art

 Wigmore Street, London, 2008.

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Erotica and bulls? Erotica and cows? How’s it all connected?

Some time ago I read William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. I like his kind of imaginative scholarship - highly speculative, but grounded in the tangible remains of the deep human past. You don’t have to believe a word of it to find it stimulating. And who knows, he could be right.

One of his major themes is the place of the bull in the development of European culture - the harnessing by humans of that vital reproductive energy of the bull to energize their own reproductive efforts. The cow, too, appears to have an important place in the European story.

The next few posts will draw on some of the literature dealing with this topic.

(Above) Albrecht Dürer - Life of the Virgin

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Some resources to be brought to the discussion:

Bulls and archaeological evidence: William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996

More bulls and archaeological evidence: Cook, Arthur Bernard. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1914.

 Bullfight: Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye

Milk: huehueteotl on human evolution

Europa:  In Wikipedia 

More Bulls: Sexculturas

Abduction of Europa, European Parliament, Strasbourg

A remarkable thing about the Barberini Faun is the way it presents the perfect body, the complete sensuality, with only the face portraying something disturbing. The dedication to the dissolute life produces something far from the good life or the life well lived - it produces a life bordering on a nightmare, or a life lived under a great weight. So says the Barberini Faun. A similar distortion of expression can be found in the other sculptures of satyrs at the Glyptothek. Age appears to deepen the malaise. The youngest faun has even a suggestion of hope in its expression. But this is lost in the Barberini Faun who is imprisoned irremediably, but not necessarily unwillingly, within his own indulgence. The second sculpture makes no reference to hope - neither present nor absent. It is at an intermediary stage. The dissolute is there, certainly, but the frown, also present in the Barberini Faun, has not yet mastered the somewhat fragile smile.

The second satyr of the three below is particularly interesting as it has on me a strong effect that I have long noticed, but which is often hard to identify. It takes us a very short while to get a first impression from a face, but it is not instant. Looking at this sculpture the very first impression is that of a smile, and yet within a couple of seconds my brain has processed other aspects of the mouth and face generally that lead my overall impression to adjust very rapidly from viewing a happy and beautiful person to viewing someone far removed from happiness and also probably far removed from from beauty, though it is hard to describe exactly the final impression. I can feel that change take place - but the process itself is quite unconscious. It’s kind of like watching a movie, except nothing in the object perceived is changing, all the change is going on as my mind takes a moment or two to read the face. Interestingly, too, the concluding point is incomplete - I am left wondering what my overall impression is - I am uncertain as to its meaning. That makes the face attract my attention, as I’d like to know more about it - it makes me search it. But it is also a very uncertain process because there are contradictions between happiness, beauty, and further strange emotions in the face. As a part of the process, my desire to see beauty is thwarted, but I find it hard to put a coherent alternative in place. The face is not ugly, but…? I am left hanging on to my desire to see beauty, even to the point of trying to project it back into the face, but my efforts are given little support.

I wonder if the sculptor was aware of all (or some) of these things, whether it is just my own reaction, or worse, my own invention? It is not hard to imagine the sculptor has sought to make a face of contradictions, but is this little two second movie with its tantalizingly incomplete conclusion a part of his intention? Any thoughts on these things?

See also Satyr 2 and Satyr 1.

20-10-08 - Having recently been to Europe I am pleased to add the following pictures of the Barberini Faun, taken at the Glyptothek, Munich. (See previous post at Satyr 1)

In preparing for another little round of posts, this time on the place of the cow and/or bull in European culture, I was re-trawling through William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (1981) to get a quote or two to match with some earlier writing. Along the way I found this reference to Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, discussed in an earlier post.

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34) From the Old Testament to the Gnostics and up into the Theosophy of Rudolph Sterner and the psychoanalytic theories of C G. Jung and Norman O. Brown, the Western esoteric stream flows unceasingly underground and nourishes widely separated schools of thought and artistic movements. Nor is Jung the end of it, the last survivor of the Hermetic and arcane into the modern technological society. The latest expression of this Gnostic tradition has appeared in the world of the contemporary film.

In Nicholas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Gnosticism appears in the guise of science fiction. The film opens with an image of life on another planet, a landscape of desert and isolation. We see a single family, a woman holding a small child, and a man, and we overhear his promises so return after he has secured the water of life from another planet. It seems as if this family is the only young thing left on this ancient and exhausted world. Bidding farewell to his wife and child, the young man enters some sort of projection device that hurtles him through space and time to earth. In the next scene we see him falling out of the sky and crashing down into a pool by an old deserted mine in the American Southwest. As he wakes up on earth he puts on his coat of skin, and some version of contact lenses to make his eyes appear human; then he walks out from the country into a small-town shop to begin his magical encounter with the economic reality of earth.

This creature from a higher world has not forgotten all that he knew before; he retains his unworldly talents and supreme intelligence. Slowly he applies his knowledge of science to patent a whole series of inventions and create a new multinational corporation. He becomes a billionaire. The secret purpose for his accumulation of all this wealth is to set up the economic base with which to bring back the water of life to his dying planet, but the whole process of his amassing a fortune is one of increasing incorporation. The corporation becomes the central metaphor for the entrapment of the soul from another world in a body. Everything in the cinematic technique of the film plays upon the theme of entrapment in grossness, in vulgarity, in the noise and squalor of a world constructed of the passion for money. As the hero makes his way through our economic reality, there are occasional flashbacks to his home planet in which we see haunting visions of the wife and child who remain above, waiting for his return. Like the feminine twin ray in Gnostic mythology, the wife hovers above her mate who is caught in the body and fallen to earth.

Hans Jonas has identified the major themes of Gnosticism as “fall, sinking, and capture.” Roeg’s film explicitly plays out these major themes. As the hero becomes a success on earth and does indeed create the kind of Howard Hughes’ empire large enough to finance his esoteric mission of planetary rescue, the very mass of his enterprise begins to capture him, to entrap him in the gross matter of our capitalistic world. The conflict between a spiritual world based upon love, yet lacking the seminal water of life that could give body to its love, and a world that is based upon nothing but matter and money, a world that lacks even a clue about the higher world of the spirit, becomes extreme. The process of incorporation continues until the hero is finally caught and cannot get back. The feminine twin souI is cut off and forgotten in her higher, arid world. In the last scene we see the hero reduced to alcoholism and falling asleep in a drunken stupor over his drink in a cafe. There are even esoteric dimensions to the condition of his alcoholism, our word “whiskey” comes from the Gaelic uiskebaugh, which means the “water of life.” The man who fell to earth came in search of the water of life for his world: he ends finding not its substance, but its shadow.

The vision of Roeg’s film is clearly religious. The intensity with which his cinematic technique psychically assaults our senses, with its loud and irritating sound track and gross imagery, comes from the fact that this moralist wishes to push our faces into our disgusting capitalistic world until we begin to see it for what it is: a world of money and lust in which objects and people are equally consumed. A Gnostic from the second century in Alexandria could not have presented a more intense denunciation of the sophisticated world of international culture.

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Thompson then goes on to discuss Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser in similar terms.

Ok, some time ago I was walking through the hallowed halls of the institution where I am required more or less to put in an appearance on a semi-daily basis. Pinned on a notice board was this picture:

It’s a lousy reproduction ‘cos I took the pic close up with my phone camera. Anyhow, intrigued as to why these guys holding masks also had erections, I decided to ask a passer-by who I thought might know the origin of the picture. Well, he didn’t, but he did know that it represented the Satyric chorus. I’ve looked on the web, but I can’t find this specific piece.

All the same, there is plenty of material about the Satyric play and chorus.

How odd that one can place on a notice board in a very respectable institution a picture of three guys with erections and no-one even notices. What is it about 2,500 year old pictures that somehow creates in us a blind-spot for this (what would otherwise be) transgression?

For more on the Satyric chorus:

Wikipedia - Satyr Play

Wikipedia - Satyr

Seyffert - Satyric drama

Mlahanas - Surviving Satyr plays

Sparknotes summary of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, Chs 7 & 8

Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext By Bobby Joe Leggett

Pancime - Barberini Faun

If anyone can let me know the identity of the actual object in the photograph and its location I would appreciate it.

If anyone has any stories about transgressions that aren’t, I’d love to hear them.

Pierre Albert-Birot, autoportrait, 1916
Dessin de couverture de L’Homme Coupe

Wikipedia: Pierre Albert-Birot (stub)

Short biography (French)

Sound recordings: Pierre Albert-Birot

Website devoted to Albert-Birot (very slow to load)

Les Soliloques Napolitains

Title page

(click here for enlargement of illustration)

Les Soliloques Napolitains, by Pierre Albert-Birot and Jean Lurçat, is a short book of illustrated poems. There are eight illustrations in total by Lurçat including the cover illustration, and sixteen poems by Albert-Birot, which really form one continuing phantasy of a woman as she stimulates herself - at first with her imagination and fingers, and then with her imagination and a dildo. Finally she comes - indicated by lines radiating from her vagina like the beams of light from the sun, or the sparkle of a jewel. The book bears the date 1822, but it makes no attempt to imitate the style of 1822. It was published in or around 1922.

Albert-Birot lived from 1876 to 1967 - hence I am frugal with the illustrations!

For a while there will be a photograph of another drawing from Les Soliloques Napolitains here.

The First Book of Grabinoulor

Dalkey Archive Press - Grabinoulor

There is little I can say about Grabinoulor that is not said in this review.

Here is a section of text from Grabinoulor (trans by Barbara Wright) from Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2007, Vol. 27 Issue 1, p93-95. The excerpt, from which this small part was taken, runs to around 1250 words.

On a shut-in November evening Grabinoulor’s feet were sploshing about in the Paris mud and that evening he distressed his shoes no end they were quite astonished at having to plough through such black mud when such white snow was falling for Grabinoulor’s shoes are full of logic even when his feet are inside them nevertheless although he was perfectly conscious–which is something that happens even to people who are not in the least conscientious–of how humiliating this state was for his shoes and indirectly for himself too he couldn’t do anything that evening other than place his feet on the ground as there was so little space between the earth and the sky and that was why even though he was Grabinoulor it took him a long time to reach the theatre which high-flown declamators were supposed to transport with all its listeners to the environs of the infinite but a gentleman with a nose a mouth round cheeks spectacles ears and a fine mirror-like pate simply by speaking brought the ceiling down on to the head of everybody sitting in the theatre and it was Grabinoulor who was the most inconvenienced by this…

ÇA NE SE FAIT PAS - IT ISN’T DONE

By Pierre Albert-Birot

This image is from Manifesto: A Century of Isms by Mary Ann Caws at Google Books. The image is at p144, but I have linked to p143 for another Albert-Birot work.

Figure of Magdalenian man at Ribeira de Piscos

The above figure is discussed in an article by J. Angulo Cuesta and M. García Diez entitled ‘Diversity and meaning of Palaeolithic phallic male representations in Western Europe‘. (See also article ‘Cave paintings show aspects of sex beyond the reproductive‘.) The figure is said to be ejaculating.

In his book The Nature of Paleolithic Art Dale Guthrie discusses rock drawings of this kind (though not necessarily this drawing) as a kind of graffiti. An article at livescience, ‘Ancient Cave Art Full of Teenage Graffiti‘, provides a brief introduction to Guthrie’s book.

The art of ejaculation continues to be celebrated at Garmskiss, and, in an entry at the blog {feuilleton}, John Coulthart has gathered together some great pictures of art, both old and new, that depict ejaculation in all its glory.

In the meantime graffiti has moved on. The new graffiti can be seen at the site Wooster Collective.

On cave art more generally, Matthias Schulz observes in ‘Pornography in Clay‘ at Spiegel Online:

The walls of the La Marche cave in western France are literally blanketed with erotic images, 14,000-year-old drawings reminiscent of the Kamasutra. One image of a head plunging between a woman’s thighs seems to portray oral sex. Another shows a standing couple, their bodies entwined, while the man’s penis penetrates his partner.

Nowadays we are more likely to find such depictions in books, films and on the internet than on the secret walls of our cities - with the notable exception of the backs of toilet doors!

For more prehistoric erotic art fun see also Adonis from Chernitz / Lake Constance. Also see Historia del arte erotico.