Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Gallery: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
Originally posted 10 January 2006.
Manet's large 1863 canvas was first exhibited in the Salon des Refusés (along with James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl and work by Monet and Cézanne), where it was summarily snubbed by Napoleon III as well as by thousands of other attendees of the Salon next door; Le Déjeuner also is often considered the first work that can be truly called "modern art," having obsessed Picasso when he first saw it in 1900. It is one of the very first pieces of "art about art," it is said, defining an avant-garde, and also a demonstration of the ways in which theater is about 100 years behind the other arts. Most theater, anyway.
Manet worked from a classical source of inspiration, specifically the
grouping of three characters at the right-
It's very hard to say, too, how these two distracted gentlemen can be unaware of the very bright and prominent nude sitting next to them (though if they're academics, this is explained quite well), introducing eroticism: more, it's an eroticism that implicates us. Quite unprovocatively, the woman is the only person in the painting who seems to be looking at anyone in particular, and that person she's looking at is us, the perceiver. By being nude, perhaps voluntarily so (she seems unconcerned and not frightened, her clothes, a hat and a dress, in a small pile next to her), she is the unadorned human subject at the center of the painting. She is very brightly lit, the brightest subject in the painting, and the way that perspective works here she is the clearest. Her face, too, is the most detailed, the most clearly depicted of the people in the painting: she has individual identity, unlike the men. The perspective itself is one of the first intimations of Impressionism; as you look into the distance of the painting you see that the background fades, becomes two dimensional, even; smudges and blocks of color.
Given the rather goofy disinterest of the two men and the fetching but somewhat more distant (and for my money similarly erotic) woman in the background, the subject of the painting is no longer the story it tells or the characters it depicts, for these are ultimately unsolvable mysteries, but the relationship between the viewer and the painting itself. The nude invites the viewer into the world of the painting, first by inviting questions as to the situation the painting seems to depict, but finally by drawing all of our attention to her. In that imaginative world we ourselves participate in the mystery of the event of the picnic, her own mystery. Because she is neither nymph nor goddess, though, she is approachable as well. She welcomes us.
Well, she does, so long as we don't turn away from her, as Napoleon III and so many of the attendees of the Salon did nearly 150 years ago. The Manet painting has survived the years as calendar art as well as a controversial album cover which reproduced Manet's masterpiece and ran into considerable legal trouble itself (the female nude, singer Annabella Lwin, was 14 years old at the time the picture was taken). But, despite its status as a classic of 19th-century painting now, it's important to remember the outcry, the accusations of obscurity and social insult that were hurled at the painting when it was unveiled at the Salon des Refusés, the same insults that are hurled at so much avant-garde art today. Said a critic at the time of the Manet painting:
A commonplace woman of demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on a holiday, perpetuating an outrage to play the man. ... This is a young man's practical joke – a shameful, open sore.
The only thing this critic seems to have left out was how ... well, boring it is, which would be the ultimate insult today.
Although the Salon itself was filled with depictions of nudes, it was Manet's that rankled – unidentifiable (though clearly of contemporary origin), unashamed, inviting. And ultimately without the certainty of narrative or historical identity.
What does all this have to do with theater and drama? Well, one of the things it points out it is how far our drama is behind the other arts, about 150 years behind painting in this case. Most of our drama is still playing with Victorian narrative form; as much as there are jokes around the edges of it, "playing with form," that form is not abandoned nearly as much as Manet abandoned conventions of narrative and allegory in 19th-century French painting. But there's more, too: there's the emphasis on light and shadow, rather than shape and detail; and, of course, the implication of the viewer. Manet's nude challenges us to enter the painting, accepting the impossibility of interpreting it, of assuming that if we do so it will grant us meaning. It doesn't. Foreman, too, places people on the stage, staring out at us, inviting us into that world, and we too can reject that meaninglessness, if we wish to do so. But the sensual pleasures it offers in our entering the world of the painting, without preconceived notions, can be revolutionary in changing our way of seeing, as Manet changed the art of painting.
POETRY: A poem by Natalie Scott, "Victorine or Naked Woman in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe," was published in the October 2004 issue of the British poetry magazine South.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Tuesday, 06 May 2008
Originally posted 13 December 2006.
Christian Schad, Zwei Mädchen (1928)
Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 80 cm.
Galerie Brockstedt, Hamburg
She does not need us for her pleasure; she needs us if she is to be
seen. Does she stay with us? Our decision, ultimately. Five years before
Germany drifts into its twelve year sleep, her face expresses a lovely,
guiltless audacity. We are rendered spectators. We can be shaken, drawn
in, if we allow it. Perhaps she will be censored, rendered invisible,
unlike the Laocoön, which the church prefers. In so
far as this is a
painting, it is a sensual Laocoön, a Laocoön of
the promise of ecstasy.
This flesh of her thigh as much non-
Perhaps Sophocles could have written a play for her as well, just as tragic. A spectator can welcome her experience as the spectator might welcome that of Oedipus.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.32 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Thursday, 24 April 2008
De causis plantarum
Originally posted 5 February 2007.
Paul Cava, Listrum Vulgare
Used by permission of the artist
Pressed between the pages of a yellowed book, its thick red leather cover oxidising with age, or a palimpsest under glass: our vision overlaid upon a translucent writing, etched upon flesh, flesh upon flesh between wooden bedposts (antiqued, whether present or past), and all laid atop the seeds contained in berries hanging from the pulsing vine. An openness, her body a blossom, rooted upon his. A finger reached to touch, to disturb, and the page crumbles: sere and flaked, ink, flesh and leaf easy fuel for a wooden match. The intent of the disturbance to participate, but the couple is beyond us, too fragile for our participation. Their pleasure operates from within the veined green, behind the unreadable text, the foolscap of their history and inscription of their coupling. Legs intertwined to weave and thread through the crumbling textures of history, drawing them all to their root, his deep penetration into her, both arched in criminal desire. (See her limbs, fetished in a caressing silk.) She settles on him, full body surrendered, his body a bed for her that surrounds, into which she sinks, as the layers settle upon a tender page, inside a tender book. Under a glass that protects them, from us.
This could remain in light, as torn as a Schwitters collage, but Schwitters you could drive a truck into, you could laugh at the tickets and the numbers, the only travel here is towards the center, the self, not detritus of railroads, instead things themselves. These handwritten words, besides, not torn but fading: ink disappearing in light; dancing letters and figures in retreat from present torture.
In anger and envy you shatter the glass that protects them, holds them safe in the confines of the curling leaf, the arms that embrace her. If you were to set a match to the sere linen page, this architecture of the dry surface, it would burn quickly, explode, set them free, in eternal memory of each other.
Posted at 8.44 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Caspar David Friedrich, Kriedefelsen auf
Rügen
1818/1819
Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten Winterthur
The viewer and the artist do not have the daring of the subjects: two men, a woman, approaching the chalk cliffs through a clearing in the forest, edging to a fall. Safely distant, perhaps to anticipate the elegantly dressed (the red velvet of the woman's dress) subjects' fall. Set deep inside the mind, perspective framed within the sphenoid of the chalkwhite skull. But the fall invites as one edges closer to the extreme of the cliff's perimeter. They may have the daring to enter the landscape.
Posted at 8.43 am in /Organum/Gallery
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