Dedicated to Pete Townshend, a great musician in troubled times. November 2002
Sometime ago I went to Bunbury to talk about sex and art and sex in art too.
It was a stranger experience than I thought possible so it has taken a long time to write about.
A show of work by Robert Cleworth prompted the public seminar I attended. He has been working with transcriptions of popular pornographic imagery in oil paint for some years. He does so with an extraordinary salon like control of his surfaces. Like a miniature Bouguereau, his paintings recognise the licks, pats and blendings of painted skin as a counterpart to a voyeur's glances, to a lover's caresses, marking out the territories of desire across all too willing flesh.
He was performing a double rescue, of the Salon from the sand blighted eyeballs of long decayed art historians and of pornography from the desert island of cheap colour printing, where the most gorgeous limbs and breasts become sand drifts of slowly shifting pixels and the lustrous gaze of lash fringed eyes turns to pools of piss in the sunlight.
Oil paint is far sexier, inherently far more arousing.
For the last decade sexual representation has been the rock on which all kinds of theories from fascist feminism to the new sentimental formalism have been shipwrecked. They have simply failed to provide an account of the world in which sexual representations have a place, let alone the place they and sex itself have in the real world (Yes there is one !! )- from newstand and television to art gallery - despite the best efforts of our cultural gatekeepers. Instead the entire topic has been proscribed, artistically, critically and ethically. Our corrupt art schools persecute any of their students who attempt to engage with sexual representations as they exist out there. Dodgy suburban politicians suggest the world might end if a child catches site of a pair of naked tits.
All of the above and more has helped make sexual imagery, especially pornography - the stylised stuff with erections, fetishism and action, a unrecognized, unacknowledged art form, often subtle, often not, sometimes beautiful, sometimes a witty game, but always compelling to the viewer male or female, in a way most contemporary art can only dream about. Pornography - a genuine cultural industry, wrecks all the pretensions and aspirations of most art in that direction and ruins all the bogus claims that art can protest, or moralise to any effect whatsoever. Pornography - a visual art with an enormous audience, mocks the interminable stirrings of art wankers and the art industry to whom no one pays any attention whatsoever.
It is this state of affairs that has enforced the meretricious silence on the subject in our art institutions, not any moral delicacy or the desire to shield the eyes of innocent virgins from the obvious. After all, they only have to glance down to know the truth. Nothing has exposed the impotent stupidity of the contemporary art scene more than its tolerance of the supposed individual "right" to be offended by anything placed in the public sphere. Although somehow only those offended by naked flesh get a look in.
I find advertising far more offensive and on occasion deadly Ð vide cigarette/alcohol advertising - than pornography could ever be - yet this is somehow seen as unreasonable. I am also offended by the digitised plastic, pornographic bodies of the work of Patricia Piccinini, soon to be seen in Perth So like the glittering corpses of pornography itself, but a blatant appeal to stylish schadenfreude, sado-masochism and moralizing self pity. Yet I would not conceal it from view.
We would better off if the community and especially the art world could return to notion that nothing in this world is or should be alien and if it is we should take a look at ourselves. Then we might be able to see her work for the perverted, neurotic re emergence of nullified desire and pornographic sentiment in an acceptable, form that it really is. Like the pornographer of old she is giving us what we secretly want want but in the redemptive brown envelope of middle class suburban neurosis.
It took the erstwhile Pop painter Ron Kitaj - famous for his great big yankee mouth - to state the obvious. Kitaj openly (and perhaps maliciously) regretted that his work would never have the holding power of a pornographic image. For him pornography and the erotic arts are not invisible or unspeakable. They are, self evidently, the competition, the greatest reservoir of the energy, desire, fantasy and innovation that should drive art.
A number of Cleworth's paintings, perhaps the best, made this point directly. The painting was worked over full scale photocopies of newspaper pages complete with bw and colour photos, and so on. One image hand wrought in oil paint featured a pair of delightful brown legs wide apart in high heeled sandals superimposed on a page from the business section complete with trade stats and mediations on the money market. The anatomy itself was painted over a photo of clothes on racks in a fashion store leaving a United States flag between the bronzed limbs. The picture was headlined Clinging on to Absolute Zero.
This is not of course an arbitrary relationship. Mechanized erotic imagery and the complex network of fetishization that infests and structures all business all corporate life (not just the consumer industries) both revolve around unprecipitated desire, more exactly on its postponement so as induce a still moment, a space of absolute zero, in which nothing can move. Painting on the other hand seems to carry the traces of a consummated desire in the structure of its strokes and the quality of its mimesis. Painting invokes an immediate presence even in the most graphic of transcriptions. Thus Cleworth's newspaper work constructs a confrontation between his art and various sources of absolute psychic zero in many levels of human practice. from the stock market to sexual imagery.
He is also taking up Kitaj's question about pornography and artistic power by directly confounding the two in the context of the everyday The proposition is that art can steal back the aura, the power, it has lost to the all consuming eye.
The re-emergence of this direct route to gratification, delightfully rendered in oils, amongst all this subliminal repressive stuff was a dramatic epiphany. Not many people masturbate over tables of exchange rates but Freud was right to suggest that all business is a kind of delayed gratification. Fear of final closure may be another reason for our overt rejection of the pornographic. It seems that the pornographic image alone shows the still point of our turning world in all its agonistic immediacy
Then there is the business of painting itself as stroking, shaping shifting light which mimics contemplation, erotic reveries, the sado masochistic gaze and so. Despite the plethora of theory on the relation between gaze, image and artmaking over the last decade we still have very little accurate description of how it all works. Painting seems to draw on wide range of functions that surround vision and on biological cultural priorities in representation but he best guess as this is done remains Francis Bacon's comment about painting the image on the nervous system.
The seminar at Bunbury got off to a good start. First I interviewed Robert Cleworth. We brought out the importance of the pornographic as the basis for his fascination with reinventing technique, which was the true central issue in this work We relocated the practice of copying (in this case pornography) as a respectable artistic strategy. We also began to engage with the issue of painting inserted or embedded in a digitally printed code as photography or other photomechanical form.
Then a large bespectable lady in a dark blue and white print floral dress appeared just bursting to join in. She began with a question which turned into a declaration - a familiar statement that began with the Mapplethorpe show and ended with the claim that most men hire pornographic videos every night and are all about to become rapists. Pornography, she believed, was also to be seen quite regularly on broadcast television. This was the usual born again manifesto heard or read many times before, and this time very badly delivered, but, in the end, the lady in the blue dress and the art world seemed to be in agreement. The audience started to mutter about everyoneÕs right to be heard. I wondered why we were compelled to listen.
She held the floor for half an hour. Then I took her on. Did she really believe the bit about videos, why the interest in sexual imagery while violence and advertising remain almost unchallenged? and so on. Oddly the audience thought this was all too personal. The shocker was the ease with which they had allowed the premise of the debate to be shifted by such an incompetent speaker. Now we were talking about everyone's right to be offended and to oppress their neighbors It seemed that none of the audience had the courage of what were supposed to be their convictions. That was the shocking thing, the possibility that art and artists have lost all conviction of independence of their role in the lifelong game of liberation.
It is not possible to reproduce Cleworth's work but we can engage the issues around the idea of absolute zero as the starting point of visual engagement in fortuitous comparison between two works both of which use a domestic stool to provoke a sense of this absolute zero in the viewer.
Both Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel and the multiple erotic work share the stool as departure point. We could imagine both as life size sculptures Both are concerned with the body. Both are related to the autonomous presences of technology. Both are concerned with negation of sensation to a psychic absolute zero, the "pointless" turning of the wheel and its still centre, the "pointless" fetishisation and restraint of the body, its graphic stillness.
We
can now ask Kitaj's question. Do both these objects have equal power to compel
the viewer, to force engagement in aesthetic, kinesthetic, erotic or epiphanic
contemplation? Everything Duchamp did had an erotic dimension, so his wheel
copes with competition very well. They must both be connected to some common
motivation. It is just not good enough to call this communal predisposition,
desire.
We need more but this is about as we can go without engaging some difficult theory. Those who wish to go there might begin with Slavoj Zizek’s The Plague of Fantasies, which has a lot of practical examples and much wisdom on censorship. For most it would be better to ask the Kitaj’s second implicit question can the pointed erotic discipline of Duchamp be regained for art. In other words can the absolute zero of experience be rediscovered in the making of an art work.
Here is a description of her work by a performance artist
I see myself walk slowly as I have learned to do, shifting my weight from one hip to the other, making myself move provocatively. I pour just enough soul into the mould of this image to give it life and movement - the image of the forever unobtainable. A quick glance around through the smoky air and there they are, their jaded-vulture eyes some arrogant, some generous, some mocking and some benevolent - but none see me.
I find my power spot, it lies beyond their fantasies; the exchange of energy will be good here. The stiffness in my legs begins to wear off as I move. I feel the music in the lower regions of my body; it is my wand and my cloak. And now as I find myself alone, the only woman in this circle of hungry, impoverished masculinity, all vestiges of my everyday self are covered as I start to disrobe and become the Scarlet Woman. I am the Scarlet Woman, the alchemist who tries time and time again to turn base desire into pure gold. My kind and me are ancient. We dare to walk the borderlands and to explore the many levels and realms of the subconscious.
I single out one of them, the punters fag, pint and dirty cardigan. I slide my glamour across the floor till I am swaying above him. Unwittingly I stumble through his gaze and into the futility of us being here. This saddens me, but we are here and so I remove the straps from my dress revealing both nipples. It seems some basic imprinting of the breast has left our punter with the memory of a time when a woman's love was unconditional. A time when the money didn't run out. All this in a flash, and our Salome turns herself on and around and pulls the dress over her ass and further to reveal the mystery that they long to penetrate.
This scene is from Scarlet by Amy from Baby Oil and Ice an account of striptease in East London Pubs. Amy too reaches absolute zero - the futility of being there beyond the gaze. The presence of that psychic site seems to be the absolute requirement for a successful artwork of any kind.
The stream of hatred, vicious oppression and abuse that has apparently been directed against sexual or erotic representation in art is in reality directed against the liberating power of art itself. The only difference fearful, misguided lady in Bunbury and the horde of art mediocrities who parrot on about pointed representation as if was a crime and politics as if it were a species of moral knitting, is that the art mediocrities should know better. They should have the courage to face the grim fact that we have ended with an indifferent tepid art that has almost nothing to offer. Somewhere in the endless freefall of sexual representation there are few clue sabout what we might do about
Next Sunday watch out for
SLUSH PUPPY The true sentimental story of Patricia Piccinini
And may be
The Iraq War does it make sense for
artists to hold a conviction about this as artists?