wseird and lovely combo of sweet and debauched, an evening of perefct pairing, 3/4s of a movie, distracted by his hand on my cock, leaving early, like that line in o'hara:"and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before
it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment
is in the Heaven on
Earth Bldg
except we are adults, and that meant sex on a hillock behind a highschool near laird, shopping for brekkie, another queer couple on the train to keele, slurpees, precoital walk thru indian grove talking about music, languge, history, kibbitzing---then back to his place, shower, sex, music, chat, post coital walk, cuddle, an episode of wonder showzen...
(too hot and sticky, i take the 3:15 bloor bus home.)
what were red lights, his youth, his risk taking, his sexual tastes, become amber, caution is advised, but things are too pleasent and we are moving slow enough, so i can say no.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
From Steinberg, Sexuality in Art...
This much Christendom has professed at all times. Not so Christian art. For when a deceiptive style aims at the other -worldly; when the stuff of which human bodies are formed is attenuated and subtulized; when Chrsitian representations of Christ, repelled by the grossness of mater, decline o honour the corporeality God chose to assume-then, whatever else such art may be after, the down-to-earth flesh of the bodied Word is not confessed... (70)
"But to the girdle do the gods inherit" and again in Goethe's assertion that "all ethical expression pertains only t o the upper part of the body"...Thye feet themselves may be menial or humble or may simply signify the whole lower stratum, sumialy identified with the generative function. Pico della Mirandola, in the closing paragraph of the Hepataplus or Discourse on the Seven Days of Creation (1489) analyzing the body on the lines of Bernardus Silvestris, finds it :astonishing how beautifully and how perfectly": the three parts of man--head, neck to navel, and navel to feet--"correspond...to the three parts of the world. The brain, source of knowledge, is in the head; the heart, source of movement, life and heat,m is in the chest; the genital organs, the beginning of reporduction, are lcoated in the lowest part" (Heptapuls, 113)...(151)
From Batialle Divine Filth
"Madame was religious at first", said Thersea, "She was pious, but the convent sent her back. She said she loves God, but what she loves most of all are weddings..."
Madame...has no name. We call her Divinity.... (33)
No Remorse:
I can't see shit
I've got shit in my heart
God flows out
laughs
radiates
intoxicates the sky
the sky sings as loud as it can
the sky sings
thunder sings
the solar flare sings
dry eyes
the broken silence
of shit in my heart
if an orgasmic dick endgedred the universe, it's make it like it is
in the transparency of the sky, we'd have blood, screams, stench.
God is not a priest, but a prick, papa is a prick.
(48)
From Andres Seranno Works 1983-1993
Below Skin Deep, Wendy Stiner:
The tensiopn between literalism and symbolism intensified when Serrano began to photogrpah vital fluids. Blood, milk and urine are strongly coded as human symbols--in paticular , as fluids requiring containment. Prohibitions against their spillage are proverbial...When Seranno claimed...that he started using urine because it introduced yellow into his photogrpahic pallete, he recealed the laughable inadequacy of formalism to control meaning and the body...(13)
Andres Serrano: The Body Politic: Robert Hobbs.
...Seranno was relucatant to give up the hook of beauty, which is a key tool of his heart. "When one works wiht difficult subjects, he emphasized, "it is necessary to put beauty back into the accomplished work" On another occasion he noted "Maybe it's easier to dismiss work when you know you're turned off by it completely, as opposed to when your'e seduced by it" The interest in captivating viewers through the sheer beauty of his light nad colour has remianed a constant in his oierve. No matter how wrepugant his subjects may be to some people, his works are stunning. As critioc David Deitcher observed, "Serrano's photographs are t herefore indfensible to so many, not simply because they blaspheme, which in a narrow sense ,m some of them do; they are insupportable because they find beautiy in substances that have always made people recoil in horror and embarrassment." (20)
...the artist has also indicated the much moore prosaic goal of countering the everyday debasement of religious belief. He is particualry persuaive when he sas that "the nuns told us...that we worship not the crucifix but Christ....we weren't supposed to worship the symbol or give it the same level of refeveance because it is only a representration" Such reasonings establishes a basis for his statement "I dont relaly feel that I destroy icons. I feel that I creatre new ones" And it prepares one to accept his declaration that his "use of bodly fluids, especially in conneciton with Chrsitianity, has been a way of trying to personalise and redefine his realtionship to christ..." (31)
David Deitcher Cummlus from Anmerica, Parkett 21
From Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola
Sadian practice is rulled by a great otion of order: "irregularities are strenoously regualted, vice is unbridles but not without order...Expressions desicribing a purposeful structuring of the erotic scene are innummerable and standard (26)
What are here being overtuned are obiviously, in a very classical way, the social fetishes, kings, ministers, eccleastics, etc, but so too the language, the tradtional classes of writing: criminal contamination touches every style of the discourse: narrative, lyrical, moral, maxim, mythological topos. We begin to recongize that hte transgressions of language posses an offensive powqer at least as strong as that of moral transgressions, and that the poetry which is itself the language of the language og t he transgressions of language, it is therbey always constestatory... (34)
...rhetoric was also the search for a second code, an artifical language, elaborated on the basis of a given idiom...(loyala) (45)
Theresa of Avila dsicerns mediation, union, excstacy, etc and John of the Cross, who has certainly gone further then Theresa in oblitering the disconinous sets up a scrupolous code of apprehnsions (exxterior-bodily, interior-bodily, distinct and particular, confused, obscure, general, etc. ARticulkatiln appears to all as the condition, warrent and fate of language, to outstrip lagnauige, articulation must be exuahsted, extenusated, after having been recongised. We know that this is ot Ignatious;s goa; the theophany he is methodically seeking is in fact a semiophany, what he is striving to obtain is more the sign of Go d than knowledge of Him or His presence; language is his definitive horizon and articulation an orperation he can never abandon in favour of indistinct--ineffable--states. (53)
(Sade's) art consists in staturing the erotic body by simtenoiulsy occupying the principal sites of pleasure (mouth, sexual organs, anus;) each subject is thrice fufilled (in both menaings of the word) and hence each of the nine pratners finds his erotic employment (true , this empolyment is simple, whereas the subjects pleasure is threefold; class difference, libertines as against agents, rich adventuresses against porr fisherman..) (129)
This much Christendom has professed at all times. Not so Christian art. For when a deceiptive style aims at the other -worldly; when the stuff of which human bodies are formed is attenuated and subtulized; when Chrsitian representations of Christ, repelled by the grossness of mater, decline o honour the corporeality God chose to assume-then, whatever else such art may be after, the down-to-earth flesh of the bodied Word is not confessed... (70)
"But to the girdle do the gods inherit" and again in Goethe's assertion that "all ethical expression pertains only t o the upper part of the body"...Thye feet themselves may be menial or humble or may simply signify the whole lower stratum, sumialy identified with the generative function. Pico della Mirandola, in the closing paragraph of the Hepataplus or Discourse on the Seven Days of Creation (1489) analyzing the body on the lines of Bernardus Silvestris, finds it :astonishing how beautifully and how perfectly": the three parts of man--head, neck to navel, and navel to feet--"correspond...to the three parts of the world. The brain, source of knowledge, is in the head; the heart, source of movement, life and heat,m is in the chest; the genital organs, the beginning of reporduction, are lcoated in the lowest part" (Heptapuls, 113)...(151)
From Batialle Divine Filth
"Madame was religious at first", said Thersea, "She was pious, but the convent sent her back. She said she loves God, but what she loves most of all are weddings..."
Madame...has no name. We call her Divinity.... (33)
No Remorse:
I can't see shit
I've got shit in my heart
God flows out
laughs
radiates
intoxicates the sky
the sky sings as loud as it can
the sky sings
thunder sings
the solar flare sings
dry eyes
the broken silence
of shit in my heart
if an orgasmic dick endgedred the universe, it's make it like it is
in the transparency of the sky, we'd have blood, screams, stench.
God is not a priest, but a prick, papa is a prick.
(48)
From Andres Seranno Works 1983-1993
Below Skin Deep, Wendy Stiner:
The tensiopn between literalism and symbolism intensified when Serrano began to photogrpah vital fluids. Blood, milk and urine are strongly coded as human symbols--in paticular , as fluids requiring containment. Prohibitions against their spillage are proverbial...When Seranno claimed...that he started using urine because it introduced yellow into his photogrpahic pallete, he recealed the laughable inadequacy of formalism to control meaning and the body...(13)
Andres Serrano: The Body Politic: Robert Hobbs.
...Seranno was relucatant to give up the hook of beauty, which is a key tool of his heart. "When one works wiht difficult subjects, he emphasized, "it is necessary to put beauty back into the accomplished work" On another occasion he noted "Maybe it's easier to dismiss work when you know you're turned off by it completely, as opposed to when your'e seduced by it" The interest in captivating viewers through the sheer beauty of his light nad colour has remianed a constant in his oierve. No matter how wrepugant his subjects may be to some people, his works are stunning. As critioc David Deitcher observed, "Serrano's photographs are t herefore indfensible to so many, not simply because they blaspheme, which in a narrow sense ,m some of them do; they are insupportable because they find beautiy in substances that have always made people recoil in horror and embarrassment." (20)
...the artist has also indicated the much moore prosaic goal of countering the everyday debasement of religious belief. He is particualry persuaive when he sas that "the nuns told us...that we worship not the crucifix but Christ....we weren't supposed to worship the symbol or give it the same level of refeveance because it is only a representration" Such reasonings establishes a basis for his statement "I dont relaly feel that I destroy icons. I feel that I creatre new ones" And it prepares one to accept his declaration that his "use of bodly fluids, especially in conneciton with Chrsitianity, has been a way of trying to personalise and redefine his realtionship to christ..." (31)
David Deitcher Cummlus from Anmerica, Parkett 21
From Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola
Sadian practice is rulled by a great otion of order: "irregularities are strenoously regualted, vice is unbridles but not without order...Expressions desicribing a purposeful structuring of the erotic scene are innummerable and standard (26)
What are here being overtuned are obiviously, in a very classical way, the social fetishes, kings, ministers, eccleastics, etc, but so too the language, the tradtional classes of writing: criminal contamination touches every style of the discourse: narrative, lyrical, moral, maxim, mythological topos. We begin to recongize that hte transgressions of language posses an offensive powqer at least as strong as that of moral transgressions, and that the poetry which is itself the language of the language og t he transgressions of language, it is therbey always constestatory... (34)
...rhetoric was also the search for a second code, an artifical language, elaborated on the basis of a given idiom...(loyala) (45)
Theresa of Avila dsicerns mediation, union, excstacy, etc and John of the Cross, who has certainly gone further then Theresa in oblitering the disconinous sets up a scrupolous code of apprehnsions (exxterior-bodily, interior-bodily, distinct and particular, confused, obscure, general, etc. ARticulkatiln appears to all as the condition, warrent and fate of language, to outstrip lagnauige, articulation must be exuahsted, extenusated, after having been recongised. We know that this is ot Ignatious;s goa; the theophany he is methodically seeking is in fact a semiophany, what he is striving to obtain is more the sign of Go d than knowledge of Him or His presence; language is his definitive horizon and articulation an orperation he can never abandon in favour of indistinct--ineffable--states. (53)
(Sade's) art consists in staturing the erotic body by simtenoiulsy occupying the principal sites of pleasure (mouth, sexual organs, anus;) each subject is thrice fufilled (in both menaings of the word) and hence each of the nine pratners finds his erotic employment (true , this empolyment is simple, whereas the subjects pleasure is threefold; class difference, libertines as against agents, rich adventuresses against porr fisherman..) (129)
Monday, July 27, 2009
Georges Batialle: Writing the Sacred.
Sacrifice and violence in Bataille’s erotic fiction: Reflections from/upon the mise en abîme
Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons
My model suggests that violent energy is circumscribed in the first moment by Bataille’s image itself; the parameters of this image may be thus seen to contain the potential force of poetic violence. The limit against which this brutal force is directed (in the second moment) is formed by the boundaries delimiting received notions,5 be they those of God, of mother, of the eye or of any other signified; what is altered is the integrity of these notions as the energy of Bataille’s image—the acting body—exceeds the confines of its discursive parameters and collides against the parameters of the received notion, opening it and releasing its energy as body acted upon...(94)
After barricading the door, Sir Edmund rummaged through the closets until he finally lit upon a large chalice…
‘Look’, he explained to Simone, ‘the eucharistic hosts in the ciborium, and here the chalice where they put white wine.’
‘They smell like come’, said Simone, sniffing the unleavened wafers.
‘Precisely’, continued Sir Edmund. ‘The hosts, as you see, are nothing other than Christ’s sperm in the form of small white biscuits. And as for the wine they put in the chalice, the ecclesiastics say it is the blood of Christ, but they are obviously mistaken. If they really thought that it was the blood, they would use red wine, but since they employ only white wine, they are showing that at the bottom of their hearts they are quite aware that this is urine.12
In this passage, Bataille invites the reader to imagine a rite in which Christ’s sperm and urine are ceremoniously swallowed; the images of sperm and urine are used to violate the received notions of the host and Christ’s blood respectively; one sign violates another without, however, permitting either one to dominate the other. The value (or energy) of the received notions, once released, continue to reverberate in a loss that is not entirely subverted to the profit of the image inflicting sacrifice.
However, the mutilation and sacrifice effected by Bataille’s imagery does not always operate between signs. It may also be directed from signifier to signified within the boundaries of a single sign. There it is a question of Bataille setting a destructive reverberation in motion, a slippage by which the normally static objects of signifier and signified are disturbed into a movement upsetting their discursive equilibrium. This is the case of the slipping word, whose capacity for self-destruction or auto-mutilation (sacrifice) had been silenced by the straightjacket of discourse. The slipping word, the sign in reverberation, becomes, therefore, the site of a mutual antagonism, an antagonism between signifier and signified, which discursive language had silenced for the purposes and profit of project, and which Bataille sets off in a gesture of poetic violence.(97)
Sacrifice and violence in Bataille’s erotic fiction: Reflections from/upon the mise en abîme
Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons
My model suggests that violent energy is circumscribed in the first moment by Bataille’s image itself; the parameters of this image may be thus seen to contain the potential force of poetic violence. The limit against which this brutal force is directed (in the second moment) is formed by the boundaries delimiting received notions,5 be they those of God, of mother, of the eye or of any other signified; what is altered is the integrity of these notions as the energy of Bataille’s image—the acting body—exceeds the confines of its discursive parameters and collides against the parameters of the received notion, opening it and releasing its energy as body acted upon...(94)
After barricading the door, Sir Edmund rummaged through the closets until he finally lit upon a large chalice…
‘Look’, he explained to Simone, ‘the eucharistic hosts in the ciborium, and here the chalice where they put white wine.’
‘They smell like come’, said Simone, sniffing the unleavened wafers.
‘Precisely’, continued Sir Edmund. ‘The hosts, as you see, are nothing other than Christ’s sperm in the form of small white biscuits. And as for the wine they put in the chalice, the ecclesiastics say it is the blood of Christ, but they are obviously mistaken. If they really thought that it was the blood, they would use red wine, but since they employ only white wine, they are showing that at the bottom of their hearts they are quite aware that this is urine.12
In this passage, Bataille invites the reader to imagine a rite in which Christ’s sperm and urine are ceremoniously swallowed; the images of sperm and urine are used to violate the received notions of the host and Christ’s blood respectively; one sign violates another without, however, permitting either one to dominate the other. The value (or energy) of the received notions, once released, continue to reverberate in a loss that is not entirely subverted to the profit of the image inflicting sacrifice.
However, the mutilation and sacrifice effected by Bataille’s imagery does not always operate between signs. It may also be directed from signifier to signified within the boundaries of a single sign. There it is a question of Bataille setting a destructive reverberation in motion, a slippage by which the normally static objects of signifier and signified are disturbed into a movement upsetting their discursive equilibrium. This is the case of the slipping word, whose capacity for self-destruction or auto-mutilation (sacrifice) had been silenced by the straightjacket of discourse. The slipping word, the sign in reverberation, becomes, therefore, the site of a mutual antagonism, an antagonism between signifier and signified, which discursive language had silenced for the purposes and profit of project, and which Bataille sets off in a gesture of poetic violence.(97)
Sunday, July 26, 2009
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| From Untitled Album |
Michael Jackson, Little Suzy. My RIP on jackson will be a reconsideraiton of his late 90s work, hopefully at left hip.
the death of print means that we will no longer have journalism like frank sinatra has a cold, but then when was the last article that matched didion, wolfe, thompson, white, talese, plimpton, et. al (though there were less women and less queers then, i know)
i am working thru my previously head homosex is a 19th century invention mindset, and this article about the naming of heterosex but not homosex in medieval europe is helping.
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| From Untitled Album |
trailer for in the loop, looks amazing.
kees goudzwaard paints white on white, but in a scarpp of paper, hyper minimalist remake of corkboard versimillitude way, need to see them live, but interesting.
some walton ford prints of parrots and other birds, d look at the turkey.
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| From Untitled Album |
Johnathon Monk, from Deflated, 2009 a set of sculptures and fotos (obv riff on koons and the market, the sculptures are from fully inflated to fully deflated, de-materializing, and making less monumental koons ego, opedial and sort of castrating, one note, but loud and piercing)
looking thru these fotos of vancouver specials, and then driving thru missuagua and thinking about millwoods, it reminds me that from the early 60s to the late 70s almost all of the houses in the suburbs were built to look the same: clean, quick, efficent, well constructed and weirdly economic/communal, there is a canadian metaphor there somewhere.
ars techinca on new genetic causes of autism as a small combo of minute genetic flaws.
shane yellowbird and crystal shawanda, two abogirnal country artists, got a lot of support from cmt and the labels, had a decent career, both young, both sort of interesting, but nothing like Buffy ST Marie's Indian Cowboy at hte Rodeo, or Susan Agulkarak, or others. at first i thot it was a heavily marketed mainstreaming, but a couple of things changed my mind, how shawnda talks to first nations media, and her involvement in native music rocks, a tour of first nation musicians from across north america, run by the semionles.
cartier panther rings
popping big red.
cartographic blankets.
Patrick Kostler's photos of colcanoes.
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| From Untitled Album |
Lynda BEnglis, Night Sherbert A, 1968, polyethelne foam (how the colours clash, the refusal of a flat pciture plane, the plasma like goopieness of it, the organic glomping against industrial minimalism (insert nochlin style female artist bit here), the technolust of new material, etc etc--how well do they hold up?)
collection of frieberg's BOM illustrations
hundreds of stewardess uniforms
Ashley does Pet Shop Boys.
Jarosz is a 17 yr old country singer, from Texas, much more traditional then nashville, but her singing of the murder ballad song up in her head is plain, edge of nausea, shiver up the spine terror. (esp. how she moves b/w the childhood edges and the adult warnings in the text)
Jimmy Carter slaps down the baptist misogyny
open source catholic
Willie, Amazing Grace (live in concert, the whole audience sings in the second half--i have always thot that both willie's and johnny cashes serious, intellectual, communiatiaran, joyful while understanding suffering, almost avuncular christianity, the american solitude of emerson's woods, and of southern tent revivals, is something profound, and something that i aim for)
the rob kelly musuem of american type at the university of texas.
images of the gutenberg bible digitalised.
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| From Untitled Album |
Julius Shurman, 195? (less house porny t hen his most famous work, i love this because it is like IS modernism gojiros the more vernacular work, it has a wryness.)
i phone app that puts ufos in fotos
i love these peter haakon thompson shots of table tennis players.
sloane stuido and the cheapie hirsts.
robot shinto priestS
the net allows for this previously normalised rural destruction of young queer voices taboo, and perhaps means that people will be shadier, less obvious, i doubt they will stop. poor 4H kid. (the 5th H is homophobia)
Gil Scott Heron against the Space Project.
erik kohn's long scale intensive, and v. adroit essay about not only the jewish implications of Inglorious Bastards but the larger politics of representation and liberation as it occurs in both 1st generation explotation films, and later attempts at deconstructing them, makes an arguement in favour of emotional excess and against historical versimillitude, which cuts apart mawkishly sentimental wwii tropes. speilberg should read this. (however he seems to uniroincally enjoy glenn beck, so ymmv)
wrangler colouring book
24 sexual things that r kelly wants
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| From Untitled Album |
Kate Beaton, Hark a Vagarant 204, 2009.
six pack annie
sometimes leboutin makes me a heterosexual foot fetishist
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| From Untitled Album |
Emil Alzamora, Minatour, 2005
the hunter gets captured by the game marvelettes. (the line like a fox on a rabbit, is the perfectly equidesent point b/w big mama thorton and elvis's hounddog)
for some r eason t he fbi decided to clean out the entireity of new jeresy corruption.
new spark bio talks about her catholicism. (as much as i love spark, and as much as i think that she is one of the clearest writer on original sin, and the glamour of evil, i suspect that she was not the most generous xians)
100 years of design manifestos
i feel weirdly in the middle lately b/w my new (instert noun) and some middle aged lady bears i know and b/w these young aspies i've gotten to know
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
what is the national leather foundation - S&M or agriculture?
3:31amAnthony
bdsm
im writing an article for this book thing
about cowboys and rodeos and gay fetishs and straight boys and secrets in mid western towns and what ever happened in cheyenne
3:32amGeoff
sounds interesting - tell me more
what did happen in cheyenne?
3:33amAnthony
i dont know
its a big rodeo town
so something is bound to happen
3:33amGeoff
nods... a warm night, the broncos are bucking
you have that book... i think it's called queer cowboys yes?
3:33amAnthony
my thesis is that gay fetish cowboys came about when regular working class cowboys encountered both rodeo cowboys and cowboyso n film and television
(i do)
but this creation sort of created a narrative that exluded other ones
you name something and the un named things get absorbed
3:34amGeoff
so in a way it depended on the cowboy being fetishised by the city/hollywood gay/gaze to reflect them back to themselves?
3:35amAnthony
yeah
so i mean accidental things that happened in hotel rooms became less accidental
though maybe they never were
its about the creaiton of homosexuality b/w the 1950s and the 1970s on the praries too
like boise in 56
3:35amGeoff
they do - it's that whole shift away from manly friendship which encompasses many to buddies which encompasses needing to bash fags/rape chicks in order to not be seen as faggy
3:36amAnthony
yeah and i mean not even that
like its also hand jobs in the bunk house and being lonely and seeking comfort are now introductions to an urban identity that might not have occured before
and i mean the state gets involved sometimes and the police sometimes
and family in idfferent ways
3:37amGeoff
right...s but like all ids, the central one of gayness tries assimilating what has different meanings outside the urban
3:37amAnthony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_homosexuality_scandal
and i mean even w/ urban contexts
new york isnt boise
so boise has as much to do with the creation of a new gay identity 14 years before stonewall
and it isnt paid attn to
for a bunch of reasons, including christ have you been to boise
3:39amGeoff
has christ been to boise?
3:39amAnthony
christ was born to boise
3:40amGeoff
ah right - i remember now. have you read sex crime panic?
3:41amAnthony
its on my pile
too much on that god damn mother fucking pile
3:42amGeoff
similar story - good for backgrounding. ties in of course with mccarthy and the notion of homointel developed in that book about.... homos and the arts in america in the 40s/50s
3:42amAnthony
that was one of hiss' big problems
3:43amGeoff
hiss?
3:44amAnthony
alger hiss
3:44amGeoff
who is?
3:44amAnthony
big commie scandal in the 50s?
a little earlier
the first one
3:44amGeoff
ah ok.
thanks
3:45amAnthony
some weird gay panic about that too
i mean the commie panic is really about immigrants and fags
and the fag bit is often left out
3:45amGeoff
so yeah - american homo id was already being locked in - on nyc and washington, and in hollywood - what washappening inbetween in movie theatres, bunkhouses, days off, not to mention korea and nam...
it is - very few commies were busted but hundreds of fags lost th eir job
3:46amAnthony
exactly
and it leads to this weird attitude that there are no gays in nebraska
or gays in nebraska have to move to hollywood or ny
same as gays in edmonton move to winnipeg
not winnipeg
3:47amGeoff
nods - and concurrently and still, if you are gay, head for the city
3:47amAnthony
vancouver or toronto
i mean god knows i couldnt stay in edmonton
but you moving back to toowoomba was kind of radical
3:49amGeoff
i thought i could change toowoomba - i also knew sydney wasn't wasn't what it was cracked up to be... i still dream of midwest urban centres... well no... compounds, ranhces, places of coming together in safety and awe
3:49amAnthony
lets buy a missle silo in kansas
3:49amGeoff
it's very tempting
seriously, i dream of self sustaining gaylands
3:50amAnthony
lesbians tried it in the 70s
didnt work
3:50amGeoff
i know... i'm wondering if it can be done within the framework of western individualism rather than imported socialism
3:51amAnthony
some kind of fag united order,
(lds reference, sorry)
3:31amAnthony
bdsm
im writing an article for this book thing
about cowboys and rodeos and gay fetishs and straight boys and secrets in mid western towns and what ever happened in cheyenne
3:32amGeoff
sounds interesting - tell me more
what did happen in cheyenne?
3:33amAnthony
i dont know
its a big rodeo town
so something is bound to happen
3:33amGeoff
nods... a warm night, the broncos are bucking
you have that book... i think it's called queer cowboys yes?
3:33amAnthony
my thesis is that gay fetish cowboys came about when regular working class cowboys encountered both rodeo cowboys and cowboyso n film and television
(i do)
but this creation sort of created a narrative that exluded other ones
you name something and the un named things get absorbed
3:34amGeoff
so in a way it depended on the cowboy being fetishised by the city/hollywood gay/gaze to reflect them back to themselves?
3:35amAnthony
yeah
so i mean accidental things that happened in hotel rooms became less accidental
though maybe they never were
its about the creaiton of homosexuality b/w the 1950s and the 1970s on the praries too
like boise in 56
3:35amGeoff
they do - it's that whole shift away from manly friendship which encompasses many to buddies which encompasses needing to bash fags/rape chicks in order to not be seen as faggy
3:36amAnthony
yeah and i mean not even that
like its also hand jobs in the bunk house and being lonely and seeking comfort are now introductions to an urban identity that might not have occured before
and i mean the state gets involved sometimes and the police sometimes
and family in idfferent ways
3:37amGeoff
right...s but like all ids, the central one of gayness tries assimilating what has different meanings outside the urban
3:37amAnthony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_homosexuality_scandal
and i mean even w/ urban contexts
new york isnt boise
so boise has as much to do with the creation of a new gay identity 14 years before stonewall
and it isnt paid attn to
for a bunch of reasons, including christ have you been to boise
3:39amGeoff
has christ been to boise?
3:39amAnthony
christ was born to boise
3:40amGeoff
ah right - i remember now. have you read sex crime panic?
3:41amAnthony
its on my pile
too much on that god damn mother fucking pile
3:42amGeoff
similar story - good for backgrounding. ties in of course with mccarthy and the notion of homointel developed in that book about.... homos and the arts in america in the 40s/50s
3:42amAnthony
that was one of hiss' big problems
3:43amGeoff
hiss?
3:44amAnthony
alger hiss
3:44amGeoff
who is?
3:44amAnthony
big commie scandal in the 50s?
a little earlier
the first one
3:44amGeoff
ah ok.
thanks
3:45amAnthony
some weird gay panic about that too
i mean the commie panic is really about immigrants and fags
and the fag bit is often left out
3:45amGeoff
so yeah - american homo id was already being locked in - on nyc and washington, and in hollywood - what washappening inbetween in movie theatres, bunkhouses, days off, not to mention korea and nam...
it is - very few commies were busted but hundreds of fags lost th eir job
3:46amAnthony
exactly
and it leads to this weird attitude that there are no gays in nebraska
or gays in nebraska have to move to hollywood or ny
same as gays in edmonton move to winnipeg
not winnipeg
3:47amGeoff
nods - and concurrently and still, if you are gay, head for the city
3:47amAnthony
vancouver or toronto
i mean god knows i couldnt stay in edmonton
but you moving back to toowoomba was kind of radical
3:49amGeoff
i thought i could change toowoomba - i also knew sydney wasn't wasn't what it was cracked up to be... i still dream of midwest urban centres... well no... compounds, ranhces, places of coming together in safety and awe
3:49amAnthony
lets buy a missle silo in kansas
3:49amGeoff
it's very tempting
seriously, i dream of self sustaining gaylands
3:50amAnthony
lesbians tried it in the 70s
didnt work
3:50amGeoff
i know... i'm wondering if it can be done within the framework of western individualism rather than imported socialism
3:51amAnthony
some kind of fag united order,
(lds reference, sorry)
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film.
Dr Strangelove (after Barry Lyndon)
2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.
cheap digital cameras, expensive cgi effects, we are now in the valley of the unreal.
3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?
shockingly have seen neither
4) Best Film of 1949.
Adam's Rib seems the obvious response, as does Kind Hearts and Cornets, and it is a great year for comedies, which is why i think that the Bugs Bunny short Grey Hounded Hare might be as good or better then either.
5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?
Oscar Jaffe?
6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?
yes, and am unsure if it can be renewed in interesting ways (Cloverfield aside)
7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?
Emmanulle, i think, or something shown on one of those showcase after dark soft core cable pieces.
8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?
I cannot place myself in the context where these were acceptable, which is my fault.
9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).
Sadly Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is 1978 and the Night Porter is 1974. In all honesty, the big battle movies never got me, and I sort of like comedies more then dramas. maybe The Americanization of Emily if it could be considered a drama?
10) Favorite animal movie star.
Francis the Talking Mule!
11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.
Schindler's List. It's hackwork, and it is hackwork that encourages lazy thinking and well processed emotionalism, the black and white, the commander listening to bach, the red coat, the coda with the stones, it cheapens and makes american the holocaust.
12) Best Film of 1969.
Hunting Scenes from Bavaria.i keep wondering why this is never brought up in queer histories of film, or why Fassbinder never really talked about it)
13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.
500 Days of Summer, Die Hard
14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.
California Split (after McCabe and Mrs MilleR)
15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?
Film crit for me is about usefunction, in case of writing about it, or seeing a movie, so i go to reference books, and the odd website, when i am looking for info, i do not go to crit for crit's sake. that said: a) the bfi seires of small volumes; nathan lee esp. in film comment, and the two big dave thomas books.
16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!)
Mao for Bandit Queen.
17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?
Mona Lisa.
18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.
Big Top Pee Wee because of how it intergrates the other while refusing to normalise it.
19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.
i keep thinking that film's real future is on youtube and not on hd.
20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.
Death Proof. Explotation films often hate women and fags, vanishing point is an awfully, violently homophobic text. So we get three women to replay it, to fuck with it, to seek revenge for all of those women who were beloved and destroyed in previous films--and then you o it in a way that is both really exciting (the car chase on the suburban highway), intergrates a wide variety of low trash, and is formally innovative. that it tells it's tales via absences is interesting.
21) Best Film of 1979.
Kramer vs Kramer has the only performance by Streep I like, and i think that her self actualization and her isolation from childhood is radically unsympathetic.
22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
Pleasentville
23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
Night of the Lepus (cute=death is always nice)
24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.
The Outsiders (after the conversation)
25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.
i think things tend towards their logical limit.
26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.
so many, the night club scene in black dahlia, nick cage losing his mind on the casino floor in snake eyes, the last 15 minutes of carrie, the first 20 minutes of femme fatale...
27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.
the emerald city in wizard of oz
28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!)
death of a gunfighter
29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?
Crash Davis
30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.
deconstructing harry.
31) Best Film of 1999.
Boy's Don't Cry
32) Favorite movie tag line.
"To avoid fainting, keep repeating 'It's only a movie...It's only a movie...'" Last House on the Left
33) Favorite B-movie western.
Johnny Guitar
34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work.
PAtricia Highsmith, even the straight to video Ripley Movie with Malkovich was brilliant
35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?
Susan Vance
36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.
37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?
Can't it be both?
38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!)
a) Louise Brookes
b) Marlene Detrich
c) Monty Clift
d) James Dean
e) Liz Taylor
(bisexual orgy)
Dr Strangelove (after Barry Lyndon)
2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.
cheap digital cameras, expensive cgi effects, we are now in the valley of the unreal.
3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?
shockingly have seen neither
4) Best Film of 1949.
Adam's Rib seems the obvious response, as does Kind Hearts and Cornets, and it is a great year for comedies, which is why i think that the Bugs Bunny short Grey Hounded Hare might be as good or better then either.
5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?
Oscar Jaffe?
6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?
yes, and am unsure if it can be renewed in interesting ways (Cloverfield aside)
7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?
Emmanulle, i think, or something shown on one of those showcase after dark soft core cable pieces.
8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?
I cannot place myself in the context where these were acceptable, which is my fault.
9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).
Sadly Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is 1978 and the Night Porter is 1974. In all honesty, the big battle movies never got me, and I sort of like comedies more then dramas. maybe The Americanization of Emily if it could be considered a drama?
10) Favorite animal movie star.
Francis the Talking Mule!
11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.
Schindler's List. It's hackwork, and it is hackwork that encourages lazy thinking and well processed emotionalism, the black and white, the commander listening to bach, the red coat, the coda with the stones, it cheapens and makes american the holocaust.
12) Best Film of 1969.
Hunting Scenes from Bavaria.i keep wondering why this is never brought up in queer histories of film, or why Fassbinder never really talked about it)
13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.
500 Days of Summer, Die Hard
14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.
California Split (after McCabe and Mrs MilleR)
15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?
Film crit for me is about usefunction, in case of writing about it, or seeing a movie, so i go to reference books, and the odd website, when i am looking for info, i do not go to crit for crit's sake. that said: a) the bfi seires of small volumes; nathan lee esp. in film comment, and the two big dave thomas books.
16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!)
Mao for Bandit Queen.
17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?
Mona Lisa.
18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.
Big Top Pee Wee because of how it intergrates the other while refusing to normalise it.
19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.
i keep thinking that film's real future is on youtube and not on hd.
20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.
Death Proof. Explotation films often hate women and fags, vanishing point is an awfully, violently homophobic text. So we get three women to replay it, to fuck with it, to seek revenge for all of those women who were beloved and destroyed in previous films--and then you o it in a way that is both really exciting (the car chase on the suburban highway), intergrates a wide variety of low trash, and is formally innovative. that it tells it's tales via absences is interesting.
21) Best Film of 1979.
Kramer vs Kramer has the only performance by Streep I like, and i think that her self actualization and her isolation from childhood is radically unsympathetic.
22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
Pleasentville
23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
Night of the Lepus (cute=death is always nice)
24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.
The Outsiders (after the conversation)
25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.
i think things tend towards their logical limit.
26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.
so many, the night club scene in black dahlia, nick cage losing his mind on the casino floor in snake eyes, the last 15 minutes of carrie, the first 20 minutes of femme fatale...
27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.
the emerald city in wizard of oz
28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!)
death of a gunfighter
29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?
Crash Davis
30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.
deconstructing harry.
31) Best Film of 1999.
Boy's Don't Cry
32) Favorite movie tag line.
"To avoid fainting, keep repeating 'It's only a movie...It's only a movie...'" Last House on the Left
33) Favorite B-movie western.
Johnny Guitar
34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work.
PAtricia Highsmith, even the straight to video Ripley Movie with Malkovich was brilliant
35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?
Susan Vance
36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.
37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?
Can't it be both?
38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!)
a) Louise Brookes
b) Marlene Detrich
c) Monty Clift
d) James Dean
e) Liz Taylor
(bisexual orgy)
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Subject:
I am interested in how the West constructs concepts of masculinity, especially in the mutability and maintenance of identifiers, and how those identifiers are constructed both by interior reserves and exterior forces. My interest also includes how popular culture mediates common ideas of masculinity, and how heterosexism complicates the liminal spaces between homosociality and homosexuality. There is little attempt to discuss these matters, and the discussions that have occurred have refused the ambiguities of texts, and made historical and contemporary discussions part of a histography that is too clean, and too well ordered.
The specific project I want help from the Leather Archives with is very much part of this culture. I want to test a thesis I have about the use of cowboy tropes among the gay fetish community, and it’s origins plus its current extensions/use. Gay Fetish Cowboys have emerged as a separate category set, which synthesizes two kinds of spectacled bodies, with one that is much more ordinary. Namely, Rodeo Cowboys, Film/Television Cowboys, and working class ranchers from the Canadian and American prairies.
Being straight, being gay, having sex with men, and having sex with women, knowing how to be a man, and knowing how to be butch are all encoded in these texts for people who raised cattle, the signals that popular culture gave them, that they learned from the traveling rodeos, and from their working class roots were transferred into a specific gay male discourse. There are questions that remain—when did this transfer occur, did it completely isolate other discourses, what are the differences between masculinity in a gay male context, in a context of men who have sex with men, and within a straight male context, how do these contexts problemtatize each other, and do they propose any problems that might be solved?
Scope:
The scope of the paper will be limited by three parameters: 1) chronology 2) gender 3) geography. It will not be limited by sexuality. In those parameters I hope to use a wide variety of sources, both officially and unofficially, including but not limited to personal records, letters, journals, fanzines, television shows, film, ephemera used to advertise both rural and urban events (i.e posters, programs, advertisements, flyers, and the like for tractor pulls, rodeos, bar nights, fetish events, and the like), oral histories, police reports, documents and records from the Pro Rodeo Association, and the like. I hope to use resources from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Archives in Oklahoma, the Calgary Stampede Archives, the Gay and Lesbian archives in Toronto, and the Leather Archives in Chicago.
The work will be a twinning between the gay world and the rodeo world, and will have then two originating points and two concluding points. The queer research will begin in 1955, with the homosexual panic found when three men were arrested in Boise for having sex with men, which broke nationally and suggested that there were queer lives outside the centers of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The rodeo research will begin in 1958 with the founding of the National Finals Rodeo, which turned a local, barnstorming type series of rural events, into a larger and more cash heavy sports spectacle. The gay work will conclude with the charting of Macho Man by the Village People in 1978, a symbolic mainstreaming of gay fetish aesthetics, and of desexualizing those who were involved. The rodeo work will end with 1976, where the rider Chris LeDoux gave up on rodeo to become a country music singer, eventually giving birth to a new kind of Nashville sound, and distancing country music from it’s working class roots.
The eventual piece will be about men. Though there are interesting gendered components in straight fetish work around cowgirls, and cowgirls do have a component in Rodeo, and they did end up on both the big and small screens, the central goal of this paper is masculine spectacled bodies interacting with rural working class culture, and how those interactions intercept traditional ideas of presenting males. In this context, the presence of women is outside the prevue of this essay.
The big rodeo centers include Calgary, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Tulsa. With the exception of work intended for those markets, and the aforementioned Boise, the essay will be about the psycho-geographical spaces between those locations.
Sources:
At the National Leather Archives, I hope to use the Chapter records from Oklahoma City and Kansas City; the visual art of Chuck Arnett , Tom of Finland, and Charles Krebbs, any relevant images or articles in the periodicals, Bear, Bullsheets, Butch, Bunkhouse Cowboys and Country Men, Cowboys, Drummer, Honcho, In Uniform, Midwest Mattachine Society, Physique Pictorial, Ramrod and A Country Journal for Gay Men; the photographs of Kris Studios and Target Studios, Posters from the Barn and Blazing Saddles in Des Moines and the Heart of Texas in Houston; T Shirts from the Calgary Eagle, and a variety of books including
I am interested in how the West constructs concepts of masculinity, especially in the mutability and maintenance of identifiers, and how those identifiers are constructed both by interior reserves and exterior forces. My interest also includes how popular culture mediates common ideas of masculinity, and how heterosexism complicates the liminal spaces between homosociality and homosexuality. There is little attempt to discuss these matters, and the discussions that have occurred have refused the ambiguities of texts, and made historical and contemporary discussions part of a histography that is too clean, and too well ordered.
The specific project I want help from the Leather Archives with is very much part of this culture. I want to test a thesis I have about the use of cowboy tropes among the gay fetish community, and it’s origins plus its current extensions/use. Gay Fetish Cowboys have emerged as a separate category set, which synthesizes two kinds of spectacled bodies, with one that is much more ordinary. Namely, Rodeo Cowboys, Film/Television Cowboys, and working class ranchers from the Canadian and American prairies.
Being straight, being gay, having sex with men, and having sex with women, knowing how to be a man, and knowing how to be butch are all encoded in these texts for people who raised cattle, the signals that popular culture gave them, that they learned from the traveling rodeos, and from their working class roots were transferred into a specific gay male discourse. There are questions that remain—when did this transfer occur, did it completely isolate other discourses, what are the differences between masculinity in a gay male context, in a context of men who have sex with men, and within a straight male context, how do these contexts problemtatize each other, and do they propose any problems that might be solved?
Scope:
The scope of the paper will be limited by three parameters: 1) chronology 2) gender 3) geography. It will not be limited by sexuality. In those parameters I hope to use a wide variety of sources, both officially and unofficially, including but not limited to personal records, letters, journals, fanzines, television shows, film, ephemera used to advertise both rural and urban events (i.e posters, programs, advertisements, flyers, and the like for tractor pulls, rodeos, bar nights, fetish events, and the like), oral histories, police reports, documents and records from the Pro Rodeo Association, and the like. I hope to use resources from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Archives in Oklahoma, the Calgary Stampede Archives, the Gay and Lesbian archives in Toronto, and the Leather Archives in Chicago.
The work will be a twinning between the gay world and the rodeo world, and will have then two originating points and two concluding points. The queer research will begin in 1955, with the homosexual panic found when three men were arrested in Boise for having sex with men, which broke nationally and suggested that there were queer lives outside the centers of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The rodeo research will begin in 1958 with the founding of the National Finals Rodeo, which turned a local, barnstorming type series of rural events, into a larger and more cash heavy sports spectacle. The gay work will conclude with the charting of Macho Man by the Village People in 1978, a symbolic mainstreaming of gay fetish aesthetics, and of desexualizing those who were involved. The rodeo work will end with 1976, where the rider Chris LeDoux gave up on rodeo to become a country music singer, eventually giving birth to a new kind of Nashville sound, and distancing country music from it’s working class roots.
The eventual piece will be about men. Though there are interesting gendered components in straight fetish work around cowgirls, and cowgirls do have a component in Rodeo, and they did end up on both the big and small screens, the central goal of this paper is masculine spectacled bodies interacting with rural working class culture, and how those interactions intercept traditional ideas of presenting males. In this context, the presence of women is outside the prevue of this essay.
The big rodeo centers include Calgary, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Tulsa. With the exception of work intended for those markets, and the aforementioned Boise, the essay will be about the psycho-geographical spaces between those locations.
Sources:
At the National Leather Archives, I hope to use the Chapter records from Oklahoma City and Kansas City; the visual art of Chuck Arnett , Tom of Finland, and Charles Krebbs, any relevant images or articles in the periodicals, Bear, Bullsheets, Butch, Bunkhouse Cowboys and Country Men, Cowboys, Drummer, Honcho, In Uniform, Midwest Mattachine Society, Physique Pictorial, Ramrod and A Country Journal for Gay Men; the photographs of Kris Studios and Target Studios, Posters from the Barn and Blazing Saddles in Des Moines and the Heart of Texas in Houston; T Shirts from the Calgary Eagle, and a variety of books including
Steinberg, Robert Rasuchenberg: October Files 4.
Perhaps Rauschenberges profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he seized his own bed, smeared paint on it's pillow and quilt coverlet and uprighted it aginest the wall. There in the vertical posture of art, it contineus to work in the imaginaiton as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, concieveing and dreaming. The horizonality of the bed relates to "making" as the vertical of the renaissance picture plane, related to seeing... (34)
Foster, Re:Post
qouting barthes "a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the message of the Authour-God but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash". such "textuali" is...based on the idea that the sign is not stable, ie that it does not enclose one signifer and signified as such... (194 in Art After Modernism, edited by BRian Wallis)
Modernism Art and the Grotesque
Van Gogh's Ear, Michel Chaouli:
Diderot troubles several widely held predjuices: that nature is always beautiful, that beauty and ugliness inhere in things, that nature is accessible to us as an aesthetic object in itself and outside of any context. For when the judgements of "beatiful" or "ugly" are at stake, the questions of place, arises. For Diderot this is tatamount to asking the question of purpose: the aesthetic judgement of the otwner (which, like the painter's judgement, Diderot does not explicitly pronouce) cannot be seperate from the fact that the oak is in the way, which is to say: out of place. The painter, however, who renders the ugly picturesque finds the oak beatuficul precisely because it is in the right place; since the two terms lean on each other for suppourt, they could also be turned around: in the right place, beacuase beautiful. Indeed, the logic of space is slightly more complicated still...The ugly is thus only ugly when it is out of place for paticular purposes, in this case, purposes of propety and use...(51)
Lessa Fanning, De Kooning's Women:
The body is not a stable object, but a set of different modes of meaning, I allow a broad semantic range for "Body" as a liological entity, pyschosexual construct, cultural product, and an "other", an anarich body that exceeds all cultural prescriptions The "body" may be repsesented as a variety of figural forms within the visual arts...(242)
Perhaps Rauschenberges profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he seized his own bed, smeared paint on it's pillow and quilt coverlet and uprighted it aginest the wall. There in the vertical posture of art, it contineus to work in the imaginaiton as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, concieveing and dreaming. The horizonality of the bed relates to "making" as the vertical of the renaissance picture plane, related to seeing... (34)
Foster, Re:Post
qouting barthes "a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the message of the Authour-God but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash". such "textuali" is...based on the idea that the sign is not stable, ie that it does not enclose one signifer and signified as such... (194 in Art After Modernism, edited by BRian Wallis)
Modernism Art and the Grotesque
Van Gogh's Ear, Michel Chaouli:
Diderot troubles several widely held predjuices: that nature is always beautiful, that beauty and ugliness inhere in things, that nature is accessible to us as an aesthetic object in itself and outside of any context. For when the judgements of "beatiful" or "ugly" are at stake, the questions of place, arises. For Diderot this is tatamount to asking the question of purpose: the aesthetic judgement of the otwner (which, like the painter's judgement, Diderot does not explicitly pronouce) cannot be seperate from the fact that the oak is in the way, which is to say: out of place. The painter, however, who renders the ugly picturesque finds the oak beatuficul precisely because it is in the right place; since the two terms lean on each other for suppourt, they could also be turned around: in the right place, beacuase beautiful. Indeed, the logic of space is slightly more complicated still...The ugly is thus only ugly when it is out of place for paticular purposes, in this case, purposes of propety and use...(51)
Lessa Fanning, De Kooning's Women:
The body is not a stable object, but a set of different modes of meaning, I allow a broad semantic range for "Body" as a liological entity, pyschosexual construct, cultural product, and an "other", an anarich body that exceeds all cultural prescriptions The "body" may be repsesented as a variety of figural forms within the visual arts...(242)
"If I had to pick one concept to survive from all of my writing about sexuality, present and future, it’s that we should banish the idea that there are right and wrong ways to experience the pleasure of sex. The concept of failure should not enter the bedroom. If consenting adults have blundered into the bedroom and gotten at least partly naked and made some kind of contact with one another for a minute, the world is a better place, and everyone aside from those people can shut up about what should have happened and how it should have happened and when it should have happened and what should have been going through their heads while it happened."
— Adrian Colesberry via sex is not the enemy
— Adrian Colesberry via sex is not the enemy
James Elkins' Pictures and Tears talks about the history of Romanticism, the sentimental qualities of the 18th and early 19th century visual culture, the emotional desert of modernism, and how sublimity can overwhelm, so language is communicated in half thoughts. It elucidates how arts professional's intellectual rigour functions simultaneously with an emotional reserve, and also how those twin instincts often fail. His own personal anecdotes, and those of queried students, artists, writers, and other academics, curate an important corpus of first-person information about who cried at paintings. Elkins' wants viewers to feel, and by that feeling acknowledge the personal biases and narratives that inform their viewing. This is a radical book, because in that desire he is breaking with his colleagues taboo against profound emotion.
Crying seems to be the most obvious of these taboos. The art historian and critic Robert Rosenblum responds to Elkins' questions with “I must end up confessing that...my own lachrymal ducts have never responded to a work of art...On the other hand, if you're interested in physiology I have truly gasped (jaw dropped, breath caught, etc.) from the sensation of what I guess we might still call Beauty or some kind of magic in art” (Elkins, 100).
Rosenblum is a critic that has an enormous amount in common with Elkins. From the most general to the most specific. In Pictures and Tear's with it's discussions of Warhol, Rothko and Friedrich, plus more general work of the 19th century can be mapped on Rosenblum major essays and books. They also share suspicions about doctrinaire modernism, and the excesses of current critiques of 20th century art history, finding a middle ground that works in personal anecdotes, wry wit, and a belief that the safe halls of the academy need to be ruptured. There is a fondness in that quote but there is also something else: even Rosenblum is not willing, or perhaps unable to talk about what it means to cry in front of a painting.
Both harbour a suspicion that academic post-modernism is part of the problem. In a long passage about what exactly it means not to be moved from modern or post-modern sources, Elkins' writes “People don't cry over fiction that is clearly modernist or post-modernist---Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Pessao; nor do they cry at modern and Post-modern films—Gance, Robbe-Gillet, Bresson, Brunel, Deren. People weep at romantic novels, especially when they're not exactly the best literature. Harlequin romances are romantic, both in the sense that they are stories about love, and in the sense that they belong in a genealogy that goes back to Romanticism.” (Elkins, 143)
Elkins is making two arguments here, one that is not very radical at all, and one that destabilizes the modern/post modern project. The first has been carefully documented, that in the words of Cole Porter “there is power in a cheap tune.” The second is that there is work that is not “the best literature” that has as much emotional value than work that is considered highbrow. But not value in the sense of academic interest, or sociological use-function, or any other excuses that critics use to justify slumming. For Elkins' the Harlequins are valuable because people's emotions are valuable. He becomes concerned that artists and writers are incapable of making work or responding to work that not only makes us cry, but makes us aroused, or angry, or besotted or any of those gut reactions that are apparently blanched out at the end of the 20th century.
This argument is made most clearly when he talks about Warhol: “The same kinds of events took place in the Renaissance, and large churches were sometimes built around small provincial chapels that contained miraculous images. From my point of view, the only essential difference is that the renaissance devotional images could be made by the best artists. Now the best artists only make ironic versions of religious images, that end up on television. I doubt anyone could pray or cry looking at one of Warhol's “camouflaged” versions of Leonardo's Last Supper, even though Warhol intended his works to be very much in the Catholic tradition...” (Elkins, 176)
The Catholic tradition is so wide and vast a territory, that to assume that it cannot contain irony, or that Warhol is less then sincere, or that sincerity and irony cannot live together in a mutually beneficial relationship, is problematic. The Last Supper paintings are difficult. They are from a reproduction of a reproduction, and they are of a work that has moved from a dessicated original to a plethora of mechanically reproduced objects of devotion. Warhol's whole life was about constructing an iconography out of the iconoclasm of modernity. The paintings in the 1980s, especially the Last Supper paintings, but others, including the eerily transubstantiative Good Body series of 1986 speak against the dichotomy of irony and authenticity, of realism and reproduction, of being and feeling that Elkins claims that the 20th century has ignored.
They are about the body of God, and feeling the body of God, about surface, desire, the haunting of the Holy Ghost through this broken century, and they are achingly holy. Warhol for me, was the artist who had this skill of synthesizing emotional sublimity with a icy wickedness. This series with it's source material in body building magazines, placed in the context of an old religious feeling, allowed for the possibility that “the raw and the cooked” can work in conjunction. Elkins' underestimates Warhol's skill at emotionally significant blankness, and by extension is unable to process this kind of synthesizing under the weight of history and Romanticism.
Personal confession time: the book encourages it, Warhol encourages it, and Elkins' rhetorical strategies makes it the logical conclusion. I have prayed with Warhol, not with the Last Supper, but with the mourning Jackies, with the Madonna/Whore of the gold Marilyn, with some of the screen tests. I have prayed with other artists, almost 90 minutes enraptured by Agnes Martin's Morning from 1965. I have other reactions; anger, or exhaustion, or eroticism. I have wanted to destroy work or to use it as a tool for personal revelry. Art has made me overwhelmed with joy, and it is has made me sad, but never moved me to tears.
In fact, most of the work that I have felt intensely about, has not been ancient work. I rarely have profound emotional responses to work that was created before 1960. Desire for transgression and transcendence work functionally together as emotions become an unruly and difficult series of events. Perhaps because I have always been a bit unhinged, a bit strange, a bit unable to find out exactly where my emotions lie, the emotional excesses that occur when looking at work fail to emerge from Diderot or the Romantics, as Elkins suggest they might. Because I want to find how I feel, and not why I feel, I seek work that has a hard shell of cynicism or irony or camp to protect the delicate centre.
Crying seems to be the most obvious of these taboos. The art historian and critic Robert Rosenblum responds to Elkins' questions with “I must end up confessing that...my own lachrymal ducts have never responded to a work of art...On the other hand, if you're interested in physiology I have truly gasped (jaw dropped, breath caught, etc.) from the sensation of what I guess we might still call Beauty or some kind of magic in art” (Elkins, 100).
Rosenblum is a critic that has an enormous amount in common with Elkins. From the most general to the most specific. In Pictures and Tear's with it's discussions of Warhol, Rothko and Friedrich, plus more general work of the 19th century can be mapped on Rosenblum major essays and books. They also share suspicions about doctrinaire modernism, and the excesses of current critiques of 20th century art history, finding a middle ground that works in personal anecdotes, wry wit, and a belief that the safe halls of the academy need to be ruptured. There is a fondness in that quote but there is also something else: even Rosenblum is not willing, or perhaps unable to talk about what it means to cry in front of a painting.
Both harbour a suspicion that academic post-modernism is part of the problem. In a long passage about what exactly it means not to be moved from modern or post-modern sources, Elkins' writes “People don't cry over fiction that is clearly modernist or post-modernist---Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Pessao; nor do they cry at modern and Post-modern films—Gance, Robbe-Gillet, Bresson, Brunel, Deren. People weep at romantic novels, especially when they're not exactly the best literature. Harlequin romances are romantic, both in the sense that they are stories about love, and in the sense that they belong in a genealogy that goes back to Romanticism.” (Elkins, 143)
Elkins is making two arguments here, one that is not very radical at all, and one that destabilizes the modern/post modern project. The first has been carefully documented, that in the words of Cole Porter “there is power in a cheap tune.” The second is that there is work that is not “the best literature” that has as much emotional value than work that is considered highbrow. But not value in the sense of academic interest, or sociological use-function, or any other excuses that critics use to justify slumming. For Elkins' the Harlequins are valuable because people's emotions are valuable. He becomes concerned that artists and writers are incapable of making work or responding to work that not only makes us cry, but makes us aroused, or angry, or besotted or any of those gut reactions that are apparently blanched out at the end of the 20th century.
This argument is made most clearly when he talks about Warhol: “The same kinds of events took place in the Renaissance, and large churches were sometimes built around small provincial chapels that contained miraculous images. From my point of view, the only essential difference is that the renaissance devotional images could be made by the best artists. Now the best artists only make ironic versions of religious images, that end up on television. I doubt anyone could pray or cry looking at one of Warhol's “camouflaged” versions of Leonardo's Last Supper, even though Warhol intended his works to be very much in the Catholic tradition...” (Elkins, 176)
The Catholic tradition is so wide and vast a territory, that to assume that it cannot contain irony, or that Warhol is less then sincere, or that sincerity and irony cannot live together in a mutually beneficial relationship, is problematic. The Last Supper paintings are difficult. They are from a reproduction of a reproduction, and they are of a work that has moved from a dessicated original to a plethora of mechanically reproduced objects of devotion. Warhol's whole life was about constructing an iconography out of the iconoclasm of modernity. The paintings in the 1980s, especially the Last Supper paintings, but others, including the eerily transubstantiative Good Body series of 1986 speak against the dichotomy of irony and authenticity, of realism and reproduction, of being and feeling that Elkins claims that the 20th century has ignored.
They are about the body of God, and feeling the body of God, about surface, desire, the haunting of the Holy Ghost through this broken century, and they are achingly holy. Warhol for me, was the artist who had this skill of synthesizing emotional sublimity with a icy wickedness. This series with it's source material in body building magazines, placed in the context of an old religious feeling, allowed for the possibility that “the raw and the cooked” can work in conjunction. Elkins' underestimates Warhol's skill at emotionally significant blankness, and by extension is unable to process this kind of synthesizing under the weight of history and Romanticism.
Personal confession time: the book encourages it, Warhol encourages it, and Elkins' rhetorical strategies makes it the logical conclusion. I have prayed with Warhol, not with the Last Supper, but with the mourning Jackies, with the Madonna/Whore of the gold Marilyn, with some of the screen tests. I have prayed with other artists, almost 90 minutes enraptured by Agnes Martin's Morning from 1965. I have other reactions; anger, or exhaustion, or eroticism. I have wanted to destroy work or to use it as a tool for personal revelry. Art has made me overwhelmed with joy, and it is has made me sad, but never moved me to tears.
In fact, most of the work that I have felt intensely about, has not been ancient work. I rarely have profound emotional responses to work that was created before 1960. Desire for transgression and transcendence work functionally together as emotions become an unruly and difficult series of events. Perhaps because I have always been a bit unhinged, a bit strange, a bit unable to find out exactly where my emotions lie, the emotional excesses that occur when looking at work fail to emerge from Diderot or the Romantics, as Elkins suggest they might. Because I want to find how I feel, and not why I feel, I seek work that has a hard shell of cynicism or irony or camp to protect the delicate centre.
Monday, July 20, 2009
From Eduardo Salibrato, Totalitarian Lust from Salo to Abu Gharib South Central Review 24.1 (2007) 174-182 2007
Torture is a microcosm. Hence, its considerable theological, philosophical, and political value. The physical and chemical techniques of destruction of the person—from the grappling irons and mutilations put into practice by the Holy Christian Brotherhood, to the electrical charges, drugs, violent contusions, prolonged asphyxia, aggressive sensorial stimulation, and sexual violation practiced in centers of military intelligence throughout the Cold War—in short, what we see before us today, is not, as the institutional watchdogs of human rights are inclined to proclaim, the vision of an inexpressible and incomprehensible horror. It is the exact opposite: the calculated expression, at once rational and necessary, that defines modernity, the global capitalist system, or Western civilization as such. This is the expression that reveals the profound logos of modernity. It is, to be precise, the same expression that once led the Marquis de Sade to explore, in his memories of imprisonment, the nexus between torture and civilizing rationality.(174)
Torture is a microcosm. Hence, its considerable theological, philosophical, and political value. The physical and chemical techniques of destruction of the person—from the grappling irons and mutilations put into practice by the Holy Christian Brotherhood, to the electrical charges, drugs, violent contusions, prolonged asphyxia, aggressive sensorial stimulation, and sexual violation practiced in centers of military intelligence throughout the Cold War—in short, what we see before us today, is not, as the institutional watchdogs of human rights are inclined to proclaim, the vision of an inexpressible and incomprehensible horror. It is the exact opposite: the calculated expression, at once rational and necessary, that defines modernity, the global capitalist system, or Western civilization as such. This is the expression that reveals the profound logos of modernity. It is, to be precise, the same expression that once led the Marquis de Sade to explore, in his memories of imprisonment, the nexus between torture and civilizing rationality.(174)
From ITALIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 1, SPRING 2007
LIBERATION HURTS: VIOLENCE, MASOCHISM AND
ANTI-CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO PASOLINI
Fabio Vighi
Salò makes visible how when the wall of prohibition
sustaining the economy of desire falls, we enter the shadowy domain of drive,
whose circulation implies the nightmare of an endless encounter with jouissance,
‘since jouissance is, at its most elementary, ‘pleasure in pain’, that is, a perverted pleasure
provided by the very painful and inherently masochistic experience of repeatedly
missing one’s goal’.43 And what the libertines discover at the end of their journey into
the dark realm of drive is that the impossibility of (attaining) the object coincides with
the impossible/disavowed/excessive kernel of the self. Pasolini tells us that the external
ever-elusive ‘Thing’ is also ‘our Thing’, the most intimate place inside us. Such a
realisation cannot but have a devastating effect on the subject: as the final part of the
film suggests, it implies the collapse of the libertines’ psychic balance.
LIBERATION HURTS: VIOLENCE, MASOCHISM AND
ANTI-CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO PASOLINI
Fabio Vighi
Salò makes visible how when the wall of prohibition
sustaining the economy of desire falls, we enter the shadowy domain of drive,
whose circulation implies the nightmare of an endless encounter with jouissance,
‘since jouissance is, at its most elementary, ‘pleasure in pain’, that is, a perverted pleasure
provided by the very painful and inherently masochistic experience of repeatedly
missing one’s goal’.43 And what the libertines discover at the end of their journey into
the dark realm of drive is that the impossibility of (attaining) the object coincides with
the impossible/disavowed/excessive kernel of the self. Pasolini tells us that the external
ever-elusive ‘Thing’ is also ‘our Thing’, the most intimate place inside us. Such a
realisation cannot but have a devastating effect on the subject: as the final part of the
film suggests, it implies the collapse of the libertines’ psychic balance.
User Rating:
8.0 /10
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I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'
'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'
8.0 /10
(3 votes)
0 E-mail this poem to e friend
0 Send this poem as eCard
0 Add this poem to MyPoemList
0 Print friendly version
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'
'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'
texts:
a) yeats, crazy jane talks to the bishop
b) batialle, divine filth
c) manzoni, canned shit
d) barthes, sade/fourier/loyala
e) pasolini, salo
f) rberg, bed
g) mapplethorpe, fisting
h) serrano, piss christ
i) koons, made in heaven
j) mccarthy, inflatables
6 points:
a) mostly catholic, all from xian contexts
b) instability of the once stable body, related to the idea of death of the author
c) abasement or abjectness can be as theological, and as strong a theological tradition (inc/esp) its inclusion of the sublime, as ideas of ascension or grace
d) heresey or blasphemey as a response to the horrors of the 20th century
e) obscenity as a liberatory/political possibilty (as punishment, as getting what one deserves, as an extension of opposition in all things)
f) it mirrors/provides a shadow discourse of the allowed/proper abjeciton of the divine body. (cf steinberg)
a) yeats, crazy jane talks to the bishop
b) batialle, divine filth
c) manzoni, canned shit
d) barthes, sade/fourier/loyala
e) pasolini, salo
f) rberg, bed
g) mapplethorpe, fisting
h) serrano, piss christ
i) koons, made in heaven
j) mccarthy, inflatables
6 points:
a) mostly catholic, all from xian contexts
b) instability of the once stable body, related to the idea of death of the author
c) abasement or abjectness can be as theological, and as strong a theological tradition (inc/esp) its inclusion of the sublime, as ideas of ascension or grace
d) heresey or blasphemey as a response to the horrors of the 20th century
e) obscenity as a liberatory/political possibilty (as punishment, as getting what one deserves, as an extension of opposition in all things)
f) it mirrors/provides a shadow discourse of the allowed/proper abjeciton of the divine body. (cf steinberg)
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
John Elkin's Pictures and Tears does many things, most of them very well. It talks about the history of romanticism, the sentimental edges of the 18th and early 19th century, the emotional desert of modernism, and how the sublime becomes so overwhelming that to express it one enters half thoughts, or not quite developed emotions into the permanent record. It elucidates how arts professionals intellectual rigour functions in the same place as emotional reserve, and how that occasionally fails work. He also, by his own personal anecdotes, that of students, and of friends, and other professionals, gives an important corpus of first-person information about who cried at paintings, and how if one so desires, a viewer could do so himself. It is a radical book, because of it's flattening of intellectual practice with significant personal details. Reading the work, reading Elkin is to be baptised into a new historical practice, to be born again against the taboos of severe reticence.
Crying seems to be the most obvious of these taboos, the severity of transgressing it found in the art historian Robert Rosenblum, who wrote “I must end up confessing that...my own lachrymal ducts have never responded to a work of art...On the other hand, if you're interested in physiology I have truly gasped (jaw dropped, breath caught, etc) from the sensation of what I guess we might still call Beauty or some kind of magic in art” (Elkins, 100).
Rosenblum, with his claiming of Rothko as a Northern Romantic, like Fredich, and his technician's skill in reclaiming the importance of otherwise problematic early 20th century sentiment, share important aesthetic details with this text's analysis of the Rothko chapel in Houston, with the clear comments on Friedrich,have the same patterns of iconoclasm, of the post-modern desire for genre shattering , for allowing work that has been excised from the Canon, or ideas that are unfashionable back in. But even he is not willing, or perhaps unable to talk about what it means to cry in front of a painting.
In fact Elkins, thinks that post-modernism is part of the problem, in a long passage about what exactly it means not to be moved from modern or post-modern sources, “People don't cry over fiction that is cleary modernist or post-modernist---Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Pessao; nor do they cry at modern and Post-modern films—Gance, Robbe-Gillet, Bresson, Brunel, Deren. People weep at romantic novels, esepcially when they're not exactly the best literature. Harlequin romances are romantic, both in the sense that they are stores about love, and in the sense that they belong in a genealogy that goes back to Romanticism.” (Elkins, 143)
Elkins is making two arguments here, one that is not very radical at all, and one that destabilizes the modern/post modern project. The first has been carefully documented, that there is power (perhaps more power) in a cheap tune. The second is that there work that is not “the best literature” has as much value or perhaps more then work that is considered artistic, highbrow etc. But not value in the sense of academic interest, or sociological use-function, or any other uses that people write about Hollywood movies or harlequin romances about. For Elkin's the Harlequins are as valuable because people feel about them, because people's emotions are valuable. He becomes concerned that artists and writers are incapable of making work or responding to work that not only makes us cry, but makes us aroused, or angry, or fall in love, or any of those strong and intense emotions that are apparently blanched out at the end of the 20th century.
The argument about this, is made when he talks about Warhol: “The same kinds of events took place in the Renaissance, and large churches were sometimes built around small provincial chapels that contained miraculous images. From my point of view, the only essential difference is that the renaissance devotional images could be made by the best artists. Now the best artists only make ironic versions of religious images, that end up on television. I doubt anyone could pray or cry looking at one of Warhol's “camouflaged” versions of Leonardo's Last Supper, even though Warhol intended his works to be very much in the Catholic tradition...” (176)
The Catholic tradition is so wide and vast a territory, that to assume that it cannot contain irony, or that Warhol is less then sincere, or that sincerity and irony cannot live together in a mutually beneficial relationship, is problematic. The Last Supper paintings are difficult, they are from a reproduction of a reproduction, and they are of a work that has moved from a dessicated original to a plethora of mechanically reproduced objects of devotion. Warhol's whole life was about constructing an iconography out of the iconoclasm of modernity. The paintings in the 1980s, especially the last supper paintings, but others, including the eerily transubstantiative Good Body work of 1986 speak against the dichotomy of irony and authenticity, of realism and reproduction, of being and feeling that Elkins claims that the 20th century have ignored.
They are about the body of God, and feeling the body of God, about beauty, desire, the haunting of the holy ghost through this broken century, and they are achingly holy. Warhol for me, the artist who had this skill of synthesizing emotional sublimity with a icy wickedness. The body painting, of course, with it's source material in body building magazines, placed in the context of an old religious feeling, allowed for the possibility that the raw and the cooked can work in conjunction, a project that Elkin's flattening of history, romanticism, and genre signifiers in order to just feel would be very much in favour of.
Personal confession time, the book encourages it, Warhol encourages it, and Elkins flattening makes it the logical conclusion. I have prayed with Warhol, not with the Last Supper, but with the mourning Jackie, with the Madonna/Whore of the gold Marilyn, with some of the screen tests. I have prayed with other artists, almost 90 minutes enraptured by Agnes Martin's Morning from 1965. I have other reactions, anger, or exhaustion, or eroticism. I have wanted to destroy work, to use it as a tool for personal revelry, it has made me overwhelmed with joy, and it is has made me sad, but never moved me to tears.
In fact, most of the work that I have felt intensely about, has not been ancient work, there are very few exceptions of work that has caused me profound emotional changes that have occurred before 1900. Perhaps I am strange, but work that functions as a sublime substitute for cathedrals, to use the example of Newman, should lead itself to strong emotions, to strong feelings. Desire for transgression and for transcendce are often the same kind of thing, work functionally on the same places, emotion becomes an unruly and difficult thing. Perhaps because I have always been a bit unhinged, a bit strange, a bit unable to find out exactly where my emotions lie, the emotional excesses that come out then do not come out of Diderot or the romantics, but as a post-modern seeking of narratives that contain some meaning while having internalized the seeds of their own dissent.
Crying seems to be the most obvious of these taboos, the severity of transgressing it found in the art historian Robert Rosenblum, who wrote “I must end up confessing that...my own lachrymal ducts have never responded to a work of art...On the other hand, if you're interested in physiology I have truly gasped (jaw dropped, breath caught, etc) from the sensation of what I guess we might still call Beauty or some kind of magic in art” (Elkins, 100).
Rosenblum, with his claiming of Rothko as a Northern Romantic, like Fredich, and his technician's skill in reclaiming the importance of otherwise problematic early 20th century sentiment, share important aesthetic details with this text's analysis of the Rothko chapel in Houston, with the clear comments on Friedrich,have the same patterns of iconoclasm, of the post-modern desire for genre shattering , for allowing work that has been excised from the Canon, or ideas that are unfashionable back in. But even he is not willing, or perhaps unable to talk about what it means to cry in front of a painting.
In fact Elkins, thinks that post-modernism is part of the problem, in a long passage about what exactly it means not to be moved from modern or post-modern sources, “People don't cry over fiction that is cleary modernist or post-modernist---Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Pessao; nor do they cry at modern and Post-modern films—Gance, Robbe-Gillet, Bresson, Brunel, Deren. People weep at romantic novels, esepcially when they're not exactly the best literature. Harlequin romances are romantic, both in the sense that they are stores about love, and in the sense that they belong in a genealogy that goes back to Romanticism.” (Elkins, 143)
Elkins is making two arguments here, one that is not very radical at all, and one that destabilizes the modern/post modern project. The first has been carefully documented, that there is power (perhaps more power) in a cheap tune. The second is that there work that is not “the best literature” has as much value or perhaps more then work that is considered artistic, highbrow etc. But not value in the sense of academic interest, or sociological use-function, or any other uses that people write about Hollywood movies or harlequin romances about. For Elkin's the Harlequins are as valuable because people feel about them, because people's emotions are valuable. He becomes concerned that artists and writers are incapable of making work or responding to work that not only makes us cry, but makes us aroused, or angry, or fall in love, or any of those strong and intense emotions that are apparently blanched out at the end of the 20th century.
The argument about this, is made when he talks about Warhol: “The same kinds of events took place in the Renaissance, and large churches were sometimes built around small provincial chapels that contained miraculous images. From my point of view, the only essential difference is that the renaissance devotional images could be made by the best artists. Now the best artists only make ironic versions of religious images, that end up on television. I doubt anyone could pray or cry looking at one of Warhol's “camouflaged” versions of Leonardo's Last Supper, even though Warhol intended his works to be very much in the Catholic tradition...” (176)
The Catholic tradition is so wide and vast a territory, that to assume that it cannot contain irony, or that Warhol is less then sincere, or that sincerity and irony cannot live together in a mutually beneficial relationship, is problematic. The Last Supper paintings are difficult, they are from a reproduction of a reproduction, and they are of a work that has moved from a dessicated original to a plethora of mechanically reproduced objects of devotion. Warhol's whole life was about constructing an iconography out of the iconoclasm of modernity. The paintings in the 1980s, especially the last supper paintings, but others, including the eerily transubstantiative Good Body work of 1986 speak against the dichotomy of irony and authenticity, of realism and reproduction, of being and feeling that Elkins claims that the 20th century have ignored.
They are about the body of God, and feeling the body of God, about beauty, desire, the haunting of the holy ghost through this broken century, and they are achingly holy. Warhol for me, the artist who had this skill of synthesizing emotional sublimity with a icy wickedness. The body painting, of course, with it's source material in body building magazines, placed in the context of an old religious feeling, allowed for the possibility that the raw and the cooked can work in conjunction, a project that Elkin's flattening of history, romanticism, and genre signifiers in order to just feel would be very much in favour of.
Personal confession time, the book encourages it, Warhol encourages it, and Elkins flattening makes it the logical conclusion. I have prayed with Warhol, not with the Last Supper, but with the mourning Jackie, with the Madonna/Whore of the gold Marilyn, with some of the screen tests. I have prayed with other artists, almost 90 minutes enraptured by Agnes Martin's Morning from 1965. I have other reactions, anger, or exhaustion, or eroticism. I have wanted to destroy work, to use it as a tool for personal revelry, it has made me overwhelmed with joy, and it is has made me sad, but never moved me to tears.
In fact, most of the work that I have felt intensely about, has not been ancient work, there are very few exceptions of work that has caused me profound emotional changes that have occurred before 1900. Perhaps I am strange, but work that functions as a sublime substitute for cathedrals, to use the example of Newman, should lead itself to strong emotions, to strong feelings. Desire for transgression and for transcendce are often the same kind of thing, work functionally on the same places, emotion becomes an unruly and difficult thing. Perhaps because I have always been a bit unhinged, a bit strange, a bit unable to find out exactly where my emotions lie, the emotional excesses that come out then do not come out of Diderot or the romantics, but as a post-modern seeking of narratives that contain some meaning while having internalized the seeds of their own dissent.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Saatchi put Snow up in a Piccadilly hotel along with his friend and fellow New York artist Dan Colen. The pair decided to make a "hamster nest" within their hotel room – shredding phone books, blankets and curtains for "bedding" in which to curl up and take a cocktail of drugs. The experiment ended with them evacuating the hotel room in the middle of the night to escape arrest. Typical of Snow's infusion of his excess into his art, he then set up the NEST installation with Colen at Deitch Projects in New York, where two thousand phone books were destroyed over five nights.from the independent
i think that the first hamster nest, the private one, wiht it's desperation, and its sadness, and its obsessive seeking of comfort, of creation and destruction, is not new, and it deft. is druggy in a really obvious way, but there is something moving in it's desperation--the conversion of a private and intimate act into spectacle, from two phonebooks to two thousand, from a hotel room to a gallery, is a nice metyonomy for the LES from the mid 80s to the present's tedency to make public that which perhaps should be kept private, and that this dichtomoy b/w different kinds of intimacy was funded by the same guy who payed for Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin, suggests an intertextuality that Saachi must have been aware of.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
At 6:03 PM, walk to stop #0804 on ISLINGTON SUBWAY BUS TERMINAL, CITY OF TORONTO (1 min.).
Take BLOOR ST and walk to stop #0804 on ISLINGTON SUBWAY BUS TERMINAL, CITY OF TORONTO, it is on the left (+/- 1 min.).
At 6:04 PM, take Bus route 201 direction West. At 6:29 PM, arrive at stop #1189 on DUNDAS ST at HURONTARIO ST, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA (25 min.).
At 6:04 PM, take Bus route 201 direction West and get off at stop #1189 on DUNDAS ST at HURONTARIO ST, street DUNDAS (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA) following street HURONTARIO (+/- 25 min.). Last intersections: JAGUAR VALLEY DR (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), SHEPARD AVE (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), HURONTARIO ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA).
View stop schedule for 0804 - ISLINGTON SUBWAY BUS TERMINAL View stop schedule for 1189 - DUNDAS ST at HURONTARIO ST View schedule for route 201 - Dundas Express (West)
Walk to stop #0717 on HURONTARIO ST at DUNDAS ST, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA for transfer.
Take DUNDAS ST and walk to HURONTARIO ST, it is the next street. Turn right and walk to stop #0717 on HURONTARIO ST at DUNDAS ST, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA, it is on the right (+/- 2 min.).
Wait 5 minute(s).
At 6:36 PM, take Bus route 202 direction South. At 6:48 PM, arrive at stop #5202 on PORT CREDIT GO STATION, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA (12 min.).
At 6:36 PM, take Bus route 202 direction South and get off at stop #5202 on PORT CREDIT GO STATION, street QUEEN (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA) following street HELENE (+/- 12 min.). Last intersections: PARK ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), QUEEN ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), HELENE ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA).
View stop schedule for 0717 - HURONTARIO ST at DUNDAS ST View stop schedule for 5202 - PORT CREDIT GO STATION View schedule for route 202 - Hurontario Express (South)
Walk to Port Credit GO. Arrive at 6:50 PM (2 min.).
Take BLOOR ST and walk to stop #0804 on ISLINGTON SUBWAY BUS TERMINAL, CITY OF TORONTO, it is on the left (+/- 1 min.).
At 6:04 PM, take Bus route 201 direction West. At 6:29 PM, arrive at stop #1189 on DUNDAS ST at HURONTARIO ST, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA (25 min.).
At 6:04 PM, take Bus route 201 direction West and get off at stop #1189 on DUNDAS ST at HURONTARIO ST, street DUNDAS (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA) following street HURONTARIO (+/- 25 min.). Last intersections: JAGUAR VALLEY DR (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), SHEPARD AVE (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), HURONTARIO ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA).
View stop schedule for 0804 - ISLINGTON SUBWAY BUS TERMINAL View stop schedule for 1189 - DUNDAS ST at HURONTARIO ST View schedule for route 201 - Dundas Express (West)
Walk to stop #0717 on HURONTARIO ST at DUNDAS ST, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA for transfer.
Take DUNDAS ST and walk to HURONTARIO ST, it is the next street. Turn right and walk to stop #0717 on HURONTARIO ST at DUNDAS ST, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA, it is on the right (+/- 2 min.).
Wait 5 minute(s).
At 6:36 PM, take Bus route 202 direction South. At 6:48 PM, arrive at stop #5202 on PORT CREDIT GO STATION, CITY OF MISSISSAUGA (12 min.).
At 6:36 PM, take Bus route 202 direction South and get off at stop #5202 on PORT CREDIT GO STATION, street QUEEN (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA) following street HELENE (+/- 12 min.). Last intersections: PARK ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), QUEEN ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA), HELENE ST (CITY OF MISSISSAUGA).
View stop schedule for 0717 - HURONTARIO ST at DUNDAS ST View stop schedule for 5202 - PORT CREDIT GO STATION View schedule for route 202 - Hurontario Express (South)
Walk to Port Credit GO. Arrive at 6:50 PM (2 min.).
Thursday, July 09, 2009
sad lute is sad.
an article about the art historical preservation of plastic.
Antique plastic dolls at the National Museum of Denmark have begun to peel and flake; classic furniture at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London might as well have been left out in the sun for years; the first-ever plastic toothbrush, at the Smithsonian, is collapsing into a pile of crumbs; etc. A whole generation of irreplaceable items that are as representative of our culture as pottery or flintheads were of ancient ones are dying—and many people charged with their care have no idea how to stop further damage.I am esp. interested in the problems of monumental work made from polymers in the mid 60s, esp. from Los Angeles, but also Tim Scott, et al, but it seems like everything made of plastic in the 20th century is prone to rot.
teak tea press
i like these toyko subway ettiqutte posters, because they a) use positive reenforcement. b) encourage a community to live together.
the mummy as female erotica.
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Samuel Asso, Salmon Loops, Screen Print, 2006
(loops as in info, as in feedback, as in sound returning, loops as in culture repeating, loops as in riff, loops as in food, loops as in remix/reclaim culture)
paintings of drug mules by andrew prayzner, there is something eerie about making monumental the anonymous (literally, w. the pixelazation of face) but i wonder if they are not v. conceptually strong?
Jay Branan Housewife. Indie folk for the painfully alone.
8 fotos of the erotic city, including a couple you have seen, a couple you haven't, and one blurry, sexy, and decadent dragged out goldin.
a urgayan bishop cannot fuck male whores w/o them blackmailing him into resignation.
house as a bridge over a winter creek and billabong an hour near adeliade. have to see the pictures.
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Kristen Dunst, Marie Antoiennette Still
the most interesting thing about these fotos of lstein's studio ca 1990, is the carefully cut out, aged comics as reference, though the work had moved past such qoutations, his reliance on printed material becomes a visual crutch, and suggests a kind of dead practice. (did he use the comic panels for the brushstroke paintings, for the benday dots on teasets, the mirrors?) (though reflections on the prom done that year, that may be the painting worked on in these photos did use two romance comics as part of a larger cubist/abstracted pop composition)
5 days too late, but still muppets do indepence day
juaya wantabe's spring 2010 modified wasp style is so fucking pretty, with a coat that works somewhere b/w blazer and windbreaker, in an ineffable blue shade that is lovely.
filson does some stuff that is horribly functional, and on sale.
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| From Untitled Album |
Wolford Tights.
love the updated morris aesthetic of some of these posters by petra borner.
cameron apologizes for Section 28, still has not done any thing concrete about queer culture now.
Two country videos from the 70s.
hooked circitury rugs
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Mary Rudolff, Bullrider, National Finals Rodeo, 2008
stewart an online site to purchase church signs.
koons on jackson
Sixto Rodquriez, the lost mexican motown genius.
joel meyerwitz talks about his best shot from the mid 70s. a tight, fascinating essay about his aesthetic.
the interesting thing about this story is again, not the inclusion of queerness into a tradtional protestent aesthetic, but how queerness allows tradtions to be suspended, by both lgbtqetc voices, and from the orginzation who is doing the censoring, in this case, the casting out of the gay positive texan church from the SBC indicates that the SBC is becoming more creedal, more willing to tell it's members what to do, and less about the traditional baptist instinct towards both pragmatisim and radical individualism.
new Edmund White on being fucked, where he is at his most lyrical best:
"Why are some men so kinky? you might well ask. Though kink is sometimes called animalistic, it's precisely what animals don't do. Monkeys and lions never think of new positions and complicated scenarios. Because we have language, we inhabit a symbolic world and are haunted by memory; the simplest gesture (locking someone in a cage and force-feeding him) takes on a powerful resonance of childhood eating disorders or a longing for (and fear of) complete possession of the elusive beloved. We can turn the simplest fuck into a circus of psychoanalytic possibilities.(and on the exact opposite tack here are sanford's emails to his argenitine mistress, must be read to belived.
agnes pelton's mystical abstractions, are 20 years before most other people's, and have a rich, deeply satisfying, pleasure. Reminds me of Hilma Af Klint but American.
stoned wallabies make crop circles.
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| From Untitled Album |
Brian Moore, Kermore Lane, Digital Photo, 200?
Fred Astaire, Putting on the Ritz.
interview with the leader of an anglican schismatic group, short and with out much detail.
clever and well designed baseball infographics.
byu lifts youtube ban.
4 lost fotos of stonewall.
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| From Untitled Album |
Oh josh turner, the things i would do to you.
brian nash gill makes abstract wooden sculptures, i have no sense of scale etc here, but they have a rough hewn grace that makes me want to see them irl.
muji portable shaver makes me want them to do other consumer electronics.
the spaghetti western string company are a qaurtet that combine jazz, old school country, and classical vocal techniques into something quite new.
liza in paris
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| From Untitled Album |
Lynda Benglis, Corner Peice, from the End of Painting Show now at SAM. maybe in august?
this deeply problematic king tut show is going to be at the ago.
homoerotic cowboy print ftw
this nytime obit about the train tagger Iz the Wiz says alot about the mainstreaming of street art.
80s candids from the ny drag place sally's hideaway.
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Jodie Foster, early 70s.
mule skinners now have to go thru tsa checks, because they might be filled with the terror.
some good news about an hiv vaccine.
frank's top singles for the first half of 09.
love the interface of worceters musuems new site.
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| From Untitled Album |
Thursday, July 02, 2009
top country singles of the half year
a) dierks bentley sideways
b) adam lambert ring of fire
c) taylor swift, you belong to me
d) john mayer who says i can't
e) john rich tearing detroit down
f) reba mcentire strange
top albums of the half year
a) hang over ost
b) yeah yeah yeah its blitz
c) lily allen its not me its you
d) mastodon crack the skye
top singles of the half year
a) lily allen fuck you
b) yeah yeah yeahs heads will roll
c) jay z death of autotune
d) britney if you seek amy
e) mariah carey obsessed
f) ray feaver when i grow up
g) horses this is a song for the one i love
h) jarvis cocker, angela in paris
i) untouchable tell me why
a) dierks bentley sideways
b) adam lambert ring of fire
c) taylor swift, you belong to me
d) john mayer who says i can't
e) john rich tearing detroit down
f) reba mcentire strange
top albums of the half year
a) hang over ost
b) yeah yeah yeah its blitz
c) lily allen its not me its you
d) mastodon crack the skye
top singles of the half year
a) lily allen fuck you
b) yeah yeah yeahs heads will roll
c) jay z death of autotune
d) britney if you seek amy
e) mariah carey obsessed
f) ray feaver when i grow up
g) horses this is a song for the one i love
h) jarvis cocker, angela in paris
i) untouchable tell me why
Do you think I can’t forgive you? I forgive
Both of us for being born of the flesh,
Which means I forgive all tossing and turning,
All foundering, all not finding,
All irreconcilability,
All the friction of this great orphanage
Where no one knows his origin and no one
Comes to claim him. I forgive even
The unrevealing revelation of love
That lifts a lid purely
To close it, and leaves us knowing that greater things
Are close, but not to be disclosed
Though we die for them. I forgive
Everything, my most dear Perpetua,
Except that I wasn’t born something less ambitious,
Such as a Muscovy duck.
— Christopher Fry, Venus Observed
Both of us for being born of the flesh,
Which means I forgive all tossing and turning,
All foundering, all not finding,
All irreconcilability,
All the friction of this great orphanage
Where no one knows his origin and no one
Comes to claim him. I forgive even
The unrevealing revelation of love
That lifts a lid purely
To close it, and leaves us knowing that greater things
Are close, but not to be disclosed
Though we die for them. I forgive
Everything, my most dear Perpetua,
Except that I wasn’t born something less ambitious,
Such as a Muscovy duck.
— Christopher Fry, Venus Observed
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