I often have this dream strange and penetrating
Of an unknown woman, who I love and who loves me,
And who – each time – is never quite the same,
Nor quite another, and yet likes and understands me.
Untitled by Nicéphore Niépce
I couldn’t help by noticing how very similar in feel this 19th century photograph is to Marcel Duchamp’s last work Etant donnés (and btw, I am looking for a precise date of when this work was first presented to the general public)
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUkybjwRBns]
“Bleu” by Etants Donnés
Etants Donnés is the name of duo consisting of the brothers Hurtado (Marc and Eric), founded in Grenoble in 1980. Their name takes its direct inspiration from the last work by Marcel Duchamp. They made six films between 1982 and 1994, composed numerous scores and collaborated with major figures of the industrial rock genre: Genesis P-Orridge, Alan Vega, Michael Gira, Lydia Lunch and Mark Cunningham.
Dead Mother (1898) by Max Klinger
“May she wake in torment!’ he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not THERE – not in heaven – not perished – where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!“
That’s the end of Wuthering Heights‘ Heathcliff‘s tirade against his faithless lover Catherine who has just died in childbirth, a speech which begins in anger and blasphemy and ends in beseechment and pleading, which epitomizes the love hate relationship between the two characters.
Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë‘s only novel. The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this love hate relationship eventually destroys both themselves and many around them.
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:
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.
Consider me: my hands can not cover my breasts, I cling to them tightly to hide my shame. But also consider this: sunlit windows gaze down upon me like undeniable eyes, millions of bronze eyes; and shame turns into pride.
Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme.
Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.
“Oh baby, is this the woman I want to be? The door is unlocked, the windows are open, every time the place looks best for me. I said, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me again, kiss me again…”
These lyrics are from “Kiss Me Again“, a track by Arthur Russell. Listen to the entire track here (unfortunately the lesser of the two mixes of this twelve inch).
The photograph is of Maria Bonnevie, one of the more interesting actresses currently working in European cinema. She is the lead in the 2003 small masterpiece Reconstruction and the current cult favorite; Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s The Banishment.
The audio track posted above comes via here, a new blog of someone who goes by the nick fac586, what I believe to be a reference to Fac 51 Haçienda also known as just The Haçienda.
The author of this blog does an extended analysis of the song and its lyrics. Regarding the lyrics he says:
Have you ever gotten back together with someone who you shouldn’t have? I think most of us have, and I think that’s what this song is getting at, and the music tells the story even more than the words.
Deserving mention in this context is a recent article by popular music scholar Tim Lawrence, author of “Love Saves the Day” and current biographer of Arthur Russell. The article is titled “Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92” and connects Arthur Russell in a tired way to the theory of rhizomatics of Deleuze & Guattari.
“Kiss Me Again” is world music classic #25 and Reconstruction is world cinema classic #41
Der Abend (1820) by Caspar David Friedrich
Connecting vocabulary: crépuscule, twilight, the blue hour.
“He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth – and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.” –from The Wanderer, of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human
