Category Archives: culture

American academics down on their knees kissing French bums


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I am re-reading Sex, Art, and American Culture by Paglia after my brother salvaged a copy from the dustbin. It must have been 4 years since I first read it and I understand a lot more. The vehement attack on “French theory” now surprises me in the sense that she mainly focuses on Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard without mentioning what are imo the truly great French theorists: Barthes, Deleuze, Bataille. I know from a Salon q&a[1] that she doesn’t even like Bataille. Really! Re-read him Camille! In that short 1997 q&a she notes that she “was deeply disappointed in Bataille from the moment I picked up his books. His themes are my themes, his influences (in many cases) my influences.” She does confess to like Sade, Gautier, Balzac, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Sartre (whom I find difficult to stomach), de Beauvoir, Genet and Bachelard.

Of course her style is offensive (and I suspect it has had some re-writing in subsequent editions). As a European I find the following derogatory remarks on the French post-wwii-climate difficult to swallow (but funny anyhoo):

“Of course the French felt decentered: they had just been crushed by Germany. American G.I.’s (including my uncles) got shot up rescuing France when she was lying flat on her face under the Nazi boot. Hence it is revolting to see pampered American academics down on their knees kissing French bums.”

Nevertheless, Paglia strikes me time and time again as a great intellectual with an amount of books read which seems astronomical and a very astute power of analysis: how she equates Foucault’s taxonomy to Primitive Classification by Mauss and Durkheim and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to Durkheim‘s The Division of Labour in Society.

This reading also brought Arnold Hauser‘s The Social History of Art to my attention.

Sex, Art, and American Culture is a sensible buy for someone who wants to brush up on cultural history from an irreverent but yet well-read perseptive.

On a different note, and only for a Dutch-reading public: the publication of Hermans-Reve correspondence is imminent. Hermans was brilliant and Reve a bit of a bore, at one point Hermans decided not to continue the correspondence. Read more at The Paper Man.

Quiddity and Derrick May

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUWpSDtD9no&]

“It is what it is” (1988) – Derrick May

Prompted by a recent comment by Lichanos, here is a post on quiddity (the what-isness of things), Susan Sontag’s essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” and Derrick May.

Derrick May’s “It is what it is” is a composition first published in 1988 on Detroit recording label Transmat. Derrick May was my hero in the early 1990s but after his collaborations with System 7 (if you’d care to track down this material, only go for the Derrick May/Steve Hillage collaborations) he basically stopped making music.

“The scene changes to an empty room.”

“The Aesthetics of Silence” is an essay by Susan Sontag first published in book form in Styles of Radical Will. She examines three 20th century intellectuals who – after having produced work in their younger years – stopped making anything as they grew older. Her case rests on Arthur Rimbaud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Marcel Duchamp.

The analogies with Derrick May are obvious, but does he deserve to be mentioned in the row of illustrious predecessors?

Back to the title of this post. The oblique link is the title of this musical composition “It is what it is” = quiddity.

Nobrow manifestos, #2

The Pornographic Imagination is is my second entry in this series, the first was Leslie Fiedler’s Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1969).

The Pornographic Imagination is a nobrow essay by Susan Sontag first published in book form in Styles of Radical Will. It had been originally published two years earlier in the Partisan Review of spring 1967.

The subject is erotic literature and Sontag contends that five French literary works are not ‘just’ pornography but literary fiction and thus genuine literature. Although the term paraliterature had not been coined at the time of its writing (we have to wait 17 years for Fredric Jameson to do that), the connection between science fiction and erotic fiction makes this essay one of the first defenses of the nobrow or paraliterary category.

Her ‘case’ is based on these five novels:

On Georges Bataille she writes:

“One reason that Histoire de l’oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and unsettling impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death. I am not suggesting that every pornographic work speaks, either overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, “the obscene,” do. It’s toward the gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends.”

The shoe of a dead woman at the bottom of a cupboard

Dead_Woman's_Shoes

The Critical Dictionary (French: Dictionnaire critique) was a regular section of the journal Documents. It offered short essays by Georges Bataille and his colleagues on such subjects as “Absolute“, “Eye“, “Factory Chimney”, and “Keaton (Buster)“.

In the entry for aesthete one finds the following sentence:

“When it comes down to it, these words have the power to disturb and to nauseate: after fifteen years, one finds the shoe of a dead woman at the bottom of a cupboard; one throws it in the rubbish bin.” […] The unfortunate who says that art no longer works, because that way one remains disengaged from the ‘dangers of action’, says something deserving of the same attention as the dead woman’s shoe.” (translation by Art in Theory).

Bataille never fails to intrigue me. I must confess – and I always do – that I do not understand one iota of what he means by the image of a dead woman’s shoe in relation to art and aesthetes, but not understanding is a very big part of the attraction. As I stated before, I like my philosophy poetic and incomprehensible.

Introducing Bxzzines

Charles Fort
Image sourced here.

 

Bxzzines [1], is a French-language blog by an anonymous internet user who goes by the pseudonym of Clifford Brown, indicating a link to Jess Franco (Franco worked under innumerable pseudonyms and was a big fan of jazz music, many of his pseudonyms are taken from famous jazz musicians, such as Clifford Brown and James P. Johnson).

Bxzzines is dedicated to zines and has featured posts on film directors Max Pécas, Michel Lemoine, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Jean-François Davy and 1970s magazines such a Midi-Minuit Fantastique and Sex Stars System.

The illustration shown depicts a part of a promotional insert [2] for the Le Terrain Vague publishing imprint of Eric Losfeld, inserted in Midi-Minuit Fantastique n°15/16 (12/1966). The page depicted above is an advertisement for Charles Fort‘s The Book of the Damned, in its second French translation, translated by Robert Benayoun; with a forward by Tiffany Thayer.

The censored title on the same page is George de Coulteray‘s Sadism in the Movies.

Recent entries on the Bxzzines blog include:

 

Cult fiction #3

The Nuba and Riefenstahl

From Leni Riefensthal’s book

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I have a habit of running into ontological problems, so my third entry in the “cult fiction” series [1] is appropriately not really fiction. It’s documentary photography, a problematic genre that is neither fact nor fiction. The Last of the Nuba belongs to the realm of documentary, faction, pseudo-documentary and pamphlet.

Leni Riefenstahl, better known for directing Triumph of the Will and Olympia, published a collection of her photographs of the people titled The Last of the Nuba in 1974. The book was extensively reviewed in Fascinating Fascism by Susan Sontag.

Fascinating Fascism is quite an essay. It was first published in 1975 and republished in Under the Sign of Saturn, in 1980. The essay considers the link between fascist aesthetics to sadomasochism.

[…] Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. “Fascism is theater,” as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience. (Riefenstahl put it: “What is purely realistic, slice of life, what is average, quotidian, doesn’t interest me.” As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be “nice,” as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged.

I started reading the essay last evening, and haven’t finished yet, but time and time again, Susan Sontag strikes me as one of the most insightful cultural critics of the 20th century, way up there with Walter Benjamin.

The essay is of an era that also saw Salò by Pasolini and The Night Porter by Cavani, both aesthetic meditations on fascism and sadomasochism.

Art history revisionism

Grotesque Head (c. 1480-1510) by Leonardo da Vinci, clearly the inspiration for The Ugly Duchess
Grotesque Head (c. 1480–1510) by Leonardo da Vinci,
clearly the inspiration for The Ugly Duchess
The Ugly Duchess by Quentin Matsys

The Ugly Duchess (1525-30) by Quentin Matsys

In my previous post I argued for a revisionist approach to art history, favoring discarded art historical movements related to the grotesque and the fantastic. I called for a start of art history with the work of Bosch rather than Da Vinci. I realized when writing it that I sort of short-changed da Vinci since the latter has also made many lesser-known works including several grotesques [1] and caricatures[2]. See the book Leonardo Da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque by Martin Clayton.

The reason I short-changed da Vinci is that he is much better known for “mainstream” works such as the Mona Lisa and Vitruvian Man. While researching da Vinci’s relation to the grotesque I came up with Grotesque Head, a powerful caricature which is clearly the inspiration for Quentin Matsys‘s The Ugly Duchess. Enjoy.

Icons of erotic art #19

Venus (1532) by Lucas Cranach the Elder. From March 8 until June 8, 2008, the London Royal Academy of Arts will hold a retrospective of Cranach's work. The posters for the expo were considered offensive for the officials of the London Underground, who stated that

Venus (1532) by Lucas Cranach the Elder

From March 8 until June 8, 2008, the London Royal Academy of Arts will hold a retrospective of Cranach’s work. This advertising poster for the Cranach expo (which displays the Venus painting) was recently considered offensive to the officials of the London Underground, who banned it and stated that

“Millions of people travel on the London Underground each day and they have no choice but to view whatever adverts are posted there. We have to take account of the full range of travellers and endeavour not to cause offence in the advertising we display.”

Lucas Cranach the Elder (Lucas Cranach der Ältere, 1472 –  1553) was a German painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving of the school now known as Northern Renaissance. His influence is readily displayed in the work of 21st century American artist John Currin [1].

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

The beneficial side-effects of censorship

 

Cover of the 1937 guide book to the Degenerate art exhibition.

Cover of the 1937 guide book to the  Degenerate Art Exhibition.

Nazi Germany disapproved of contemporary German art movements such as Expressionism and Dada and on July 19, 1937 it opened the travelling exhibition in the Haus der Kunst in Munich, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art, to inflame public opinion against modernity and Judaism. The cover the 1937 guide book (illustration top) features a sculpture of unknown origin. It could be Polynesian or any other tribal art work, please help me out here.

The sculpture clearly links modern art with primitivism.

This exhibition is also a perfect illustration of the beneficial side-effects of censorship. Beneficial in the sense that any attempt at banning works of art, books or other cultural artifacts results in an aide to discerning culturati to seek out these artifacts with zeal. Such has been the case with Video Nasties, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Catholic Index) and the Degenerate Art expo mentioned above.

I once again repeat my question to you, dear reader: what is the origin of the statue depicted in the picture above. I thank  you beforehand for a reply.