lecture - between desire and disgust

8/12/2019 LECTURE - Between Desire and Disgust

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In this session

To recap some ideas on beauty

To think some issues of desire and disgust

To discuss what is avant-garde european photography


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Beauty as a historical concept*proportion*that which is loved*moderation / harmony / symmetry


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Once one talks of beauty, one always finds the ugly

That thing without:

proportion (it has the wrong scale)

form (it is formless, a stain or out of place)

conformity with an ideal / purpose (itfails)clarity or distinction (it is indistinct or hybrid)

The ugly object is an object which is in the wrong place

Mark Cousins, The Ugly,AA Files, 1994


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Twentieth Century responses to beauty:A split

beauty found (and refined) in media images

*the body

*the commodity*the cultivation of taste (design, style, marketing) a critique or distrust of beauty is found in fine art practices

*The primitive (against the classical)*The machine (against the organic or the expressive)*Excess (convulsive beauty)


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Mert & Marcus, Kate Moss for Playboy, 2012


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The Ludovisi Cnidian Aphrodite, Roman marble copy after the4thcentury BC sculptor Praxiteles with restored head, arms,

legs and drapery support


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Paul McCarthy, Butt Plug, 2007


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Lewis HinePower house mechanic1920


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Andr Breton:

Beauty will be convulsive(in his Nadja)

Convulsive beauty will be

veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive,

magical circumstantial or will notbe (in his LAmour Fou)

Man Ray, !Fixed-Explosive", 1934


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Miles Aldridge


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Helmut Newton,Nova, 1973, Paris


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Guy BourdinUntitled

1978


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Desire?

Disgust?

Some definitions?


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Desire:

Judith Butler: desire is an interrogative mode of being, a corporeal questioning of

identity and place

desire is that which suggests the displacement of the subject coming to suggest the

impossibility of the coherent subject itself

Jean Hyppolite: desire is the power of the negative in human life

Benedict de Spinoza: Desire is the essence of man

see Judith Butler Introduction, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century

France, Coulumbia University Press, 1987


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Disgust:

Georges Bataille, Eroticism

Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the

essence of eroticism The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled

Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation

Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and

emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation

A dynamic of distinctions between digestible/unpalatable, acceptance/rejection

Disgust arises from a nearness that is not wanted


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A proposal to think of aesthetics not as contemplation but as of the senses

The twentieth century has witnessed many art practices that re-affirm the sensorial as the

key site for practice..

These works addresses the senses in ways that can evoke both desire and disgust

>pleasure and displeasure

>novelty and shock


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Shock as the modern condition

Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of

shock-impulses that consciousness must parry. In industrial production no less than

modern warfare, in street crowds and erotic encounters, in amusement parks and

gambling casinos, shock is the very essence of modern experience. The

technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physicalshocks that have their correspondence in psychic shocks, as Baudelaires poetry

bears witness. To record the breakdown of experience was the mission of

Baudelaires poetry: he placed the shock experience at the very centre of his artistic

work.

Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October,

vol.62, Autumn 1992, pp.16-17


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Shock as the modern condition

Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of

shock-impulses that consciousness must parry. In industrial production no less than

modern warfare, in street crowds and erotic encounters, in amusement parks and

gambling casinos, shock is the very essence of modern experience. The

technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physicalshocks that have their correspondence in psychic shocks, as Baudelaires poetry

bears witness.To record the breakdown of experience was the mission of

Baudelaires poetry: he placed the shock experience at the very centre of his artistic

work.

Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October,

vol.62, Autumn 1992, pp.16-17


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Buck-Morss point?

For Walter Benjamin aesthetics is not disinterested contemplation but rather that

which is perceptive by feeling of sensation

Aesthetics is not the culturing of taste, but rather the redemption of the senses:

In this situation of crisis in perception, it is no longer a question of educating a

crude ear to hear music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question oftraining the eye to see beauty, but of restoring perceptibility.

A vital relation to sensation and shock through new technology is essential to this

strategy (not to regress into old ways Bertolt Brecht: better bad new things than

good old ones)

Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October,vol.62, Autumn 1992, p.18


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Buck-Morss point?

For Walter Benjamin aesthetics is not disinterested contemplation but rather that

which is perceptive by feeling of sensation

Aesthetics is not the culturing of taste, but rather the redemption of the senses:

In this situation of crisis in perception, it is no longer a question of educating a

crude ear to hear music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question oftraining the eye to see beauty, but of restoring perceptibility.

A vital relation to sensation and shock through new technology is essential to this

strategy (not to regress into old ways Bertolt Brecht: better bad new things than

good old ones)

Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October,vol.62, Autumn 1992, p.18


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Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection

curated by Norman Rosenthal and Charles Saatchi

1997


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The work of art is a being of sensation

Sensory becoming is the action by which something or someone isceaselessly becoming-other

Art is always a compound of sensations the vibration, theembrace, the withdrawal

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp.164-172


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Man Ray, Cadeau (Gift), 1921


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Desire and Disgust as found in:

FuturismDada

Surrealism


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A futurist proposal: art should affirm the sensation of speed

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti:

We affirm that the worlds magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the

beauty of speed a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful

than the Victory of Samothrace


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*The importance of embodied sensation in the work of art replacing distanced cerebral

observation.

*The punch, the slap, spasms of violence as the ultimate Futurist gestures.*The avant-garde as typified by shock and / or provocation art as rupture with tradition

and/or common sense*art as slap in the face rather a comfortable armchair


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Luigi Russolo: We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the greatmasters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are

satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams,

backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the Eroica

or the Pastoral'.


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Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Automobile, 1911


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Umberto BoccioniUnique Forms of Continuity in Space

1913


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Umberto BoccioniUnique Forms of Continuity in Space

1913

Umberto Boccioni:

all forms of imitation must bedespised

in the manner of rendering Nature the

first essential is sincerity and purity

movement and light destroy themateriality of bodies


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Fortunato Depero

!Self-portrait with clenched

fist"1915


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F. T. Marinetti:

We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer"s

stride, the mortal"s leap, the punch and the slap

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty Poetry must be conceived

as a violent attack on unknown forces


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Filippo Masoero !Dynamised view of the Roman Forum"1934


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Ottavio Berard, !Futurist photograph: punch in the eye"1932


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Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Arturo Bragaglia, !Typist"1913


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Anton Giulio Bragaglia:We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of

which still palpitates in our awareness.

We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality

We will endeavour to extract not only the aesthetic expression of the motives, but also the

inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions that we feel when an action leaves its superb,

unbroken trace.


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Arturo Bragaglia !Photodynamic portrait of a woman"c.1924


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Hugo Ball in costume at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916,

text for poem Caravan overprinted

Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic

disease I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony,the science that finds everything in order I am

against systems, the most acceptable system is on

principle to have none.

I proclaim bitter struggle with all the weapons ofDadaist disgust: Every product of disgust capable of

becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protestwith the fists of its whole being engaged in

destructive action: Dada abolition of logic

abolition of memory abolition of the futureFreedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense

colours, and interlacing of opposites and of allcontradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE

Tristan Tzara, #Dada Manifesto 1918$

(see Art in Theory: 1900-1990)


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Raoul Hausmann,ABCD, 1923-4

Hannah Hch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar

Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-20


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Hannah Hch, Self-portrait (double exposure)1924Hannah Hch, Das Schne Mdchen (Pretty Woman), 1920, collage on paper


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Hannah Hch

!Merry Woman

"

1923


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John Heartfield

!The true meaning of the Hitlersalute: millions stand behind me"

1932


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Martha RoslerBringing the War Home: House Beautiful

2004


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Martha Rosler

Bringing the War Home:House Beautiful

1967-72


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Thomas Hirschhorn

1 Man = 1 Man2002


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SURREALISM&PHOTOGRAPHY


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The surreal as a dialoguewith the other that is encountered through:

dreams

coincidences

correspondences (strange equivalences)

the marvellous

the uncanny

a reciprocal exchange: connecting conscious and unconscious thought


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SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written work, or in any other manner the actual functioning of

thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exemptfrom any aesthetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality ofcertain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the

disinterested play of thought.

Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924


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Man Ray, Waking Dream Sequence (detail), 1924

Robert Desnos communicating a message in a trance

like state. Published in La revolution surrealisteCover of La Revolution surrealiste, 1, 1 December 1924

Surrealist journals


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Andr Breton:

Beauty will be convulsive(in his Nadja)

Convulsive beauty will be

veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive,

magical circumstantial or will notbe (in his LAmour Fou)

Man Ray, !Fixed-Explosive", 1934


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Salvador Dali, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933

Published in Minotaure, December 1933


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Surrealist techniques and themes:

Doubling - Superimposing

Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary

Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of theanimate and inanimate, the alive and the dead

The found object - the lost object - the chance encounterThe pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge


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see Rosalind Krauss, The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism


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Man Ray, The Marquise Casati, 1922


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Man Ray, Untitled, 1931


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Man Ray, Tomorrow (Demain), 1924


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Brassa,

!Involuntary Sculptures"1933


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Brassa, Graffiti, 1933-1956


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Dora Maar, Untitled, 1935


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Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936


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Andr Kertsz

Distortion #34


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Georges Bataille, The Big Toe, 1929:

The division of the universe into subterranean hell and perfectly pure

heaven is an indelible conception, mud and darkness being theprinciplesof evil as light and celestial spaces are theprincipleof good: with theirfeet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinatelyimagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, intopure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeingoneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to theideal, and from the ideal to refuse - a rage that is easily

directed against an organ as baseas the foot.


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Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Untitled (The Big Toe), 1929

Published in Documents 6, 1929.


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Hans Bellmer

The Doll

c.1939 / re-colored 1940s


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Man Ray !The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse"1920Published in La Revolution surrealiste, 1, December 1924


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Salvador DaliCommunication: visage paranoaque1931


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Three key practices:

Man Ray

Claude Cahun

Hans Bellmer


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Man Ray, Lee Miller, 1929


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Meret Oppenheim, 1931


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Natasha, 1929


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Untitled, 1930


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Man Ray,Anatomies, 1929


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Jacques-Andre BoiffardUntitled

1930


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Sous ce masque un autre masque.

Je nen finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages.

Under this mask, another mask.I will never finish lifting up all these faces.

Cl d C h l f A A [Di l C ll d


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Claude Cahun, plates fromAveux non Avenus [Disavowals or Cancelled

Conferssions], 1930


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HANS BELLMERanagrams, ambivalence, perverse assemblage

Hans Bellmer, spread in Minotaure, 1934


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La Poupee, 1936


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Hans BellmerGuy Bourdin


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Hans Bellmer:

The game belongs to the category of experimental poetry, and bearing in mind such

poetrys method of provocation, the toy will take the role of the provocative object

Paul Eluard:

Its a girl! Where are her eyes?Its a girl! Where are her breasts?

Its a girl! What does she say?

Its a girl! What games does she play?

Its a girl! Its my desire!

Hans Bellmer,

The Doll, 1936/1949


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Hans Bellmer


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Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992


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Cindy Sherman


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Cindy Sherman


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Francesca Woodman, New York, 1979-1980


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Hans Bellmer / Francesca Woodman

To conclude:

We find a new beauty residing somewhere between desire and disgust

(between wandering displacement and dynamics of acceptance/rejection)


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(between wandering displacement and dynamics of acceptance/rejection)

Through:

Form made formless

The familiar made unfamiliar

Reality as given over to doubling, replication and displacement