Category Archives: art

The art of stalking

In search of Sophie Calle, Vito Acconci and Christopher Nolan

Films such as Following by Christopher Nolan (whose 2006 film The Prestige is out now in Europe) and artworks such as Sophie Calle’s and Vito Acconci’s are about following perfect strangers for the kick of it. The art of stalking comes to mind.

The comparison of Calle with Acconci is inevitable:

The cultural and social question of who is using whom is always at issue in artwork that gives others a voice (Krzysztof Wodiczko’s enlistment of people with stories of cultural dislocation is one relevant example) or relies on their presence in some other way (the inevitable comparison, to Calle’s early work in particular, is Vito Acconci’s 1969 Following Piece) —Art in America, Sept, 2005 by Nancy Princenthal

For a picture of the Following Piece click here.

On Sophie Calle’s Address Book (1983):

One of Calle’s first projects to generate public controversy was Address Book (1983). The French daily newspaper Libération invited her to publish a series of 28 articles. Having recently found an address book on the street (which she photocopied and returned to its owner), she decided to call some of the telephone numbers in the book and speak with the people about its owner. To the transcripts of these conversations, Calle added photographs of the man’s favorite activities, creating a portrait of a man she never met, by way of his acquaintances. The articles were published, but upon discovering them, the owner of the address book, a documentary filmmaker named Pierre Baudry, threatened to sue the artist for invasion of privacy. As Calle reports, the owner discovered a nude photograph of her, and demanded the newspaper publish it, in retaliation for what he perceived to be an unwelcome intrusion into his private life.

On Following:

Following (1998) – Christopher Nolan
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Bill is a young, jobless aspiring writer. He tells a story about himself to a man, explaining how he began to follow random people on the street in an attempt to understand them. He sets up a number of rules to separate himself from the people he follows, but breaks them when he begins following a specific man, Cobb, day after day. Cobb wears a suit and leaves several different apartment buildings carrying a bag. He eventually confronts Bill at a diner and reveals that he is a burglar. Cobb invites Bill to accompany him on his next burglary.

On Following piece (1969) – Vito Acconci:

Following Piece is one of Vito Acconci’s early works. The underlying idea was to select a person from the passers-by who were by chance walking by and to follow the person until he or she disappeared into a private place where Acconci could not enter. The act of following could last a few minutes, if the person then got into a car, or four or five hours, if the person went to a cinema or restaurant. Acconci carried out this performance everyday for a month. And he typed up an account of each ‘pursuit’, sending it each time to a different member of the art community. —http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/01?print-friendly=true [Mar 2005]

Engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional

Tracey Emin (2006) – Tracey Emin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The most highly publicized of the infamous Young British Artists, Emin has stirred as much controversy as she has acclaim, being both highly personal and extremely original in her art. Emin’s work is engaging, titillating, disturbing, and startlingly confessional. One of her most famous pieces is Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with names. Another notorious work, My Bed—the scene where she spent four days contemplating suicide—was exhibited at Tate Britain when the artist was short-listed for the Turner prize in 1999. Though denounced by conservative critics at the outset, Emin’s work has attracted serious critical attention for more than a decade. In the words of Art in America, “What brought Emin to prominence was shock value, but what keeps her work powerful as she continues is the strength and nuance of its form and content.” Compiled in close collaboration with the artist herself—and unprecedented in its scope—this is the definitive book on Emin, featuring drawings, paintings, sculptures, appliqués and embroideries, neon and video stills as well as her own writing. –from the publisher

See also: contemporary art – British art

Carlo Chiostri

African child in tree with snake () Carlo or Sofia Chiostri

Image sourced here, from a series entitled ‘Modernism from the masses‘ dedicated to art deco postcards.

“It appears to me that Topor is the last representative of the great illustrators who, like Blake and Daumier, Doré and Carlo Chiostri (1863 – 1939), are capable of creating complete universes described in minute detail.” – Fellini quoted in Topor (1985) – Gina Kehayoff and Christoph Stölzl.

More on the notion of ‘modernism for the masses’ and the notion of modernism itself:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

Andromeda interpretations

Andromeda (1629) – Rembrandt

Rembrandt’s is one of the uglier interpretations of the Andromeda myth, especially when compared by the following by Chassériau and Doré.

Andromeda and the Nereids (1840) – Théodore Chassériau

Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883) painted Andromeda exposed to the sea-monster. (1869?)

Perseus Frees Andromeda (c. 1515) – Piero di Cosimo (1462 – 1521)

Hatching from a nameless gleam of light I see

Inspired by Richard T Scott’s comment New figurative art

Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo (1998)
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo (1998) features contributions of Luc Sante, who also contributed to a monograph on Guy Bourdin.

Octopus with the initials V. H. (ca. 1866) – Victor Hugo

The great romantic painter, Delacroix, wrote to Victor Hugo that, had he decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century. –via here.

Hatching from a nameless gleam of light I see
Monstrous flowers and frightening roses
I feel that out of duty I write all these things
That seem, on the lurid, trembling parchment,
To issue sinisterly from the shadow of my hand.
Is it by chance, great senseless breath
Of the Prophets, that you perturb my thoughts?
So where am I being drawn in this nocturnal azure?
Is it sky I see? Am I in command?
Darkness, am I fleeing? Or am I in pursuit?
Everything gives way. At times I do not know if I am
The proud horseman or the fierce horse;
I have the scepter in my hand and the bit in my mouth.
Open up and let me pass, abysses, blue gulf,
Black gulf! Be silent, thunder! God, where are you leading me?
I am the will, but I am the delirium.
Oh, flight into the infinite! Vainly I sometimes say,
Like Jesus calling out “Lamma Sabacthani,”
Is the way still long? Is it finished,
Lord? Will you soon let me sleep?
The Spirit does what it will. I feel the gusting breath
That Elisha felt, that lifted him;
And in the night I hear someone commanding me to go!

VICTOR HUGO

From ‘Le bien germe parfois…’ (Good Sometimes Germinates…),
from the collection Toute la lyre, first published 1888. via here.

Renunciation of a vocation

Having read about Rimbaud’s life (and how he had stopped writing altogether) in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, I re-read The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag. It’s incredible how Sontag – who was only 34 at the time this essay was published – reaches an impeccable style and an enormous lucidity. An excerpt:

The scene changes to an empty room.

Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. —…

The essay is published in the bundel Styles of Radical Will, which also features the seminal The Pornographic Imagination (1967).

L’Ultrameuble (1938) – Kurt Seligmann

L’Ultrameuble (Eng: Ultrafurniture) is a work of surrealist art by Kurt Seligmann. This 1938 sculpture is a three legged stool where the legs are quite literally women’s legs (stockinged mannikins’ legs in high-heel shoes.). It first came to my attention via the excellent German book Sade / Surreal.

Dismembered body parts such as dolls, living plants and speaking body parts belong to the category of the grotesque and the uncanny. Freud wrote an essay on the latter entitled The Uncanny in 1919:

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of [Wilhelm] Hauff’s, feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by [Albrecht] Schaeffer which I mentioned above–all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition. —The Uncanny (1919) – Sigmund Freud

A picture by Roger Schall of it here. It would make an ideal illustration for my page on independent body parts in fiction.

BTW, does anyone know the location of a the Legs video clip by ZZ Top?

P. S. I think I finally ‘ve been able to track the two writers Freud cites in his essay: Wilhelm Hauff and Albrecht Schaeffer.

Introducing Dr. Gaston Ferdière

Ferdière has been somewhat on my mind since a letter that Hans Bellmer wrote to him on his strange codependent relationship with Unica Zürn came to my attention. It appears that he was the psychiatrist of Unica Zürn, Antonin Artaud and Isidore Isou. Here is an excerpt from a 1995 article by British academic Stephen Barber:

“Under Ferdiere’s supervision, Artaud received 51 sessions of electroshock between June 1943 and December 1944. The treatment had been invented only five years earlier, by the Italian doctor Ugo Cerletti, who had observed the pacifying effect of electric shocks applied to the skulls of pigs in a Rome slaughterhouse and adapted the strategy for human application. The treatment was surrounded by an aura of discovery and excitement at the time Ferdiere began to use it, and he embraced it enthusiastically. Ferdiere’s assistant, Jacques Latremoliere, included an account of the treatment Artaud underwent in his doctoral thesis, Incidents and Accidents Observed in the Course of 1200 Electroshocks. He writes of the “theatrical reactions of the subject in the face of his hallucinations” and notes that one of Artaud’s vertebrae was shattered during the third of the unanesthetized sessions. Artaud himself would write of his having been taken for dead at the end of this same session, and of watching the orderlies prepare to take his “corpse” to the mortuary before he suddenly awakened after a coma of 90 minutes. Ferdiere, while not denying that such an incident took place, told me that, with such a volume of electroshocks being applied, it was difficult to remember this particular event. … Ferdiere, building on his reputation as the “rehabilitator” of Artaud, would subsequently become the psychiatrist of the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer and his companion, the poet Unica Zürn (who committed suicide in 1970 while under his care). He also treated the leader of the Lettrist art movement, Isidore Isou, during the events of May 1968 in Paris. Isou and his fellow Lettrist Maurice Lemaitre subsequently wrote an entire book of outrageous insults against Ferdiere, titled Antonin Artaud Tortured by the Psychiatrists. They asserted: “Dr Gaston Ferdiere is one of the greatest criminals in the entire history of humanity: a new Eichmann,” and demanded his immediate arrest …” —Art in America