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 16th 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 12th December 2010
