Category Archives: modernism

To Have Done With the Judgment of god

Antonin Artaud’s radiophonic play ‘To Have Done With the Judgment of god‘.

This work was shelved by Wladimir Porché, the director of the French Radio, the day before its scheduled airing on February 2, 1948. The performance was prohibited partially as a result of its scatological, anti-American, and anti-religious references and pronouncements, but also because of its general randomness, with a cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements. While remaining true to his Theater of Cruelty and reducing powerful emotions and expressions into audible sounds, Artaud had utilized various, somewhat alarming cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.

Artaud coined the term body without organs in this radio play.

Two excerpts and the full text here.

“I deny baptism and the mass. There is no human act, on the internal erotic level, more pernicious than the descent of the so-called jesus-christ onto the altars.
No one will believe me and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders but the so-called christ is none other than he who in the presence of the crab louse god consented to live without a body…”
…
All this is very well,
but I didn’t know the Americans were such a warlike people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the
last tons of real morphine they have left and replace it with
substitutes made of smoke,–Artaud via [1]

These unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body

well

The Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall

Denounced, banned and applauded — the strange love story of a girl who stood midway between the sexes, complete and unabridged.

Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dress-maker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbor. Angela uses Stephen as an “anodyne against boredom“, allowing her “a few rather schoolgirlish kisses”. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen’s mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for “presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with… these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body“. Stephen replies, “As my father loved you, I loved…. It was good, good, good — I’d have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby.” After the argument, Stephen goes to her father’s study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing — assumed by critics to be Psychopathia Sexualis, a text about homosexuality and paraphilias — and, reading it, learns that she is an invert. —The Well of Loneliness

Cherchez la femme #1

Colette Peignot

Unidentified photo of Colette Peignot sourced here.

“I believe in our life together . . . I believe in it the way I believe in everything that brought us together: in the most profound depths of your darkness and of mine. I revealed everything about myself to you. Now that it gives you pleasure to laugh at it, to soil it––this leaves me as far away from anger as it is possible to be. Scatter, spoil, destroy, throw to the dogs all that you want: you will never affect me again. I will never be where you think you find me, where you think you’ve finally caught me in a chokehold that makes you come. . . . As for me I am beyond words, I have seen too much, known too much, experienced too much for appearance to take on form. You can do anything you want, I will not be hurt.” Colette Peignot in a letter to Georges Bataille via Laure: The “True Whore” as Muse by Jason DeBoer

Laure [Colette Peignot] began her affair with Bataille in 1934, and it proved to become one of the more tormented love stories of modern letters. Their correspondence reveals a mutually influential sharing of transgressive ideas: she was the woman of action, and he was the man versed in scholarly knowledge. Her uncompromising, anguished lifestyle proved very inspirational to Bataille, especially Laure’s own infatuation with the sacred and communication, two important ideas in Bataille’s later work. —source

Colette was born 104 years ago today.

Cultissime!

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd6D8PU95qU]

Buffet Froid (1979) – Bertrand Blier

Context of clip: Depardieu has stabbed Carmet, Depardieu denies, “no I could’nt have done it, I just arrived”. Carmet does not seem to mind dying. Depardieu asks: “how does it feel”. Carmet answers: “Like a sink draining”. At the end Carmet offers Depardieu to take his knife back and says: “You’d better because your fingerprints are on them.” Depardieu thanks him. Spoiler warning: Carmet lives.

Buffet froid is a 1979 French film, written and directed by Bertrand Blier, and starring Gérard Depardieu, Carole Bouquet, Bernard Blier and Jean Carmet.The plot of this film is extremely complex and elusive, for the simple reason that we are left at odds as to the motivation of the characters to perform acts that are systematically the opposite of what is expected of them. Thus, the police inspector allows murders, commits murders himself and pretends not being occupied with his profession when off duty.

The film owes much of its ideological framework to surrealism, re-enforced by an ambience of mystery et theatricality, very similar to the work of Luis Buñuel, who was known to punctuate his work with numerous « gratuitous » murders. We are also reminded of the absurd theatre of Alfred Jarry and Eugène Ionesco.

The location of the metro station of the RER of La Défense, then ending its construction phase and not yet receiving its 170 000 daily employees as is the case today, highly contributes to the atmosphere of the opening sequence of the film: a dehumanized urban space, cold and anxiety-ridden, filmed by night, the only encounters to be expected those of marginalized human beings. All “urban” scenes were filmed in Créteil, in areas under construction at the time.

Bertrand Blier reunites a sublime trio, with his fetish actor Gérard Depardieu), a un-police officer (Bernard Blier) and an assassin strangler of women played by Jean Carmet, all at the peak of their careers.

Digression: Happy birthday Roky Erickson.

On whimsy and monochromatics

Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit

My previous post on Cohl led me to the French avant-garde of the 1880s and 1890s. Above is what is now generally held to be the first monochrome painting, rendered here in an appropriated version by Allais.

Here is the background:

Paul Bilhaud (born in Allichamps, December 31, 1854 – Avon, 1933) was a French poet and dramatist who belonged to the avant-garde group the Incoherents. He is the author of an all-black painting called Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night.

On October 1 1882 the “Exposition des Arts Incohérents” in Paris featured a black painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud titled Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit, which was appropriated in 1887 by the French humorist Alphonse Allais, in an album of monochrome pictures of various colors, with uniformly ornamental frames, each bearing a comical title. Allais called his all-red painting Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea.

Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night predates Malevich‘s, Black Square on a White Field by 31 years.

Compiling this documentation, I stumbled on Il Giornale Nuovo’s post on Allais: Primo-Avrilesque and on Monochrome (une enquête) by L’Alamblog.

A daringly frank novel

I’ve updated my page on adultery, and especially adultery in literature and happened upon this picture of a 1956 Signet edition of Alberto Moravia’s novel Conjugal Love, which I’ve sort of reviewed here. Signet is an imprint of the American paperback publisher New American Library.

Some comments on the wording on the jacket by antydiluvian:

Note the puffery from 1956: “A daringly frank novel.” This meant that if there was an adulteress in it, she didn’t die at the end. Or if she did it was from something not directly related to sex. What the woman did with her lover(s) was left to the imagination, of course — no “frankness” there. Any book that was translated from the French, Swedish, or (as in this case) Italian might be called “daringly frank” simply because anything written in those languages was automatically regarded as racy. And “complete and unabridged” meant that any scenes of actual European “frankness” in the novel were left intact for its American readers — which wasn’t always the case in those days.

I don’t know if any of you have checked IMDb keyword tool, but for Moravia you get this, which explains why Moravia’s work is classified as naturalistic, and also why I have come to like his work over the years.

Bill Marx writes in Alberto Moravia’s kinky, subversive realism is back in print:

“In the 1940s and ’50s, Italian novelist Alberto Moravia achieved international acclaim as a kinky realist whose Marxist-inspired moralism detailed the paralysis of the middle-class ego in the face of cultural and political collapse. Before and just after World War II, Moravia analyzed the blight of fascism; during the Cold War era he explored the spiritual costs of capitalism. What distinguishes Moravia from most other writers of politically inspired fiction, however, is that he was a popular novelist, his wide appeal rooted in his frank depictions of love and sexuality. Like Ignazio Silone, Moravia bore historical witness to the century’s horrors, but his fiction’s sleek dovetailing of Marx and Freud exposed the West’s inertia through the tortured curbs and caprices of the libido. The marketability of sex made the subversiveness of his critique palatable: Moravia’s books sold more than one million copies in the United States during the buttoned-up 1940s and ’50s.” —source

Incidentally Moravia’s work came to my attention in the early 2000s via Cédric Kahn’s excellent film L’ Ennui (1998). If you read more of Moravia — he is often considered the most popular Italian novelist outside Italy and his novels have been filmed lots of times in cinematic modernism — , you get the impression that there is nothing as exciting as an unfaithful wife, I tend to agree. It reminds me of a quote I read in one of the early issues of Mondo 2000 magazine. It went: “when you come to realize that safe sex is boring sex.”

We want to declare on all forms of bad taste

Danae (1907-08) – Gustav Klimt

“We want to declare war on sterile routine, on rigid Byzantinism, on all forms of bad taste… Our Secession is not a fight of modern artists against old ones, but a fight for the advancement of artists as against hawkers who call themselves artists and yet have a commercial interest in hindering the flowering of art.”

This declaration by Hermann Bahr, the spiritual father of the Secessionists, may serve as the motto for the foundation in 1897 of the Vienna Secession, with Klimt as its leading spirit and president. The artists of the younger generation were no longer willing to accept the tutelage imposed by Academicism; they demanded to exhibit their work in a fitting place, free from “market forces”. They wanted to end the cultural isolation of Vienna, to invite artists from abroad to the city and to make the works of their own members known in other countries. The Secession’s programme was clearly not only an “aesthetic” contest, but also a fight for the “fight to artistic creativity”, for art itself; it was a matter of combatting the distinction between “great art” and “subordinate genres”, between “art for the rich and art for the poor” in brief, between “Venus” and “Nini”. In painting and in the applied arts, the Vienna Secession had a central role in developing and disseminating Art Nouveau as a counter-force to official Academicism and bourgeois conservatism. –Gilles Néret, 1993

P. S. The concept of “Venus” and “Nini” are the most intriguing part of these last posts on the book by Néret on Klimt I’ve been reading, and I want to add that it is unjust and unfair to direct the Nini page to “prostitution in art”. The woman who is impartial to casual sex and/or wants to lead an independent life is not a prostitute but is easily perceived as one. Most generally this dichotomy is labeled the mother/whore or Madonna/whore complex. If anyone knows of a very good exploration of this theme (apart from The Mother and the Whore (1973) – Jean Eustache and the work by Camille Paglia), please let me know.

Carlo Chiostri

carlochiostri.jpg

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