Awkward x 2

The Lapdog and the Pussy

He thinks he’s being loved for himself, but actually he’s being loved for his usefulness.    Imagining himself a star in the sky, actually he’s a vibrator in a crotch.  He is not special, as he is being led to believe.  On the contrary he could be any little dog that wriggled.[1]  He’s there to pass on the excitement he thinks is all for him.

The niceties in the room, encapsulating this jest of a single perfect and loyal attention, are not seemingly luxurious, but they do appear to occupy a plush environment. The impersonal sheets on the soft bed for repositioning oneself yet again after a day spent in the fetish of objects; the robust yellow drapes frame this private space for one, who incidentally likes to be tickled.

Chinese ladies loved the Pekinese because it was quite harmless but would entertain them by flying into yapping rages, and being harmless could be taken a way by a servant without any difficulty when the yaps became tedious.  We have come to think of it as the Serra condition. 

White puffy sleeves are held up by elastic which stretches only as far as needed around the flesh in order to keep the shirt in order. This area of white touches the flesh, pinches at its circumference, an oval around her arm, a band making a mark. The fabric of the shirt dress touches her skin, tangling her up in it where it may be twisted under her moving figure. She is clothed in this white fabric, covered, she can know her exterior skin and body, feel it, through the way the shirt dress covers her skin, or pulls from her hip to her shoulder underneath her, though that we could not tell by looking, if that were happening.  Whatever is complex about how she feels in her shirtdress is not available for us, we can only imagine it.

A very private moment, unless, like Giorgioni’s Venus of Urbino the painting is an advertisement for a marriageable young woman.  Everybody wondered for years why the young woman in Giorgioni’s painting appeared to be masturbating.  What could be going on?  Then it turned out that she was (is) masturbating.  Her dad commissioned the painting and it’s supposed to tell the world that she’d be a good wife and potentially a good mother because she likes sex.

Likewise we may wonder what is the complex touching that we can see is the back and forth of the hairy hindmost part of the canine’s (shitz-u? Pomeranian? Mutt?) body, the part prolonged beyond the rest. Is it, indeed, complex?  Its movements (a reaction to being stimulated by the young lady with fleshy arms and a puffy sleeve shirt that has a white puffy hat with a blue ribbon that accompanies her outfit that is now on her pillow having been tasseled off her head by the playful acts occurring in her bed) are being directed by the lady’s feet. They help to create a seat for the wiggle furry living toy, and in an opening between her ankles the tail falls, the wagging that usually has no direction except through physiological limitations, is being given an aim guided for her personal pleasure.  If she’s just some nice kid who posed for Fragonard that’s one thing.  If she’s some Comptesse whose father is looking to put her out on the market we might read the painting a little differently, but let’s leave that aside for a moment.  Except to note that the court of Versailles was a place where there was not private moment, kind of like the art world, where the private moment is also a public opportunity, or statement.

It’s very important that the pleasure the tail provides is both incidental to the dog’s pleasure and, conceivably, the only reason for the dog’s existence from the girl’s point of view.  How like the public figure who is not quite an intellectual but, rather, the not quite an intellectual who assures the rich they need not bother too much with intellectuals.  He (it’s usually a he) says dismissive things about work he will never grasp.  He thinks he sounds clever and witty.  And perhaps he does.  But what his audience likes is not what he says but the little tickle of relief that comes from knowing they don’t actually have to read Derrida or anything else that is or seems, well, difficult.  Or that the Occupy Wall Street people are just bohemians, likeable but not really people we have to worry about.  He kisses the rich audience’s ass, and thinks they’re smiling because they worship him.  They are smiling because he is jerking them off and they like it.

She has him, he her wiggling friend, he is what she has thrown her passions onto, fondling the young playful hairy living panting breathing barking tail wagging creature.[2] Even, in regards his specific nose, if we could say that she has been guided to it for it is oddly shaped like hers, and makes her think that you may be as extreme as Freud’s Emma, well at least then we could say she has gone somewhere, driven by a specific object that directly ties to her, and his, more sensual sexually charged parts.

It’s hard to judge this lady and her pet, but I think, if she was drawn towards the nose, she would not need that tail. She would already be getting off.

Wouldn’t he, this young wiggly lass, rather remain a wild creature? But what can he know about being a wild creature when he is a breed born into a cultivated role, to be a pet. And to be adorned just as a lady’s hat, with a blue bow?

And never to be as direct and aggressive as a pushy black snout, but rather to be discrete, in fact so discrete as to not know oneself that that’s what’s going on.  It is not you intellect but your flimsiness that she finds useful, not your wriggly body—although that has a certain charm to be sure—but the wispy air-filled tickling it makes available, it’s not holding you up that’s so much fun—as you stupidly imagine—it’s what hangs off you and that you can’t control.  It really isn’t what you say about art, or about people smarter than you but whom you tell us we need not read, it’s just that we need someone around who will tickle us a little while reassuring us that everything we once thought forceful is actually just a little tickle, for our benefit whatever those making the tickling mean to do.  Especially when they didn’t mean to just tickle.  But our official and favorite Versailles near-intellectuals do mean just to tickle.  They do not wish to be a nuisance.  They know that the price of admission is to be a Pekinese.  There aren’t any paintings of Versailles with Irish Wolfhounds sitting under the table.   Andy Warhol had all sorts of people around, except intellectuals.  No black snout he, and not eager to have any around either, they just scare off the clients.  She must like to masturbate, but not be too pushy about the real thing… who knows what the mother can actually manage, if anything, could be her best friend is always going to be a little dog, pleased with itself and quite unaware of how silly it has to be in order to be lovable, no wonder it is eager to reassure everyone who will listen that it’s silly to be serious… it is what they want to hear and what he has to believe if he is to believe in his own, well, seriousness…

(even better- is it a hat, or are they panties, that lay behind her head?)

If she took off her knickers before picking up the dog we’d really know where we were…

The things that are not alive in this room can entertain her- it could be the satin sheets, being brushed up between her thighs, her hands massaging her fleshy pink bits with a cool, silky finish of fine fabrics; wrapped up in the yellow drapes, a naked flesh holding itself within the feeling of another kind of surface on her being.   And you so fond of being a whim that you do not even see yourself as being as her sheets, white sheets like your white tail, perfect clean naïve innocence, tickling her, making her laugh while you keep panting… everything like your tail, a whole room imitating your anterior extension’s lack of substance and plenitude of softness, satin sheets, silk drapes, perfectly clean—by eighteenth-century standards at least—maybe perfectly naïve maybe not an innocence which is quite that a this is taking place in Versailles, where innocence is not really an option on account of everything has to do with power… Lucky her if she is just some nice girl that has a model’s job.   Fat chance of that, she’s much more likely to be a nice young woman having a bit of fun being able to do what she actually likes, by herself, for once, before dad introduces her to another fucking Marquis…

Who is she? When she waxes and wanes and dismays in loud bellows, aloud for all to hear, aloud and insincere, aloud she calls out her own hypocrisy but turns her blind eye to her part in her cries, when she does this will you come to her side with the tail wagging and will you begin to bark in unison with her? She does no wrong to you, you say, as long as your food bowl stays full. And you do her no wrong, as long as you remain by her side, letting her hand rest on your head, on your back.

You are an interesting wiggling toy, with no desire to spit out your world but rather a happy acquiescence in being fed by it. With no desire but to be, for her, an impersonal equalizing of the world she owns…  Impersonal but so full of character.  The servants take you out and bring you back, you thinking your indispensable, them never knowing when the mistress might or might not feel like having you around, it’s entirely a matter of whimsy.  You so aware of how cute you are.  Them thinking you’re kind of funny-looking, but then you’d expect that from a person who spent all his time thinking about art while hanging around people who think of nothing but power.  I am so wonderful thinks the little doggie, and write such easy and undemanding prose, light and tickly and no kind of threat and not aggressive like a snout.  He is so funny, she thinks, I’ll keep him around for when I want my pussy tickled, which is quite often, actually, and it’s nice the way that he tells me I don’t have to read anything that’s hard or demanding.  I’ll leave hard for when I want to get serious, for which I’ll need something more snout than tail, more Derrida than dumb dog, more hunter than happy little fellow, but for now why the fuck should I want to get serious?  It’s a bit of a commitment.  I prefer these little fellows who know how Versailles works and never make me have to do anything but decide whether I want to be tickled or not. 

He thinks he’s wonderful and that she loves him because he is so wonderful.  She does love him, sort of.  It’s because he is simply lovable.  Because he is very loyal, being a dog, and his tail tickles her pussy.  Actually the latter is the important part.  Of course he’s loyal, she feeds him and takes him for walks.  It’s the bi-product of what he can’t control that makes him really useful.  Not admirable, as he foolishly imagines.  Useful. Everything an aristocrat despises, to be valued for what you can do rather than for what you are.  A little bourgeois dog being taken advantage of by an aristocratic situation he thought he was there to impress.  They will clap when he trashes his own class or the Occupy Wall Street people or anyone who’s clever.  It’s what they want to hear, it tickles their fancy, it’s what lapdogs are for.  Their coats need a lot of brushing but it pays off and they can be carried out of the dining room whenever they make a fuss.  And trained to come when one whistles.

The Skin and the Feminine

You probe and manipulate the world with your fingers. The world touches your whole skin and your whole skin touches it. You point with conviction by asserting a direction- with fingers. Forward is for you only what’s in front of you, where you point, what you do. The world points everywhere and nowhere. It enters in many places at once, everywhere that - bare feet and wrists and neck and ears…- you are feeling it.  But you do not lead with the back of your knees.  We think that when we touch the world we do so with what leads us forwards. To feel the direction of the wind I lick my finger and stick it in the air…but truly I am feeling the direction of the wind all over my body, if only I would stop for a minute and seek it out. The fingers are rarely thought of as receiving sensations they didn’t seek, but all the bits of one’s body transitively receive sensation involuntarily all the time.  We speak of them as mutually exclusive kinds of organs.  One talks of the wind in one’s face and one means the wind on one’s cheeks rather than one’s lips or in one’s eyes.  What one sees and talks with one notices only when there’s a problem, or when consumed in a very deliberate act, like a kiss. 

David’s Oath of the Horatii is in a way the ultimate boy power painting, it’s the Hatfields and McCoy’s only the turf isn’t a bit of mountainside it’s Rome.  Certainly it’s the ultimate nutty old man painting, sending his sons off to slaughter a family to which they are related by marriage on the grounds of a political dispute.  One of them is the one who’s done the relating, his wife is among the women on the right—more depressed than the rest by the oncoming slaughter as her husband is going to kill her brother.  In his left hand the old boy holds the swords he’s giving his sons; with his right he makes an inspiring gesture. [i]

In an age when it’s the girls who ask the questions in class while the boys are reticent, it’s easy to imagine an inverse version of the Oath.  The clothing should be contemporary. The setting could stay the same(hard cold marble floors, generic Doric pillars, wood beam roof supports…a pastiche of architecture harking back to a when that has past, kind of like most post colonial American architecture. The helmets should be rethought a bit, a lighter bullet-proof material is clearly called for, and a bit more of an aerodynamic design, but the plumes could stay. Rather than a cloak something padded and likewise a shorter skirt certainly but tights so as to avoid or contain abrasion when parachuting and of course a more elastic and protective footwear, jump boots instead of sandals.  Instead of three kinds of sword, three kinds of submachine gun—a Kalashnikov to celebrate the role of women in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler and also in many post-colonial liberation movements, something light and nifty that is the favorite of right-wing women in Texas, perhaps, to celebrate the relatively liberated position of women in the United States, and the similarly light-weight weapon carried around by women as well as men police officers at Heathrow Airport, in acknowledgement of the advances made by the Europeans too in regard to general notions of sexual equality.  The back wall could be embellished by an English fully-automatic p90, just because it’s a sexy amazing piece of artillery that fits snug in one’s grasp. Instead of the old guy, the guns would be handed out by an old woman looking like Meryl Streep acting Anna Wintour.  Her clothing could be essentially the same as the old man’s, but clearly something would need to be done to make the cloak more threatening and the tunic more severe; not flat boots in her case one supposes, very high heels instead and perhaps gun-metal colored for coordination’s sake.  To the right there would be not weeping women in flowing clothes but slumping boys in large football jerseys, hiding from the rhetoric of actual conflict by desultorily playing war games on hand held video players.

What’s wrong with the picture is that it’s just an inversion: the girls are all holding phalluses—they may have seized power from the males but it’s still male power, all about force and authority.  The original cast of the Oath (it is after all a scene from a play) wanders on to the set of the original version of Absolutely Fabulous.  The sheer pomp of the Roman Military cannot survive Patsie’s attention:  “Every girl loves a uniform darling, and that kilt is so short.”   The heroic is automatically comedic in Patsie’s world.  It can only be a figure of fun, melting away in the face of itself as an image of the super-buff robbed of seriousness in the face of sexual teasing.  Nor is she simply the opposite of the heroic, she lives in a world in which it’s no longer relevant so all she can do is invert it because robbed of its identity as image of actual power it’s an image of cuteness, boy style, quite devoid of authority of the sort on which it wholly depends.  It belongs to a world in which the model was the deliberate, the drawn, the sculptural as an image of the eternal (Poussin wanted his figures to be more like statues than people, and David followed his example,) not the open to the provisional, the painted as the embodiment of the perpetually uncertain (space which is not ‘really’ there, depth which is a surface.)  To find another starting point we’ll turn to Cranach, whose work is about surfaces rather than drawing (he is the not-Durer,) much more about fun than duty, precisely not sculptural because it’s about flesh—a surface which is alive, precisely not like marble especially when it’s female apart from both seeming to glow from inside, which effect tends to underscore rather than obscuring the difference.

A world made of surfaces which are continuous with other surfaces and where there ‘really’ is nothing but surface is automatically, surely, sexier than one made out of solids separated from one another twice, first by voids and then by lines, which, in demarcating, keep apart whatever they also bring together so that drawing is forever analytic, the resolution of confusion, a clarifying.  Norman Bryson once said that photography—ultimate drawing, drawing by light—what inherently sadistic because it fixed in place what it presented.  When colors come together they make a vibration, a movement which signals an interaction.  Interaction implies but also undermines demarcation.

Cranach’s painting is almost empty of signs which could identify or obscure the body as a body.  There is a wispy bit of cloth that underscores how it is a work of presentation without specification. The veil is transparent, its activity is to capture and throw light, and reveal the body as a surface that does the same. Its sign is a sign of movement, and as such signifies the undoing of fixed immobility- the three quartered turn of the hips shoulder and face. The arms are relaxed, the face relaxed, body, posture, mouth, eyes…casual and calm. A naked person wearing a single item of any kind identifies her or himself as a kind of person, the kind who’d wear that thing.  Absent anything at all she is an image of action, desire, sensation.  No sword is required.  The action in question is entirely involuntary: she is open to the world (and filled with light,) we can only be moved through our body by what we see.  (If all we see is an historical document we see nothing, and there is no way that we can critique this work as a good or bad embodiment of a story about justice, or as a good or bad embodiment of anything except embodying.  The painting acts out the possibility of being continuous with the world.)

This lady does wear something- two somethings: a necklace and a choker. The choker adorns the curve of her neck, just as her hairstyle embroiders of her forehead. The necklace falls loosely across her collarbone to rest its charm between her breasts; its chain frames a space of her flesh that mimics the cosmos framed by her right arm. Her skin is as much the beginning of the outside as the outside of the insides where everything happens. 

Painting starts as space.  Only when drawing dominates can it be seen as a space which exists to be divided and dominated by a phallus, as Kristeva says poetry was about the pen invading and organizing the white space of the paper until the Symbolists turned it against itself, making the pen be an instrument that released what it was designed to repress.  In David, the painting as object disappears, replaced by organization achieved through line and tone.  In Cranach, the painting is a space which contains a body that is itself a receptacle for light, as much container as form.  Painting is here allowed to continue to be what it started as, and as such it is a body in the room with the spectator rather than a window or a stage, paradoxically more of a body because it never stopped being wholly a space, which is to say, a depth.

 The body is continuous with the world, which usually starts next to the body, as clothing.  Cranach grasps that the body as subject and object of desire has no need of a fetishism of perfection.  Flaws are irrelevant except when someone finds them hot, mobility is the story the flesh tells, a story involving blurring rather than points and lines.  The body’s most intense zones of physical sensation are the pinkest ones, while the eyes and the teeth have white in common and while crucial to sensation are themselves devoid of it, only drawing attention to themselves when strained or painful while the lips are by definition nothing but sensing machines where what they feel is what is felt.  When not touching another surface, the body meets the air.

 What the wind feels like is what the body feels like when it feels the wind. It knows it only as another surface.

 Cranach’s woman is a depth that stands in a space, in a world made only of surfaces there is also the opportunity to think it as only depths.  They’re inseparable.  This is not the opposite of a world of solids and voids, of definition and the definitive.  Or if it is it means something else by those terms.  The painting can only be ‘about’ direct sensation, but there’s also no other way to get to it except by staring at it.  How the woman is there is what one wants to see, where seeing means being as open to what comes at one as she is.  There is no point in seeing the work as a woman presenting herself to the viewer, that misses half the point.  The work is about us imagining how she meets the world.  For one thing she stands on it without bearing down on it.  The softness of women’s flesh; their relative lightness: both hold light. Space is about receptivity and the soft already promises that. 

Cranach is about dreaming. His makes us pause, bathed in unbiased sensitivity. David is about nagging. His drama appeals to a rigid discourse, thinking with the point of a weapon rather than the feeling of the heart through the hand. Cranach paints a world of color; David represents the world as a standoff: this against that rather than this and that as a more.  Drawing can only specify form, color can only undermine it.  Drawing gives form but color takes it away, replacing documentation and explication with immediacy and the involuntary.  Nor is ambiguity the opposite of certainty, it is what is there before and to what the latter will in its turn give rise.  It may not be interesting to reduce or relate Cranach’s woman to a question about gender, but it’s surely clear that she raises a question about immediacy and sensation as the not-masculine, being as she is neither prancing hero nor grieving wife.  But it does seem that the difference between David (or Durer) and Cranach is one between probing and being open to sensation.  One must follow the line and form in the David to get with the story, everything in it has to do with an opposition between hard and soft.  That’s of no use to contemporary women or men.  Fixing things tells us not very much, and in any case we don’t want to be told, we want to be aroused.  And to wander around, seeing (what might happen) without direction, let alone direction which is reactive.

Red

The treat for the turtle is the same color as the turtle.  Why is the woman proffering it looking away from the turtle?  And what is the standing girl eating? And does the girl on the right sort of look like a turtle, even though it’s actually just that her hair’s wet and slicked back?  But still, why is she looking at the turtle but the woman who’s feeding it is looking away?  Kind of funny to make a whole painting out of a casual coincidence, but also sounds pretty good…

This boy holds a red sheet, as would a matador.  Three black balls and three half circles, heads of black hair.  The balls hard and the hair soft, the one a little bit heavy the other almost weightless.  The red sheet drapes the boy in a way that follows his posture, making a twisting vertical that brings the horizontal blue strip that unites his shoulders and head with the head and shoulders of the boy sitting on the right, the boy who’s doing something crouched below the blue, his hair almost exactly above the ball he’s holding, his crouching height almost exactly lined up with the red sheet, the standing boy looks carefully at his ankles, perhaps hoping he won’t get hit just there by a heavy wooden ball, or perhaps being mysteriously or is it just Classically phlegmatic about it.

Both the singular items in both paintings are red, or nearing red. Red turtle. Red sheet.  And the turtle can get into his red shell; tuck himself in so to speak.

And, between the two, only one blonde.  And she’s looking away, like there’s something much more interesting in the grass that we can’t see…

If you want to draw attention, use the color red. If you want to release serotonin, surround yourself in yellow (not too bright a yellow, which could lead to a sort of fierce blast, like sounding mares loose in the immature grip of weak hands, buried by a deep blare). A golden blonde will do; laughing yellow color. Matisse’s paint strokes seem to produce tangy yellowish-orange streaks, smeared like butter but more palpable a type of soft biscuit cheese that lets us know the youth on the bottom left is looking down and away from us. The back of the young’s girl’s head of hair is nearly of the same size as the turtle. Not to mention as well it’s mimicking the reptile’s form; the soft, fragrant head opposite the hard, brittle shell

Why do these boys not laugh? Why does the girl who seems most at ease, and the one who can wield the timid creature from its isolated unit, why does she not share the same color hair as the other young ladies?  Ask the question more than one way:  Why does the girl who seems most at ease have the easiest time teasing the timid out of its timidity (if that’s what’s being asked)?  The answer is that it is because her confidence is contagious and drives timidity away.  Why is the one who can do that blonde?  Because being the object of adoration makes one both tough and self-confident, the others don’t need to be tough and thus have no confidence to transmit, subliminally and by overt example by the way.  

If the young fella on the right had blonde hair, and a red ball in his hand, what would he be daring to draw from behind the curtain of red covering the youth on the left?  Surely this would have to do with whether his narcissism was benevolent or malevolent, whether he wanted to draw something forth only for himself, or for the benefit of the other(‘s confidence) or for both of them for the usual reason…

The boys do not even seem to be discussing. They are watching, weighing, waiting to see where the action of the next toss will lead them. The young girl in the center has her hands in her mouth, swallowing her fingers as she feels around her mouth which surely may be making a gurgling choking sound, but at least she has the sense to put an end to thoughtless dribble, for, does she know, it would most likely not enlighten the turtle to peek its head out and see what is really involved in the world around him.

Nope, words only won’t do. One also needs something sensual, a something similar to oneself.

No doubt, that little mark made by Matisse, that bit of red in that girls hand, that swatch of paint sitting there on the surface of this weird image, that tiny little hardly what one would see as important bit of action…that is part of a painting that, though following the formal triad composition of three figures, and with calming greens and blues that remind us that most of the world is blue, is a painting with a red turtle and red treat and is, as a work of art, stimulating in the sense that we can share that we sometimes poke our heads out at things that are most similar to us.  We are red attracting red.  (Tongue; lips…)(Fingernails, he kisses every finger of her hand; she puts her tongue in his mouth.)

That red might not be pretty to us, but the painting sure is. 

A butterfly floats among the trees in the jungle.  It knows the perfectly red flower is there.  If finds it and disappears from view into a red fleshy petal on which it sits, invisible in plain view, out of sight without being hidden, within and concealed by the color that most turns it on.  It is reluctant to leave when the time comes.

Suppose it could be that the paintings are read in the following way:

The ladies seem to be able to get the thing out of its shell, the boys are in competition… could be turtles and not balls; they do not seem to mind either way. In the girls the three identify with one (but I would suspect that if it were to turn into a handsome prince these girls would get beastly. look at the already eager and anticipatory look on the face of the girl who is standing), while the boys each identify with their own object for the game.

But it leaves us with that. Boys and girls and arguing about who deserves what.

The butterfly doesn’t care about deserving.  It’s just hot for the flower, and determined.  It’s not interested in arguing either.  The jungle’s not a nice beach.  It’s more colorful, more intense.  A butterfly’s almost as far as you can get from a tortoise.  A butterfly can’t afford to be cautious because it doesn’t have a shell.  No one ever talked about a tortoise that left you breathless except maybe another tortoise.   

In Matisse intensity is usually or at least often a form of mock simplicity.  Matisse draws out and flattens the composition of the landscape. Three lines run behind the figures. Three figures, typical of painting studies of figures, and three lines, typical of landscape (foreground, middle ground, background). He puts the threes in play and says “so what?” the action of the painting is what is going on in the fleshy brushy surface, not in reading threes. The expressions are fleshy, and on the girl a bit scary. The tits and bellies are rounded fleshy mounds, as is the ass, and the toes. Could be Matisse pointing to us that what gets us to be into the work are these active qualities of the skin of the painting. All the sexual innuendos, if there are any, and sure they are in there, hit us with a timid laughter given what we are able to imagine to be the symbolic parts of these two paintings of three figures and three division in space, and two singular red things (from beneath only one of which a head pokes out?)

So you see, we can imagine it, just as he could. Or maybe we can only imagine that we can imagine it just as he could, but that’s just as good.  We can feel the skin just as he could and compare it to the water and the grass, the one wet the other just this side of prickly and of course to be compared to the hair which everywhere except in the case of the blonde and the girl who’s eating and looks kind of like a cave man is actually smooth like the balls and the back of the tortoise while the flesh, curiously loose on the bodies, calls forth its difference from water and air. And we could care less what the work is saying, what its discourse of boys and girls is, if we can laugh at and feel what is actively happening, visually and in imagery, we are out of the discourse of boys and girls perhaps and on our way to the discourse of children. Where the arguments are savage but not fatal, and half of them just playing at arguments.  Maybe.  It seems quite gentle. Nothing is stirred up. 

Objects perceived based on color content become not isolated but seen participating in a world invented by a sense of a totality of that world, through the imagination. In Matisse we are in a world of color where we can learn, like children, to see and not be ashamed, reflect and not prescribe an order to things. Everyone sits or stands or squats without tension except of a relaxed and athletic sort.  Very classical.  End of a summer afternoon stuff.  Limpidity of the mind, she’s not looking at the tortoise because she’s day-dreaming.  The boy is only half thinking about his feet.  The other half is thoughts about things he is only half aware one has thoughts about.  He already realizes they’re not quite thoughts.  He knows for sure that they’re about her. In the painting we see both an after and a before, always on the brink of exhaustion but never at that point where one totally forgets that world and everything else. Everything else being before before and after after thousands of times over till it’s just pure sensation causing ideas to become so jumbled that they cannot remain anything decisive. I don’t know where climax is in this, or if it is everywhere.

Barthes once said that the small death was how one should experience literature. You turn pages when you read from a paperback book, either remembering or forgetting what came before and moving, sequentially, from one narrative to the other, back and forth in a space that keeps referring to itself yet forgetting itself in the thoughts that arise from the darkened letterforms on the page. The after informs the before and vice versa through an entire book, until it’s closed. The book of letters can be closed, though thoughts of it may remain. However, we presuppose an end to the process of turning pages…

 Where does a painting end? Touching and seeing in intercourse happens all over the surface. A painting is all surface, touching and narrations happening everywhere all at once.

What is most fleetingly sensible about the surface of a canvas is the flighty activity of color. Its position(s) are made believable only by those others happening around it. No color has any particular single heavy-handed motivation. Walter Benjamin said “Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next.”[1]  He also said that children are excited by soap bubbles because they shimmer, moving in and out of forms in subtle shifting nuances, dissolving the total object into a series of moments.

                                 ^[2]

So in color, a griffin, a fairy, a dusk or a dawn are all at once but only as a circumstance.

In Goya’s painting the blind-folded boy ducking away from the other blind-folded boy’s bat must only be able to keep from being knocked down because he is engaged in movement, pulled and directed from both sides (oh the tender touches of this lad’s firmly but softly gripped fleshy hands!  Is it like the way the clouds are touching the sky or more like that in which the same clouds are cupped between the hills, a vapor between mounds which it softens even as they provisionally contain it?) and through which he can get a sense of what is there but cannot be seen. We, as witness to this, with them frolic gaily in a space blanched white before the heat of the sun, in an oval formation mimicked by the possibly quite cool lake. They dash madly or stand, blue and yellow responding to one another, red vibrating with intensity in itself, colors tickling that something that reminds us of our generous ability to comprehend that we cannot possibly comprehend it all.   At one end, the beginning, a dress that stands.  At the other one that moves almost as fast as the moving, dodging, crouching boy.  In the middle moving only slightly a dress whiter than the other two, but topped with red… And the two most fragile details the feather in the woman’s hat across from the girl whose blouse is red, which find their echo in the few leaves at the upper right, which move horizontally out into the painting to complement the feathers’ vertical assertion of where the center of the painting is, and we wonder if the girl in the red blouse is looking at the man next to the woman with the feather.  For his part he holds the woman’s left hand but is looking at the girl, across the dividing line between who moves most and who moves least, and his movements match hers, or possibly it’s hers which correspond to his.  Or maybe both are mutually involved in a dance of their own which anchors in its provisionality the playful drama at whose center it is, or which it might even be said to frame in another kind of dance.

            The dance is fastest on the right, where sentences end.  Its participants’ goal the same as ours, to enable it to release sufficient energy to precipitate its dissolution in that totality that is defined by circling the sun while caught in movements whose explicitness obscures those that are smaller but even more rapid, like the movements of eyes.  The guy to the right of the woman with the feather is looking at the girl in the red blouse too.  It’s no accident that she’s at the centre.  This is surely made clear by the fact that the man who holds her left hand leans away, for frame the glance of the man holding the feather hat lady’s right hand, while the crouching but moving boy clears the way for us to see quite clearly what’s going on between the girl and the man across from her.  And the tree stabilizes and ends the drama by leaning out, matching exactly in its stability the rapidly moving girl next to it, but towards the top leaning back in, whose (or what couple even) does it match as it reaches the top of the painting, where it really ends, in the upper right.  And just what are those two rocks doing, suggestive as they are given what’s going on?  And then we notice that the brightest part of the sky is also at the center, its gaseous luminosity matched by the water, and exceeded by the lacy folds of the almost weightless skirt and pale hair of the girl in the red blouse.  What does red reach out to here?  It certainly seems to indicate that something’s happening at the center of the painting that could precipitate the collapse of movement into a gaze that might even make the fastest movement seem quite slow.  Because it’s quite true that decisive moments cause even the fastest movement to become the container and embodiment of slow motion.  Transfixing within extreme and wild cavorting, dancing feet and crazy crouching overcome by the imperceptible movements of clouds, let alone of moving around the sun, dissolution in a totality which is more than painting’s, in Goya just as in Bridget Riley.  Because it’s totality without finality, duration, acceleration, concentration, improvisation, chance, hit on the head with a bat if you’re not careful and lucky, head knocked off by a girl in a red blouse if you’re carelessly attentive and really, really lucky. 

Dancing with the steps untraceable, swallowing in depths of oceans and skies never as imaginable as they are in a painting and from whence it can be seen how very much more there is to jump in tune with and behold. The earth moves around the sun and this makes all that is visible visible in the most various kinds of ways.  Painting is a recollection of what we are doing when not thinking about it:  engaging an experience that has little to do with control, and more about being open to not caring about control. What a susceptible sensitivity to aesthetic maturity this brings out.  Triviality absolved when all seriousness is given free range to at once assert and evaporate itself in its opposite.  Oh the sensation of this as it brushes against flesh!  Brushing her being a kind of grasping that involves no violence, least of all violent possession except that it possesses everything by becoming so suddenly a memory.   Memory being a totality that keeps changing under its own weight, maybe.

[1] Benjamin, Walter, ‘A child’s View of Colour’ (1914-15, formerly unpublished0, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) 50-1.

[2] Bridget Riley, in an interview with Robert Kudieka in 1972, has this to say about her series Circles Colour Structure Studies (1970-71): “I have always tried to avoid « colouring forms ». I want to create a colour-form, not coloured forms. It is very important that each form finally relinquishes its separateness in the whole. It must be fully absorbed. So while it is necessary in the early stages to analyze each unit, my aim is to enable it to release sufficient energy to precipitate its dissolution in totality.”

Canvases and human bodies have smooth skins, usually, roughness being a relative term in this regard.  Most human flesh looks pretty un-smooth under a microscope, likewise the smoothest oil painting, but that’s not the impression either create.  That is to say, it’s not how they work.  Not how they work on you, the viewer, who desperately wants to take things in by being taken in.  Both paintings and bodies are porous. They open up, through their skins, to space—what a surface is not. The surface of a painting is a singular noun on and in which anything can happen, or if not anything at least a great deal. Its plurality, its most generous quality, is a given because we can recognize it to be so. The skin is the body’s largest single organ, on and through which a great range of movements can be felt, acted, acted out, acted on—acted and spontaneous action—neither of which can comfortably be described as embodying anything as simple or straightforward as a ‘thought’… Both paintings and humans communicate through their skins, the human one both invoking and employing touch. She wants to be touched, she knows sort of what he would feel like were she to embrace him. But what she sort of knows is not as important once the touching begins. Understanding does not give rise to sensation. It is rather the opposite. A painting operates almost only visually and, unlike her, can by definition operate only at a distance, because ultimately proximity renders vision irrelevant as well as impossible and while that doesn’t matter in fact it can help in human interaction.  For paintings it’s no use at all.  You can’t see anything if you’re less than an inch or even further away from it.  Paintings, then, keep the viewer at a distance.  Unless she can’t resist running her hands over the surface, which will confirm almost nothing about what she sees when she looks at it, but it will seem nonetheless to be an important part of getting to know the work.  You’re not supposed to do it.  It transfers grease from the fingers to the surface and eventually will do some damage.  Doesn’t mean it isn’t irresistible.    

And speaking of the irresistible, perhaps it’s reassuring that there’s at least one person in the world who sympathizes with Lolita—whose last name we never remember while her adult (!) lover has the same one twice.  Sympathizes with here that is to say without doubting for a moment that she’s without guilt or whatever you want to call extreme coquettish manipulation or something.  Likewise maybe it’s also reassuring to know there’s at least one person who sympathizes with Becky Sharp—again, without supposing she is as it were entirely faultless although what does that come down in a girl whose only escape from abuse was more abuse, whose place in Vanity Fair is to be never treated fairly?  But is it also true that neither Lolita nor Becky seem moved by love, and that this confirms they are figments of a male imagination of a familiar and indeed conventional sort?  Bit too easy to sympathize with that, surely, doesn’t it just allow the boys to wallow in guilt even though they didn’t take any risks—for example, the risk of being irrelevant, or at any rate not in charge?  If Nabokov and Thackeray had been more courageous both girls could have had what they wanted perhaps or at least not what no one would want:  Lolita need not have ended up in a trailer park nor Becky ruined.  It’s true that Humbert Humbert would have been deprived of his pathos and instead have to function more obviously as an object of, perhaps, not so much desire as a quest for desire and what that might be on the little girl’s part.  But leaving him and his potential difficulties with his self-image aside, instead of moralizing (however skimpily clad in a see-through version of the amoral—or in Thackeray’s case, a putative realism,) an inevitability (however postponed by the author in order to make it be a novel as opposed to a sermon,) we could have had what we want, the triumph of desire over reason: love.  Not love not war but love not work—anything stuck in the domain of exploitation is work, the contract, the agreement, everything that is about power over, and everything that’s about there being a boss and maybe too always a winner and a loser.  The trouble with Foucault is perhaps that there’s nothing but work, even or especially when one is having fun.  Perhaps it’s a slight advance on Freud where there’s nothing but guilt, but it still doesn’t sound all that much like a movement toward the sort of freedom that the erotic seems to as it were embody…     

…If it were to embody freedom, the erotic would be hard pressed to think that even a trailer park was an unsuitable place for it…

And why should it care? If an erotic freedom is that place as in the ultimate joy inexpressible yet expressing and active- not to be considered performing in carrying out the intended measure in dialogue, but truly vigorous spontaneity gasping and pulsating- can it be gauged with an acute sense of accuracy when work and guilt are not involved? White metal tins for the day’s refuse, beaten and damaged, and side paneled tractor homes with wheels that allow their residents mobility yet are otherwise intended classified ads for Lolita and Sharp’s one dollar dance numbers is a limiting novelty for hips that move for the pleasure of charms detached from emotional involvement. How about putting away that wallet, mister?  A riddle in a tight dress and early pubescent wet dreams is actually a feeling fleshy thigh-biting tongue-tying sensual being spot-lit in lowlights or highlights, moving in and out of shadows that frame seductive gestures of a body’s thoughts on actual bodylines.  The eyes look out at nothing and in at everything, involved in the deep and surface feelings of the legs as they wrap around one another, the body moved to the ground, on the back, a deep concentration of muscles and tension weight and gravity, thighs pressing toes into the air letting hamstrings free to giggle and flex. Mouths pursed, hair wild or pulled tight in a ponytail whipping loose ends in movements that come only as a result of the body underneath in motion, air in and out, deep breathing forgetting breath. Sitting here watching this the whole body too in movement on a stool legs fidgeting from solid ground underneath to tingling of the toes. Shoes tapping on the floor now toes twisting and pinching pressure against cotton fruit-of-the-loom. Not money in hand but sweaty hand wet and moist fingering the bill feeling flesh on paper that rather be flesh on flesh. Forget where it is that Lolita and Humbert Humbert find themselves in the end. Where are they when caught in the middle of their actions, are they weighing each move with certainty?

One would think but also hope not, but as far as that goes, just where is the middle of the action?  Bergson supposes that we accept that space is there from near to far and we perceive it as simultaneously present if not simultaneously accessible.   But we don’t do that for time, he says.  There we insist on a fissure between then and now, between what we remember and what we are conscious of happening right this minute.  But that’s not how it is, he insists.  Actually it too is all here in a way quite comparable to space, but a matter of duration that is always ongoing, so no simultaneity ever but always a movement between memory and anticipation.  The present is always a set of movements, not necessarily remembered or otherwise thought as a sequence that is immediately understandable but in which one moves from all memories of what has happened that might effect and affect what is happening to what is about to happen, and it is that oscillation both erratic and smooth which constitutes the present, as when we move our hand and do not think of it as a sequence but a single action, done before it’s finished unless something happens to interrupt it. Singular action is a consequence of anticipating a narration of an act rather than sense sensing pervious and therefore incalculable actions in an act. The present is a series of movements between memory and anticipation where both are equally present as images acting on one another.  So where is the middle of the action?  Holding her big toe between his thumb and forefinger he kisses her from her little toe up past her heel and thence her up her leg, inexorably heading toward cunnilingus in a continuous action and she doesn’t squeal as she thought she might because actually by then she’s sort of breathless.  It’s more like a musical gasp, but that’s because she’s already been waiting to gasp for a few seconds.  And the question of when it’s already happening is not obviously clear.  Is anticipation almost replaced by another intensity by the time his lips are only just above her knee although admittedly already on the inside of her thigh?  Might be hard to recall where the middle of that action was.  Or whether it had a middle as opposed to starting like a hit of intense pink and then getting whatever that would be, pinker probably… And so, where are we in The Bar at the Folies-Bérgère?  Surely he’s already attached every hard and soft thing on the counter to her by the time we enter the scene, as him… We’re always already in the middle in that painting.  Unless it was the moment when she said How about putting away that wallet, mister?  Suddenly, nothing’s what it looked like.  Everything attached to her is for sale but she isn’t.  Changes everything, unless that was the original meaning and no one noticed.  On account of we’re so keen on contracts and encounters that have pay-offs.  What about it doesn’t end, there is only a middle always getting more intense?

Paint is painted on the surface, always already in the space between the viewer and the canvas. Always already, presupposing a bustling middle. Paintings use one surface to represent or embody every conceivable kind of surface in order, nearly always if not always, to communicate something that’s invisible—a messy thought or an obvious sensation.  In painting nothing and everything, from the deepest depth to the hardest and most concentrated block of steel, is also an experience of paint.  Painting makes a distinction between surfaces while remaining (nearly) always only one surface.   Sex is entirely a matter of two surfaces, expressible as: one surface, skin, with and against another version of the same thing.  The skin is the body’s largest single organ and wraps it in continuity because it can only be thought and experienced as a continuous surface which subtly over the course of going around and from head to toe and always coming back to itself, punctuated by hair (the opposite of a continuous surface); eyes (wet rather than dry but hard and the body’s only exterior part which cannot be touched in a way that’s pleasurable); mouth and vagina (which echoes which?) wetness and mobility and the interior in the case of both; fingernails, the hard element on the fingers’ exterior and at the body’s extremity—matched by the teeth at one of its portals.  Everything else is action involving flesh against and with flesh.  Lips, we note with relish, can be either wet or dry.  They are the only part of the body that can do that, more or less without meaning to.

            So in a painting nearly everything is paint, the land and the sky, the near and the very far away.  In sex nearly everything is flesh, except for some extremities and for the very far away, but that perhaps disappears altogether.  What is contiguous to the paint and may play a part is the canvas, what is contiguous to the flesh are the sheets, likewise possibly in play with the experience of flesh and friction.  We can think of how they are grounds on which eros fools around. The point may be made that the vagina is able to erupt and receive, the penis only to erupt and be received. (Then again, “The penis and clitoris have about the same number of nerve endings. The vagina doesn’t have as many nerve endings as the penis or clitoris, but it has far more nerve endings than the testicles, which have almost no sensory nerve fibers.”[1]) ‘Penetration’ a boring and even misleading word and concept most of the time, returning sex as it does to the language of power as in ‘power over’, while sex is surely only exciting or at least interesting when it plays with power, otherwise it could only be another form of power, power in the form of sex, along with all the other forms of it we have to put up with in our daily lives.  Certainly couldn’t be very erogenous…  But back to the question of nearly everything being flesh, we think it may what Carolee Schneeman had in mind when in 1957 she wrote to Stan Brakhage that “I ‘break’ with the figure; for I don’t want ‘it’; I want its limitless possibilities for forms and spatial expressiveness”.[2]  What a great manifesto for painting except that we don’t necessarily need to express it as something we want. Suppose it as a place of suspension and acceleration, this does not allow painting to be something that becomes a representation of what we want, but leads us to a state of mutual waiting, revealing, receiving, recalling, forgetting and then perhaps it all again.  We take it for granted we can use its possibilities and we’ll discover our own version of their limitlessness, like Carolee we don’t expect the authorities, which only like the language of power especially when discussing sex or beauty or of course love, to like what we do, we should actually quite like it if they don’t.

After she left he found himself basically staring at the wall. When she arrived home she felt he was waiting in the kitchen around the corner jumping in and out unexpectedly from behind the curtain like he was in her thoughts.  For about two hours as it turned out.  He smoked a couple of things, she put items away and looked at whatever but when he noticed the time he hadn’t moved much and it seemed to her as if she hadn’t done anything either. When, in an entirely dark room, she raised a hand in front of her own face, her mind and body sensed its presence, and so it emerged in undulating rhythms, colors and patterns.  And rhythms of him, too, in the walls, the stairway, the sink, fruit, pillows and covers. Thinking about her sort of for sure throughout but what he was thinking was not immediately available for recall.  More like something on the order of how she was everywhere in the space she’d left because she was everywhere in his head.  And weeks later when the question of jouissance was as it were brought up he thought oh yeah that is maybe the problem with Barthes’ otherwise compelling blah blah theory of personalized sexual pleasure, it doesn’t account for it as a duration.  Climax is only half of it or something.  When does it start must be a part of it all, and what starts but can go nowhere or doesn’t whether it can or not must also be an ancillary question in the whole debate about pleasure as a magic moment.

And thinking of that is everything in The Bar at the Folies-Bergère a different beginning that leads or proposes to lead to the same end, which is to say to the same end differently realized depending on what it began with:  the flower, the wine, the oranges, etc?  A whole counter full of different jouissances?  As noted, we arrive in the middle.  Seems like we’ve suggested it’s at least two violently different jouissances, one of them violent by definition while the other doesn’t have to be and is therefore free to reduce violence to the playful, if it has a place for it at all.

We learn that when one has an idea the brain lights up on the brain scanner, but when one has an orgasm it goes almost dark.  It empties itself out and resets itself, like a computer as one might say.  Clearly a convincing thought, it is surely the case that one feels totally reset after lovemaking and the reverse if it wasn’t good. Does this mean that an explosion of skin and touch is like an overwhelming blindness of color, if it is that the brain is lighting up? The skin and thoughts contiguous yet messy? Prisms and prisms, color and feeling in it. And the darkness, maybe not the absent of color, but more like a complete absorption, not necessarily here nor there, but an absorption deep in the senses beyond anticipation. Does this mean that we fuck like computers and always did?  Or does it mean that in order to fuck satisfactorily one has to stop being a computer, the instrument par excellance of the contract, the relation between powers, in a word, calculation—rather than of passion, for example, and of the involuntary and of being led without losing the will to act, even though in the case of the latter being obviously or even by definition quite out of control, that sort of thing…?  Seems that couldn’t be right.  There isn’t a clear this and that when skin meets skin as part of an act that’s always both one and two.  There’s that painting of Matisse’s that MoMA has.

Why is everyone androgynous in this painting?  Is the key in the inherent reality of music and paint, in not so much what each of them is but how it is?  That is to say, is the reason for the androgyny of everyone in this painting that neither music nor paint are of either or any sex, but at the same time each is very much about, or the embodiment of, sex as such if there is such a thing?  Is that the point about sex as an event?  It’s both but not only both; in fact, it’s a single event?  Surely that’s one possible reading.  Paint is one skin that infinitely subdivides, exfoliates in Mallarmé’s super-sexy way of putting it.  The act is androgynous because it is made up of both and slipping and sliding occurs within the event as a result and it has, by now, little to do with Foucault’s rules.  Power is so yesterday…     

[1] Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_one_of_these_has_the_most_nerve_endings_penis_vagina_testicles_or_clitoris#ixzz1B91ZFKUJ

[2] Trinie Dalton, Review of “Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneeman and Her Circle, edited by Kristine Styles (Durham, North Carolina:  Duke University Press, 2010)” Bookforum (Dec/Jan 2011) p 40.

If one considers that introductions are usually already awkward…

What can be done with painting’s sexiness and decoration that’s not—but is instead more than—a critique of the sexy and the decorative? Moving in this direction does not necessarily place painting at home in the contemporary art world, a world much more concerned with art as signage to which one may respond, or not, consciously and to that extent by choice. This position is more as (and for that reason with) an art that goes straight to the body regardless of what you want.  With that in mind we’d just as soon change that world.   How to work with or through the body is a question that we have both asked ourselves at one time or another before we realized that question out loud to one another.  We’re both big on Kristeva.  Neither of us cares very much about being exactly right about anything so much as about getting better at describing things, but when we get it right we seem to know it, or sense it, or at least get the sense that we think that we know that we are right, or it is right.  This is more, frolicking in margins where boundaries continually expand and contract- dense and immediately sensational. What may be reason for these aspects of the art of our time to be marginalized? Censored? Because, we think, they are more fun, because they stop thought- or so has been suggested. What’s more exciting than that which stops thought?

Descriptions of meetings between and assemblies of disparate forces collectively defines entities that work as, or are, bodies. We think we are going to try to tell you about this as we progress, the best we know how. Being in a room with a painting is a lot like being in a room with a person, and we’ll be starting, sort of, from there…

Can we just say that sensation is by definition physical and the physical is not easily separable from the sexual when pleasure is involved, i.e., all sensuous pleasure is in some sense an echo or analog of sensual pleasure, and the latter can’t easily be detached from the sexual, as in the language that gets used when one describes satisfaction that goes with eating or taking a bath or whatever?  This seems to go with Susan Sontag’s “I want to fuck the screen” remark about Straub’s History Lessons.  This is because her enthusiasm had to do with being pleased and was not about possession.  So her attitude was not that of someone who’s mastered the work through understanding it but rather of someone who was attracted to it.  Maybe that has something to do with the relationship between the work and the world that being open to the work rather than just wanting to read it as a text about goodness and/or art history (same thing). 

Two Lovers by 16^th century Italian painter Giulio Romano

In attraction, lovers bridge two into sensual time. She fingers her hair on the surface of his skin, just above his right tit. The gesture traces her flesh, her hair, her touch on his flesh. The trace is visible and invisible, and such the two are involved in spatial presence that involves senses, nerves, and erotic thoughts. She teases him with the suggestive trajectory of her left hand, he her with the warmth of his breathe that, without words, draws in her gasp of “hallelujiah” through his parted lips. Her red hair is a fire kept, for the moment, underwraps. Her right leg becomes her partners left leg, while his actual left leg, blended into the shadows of the bed, is positioned oddly behind her.  Nearly impossible for it to be stretched that far back, in fact it seems to be out of socket if it were to be outstretched in such ways. His groin must be in pain, wanting and waiting but nonetheless feeling in its desire for relief. The two become absorbed into one space, no longer objects of one another’s desire but both entering a riddle of their attraction for one another. The entry of the peeping tom around the door suggests that the lovers are both exhibitionists- objects of desire-objects of projection (like the film, but Susan Sontag was wanting to be behind the curtain with that big screen. In our visual example, the curtain shelters two from a third, and allows them to remain naively engaged in pleasure.  Art history, take a back seat. For a moment I am not concerned with where all this is to be finally situated, I want to know what it is to be one of the two involved in the drapes.)

AND ONE OF US ASKS: The original peeping tom, the only one to see lady Godiva ride on her horse, was he even aware it was lady Godiva who was riding by, did the horse’s breathe and rhythmic beat of its hooves challenge his attention, draw him from his work to ask what is was that was going by his window so early in the morning?   Was it that he was unprepared for this vision, this naked beauty whose ride was a duty for citizens of her city, and he its only witness who did not choose to be that, but was nonetheless. For this, should he have been blinded?

Was she riding bareback English style? Was she a redhead? Was that mare on fire?

Hahaha…these things I think about.

AND THE OTHER ONE OF US REPLIES: What if he knew what he was doing but couldn’t resist?   What if he knew he had to see her at whatever cost, knowing that would be as close as he would ever get?  And he was blinded for it, which means castrated as in Oedipus and other mythic and also historical precedents.  So that the whole thing was acted out at the level of vision and the stolen look.  There was no sex, just unreasonable wanting and then oblivion.  Unfortunately an oblivion that didn’t leave him dead, but that too doubtlessly is part of the story’s pathos.  Best if she were riding bare back.  I think she’s traditionally blond but that’s a flexible adjective.  Could she have been anything but on fire, secure in her body as some(one) might say?  And her stupid husband had demanded it…

Regarding the husband question, What if the peeping tom in our painting weren’t meant to recall Coventry and Lady Godiva but the dwarf who spied on Tristran and Isolde and told King Mark his wife was cuckolding him with the man he admired most?  The dwarf would have to report back that they were indeed enraptured to such an extent that they were oblivious of a small and smelly man’s sticking his head around the door.  But this of course raises the question of whether they knew he was there and wanted to send a message.  Of course it could be that one is not supposed to be asking a question like this of this painting, where perhaps one is meant to allow for how there has to be a light on so you can see the action and you’re supposed to pretend that the dwarf’s not noticed the way you would if it were an opera.  But perhaps it’s better to look at it as if it were meant to be taken literally.  It makes it impossible to tell whether the couple is wholly absorbed with one another or only pretending to be.

            Let’s suppose they are wholly lost in one another, which is to be sure also to say wholly found in one another.  Their posture is the opposite of relaxed but shows no sign of strain.  Everything points to arousal, including the woman’s hand.  Are they about to roll back (from us) onto the bed so they can get to it?  Is this a moment of persuasion, of prolonging, of both, or are we at the very moment when extreme activity bursts into play, when they explode and the half upright position and tentative gestures and laying back gives way to everything that can happen between them, from fingers probing and stroking to torsos pushing against one another, that is not a tentative gesture?  By which time neither would be able to think about the dwarf even if they wanted to unless they were not hopelessly in love, in which case they would.  So one moral this painting may bring up is that love cannot play to an audience, but it’s not likely that that was the moral originally intended.  Between the sheets and between the bodies everything that’s felt is invisible.  Art that makes us want to fuck or make love—saying it either way works just fine here, perhaps—makes visual excitement be everything it should be and in doing so points to what’s always invisible, where the lovers’ bodies come together, and the lovers feel as they do.  And feeling here is, after all, being used in a way that makes it impossible to separate emotion from sensation…..      

   Awkward x 2, Sunday 12^th December 2010