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.
