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.
