Mistress La Spliffe comes out of the closet

We went on holiday in Munich and it was lovely. Germany is so fucking under-rated as a tourist destination, with all their awesome food and beer and relative niceness. And Munich itself was special. There were a few things that moved me to tears there:

The Barberini Faun: I couldn't believe it when I saw it, from its cuticles to its beginning-of-Jim-Morrison-bloat face. Such an excruciatingly beautiful thing. I've read commentary calling it homoerotic because of the vulnerability and beauty of its pose. Well, if that's the case, call the Westboro Baptists to picket me, because apparently I'm gay. I am totally gay for this statue. Oh wait, I'm a heterosexual woman and art history commentators haven't figured out women like looking at beautiful, vulnerable men. I mean holy fuck, we are 52% of the population and 90% of us like fucking men, just possibly a sculpture of a beautiful vulnerable man might possibly be hetero-erotic as well, especially considering the history of women involved in the worship of Dionysus. And I'm not the only woman who's geeked on this stature. Look at the Leni Reifenwhatever photo of it:



Raphael's Tempi Madonna: Look at that lovely cuddle she's giving him - that mother-nuzzle, those protective hands. Oh Mary, poor Mary. Having to see your baby on a cross. That super-blows. Mary - the Catholics have used the shit out of her. If the Protestants had said she was kosher (ie intercessionary), even if the saints weren't, we wouldn't have a sub-section of the international population who could go around kiddie-fiddling without anyone consulting the police now.

The Red Dragon is incapacitated

Ugh. Drunk too much crappy wine last night, headachey this morning, and going to Canada in a week, exactly. Awesome, but shit. I have to . . . do . . . stuff. I haven't even thought through what I fucking need to do yet . . . let people there know, I guess . . . and the F-word's dad gets here Monday, and I haven't met a boyf's parents since 2002, and I'm not quite sure - possibly I'm nervous.

The good news is that the F-word has found my camera cable and I can put pictures on this blog again. Since I'm in a touch of a panic - no, I'd say more a touch of an anxiety - by testament of feeling like having a headache this morning is throwing some massive wrench into the delicate process of getting me safely to Canada next Friday, let's put up something lovely and calm - the Michaelangelo that makes going to Bruges the way I do everytime anyone comes to visit (thank god, I'll have left for Canada before the F-word takes his dad there, because I think I've been there six fucking times in two fucking years) fairly worthwhile:

Mary and child, Bruges
Originally uploaded by Mistress La Spliffe

I could stare at her for ages, and have . . . it's my favourite representation of Mary, and while I've read commentaries saying it's compositionally remarkable for how sad Mary looks, how 'distant' from her son, and how Jeebus is about to rush out to his cruel but heroic destiny in the world, for me the remarkable thing about this statue (and the Pieta, bizarrely) is how infant-motherly Mary looks - that sort of pre-occupied, hasn't-slept-enough-for-months look, but at the same time, how tender, how protective, and still how nurturing - one arm steadying her kid, the other poised at the ready in case he tumbles, but letting him move around; you have to, and anyways, you can tell looking at the kid he'll be a whiner if he isn't allowed to.

I've seen this woman and her kid hundreds of times in waiting rooms. Which is what makes Christianity Christian, I suppose.

Crazy like a crazy person

Watched the final section of Berger's Ways of Seeing and then Robert Hughes's doc on Goya last night; just to make a week of comparative art documentaries, I suppose. The final section was on advertising, and it left me with the suspicion I like John Berger so much so far because he says things I already thought, in a much more coherent way than I could say them - notably the sheer contextual madness of paging through a magazine between pictures of dead and dying third-world types and the warm fuzziness of hard liquor ads.

That sort of thing first struck me in a big way back when I was working at the television commercial place, watching 50 or more commercials a day, one after another. Especially watching the PSAs next to the other ads - a woman with black eyes gazing imploringly at the camera in the rain, or something of the sort, when it was aiming to boost donations for shelters or encouraging men not to beat their wives - and then a beer ad suggesting all the marvellous social and sexual things that would happen to a man if he got plastered that night.

The side effect of my job - and this happened to my predecessor in the position too - was not being able to watch commercial television anymore; not only was it infuriating and awful to be inescapably confronted with the fact of audience-as-commodity, but it was like listening to the pushier kind of madman, or a cacaphony of opposing, fanatic voices. Without even changing the channel. Thank god for internet streaming sites.

Anyways, profoundly enjoyed the whole Berger series, and the Hughes Goya: Crazy Like a Genius documentary wasn't too bad either, though I vastly preferred the book. I think that's partly because when you read the book, you don't have to listen to the lecherous snide fuck speak, and can let your eyes skim over the gratuitous sentences about what he'd like to do to the Naked Maja. In his documentary about Caravaggio and in American Visions and in the Shock of the New, I swear he wasn't so consistent about forcing himself front and centre, and that they're vastly better television for it. Somehow in the book, the extended part about the visions of Goya-ghouls during the aftermath of his road injuries was less obtrusive. I think it made more sense in the broader context of a kabillion-page book rather than an hour-long or whatever it was documentary.

Ways of Being, 2

To continue from yesterday.

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.

BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.

Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .

Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.

But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.

He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.

And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.

Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.

Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.

Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.

Anyways, worktime.

Ways of Being

Why be left-wing? It's a question no-one has ever bothered to ask me, either because at this point in my life I've surrounded myself with unquestioningly left-wing people, or because my interlocutors simply assume I'm left-wing because I adore marijuana. But as the freshly returned Masonic Boom has remarked, drugs and deep, macho conservatism are hardly mutually exclusive. And it's not a given that I be left-wing; it's not something I can leave unquestioned. I spent some years of my life deeply emotionally involved with someone rather to the right of Hitler, and it's not enough for me to say I didn't know while I was falling into the silken snare and didn't notice until it was too late, because I did know for some time - I'd say for a solid year - before I finally split.

Emotionally speaking, part of the reason I'm this far left at this point in my life is probably that time with Bluebird, which taught me some plain and revolting truths about what my life would become if I failed to grow a set of ideological balls. In fact, there's probably a big, complex set of emotional reasons why I'm left-wing that come from the strange cocktail of upper-middle-class inselaffen and Mussolini-lovin' guinea in my family unit, and any number of other things.

But I think the quickest, best, and most blog-friendly answer to the question - "why be left-wing?" - is for me to post these two documentaries, both worth watching: John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Robert Hughes' Mona Lisa's Curse, which both deal with the de-contextualization of art.





John Berger himself is what we call a raving fucking pinko. His documentary is simply astounding, and really not to be missed. I can't do it anything approaching descriptive and commendatory justice in the tiny amount of time I have left before I have to go to work, so let me just put it like this: he leaves himself behind, fills us with his ideas, decontextualizes art, and then recontextualizes it. It's fascinating and thorough and engaged. And it's from 1972 and looks like it cost about GBP 200 to make.

Robert Hughes - well. I love Robert Hughes, when I don't hate him; I've mentioned before that I think that Barcelona and Goya and The Shock of the New were all astoundingly good, in about the same measure I think Things I Didn't Know was one of the shittiest things I've ever read, breakfast cereal boxes and Martin Amis novels included, and The Fatal Shore a superb effort in making the fascinating painfully boring and disorganized. The Mona Lisa's Curse, an expensive-looking, slick and supremely grumpy effort that came out last year, falls on the 'hate' end of my spectrum. My first big complaint about it is that he makes excellent points about the most notorious section of the modern art market:

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

That's marvellous, and in my estimation, true. The problem is it's a lonely little point, towards the end - it's in the company of some other good points - but the bridge to those points is rickety, weak, and deeply fucking annoying. And fuck. I'm out of time. More later.

When did 'provocative' become a synonym for shitty?

Hoping for third time lucky at the maison communale today. Belgian institutional incompetence still not getting to me - much. Not as much as the economy, as I wrote about 131 more layoffs yesterday and there are strong deflationary pressures deflating things. Including the British pound, which is actually approaching euro levels. Can you fucking believe it? I can't. Do you fucking care? I do. We're going to London next week - I have a conference, and then a date with Rodelinda, and the F-word and I both want to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Skipping the Turner Prize exhibition, though we could get a bundled ticket for a mere extra GBP 2.5 or EUR 2.9. It's not that we dislike the sort of things they have on display, it's just that there's no reason in heaven, hell, or in between to pay EUR 2.9 to look at the sort of things they have on display.

And looking at the things they have on display, I must point out I do actually dislike the things they have on display. Crawling up the asshole of something that had already crawled up its own asshole and died. It would all just be a ghastly joke, except there are actual artistic endeavours rolling out all over the world that aren't unbearably boring and masturbatory, and that don't rely on relentless, unimaginative referentialism and the least intriguing and involved symbolism possible for their impact or appeal, and that would benefit by a fraction of the attention this ridiculous, expensive Guarniad joke garners for assholes so mentally and aptitudinally debile they rip off Jeff Koons.

Anyways, I'm off to queue now.

More like beautiful up your own ass forever, shitbird

Love-hate relationship with my prime loved, hated Robert Hughes coming down hard on the side of love following this little diatribe about the Hirst auction. Oh, those sentences of his! So damn sloppy and so fucking horrible in his stupid fucking autobiography and so damn tedious in The Fatal Shore, and yet so punchy in his art criticism, like a lighthouse beacon punching its way through the fog. Seriously, I get physical pleasure from beast sentences like this one:

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.

Obviously I love it so much because I agree. And then, I've never seen a single work by Damien Hirst whose spirit couldn't be encapsulated in 30 words or less, and if you can do that, what the hell is the point of appreciating that it has been brought into existence as an object? Especially when it has no merit as a craft or technique. I can't stand the notion it, Koon's shit, or anything, for that matter, has some intrinsic value merely because it reflects the spirit of the age. You know what else does? Events. Beliefs. Conclusions. Traffic jams. Silicone spatulas. Words. The problem is you can't pretend those are art and sell them to fuckwits for 50 million a pop, though I'm sure some Hirst-esque cunt will have a go with the spatula, given enough time. Pack of parasitic whores.

The thing is with Hirst, I get the sense his brain doesn't work well enough to use words instead of uberobvious symbols he can hire people to create for him. He responded to Hughes' criticism by calling it Luddite, which actually made me laugh out loud. I know Luddite and Philistine both sound clever, but that doesn't make them mean the same thing. How exactly is it that Hughes would like to smash the industrial machinery of the modern world, you stupid bourgeios fucker? Unless, of course, you're pointing out that your own activities are not art, but industrial machinery - much like an HP printer that provides a clear but annoyingly useless metaphor for the modern rhythm of existence by jamming all the fucking time. Which begs the 50 million dollar question . . .

Shades of grey

Post-modernism is a talking point in our household because the F-word is an artist. To an artist post-modernism means something different from what it meant to me as an academic woman, and what it means to me now as a cultural participant. I think post-modernism is a uselessly, broadly accurate (not to mention ugly) term for a kind of relativism whose absence these days renders any academic or cultural inquiry worthless, and whose presence renders art wankerish.

But when it comes to cultural documents I sit around and read, keep your doubtless clever-ish post-war reinterpretations of everything, and give me a raging Oxbridge maso-queen who thought of women as 'raddled meat' and of Arabs as a society of lazy gorgeous dreaming males whose limbs quivered when they sexlessly, hygienically fucked each other in the sand.

Long way about of saying that so far The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an absolute lark. I don't know how long I'll continue with it though. 600 more pages to go, when there are so many other books in the world. . . And the bulk of my fascination with it is of the sort I feel when I'm listening to a sauced Englishman blathering about ethnic groups without any restraint borne of modesty or cultural relativism - I can enjoy it for an evening, and after that he's just another liquor-soaked twat who might as well be talking about football teams, and who thinks, if he thinks at all, that post-modernism is a communist tool to rob him of all credibility.

In that blathery sense The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is even better than my old favourite Wilfrid Thesinger - another of those hygienic, 'sexless' types who dug young Arabs and who had an enjoyably terse, funny writing style - because Thesinger seemed to have tried his best to become one of them (living for a long time with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq, who did badly under Saddam Hussein). Whereas, in his writing at least, Lawrence is so awfully English and the Arabs - not to mention the Turks and Jews - are so awfully not. I don't know if he loved them - he's certainly rather crueler than Thesinger about them - and so far he gives the impression that everything good they did was more or less an accident until he came along.

The thing is, books like Seven Pillars are the story of me, of us, as western Anglophones (nobody else reads this blog, do they?) - our identity documents. Post-modernist or not, I can't understand being impatient with or dismissive of these texts or the general Dead White Male canon, or primary sources in general. Incomplete, maybe; but meaningless? Certainly not! We can't invent a post-modernist past when we have such a profoundly pre-modernist history; we can't be revisionists; that's the only thing that's worse than being an asshole in the first place, and it stops us from knowing ourselves. When Lawrence writes that Arabs are incapable of seeing shades of grey, only being capable of seeing black and white, thus 'despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns', it tells us so little about Arabs but so much about us.

The Red Dragon doesn't like American movies

Awhile ago I stopped watching American movies, which wasn't a conscious decision. In fact, I could only see I'd made it after realizing I hadn't watched an American movie in months. And while working in advertising made product placements veritably leap of the screen and pluck my disbelief down from where I'd suspended it, I don't think that's why I stopped; I think I stopped because I had turned into a bitch who was impossible to please. Witness a couple of the movies we watched this weekend after last week's stress and Friday night took us out of physical and mental commission:

No Country For Old Men. Not liking this movie pissed me off so bad because I was 100% expecting it to be good. But it was flat. It wasn't a landscape that I could enter and get lost in, like Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, even Raising Arizona . . . just felt like a bunch of gross, sad stuff happening and then it ended. Okay, maybe the Coen brothers didn't want to get hemmed in to a traditional sort of storytelling or pacing, but if I run out of characters to be interested in by the 2/3 point of the movie, then as an audience member I'm just marking time until the thing ends.

Javier Bardem was great but they didn't give him enough to do. And finally I didn't care what he was doing because he spent too much time doing boring stuff. I love the way the Coen brothers use little visual cues to tell a story, like having him check his shoes for blood at key moments, but that's not enough to carry a film, especially when they labour other points for visual impact even when the node has tapped out. It was cool the way he blew up the car in front of the pharmacy to go get stuff to fix his leg. It was lame that I had to sit there for five minutes watching him fix his leg.

Ah, that's the thing . . . the whole movie felt like a visual wank - trading in character development for a series of visual impacts and shocks and conceits. Fuck.

Anyways, we were left disappointed and then tried to fix the disappointment by watching I Am Legend. For all his arty-fartiness the F-word likes an event movie from time to time - witness the 300 debacle - and I didn't mind as I wanted something that was sure to have an ending, which this type of film also does. Also, he'd told me it was based on the Omega Man, and I figured watching it would give me a better background on the Simpsons Halloween episode parody without forcing me to watch Charlton Heston 'act'.

I liked it more than I thought I would, as the fact that there was lots to look at and not much of a story helped me over the plotholes, and wasn't even unduly annoyed by the Brazilian god talk. The thing is, Will Smith can't cry without making me cry. It's awful. There are a couple of actors like that, who, if they have any reputation for talent, probably get it from making people want to cry when they do. Tom Hanks is another. You know, actors who are always playing more or less the same person, maybe with different accents or in different weight ranges, but more or less the same character in every movie, who you know is flawed but also probably a really great father so they're always showing them holding kids, and who is basically normal but who would lay down his life in a reluctant but determined Jeebus-like fashion in the face of real danger or iniquity - a James Stewart-y sort of guy without the whininess.

So there was a point in the movie when Will Smith's dog had just died, and he was going nuts, and he was all alone and hadn't got laid in years, and his family was dead, and there were all these flesh eating zombies around, and he started crying, and then I started crying, and then I felt manipulated, and then other humans came into the movie and I didn't care because I was too busy feeling manipulated, and then they plugged the Shrek series for 45 UNBROKEN SECONDS, and the bungee cord of my disbelief snapped, sending it hurtling down to the bottom of the ravine below, which is not where you want your disbelief during the climax of a zombie movie.

Ugh.

Then I remembered we had reefer butter, so I ate a bunch of that and we watched Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and that was keen. But more on that later.