undercurrent

relief from text

Shoes and Sex

Although I'm by no means an expert, I find myself demurring from the official line on Helmut Newton, after reading the recent eulogy and comments. Of course, k-p is backed up on this by Ballard and Sinclair, so I haven't a chance, but still...

The Newtonian's commentators applaud him for the foray into 'desire as pain', desire as 'profoundly unnatural'. With no, or only tacit, reference to the fact that the pain and discomfort is entirely with one party, whilst the desire is with the other; in short, the gazed-at subject (or more properly, object) exists for the fulfillment of the desire of the looking subject, or, let's be frank, the looking man: "Newton treated women like objects, obviously. Yet his logic is pursued to such a point of perversity that it would be churlish and gauche to impose obsolete sexual political moralisms onto his work, in part because in really treating women as objects, he desubjectifies them to the extent that these 'physically striking women positioned in such a way that they are divorced from the bodies they display with such flagrant interest' are no longer sexual."

The apologia is a bit of sophistry really. If I'm being churlish and gauche, well OK it's not the first time, but what sense does this make?

It's alright, as an intellectual-visual game, to treat women like objects, if in doing so they cease to be sexual. Doesn't this mean the following: the power game that consists in the woman's bondage and mutilation for and by the watching man, has not only gone so far that the woman need only be present in telegraphic, in flat, reproduced form, but that the mastery implicit in the act now flings off the disguise of sexual desire, and reveals itself for a pure delight in abstracted cruelty? That the eye is no longer a metonymic penis but is now sovereign in its own right...That the only quality the female was allowed to have, something she was wanted for that could briefly take their relationship beyond the sterile, loveless gaze, beyond her desperate waxing and waning attraction/fidelity to The Model and his specular enjoyment of himself : this one hope of intimacy or communication (which she has been thoroughly trained to rely on as her only currency) has now been revoked, leaving her as a cipher, nothing left but the detached, staring eye.

Has Newton taught us something here? Isn't it clear to anyone who cares to step back for a moment from these traditional ritualised signifying practices of desire - the lipstick, the haughty gazes, the high heels, the hard bodies - that glamour is a power game, a ridiculous one at that, and one in which women are inevitably the losers, for they are brought up from early childhood to see that their appearance, their garnering attention through ritualised behaviours such as flirting, eyelash fluttering, feyness and yielding to male expertise, are the only (or best) tools they have to work with. Even those who manage to break out of this web, or those who somehow can't manage to keep up the mask, will find it's a tough, unrelenting battle - to explain why they're not behaving properly, to fake it when necessary, to be refused entrance into all culturally-prescribed roles and live as an alien unless they get into character. To this, so far, nothing is added, indeed one might say that Newton doesn't even get this far.

I went out with Ruth trying to buy some shoes recently. I took for a mild exaggeration her complaints that it was impossible to find decent shoes for women: but incredibly, a shop assistant literally confirmed her suspicion that there are no shoes suitable for walking. 'No, sorry, we haven't got anything like that at the moment'. Hundreds of pairs of shoes. None for walking. Just pause to relish the disgraceful absurdity of this. For those who like to think that in the 21st Century all is enlightened and rational, girlpower and freedom is all around, and all gauche politicising is obsolete, take another look. (Of course, they have trainers - trainers, the great marketing triumph of the 90s, and the reason why a generation of kids will grow up not only obese and hyperactive but also lame...sorry, wrong rant.)

Surrealist Meret Oppenheim (whose most famous work is the fur-covered teacup Dejeuner en Furrure;) created a disquieting object in her sculpture My Nurse;(above). The sculpture consists of a pair of high-heeled shoes arranged on a silver platter and adorned, like a piece of meat, with crowns of paper. Some have interpreted it merely as a vulgar symbol of female sexuality (Oppenheim herself only went so far as to say it was a 'revenge' on her nurse). But a far richer interpretation, and one that takes in all the associations of the object, is made in an article by Maureen P. Sherlock in a book on 'outsider art'. Sherlock creates for the reader an imagined 'installation,' an affecting assemblage of Oppenheim's My Nurse; and Luce Irigaray's text One does not stir without the other;. The text opens up the powerful ramifications of the object Oppenheim created. It is an uncomfortable poetic identification and evocation of a repressive complex revolving around food, domesticity and domestic bondage, motherhood and muteness, a lament for the woman caged by wife- and motherhood in eternal domesticity, the impossibility of communication between mother and daughter, and the hereditary recapitulation of this impossibility:

"You've gone again. Once more you're assimilated into nourishment. We've again disappeared into this act of eating each other. Hardly do I glimpse you and walk towards you, when you metamorphose into a baby nurse...
I want no more of this stuffed, sealed up, immobilized body...I'll turn to my father, I'll leave you for someone who seems more alive than you. For someone who doesn't prepare anything for me to eat. For someone who leaves me empty of him, mouth gaping on his truth.

"And the one doesn't stir without the other. But we do not move together. When the one of us comes into the world, the other goes underground. And what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive.;

In Oppenheim's piece the visual (sculptural) image functions to set off a complex of ideas that bring to the surface emotionally powerful structural relations between apparently disconnected phenomena (a good definition of surrealism). In an oblique, subtle way, the piece functions to call attention to a logic of desire and repression, a pandora's box which once opened, one can never again fully consign to unconsciousness, or be unaware of in one's own life.

<img alt="groom.jpg" src="http://www.urbanomic.com/MT/undercurrent/archives/groom.jpg" width="297" height="236" border="0" />

In Paula Rego's images, what you might think you see (if you're male) at first are sexually provocative, impish young women and girls. When you look closer, you realise that Rego's world is one in which women have the same relation to their childhood, and their bodies, as men (in fact in one series, above, women become dogs in order to allow them this privilege). Men are allowed, encouraged, indulged in their 'boyish' ways, their pathetic fantasies, their toys, their oafishness and selfish disarray, girls are taught to become women. And once they're women, there's no way back. They must sit a certain way, they must act a certain way, they must follow the most elaborate convolutions if they are not to stand out as freaks. Rego's women are freaks. They sit with their legs open, on the floor, absorbed in play or work, just as Rego paints sitting on the floor surrounded by her childhood objects. They're freaks, their faces are characterful, they have physical presence and weight, in short, they are people. And looking into this alternate world fills one with a most leaden, stomach-churning despondency and shame, because you realise how far away, how impossible, this world is.

Have you seen a young female child being socialised? It's the most painful, the most heart-rending, disgusting process. The breaking of an animal. The twisted bones are only the physical signs of the repugnant deformation required by the socius. But nevertheless since they have been 'celebrated' let's talk about them:

'The foot in heels : Newton takes an almost medical interest in the savage twisting of bone.'

The trouble is, of course, that no-one does take any medical interest in this. Unlike the realms of obstetrics and gynaecology, where there are legions of white-coated experts ready to stick the scalpel in, pump the hypodermic, and generally arrogate to themselves what little power women have over their own bodies, there are few doctors in the world who are interested in talking about the adverse effects of make-up, high heels, fad diets, and all the other addictive-desiring-technologies that women are subjected to. This could be because those doctors all benefit financially from the pharmaceutical/cosmetic/medical business-behemoth. Not that this is Newton's fault of course, but, and here is the nub, in what sense does his work tell us something new, or create any significant shift in our perception of this everyday, acceptable mutilation? I have offered two cases which, for me at least, offer powerful critiques of power and womanhood. I want to ask what critique Newton offers.

Newton has nothing like Rego's world to show us. I don't hold anyone under an obligation to be 'positive', but to my mind his work is simply a distorted mirror on the ugliness of the actual, and it's the lack of challenge rather than the ugliness that offends. Worse than this, by presuming to say (if he himself does say so, I don't know) that he is exaggerating or using satire, he necessarily undermines the extremity of the actual situation, that is, the cruelty constitutive of the socius.

'Newton doesn't doubt for a moment that eroticism is profoundly unnatural. Bodies acquire what charge they have only from becoming elegantly contorted into the most excruciating postures.'

Surely only the assumption of an aesthete bachelor-pad audience could excuse this being blithely offered up merely as a truism. Because once again wouldn't the erotic charge be dispersed somewhat if one had the courage to go beyond one's cultural training, to empathise, to treat the elegantly contorted object as a person? To doubt for a moment...this is precisely what an artist (and a critic) should offer us. A way out of the world, not a confirmation of it. Changing us, not offering us cheeky, smug glimpses at how naughty we are. Trapdoors to alternative universes, not peepholes into convention.

To take a different tack, let's look at this functionally, I wonder what percentage of the owners of Newton's work in its various reproduced forms have the same thoughts as k-P (or ballard or sinclair) about it. I suspect not the majority. I wonder how less-than-perfect 14-year old girls feel about it. Empowered and confident about sexuality, I somehow doubt it. Obviously it's easy (for some) to totally disregard this naïve critique, though: so if we do, then the claim remains that by pushing the norms of customary eroticism 'to the limit', Newton somehow effects, not a release from them, but some kind of a difference in our relation to them. He makes a difference, must surely be the claim of the Newtonian. Let's say, he makes us realise how unnatural our appetites are.

To be sure, exaggeration is a part of satire. And there's no obligation to offer a haranguing explication after the gags. Just think of an excellent satire like Chris Morris' Brasseye, for example; it's for the most part deadpan, in many places indistinguishable from that which it satirises. Of course there are signs, it's these little signs that make us laugh, that just go a tiny, perfectly-judged iota too far and signal satire to us (some people's addled brains can't pick up these signals, of course, nick, but that's another story). Presumably, the Newtonian would maintain that the walking stick, the medical scaffold, etc. fulfill this very function: they let us know that we are in Lilliput or Erewhon: that the real world has been transcended and is being parodied.

But the difference is of course, behind the scenes of the performance, in the workings of the thing, the creation of the work : Chris Morris didn't have actual paedophiles raping actual children on Brasseye. The 'acting out' was just that, an acting-out for the purpose of satire. There were those that complained, rather implausibly, that joking about such things would somehow exacerbate the issue. But most sane people would not have difficulty accepting it as satire. The situation is different with Newton and photography, since unless he makes some innovative gesture he is trapped within the world he supposedly seeks to critique. It's the same delusion as an advertising executive saying 'yeah I'm only doing it as a pisstake, really I hate it all and want to smash the state'. Newton in fact never makes such a move. He never gets beyond the specular. In no sense can he be said to be merely 'acting out' the role of purveyor of objectifying images, any more than Kylie, no matter how ironic she likes to think she is, can be said to be merely 'acting out' the role of objectifying trivialising image of womanhood (in what would the 'mereness' consist?). And so neither of these is able to offer any effective critique.

The idea of satire, exaggeration and irony loops back nicely to Irigaray: her method for interrogating the heroes of philosophy was mimesis;: taking the voice of the 'enemy', slowly and carefully explicating the content of what he was saying, the hidden assumptions and structures of power behind it (in effect a form of deconstruction, although I don't think the connection helps Irigaray, nor does her robust questioning need any of deconstruction's intellectual bullshit). The important thing is that Irigaray makes the enemy say what he didn't want to say, what he hoped to keep hidden behind clever conceits; that which, so long as it remained hidden, would keep him in control, would keep the game playing by his rules.

In Newton there is nothing of this: his 'satire' fails to make anything happen or stop happening, it doesn't break anything open, doesn't cause anything to be said that wasn't before, in fact it reinforces the mute encapsulation of the image-cipher. It is a quiet place, the planet of shaven, crippled, plastic aryans. The cruelty of the image doesn't make us say 'stop,' it invites us to say 'more'.

Never Existed

Sometimes you don't know you're undercover until you come out.

You may not notice to look at us, but we've had many lives. It's how we avoided existence, becoming people.

Lives, like ideas, like friends, need to be discarded when they outlive their usefulness, when nothing further remains to learn, nothing to absorb; when it all becomes a matter of redundant cycles and tolerated frustrations, pleasantries.

Like shed snakeskins: left behind they become brittle images so dessicated that you can hardly believe they once contained life.

Sometimes -- perhaps most of the time - you don't realize you're undercover. That's all part of it. You have to suck up the dirt, go native. You melt into it. You believe your own act, which is after all only what the rest are doing.

What makes us different, noncommital, not joined, terminally incomplete? Something that remains, the umbilical by which eventually we're pulled out, involuntarily, jarred out of believing we exist, just in time. Hasn't it always been tugging, that slight discomfort in the pit of the stomach? Didn't we always know, even through the temptations to comfort and certainty?

When you go they're shocked, of course. Because they all talk about escape. Interminably. For them it's a dream. For us it's a logical necessity. In actual fact you could never pay them quite enough to take the leap. You can never pay us enough not to.

The Pack Shot

Anyone who seriously tells you graphic design has improved since 1970 is lying.

Taurian takeover

Meet my neighbours.

E14 Revisited

It must be a sign, I thought - a chance for atonement, after my defaming of the East End: Now I get a chance to do a good turn for the tourist board. I just got a letter from the Lea Rivers Trust (who look after the waterways of East London) - actually a questionnaire about whether crime had gone down or up, whether I liked what they'd planted by the side of the canals, etc. Strangely they don't seem to have connected the address they're sending this mail to with the fact that I now live hundreds of miles away from the canal.
Anyway they enclosed this lovely postcard (I swear this isn't a mockup, it's real) - in fact this is the reason they've got my address, see if you can guess which of the photos is mine (clue:it's the gloomiest one...). Apparently the winning entries did a tour of Tower Hamlets libraries, so you will probably know all about it already ;) I just love the idea of sending a postcard home from Limehouse Cut though!

3 and a half lives

Got to admit to feeling atextual at the moment...There're a couple of things that are slowly getting to the sitting-down-and-typing stage, but...
I do have the time-constraints of having 3 lives to lead: sequentially learning every part of the building trade in order to bring about some form of order in a terminally unfinished and plasterdust-strewn house, plying an honest trade as a programmer, and, as a proposed exit from the same into a mildly interesting way of making a living, trying to become a photographer. I've never been good at that bullshitting confidence that many people, particularly london-centric upper-middle-class types have, that lets them perform these incorporeal transformations at will: "I'm an artist". Despite the fact that sensitivity and caution reap no wordly rewards, I've toiled away in seclusion for a good few years before my first exhibition, which is upcoming, and which if I sell anything may finally allow me to say without cringing "I'm a photographer". Along with actually getting work ready for the exhibition (which is only in a tiny, local gallery), it's doing posters, publicity, and a new website (watch this space) that's been taking up the time. Blogging, as my fourth and most recently commenced life, has as a consequence had to take a back seat.

Intermission Time

Yes, the testcard motif is more fitting than originally intended....I will be back before the end of the week...

The Mystery of Morse

(unfamiliar with british TV minutiae by any unfortunate chance? Give up now. )

Isn't it time someone set up a tribute site for Ken Morse, the man who for a generation has interpreted the sedate lost world of the still image for children of the cathode ray tube? He is the one constant factor since the dawn of the BBC age...

Can there be anything more resonant with every single period of your TV-watching life, than the words
ROSTRUM CAMERA - KEN MORSE
floating up the screen?

Perhaps Ken Morse's ubiquity and apparently eternal monopoly on the rostrum camera market actually prevents his presence from being an evocative memory marker. His dark art remains impartial, unattached to any particular genre, style or period. He's undatable, omnitemporal. He could be Gallifreyan.

I remember when I first learned about the dots in films that flick up in the top corner to signify the end of a reel - once you know, you will never be able to ignore them. KEN MORSE - ROSTRUM CAMERA is like that. He only ever appears 'in person' at the end, when the credits roll, and every time, I greet his name like an old friend. I imagine him as a dignified bearded gent in an old-fashioned wood-lined workshop; when he's not filming with the effortless ease of a master-craftsman, he's meticulously adjusting the springs of the rostrum camera apparatus, cleaning the lens lovingly with a soft cloth, or carefully oiling the hinges of the custom-built (by himself, in his spare time) fur-lined mahogany rostrum-camera-case. When he turns up on set, young Shoreditch cads shut up their chatter of 'reality TV' and 'idents' and hover uncomfortably, cognizant of a superior presence. He'll be the only man left at the BBC with a contract that extends beyond next week. He's got a private parking space right outside the main entrance next to the DG - Morris Oxford, immaculate as the day he bought it.

As far as I know the function of a rostrum camera is to translate printed images for TV by hovering above them and on occasion to pan slowly to reveal their contents. There's a lot of it about, and Ken's responsible for it all. Probably an obsolete technology now that you can just scan'n'pan onscreen. But despite this, and although Ken must be retirement age by now, he can still be spotted in the credits, gliding gently upward, right there where he should be, where he's always been.

update : this site maintains, convincingly, that it's all a conspiracy, and that there is more than one Ken Morse.

The invariable factor

Life - the invariable factor by which all theories must be multiplied; even the most delicately assembled calculation, in order to attain consistency with its subject, is ultimately bolted to the brute fact of the continuation of life, and subject to its obtuse momentum.

Thereby pessimism is rendered self-refuting. Where thought truly pierces life and its futility, it becomes unable to speak. Mute, invisible philosophies of death whose presence life will not admit; suicides who die with their secrets. Not all at once, but by an asymptotic spiral, gradually targeting the nadir, the black hole where thought takes control of life for a dull, juddering, final moment of mutual extinction.

Therefore, how could we ever think that life is motivated by thought, that we live out our vital urges subject to rational cogitations; not only is this manifestly not the case, if it were it would be catastrophic for all but the stupid. On the other hand, which of us has not secretly wondered whether this catastrophe has already taken place, that thinking has expired from its own lack of utility?