One other painting in the category ‘existential angst’ comes to mind, the far more famous The Scream, depicting an artist tortured by existentialangst.
Two of these works (Negroes and Funeral March) are about nothingness and the void. They are precursors — by decades — to Russian artist’s Kazimir Malevich monochromes and to American musician John Cage’s silent music.
Then I remembered French artist Yves Klein, another artist who worked with the void.
There is his Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959) in which he sold empty space in exchange for gold (of which he threw away half in the Seine) and his photomontage Leap Into the Void (1960) in which he leaps from a wall seemingly on the pavement, but actually into the ‘void’.
Towards the end of the Yves Klein documentary above there is footage from the ‘living brushes’ paintings in the exploitation film Mondo cane, and the documentary mentions a tragic event:
“while leaving the screening he had a minor heart attack.”
Why did he have a heart attack? Was it a coincidence?
Maybe. Probably.
But some (among whom Derek Jarman) have speculated that the heart attack was due to his “misrepresentation” in Mondo cane. Well, misrepresentation, one could almost say ridiculing; his Monotone Symphony, for example, was exchanged for a cheesy “More, More, More“-type soundtrack song from Mondo cane (while the orchestra was still seen playing) and the voice-over was anything but respectful for Klein’s exploits.
The documentary then draws attention to “Klein’s obsession with fame,” which “finally betrayed him.”
I am reminded of Boris Vian, who also suffered a heart attack while screening the premiere of an adaptation of one of his novels. See the death of Boris Vian.
One last digression.
Watching this documentary, I heard Klein reciting perennial favorite Gaston Bachelard:
“D’abord, il n’y a rien, ensuite un rien profond, puis une profondeur bleue.”
“First, there is nothing, then there is deep nothing, then a blue depth.”
Also remarkable is the fact that Duchamp was actually not original when dissing “retinal painting” in the 1950s. In the 1912 pamphlet Du “Cubisme”, two hardline cubists, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, had already accused Courbet of having “accepted everything that his retina communicated to him, without intellectual control.”
This post is prompted by my reading of Umberto Eco’s “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence” in On Literature and finding the terms blituri, skindapsos, babazuf and tophlattothrattophlattothrat, four early nonsense words.
In a different chapter, “Between La Mancha and Babel” of that same On Literature, Eco claims that Jorge Luis Borges invented the “exquisite Joyce – flavoured calembourwhateverano (which can be read as ‘what a summer’ and ‘whatever is summer’).
I admit, whatever-ano here has not the same wordplay-value; however, it has the same orthography (except for the hyphen) and perhaps Borges, who was a fan of Quincey, read it here first and in a case of cryptomnesia, “invented” it many years later.
Ah… (one of my favorite words of late it would seem), the anxiety of influence!.
While in general I don’t ‘do’ negative criticism, I’m making an exception for the man from Köningsberg [the town where he was born and where he died and which he never left].
Today, while researching kitsch (most recently explored here[2]), I came upon another and similar of his dicta. This one warns us for charm and emotion in matters of taste:
“Any taste remains barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in, let alone if it makes these the standard of its approval”.
I’m stumped.
Being charmed and moved, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Not for Kant it would appear.
And then I remembered one of my favorite definitions of aesthetics.
“Some of the meaning of aesthetic as an adjective can be illuminated by comparing it to anaesthetic, which is by construction an antonym of aesthetic. If something is anaesthetic, it tends to dull the senses, cause sleepiness and induce boredom. In contrast, aesthetic may be thought of as anything that tends to enliven or invigorate or wake one up.”
“I remembered too that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity…”
“By Allah, this story is my story and this case is my case,” shouts the king when he finds out that Scheherazade is telling him his frame tale.
Again in the words of Borges (from “Magias parciales del Quijote“) in which he calls that night a “magic night among the nights”:
“The King hears his own story from the Queen’s mouth. He hears the beginning of the story, which embraces all the others as well as – monstrously – itself. Does the reader really understand the vast possibilities of that interpolation, the curious danger – that the Queen may persist and the Sultan, immobile, will hear forever the truncated story of A Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular?”[1]
This goes back to Plato, who said that fiction is untruth and untruths are lies. And we should not tell our children lies if we do not want to corrupt them.
Following his reasoning, actors are actually professional liars
