Category Archives: nobrow

Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl

FIRST, LET us not confuse the pin-up girl with the pornographic or erotic imagery that dates from the dark backward and abysm of time. The pinup girl is a specific erotic phenomenon, both as to form and function. –Bazin

A public domain photo of Ingrid Bergman

André Bazin‘s 1946 essay “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl,” was first published as “Entomologie de la pin-up girl “, L’Écran français issue 77, September 1946.

It starts thus:

Definition and Morphology

A wartime product created for the benefit of the American soldiers swarming to a long exile at the four corners of the world, the pin-up girl soon became an industrial product, subject to well-fixed norms and as stable in quality as peanut butter or chewing gum. Rapidly perfected, like the jeep, among those things specifically stipulated for modern American military sociology, she is a perfectly harmonized product of given racial, geographic, social and religious influences.

“Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl” is featured in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?

French theory: the Annales School

The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (first published in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) where it was first expounded. Annales school history is best known for its approach to history diametrically opposed to various great man theories, incorporating social scientific methods into history resulting in one of the first currents in social history. The Annales school critics influenced later thinkers like Michel Foucault, who, in turn, influenced other Annales thinkers such as American cultural historian Robert Darnton (The Literary Underground of the Old Regime) and the best-known exponent of this school: Fernand Braudel.

The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem. While several authors continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history and economic history.

The images shown (Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution, 1921 in a French 10/18 translation and Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVI^e siècle. La religion de Rabelais, 1942) are only tangentially related to the Annales School and were sourced at the enigmatic page La Passion des Anabaptistes by Belgian comic book creators Ambre and David Vandermeulen.

I can’t help but wondering what – if there was one – the relation of the Annalistes was to Georges Bataille, who started his journal Documents in the same year as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. Perhaps Valter “Surreal Documents” knows?

Love Letters of Great Men

Love letter from Beethoven to an unknown woman (his Immortal Beloved), published in the fictional book Love Letters of Great Men. And I thought my handwriting was bad.

dir – mein Leben – mein alles – leb wohl – o liebe mich fort –
verken nie das treuste Herz deines Geliebten
L.

ewig dein
ewig mein
ewig uns

And this is the English translation

you – my life – my all – farewell. Oh continue to love me –
never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved
L.

ever thine
ever mine
ever ours

By Freudian free association: Du and Dir are German words for you. “Du” (Bist Alles)[1] is also the title of a European popular song by Peter Maffay later covered by David Hasselhoff [2]. In 1969, when this song came out, you could also have been discovering Kool & The Gang and The Stooges.

Introducing French Book Covers

French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.

A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.

I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.

Mad love

On double coding, guilty pleasures and Roland Kaiser‘s “Santa Maria.”^YouTube

Guilty pleasures is about liking things you shouldn’t be liking, Roland Kaiser‘s “Santa Maria.”^YouTubefor example.

You shouldn’t like “Santa Maria” because it is in “poor taste”.

Another example of guilty pleasure would be a man who watches television shows marketed towards women such as Sex and the City. This is considered a guilty pleasure because it violates most western ideas what society views as masculine. For this reason the man in question may watch this show in secret because other members of the society may react negatively to a man watching a feminine television show.

The postmodern age is gentle towards guilty pleasures.

Double coding

Yet, I don’t agree with Umberto Eco when he says that in a postmodern world you can no longer say: “I love you madly”.

It’s is too Barbara Cartland-ish, say Eco. I don’t agree. Long live mad love. Although I don’t agree, Eco formulated his point beautifully, in a way that captures the voice of compatriot Alberto Moravia. Here is the quote:

“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.” —Umberto Eco

Introducing Colette Calascione

From various Flickr members.

Colette Calascione (born in 1971) is an American artist. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.

Sometimes her work reeks just a bit too much of the lowbrow art movement on which I am not always too keen (exceptions such as Mark Ryden notwithstanding), but the work above is steeped in art history, yet feels fresh.

This painting (title: Persephone, 2002) constitutes Icon of Erotic Art number 26.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008)

Retroactive I (1964) by Robert Rauschenberg

Photo from the Flickr collection of ALFAP

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22 1925 – May 12 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and best-known for such works as Retroactive I (1964) which “collaged” images of current events gathered from magazines and newspapers. A large press photograph of John F. Kennedy speaking at a televised news conference was the source for this screen print on canvas. He juxtaposed the image of Kennedy with another photo silkscreen of a parachuting astronaut. The overlapping, and seemingly disparate, composition creates a colorful visual commentary on a media-saturated culture struggling to come to grips with the television era. (see Susan Hapgood’s Neo-Dada, Redefining Art 1958-1962)

The painting was described by John Coulthart in 2008 as a work that could easily serve as an illustration to J. G. Ballard‘s The Atrocity Exhibition. Coulthart added that “Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words. In this respect Robert Hughes’s discussion of the “landscape of media” [in The Shock of the New (1980)] (Ballard’s common phrase would be “media landscape”) is coincidental but significant.” [1]

“I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else”

Discover Johann Sebastian Bach [1] through Nina Simone “Love Me or Leave Me“[2] (from 1:40 to 2:50). No, really.

Click the numbers to listen to the music.

Oblique “namesake” connection: Moodymann’s “I’d Rather Be Lonely”

American academics down on their knees kissing French bums

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

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.

Introducing Kirsten Anderson

Pop Surrealism: The Rise Of Underground Art (2004)

[FR] [DE] [UK]

American Kirsten Anderson, founder of Roq La Rue Gallery, and co-founder of BLVD Gallery, editor of the book Pop Surrealism (depicted above) has been blogging for a while at Right Some Good. She notes that “This blog is mainly to showcase art that I’m currently enamoured with,” which includes posts on Caspar David Friedrich, Gustave Moreau, Richard Dadd and Leon Bakst.

From her blogroll also these interesting blogs:

Tip of the hat to Paul Rumsey.