters from an early age, even completely falling for the lusciously maned and youthful Simba (of Lion King fame) at one point, she had always been used to seeing human characteristics in animals, whether it be the sensitive soul expressed in the sad eyes of her dog or the gormless credulity so obviously expressed in the rolling eyes of a drooling cow; but it took a particular mix of specific narcotics on one particular night in a rave for her to have this tendency inadvertently reversed. Apart from the air around her being apparently filled with small, crawling black creatures, she noticed, or rather couldn’t help but be utterly taken aback by everyone around her being animals, or maybe not quite animals, but at least as having such strong characteristics of certain creatures that they were somewhere between the two –beautiful animals with human form and language, and they were beautiful, as beautiful and beguiling as all those animals which had been transformed by human characteristics in all the Disney films she had cherished so long before, but there, in that room full of crawling black things, her mind had inadvertently reapplied the magic of analogy back into her world, back into her almost-adult, increasingly magic-less existence. Whether stimulated by narcotics or not, and increasingly not as time moved on, the appreciation of her human surroundings was enriched and partly guided by the resemblances she found between every combination of jaw line, eyes and nose -or any other mix of body parts- and her exotic index of animals and their characters; the two bringing separate qualities which together forge for her evocative wholes which would have been impossible through bare observation.

People Watching

The night before last I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the orchestra stalls –the lowest area of seating- in the Royal Opera House, reading the cast-list and listening to the struggled breathing of a large man next to me when the lights dimmed and the entire audience began to clap. The clapping began slowly like a breeze running through the crowd, making the throngs of elegant individuals rustle with a sound somewhere between the wind in a forest and a distantly falling cascade, not as sharp as it usually sounds because the space was so large and because nobody was clapping to any precise cue, there was nothing happening on stage, the applause had emerged from within the audience while the hall was in semi-darkness, with nothing to see but itself and as I looked up at this moving blanket of sound I saw innumerable people rising up, away from me in every direction, stacked on top of each other until they disappeared behind the glistening ceiling, but below it they were as decorative in their clapping as the gilding was in its shimmer, and everybody was facing me; in the quasi-light before the opera, this encrusted waterfall of people seemed to be clapping for me and I couldn’t help but let myself go for a second and be filled with the expansive glamour of attention, be irradiated with the elating energy of a thousand pairs of eyes: for a brief moment, because of the combination of the extrusion of an elongated horse-shoe plan and my position in its pits, I felt a touch of the basic form of celebrity in all its seductiveness, I felt how the simple accumulation of individual attentions on one person can have the sublime force of standing frozen in joyous, exultant terror in front of a vertiginous Andean precipice.

Boxes in operas and the theatre rarely have the best view, and often have severely obstructed views, but this was irrelevant since their primary role was not to provide a perfect place from which to see the performance -the optimal place to see the stage- rather they were meant to be the perfect place from which to be seen, to be stages in their own right, and also from where to have the perfect view of the audience. The event being performed on stage was often just the funnel through which a kaleidoscopic display of dress, decorum, judgemental observation, social critique and good old people-watching would be brought together in one place and time; it was the packaging in four dimensions which contained the sparkling bitchiness within its two or three hour limits, and it was this coruscating display of interchanging glances and asides within the audience which was for what the architecture was designed, both to be its container in three dimensions and its catalyst in form: from the over-articulation of every protruding element within the auditorium which framed the miniscule and multiple exchanges within the audience more elaborately than any exchange between them and the stage, to the overall layout with its considerable care for sightlines leading in any other direction than the stage. The space of the audience as a self-observing and self-celebrating social spectacle was codified within the architecture and layout of many of our older performance spaces, and while most of them are no longer loci of any kind of social relevance, like archaeological sites they retain pungent remains which can be picked for clues: their architectures worked for, and with, more material than the performances they hosted and while the endless iterations of Carmen and Rigoletto, the silences of abandonment or the thumping of a nightclub surround the crumbling or pristinely renovated stucco and gilding, there are whole milieus of strange and distant fashions, hairstyles, predilections, conversations, hatreds, jealousies and allegiances whose existences tenuously cling to the present with every unnecessary chandelier that has survived their abandonment, with every pointlessly plush surface populated with irreverent putti that has been left uncovered.

I am embarrassed and thrilled every time that I go to the Queen Elizabeth Hall when during the performance I turn around in my seat to look behind me at the encyclopaedic grid of faces rising away in its huge, dark space; embarrassed because I am standing out like an incorrect calculation in a vast spreadsheet, denuded and alone, and thrilled because there are so many people, and they are endlessly interesting and I want to see them, exchange glances with them, study them furtively but in full sight, experience the performance differently depending on their reaction, hate some of them because they are elated and I am frowning and the show is just stupid… I once saw a tutor from my old university when doing this, sitting with his arms around a student of his from whom, the moment he saw me, he withdrew his arms and enacted a comical attempt to hide his face from view. He immediately ran out as the lights came on.

My Synagogue is large and split into two levels, the upper level rising steeply away from its banisters in tiers, and curving around the floor below to create an unusually accentuated Edwardian amphitheatre full of women and girls with large bobbing hats populating the brightly lit second floor, and suited men with small white shawls crammed in rows beneath, talking to each other with furrowed brows and serious glances which place the atmosphere there somewhere between the boardroom and the Gentleman’s club. The men are arrayed in subterranean solemnity in full sight of the women who look down on them, pointing and talking to each other and about the level beneath in such a way that the boys and men can tell not only who they are talking about amongst the huddles suits –the seating is bought by subscription and only rarely alters, meaning everybody knows who is being talked about- but also what they are thinking and feeling, since the women are all set in full view and relief by the progressively raised tiers of seating which isolates them into gesticulating tableaux. Everybody is seen by everybody else at every moment, and very soon after each sermon the observations made within the amphitheatre are shared, tested, confirmed or disputed when overall opinion assembles in the Synagogue’s lobby to noisily conclude its cultural verdicts on the evening’s “horrors”, “he should be ashamed”s and “she is really taking it very well”s, before spilling out into the street to go back to their respective dining rooms, armed with more than enough material for a good meal’s hearty and denunciatory conversation.