Critical Beauty: the Decorative, the Grotesque and the Explicit in the Work of Aubrey Beardsley and Kara Walker

Home , Curlicue, Grotesque, Peak ornament, The Peacock Skirt

Critical Beauty: The Decorative, the Grotesque and the Explicit in the work of Aubrey Beardsley and Kara Walker

Natalya Hughes

School of Art Theory/ Art History College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales

STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORISHIP

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

Signed ……………………………………………......

Date ……………………………………………......

ABSTRACT

This research project centres on a representative mode in the visual arts marked by seemingly contradictory operations. Made through a particular use of decorative form, this mode combines the operations of aesthetic pleasure and a more challenging or destabilising affect. It co-implicates formal beauty and a critical content usually associated with so-called anti-aesthetic art practices.

The written component analyses the occurrence of this contradictory logic of representation in the work of late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley, and contemporary African American artist Kara Walker. Here I argue that while existing criticism on Beardsley and Walker points to the co-existence of these seemingly contradictory operations, it consistently privileges one term (i.e. beautiful form or critical content) over the other. As such, this criticism has failed to properly account for the formal and conceptual strategies of these artists’ work. Examining relations between the decorative, the grotesque and the sexually explicit in the art of Walker and Beardsley, and utilising Kantian and psychoanalytic theories, I examine reasons for this failure and interpret the work of each artist in a way demonstrates the critical fecundity of their dismantling of given oppositions been formal beauty and socio- political criticism.

The practice component of this PhD engages with this contradictory logic in the medium of painting. It is similarly geared towards an exploration of grotesque and sexually explicit dimensions articulated in and through decorative form. It does so through the appropriation and manipulation of graphic traditions: mainly the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e, and the work of Aubrey Beardsley. Like the written component, the practice component of the project seeks a means of accommodating a critical position within the aesthetic of beauty.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The period of my PhD candidature has been more than eventful. In bringing the project to completion a number of people have played an indispensible role.

No written acknowledgement can do justice to the time and energy that Dr Toni Ross has put into this project. Her theoretical rigour, her support and her unending conviction that the project be completed, no matter the obstacles, have not gone unnoticed. For these things I cannot thank her enough.

A number of friends have also provided considerable support and encouragement. First and foremost, Dr Grant Stevens has been a touchstone for all my ideas and has provided a PhD student model to aspire to. Sally Brand and Carl Flannagan gave me a home and so much more when the writing heat was on. I would like to thank Romy Ash for talking through the death drive with me and for saying the words “keep going” over and over again. Thankyou to Jim Byrne for pushing me forward on a day to day basis. Thanks also to Amanda Rowell, Stephen Gilchrist, Angela Goddard, Jess Dudgeon, Gen Griffiths, Murray Barker, Tony Albert, Craig Dermody, Dr Esther Faye and Caro Cooper for their enthusiasm, encouragement and support.

I would like to express my gratitude to Josh Milani, Peter Bellas and Hamish Sawyer at Milani Gallery (previously Bellas Milani Gallery) for their patience and ongoing support of my practice.

Finally, I would like to thank my family whose high academic expectations are largely responsible for my embarking on this project. The competitive spirit of my brothers Anton and Soren gave me extra reasons to complete the project within a given timeframe. To my mother Desma Hughes, I owe everything. Finally, I would like to thank my father Robert Hughes, who I lost to cancer during the course of this project but seemed to inform it every stage.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Statement of Original Authorship...... ii Abstract...... iii Acknowledgements...... iv Table of Contents...... v List of Illustrations...... vi Introduction...... 1 Chapter One: The Decorative...... 14 Chapter Two: The Grotesque...... 53 Chapter Three: The Explicit...... 90 Chapter Four: Sublimation...... 124 Conclusion...... 151 Bibliography...... 155 Appendix 1: Back and Forth...... 163 Appendix 2: List of Visual Documentation…………………………………...182

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1-1: Faux Rococo jewellery piece, twentieth century....……...... …..30 Figure 1-2: Ornamental marquetry design, seventeenth-century…….....…...... 30 Figure 1-3: Kara Walker, Slavery! Slavery, 1997…...………...... …………...... 34 Figure 1-4: Eastman Johnson, Old Kentucky Home, 1859……………………...... 35 Figure 1-5: Kara Walker, installation detail from Slavery! Slavery!, 1997...…...... 35 Figure 1-6: Kara Walker, installation detail from The Emancipation Approximation, 1999-2000…………...... 41 Figure 1-7: Kara Walker, installation detail from An Abbreviated Emancipation, 2002...... 41 Figure 1-8: Kara Walker, detail from World’s Exposition, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 3 x 4.9 metres, 1997...... 42 Figure 1-9: Kara Walker, Cut, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, 2.2m x 1.4 metres, 1998...... 42 Figure 1-10: Aubrey Beardsley, Headpiece for the title page of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, c.1893...... 48 Figure 1-11: Aubrey Beardsley, La Beale Isoud at Joyous Guard, illustration for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, c.1894...... 48 Figure 1-12: Aubrey Beardsley, A Suggested Reform in Ballet Costume, Illustration for the Justin McCarthy poem At A Distance,1895...... 49 Figure 1-13: Aubrey Beardsley, The Peacock Skirt, Illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, 1894...... 49 Figure 1-14: Aubrey Beardsley, How Sir Tristam Drank of the Love Drink, Illustration for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, c.1893...... 52 Figure 2-1: Frederick Evans, Photograph of Aubrey Beardsley, 1895...... 52 Figure 2-2: Aubrey Beardsley, Self-Portrait, c.1892...... 54 Figure 2-3: Aubrey Beardsley, Silhouette of Aubrey Beardsley, date unknown...... 54 Figure 2-4: Nicholas Ponce, engraving from Domus Aurea designs, in Descriptions des bains de Tituts, 1786...... 54 Figure 2-5: Marcel Ferraro, engraving of pilasta in Raphael’s Vatican Loggia (detail), in Les Ornaments de Raphael, 1860...... 61 Figure 2-6: Christopher Jamnitzer, ornamental engraving, 1610...... 62

Figure 2-7: Lucas Kilian, ornamental engraving, 1630...... 64 Figure 2-8: Jan Lutma the Elder, One sheet from the series Veelderhande Nieuwe Compartemente, copperplate engraving, 1653...... 64 Figure 2-9: Aubrey Beardsley, vignette on page 26 of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan’s Bon Mots, 1893...... 66 Figure 2-10: Aubrey Beardsley, vignette on page 148 of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan’s Bon Mots, 1893...... 66 Figure 2-11: Aubrey Beardsley, Design for St Paul’s, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March, 1894), 1894...... 67 Figure 2-12: Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilet of Helen for Under the Hill (in The Savoy, No. 1, January 1896) 1896...... 67 Figure 2-13: Aubrey Beardsley, Heading of Chapter 16, Book 9 for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, 1894...... 71 Figure 2-14: Aubrey Beardsley, The Cave of Spleen , Illustration for Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, 1896...... 71 Figure 2-15: Kara Walker, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 4.6 x 10.6 metres, 1995...... 82 Figure 2-16: Kara Walker, Untitled (Milk and Bread), cut paper and adhesive on wall, 3 x 6.4 metres, 1998...... 89 Figure 3-1: Kara Walker, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, stills from 16mm film and video transferred to DVD, black and white, silent; 8.49 min...... 89 Figure 3-2: Kara Walker, Testimony, Still from 16mm film and video transferred to DVD, black and white, silent; 8.49 min...... 92 Figure 3-3: Kara Walker, Detail from Chronology of Black Suffering: Images and Notes 1992- 2007, photos and ephemera, 2007...... 92 Figure 3-4: Kara Walker, detail from Grub for Sharks: A Concession to the Negro Populace, cut paper and adhesive on wall, dimensions variable, 2004...... 96 Figure 3-5: Kara Walker, Consume, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 175.3 x 81.3 centimetres, 1998...... 96 Figure 3-6: Kara Walker, detail from Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of one Young Negress

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and Her Heart, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 4 x 15.2 metres, 1994...... 109 Figure 3-7: Aubrey Beardsley, Cinesias Entreating Myrrhina, 1896...... 113 Figure 3-8: Aubrey Beardsley, The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors, 1896...... 113 Figure 3-9: Aubrey Beardsley, Athenian Women In Distress, 1896...... 115 Figure 3-10: Aubrey Beardsley, Lysistrata Sheilding Her Coynte, 1896...... 115 Figure 3-11: Aubrey Beardsley, Enter Herodias, Illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, 1894...... 118 Figure 3-12: Aubrey Beardsley, How King Mark Found Sir Tristram, illustration for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, c. 1894...... 123 Figure 3.13. Aubrey Beardsley, Cover design for Ernest Dowson’s Verses, 1894...... 123

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Introduction

Central to this thesis is the argument that the work of late Victorian English artist Aubrey Beardsley, and that of contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker share a similar representative mode. This mode is of interest to me insofar as it consists in a logic that I have identified in my own art practice and which guides its production. Made through a particular use of decorative form, this mode combines the operations of aesthetic pleasure and a more challenging or destabilising affect. It suggests the co-presence of beauty and a critical content usually associated with so- called anti-aesthetic art practices. I will argue that while existing criticism on Beardsley and Walker points to the co-existence of these seemingly contradictory operations, such criticism has consistently privileged one term (i.e. beautiful form or critical content) over the other. As such this criticism has failed to properly account for the formal and conceptual strategies that are central to both artists’ work.

I will argue that the binary inherent to the criticism surrounding Beardsley and Walker is symptomatic of a wider critical context, marked by a split between the claims of aesthetic philosophy and the critical challenges to apoliticised, “transcendental” and “inert” art objects that are viewed as Modernism’s theoretical legacy1. Determined by the anti-aesthetic literature’s conflation of aesthetic beauty with a depoliticised object and a humanist model of the centred subject, this split has further polarised the terms that are co-present in Beardsley and Walker’s art. In examining the decorative, the grotesque and what I call the sexually explicit dimensions of both artists’ work I will, with reference to a particular reading of Kantian aesthetics and psychoanalytic theories of artistic production, both redress this split and approach the specificity of both artists’ work. Where both theories are useful is insofar as they find a means of accommodating a critical position within the aesthetic of beauty.

I wish to suggest that at the centre of both Walker and Beardsley’s practices is an approach to subjectivity and identity that is in conflict with the humanist subject, but

1 Hal Foster, “Preface”, Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) x.

that this approach is made in and through decorative form. It is my contention that decorative and beautiful form is not necessarily exterior to the critical or subversive content of the work, but is integral to what is subversive about the practices as a whole.

The concerns of my project were first conceived in relation to the art practice of Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley’s illustrations have been a crucial influence in the development of my own art, both as a technical and thematic reference, and as an image source for my appropriation based work. My interest in the artist has been marked by two key moments, both of which have informed the scope of this project. The first was upon discovering Beardsley’s highly decorative and ambiguous figurative representations via a 1967 Dover publication entitled The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley2. My interest in Beardsley’s practice at this initial stage was as a representative of the European tradition of Japonisme, and as influenced by the Japanese print tradition Ukiyo-e that I was already adapting in my painting practice. I was interested in the manner Beardsley both appropriated Japanese decorative and ornamental motifs, but also seemed to adapt a Ukiyo-e sensibility with regards to the representation of garment and the body. It appeared that Beardsley’s work, like the work of the Ukiyo-e tradition pivoted on a dynamic interplay between decorative abstraction and mimetic elements, between dense detailing and stark voids, and between a graphic flatness and suggestions of three-dimensionality. Like the tradition of Ukiyo-e, Beardsley’s work consisted in beautiful but at times aberrant representations of the figure. As my practice had been engaged with the notion of an ambiguous or ambivalent body, the work of Beardsley provided an important reference point and one that was distinct insofar as it provided evidence of this figurative ambiguity within an a highly ornate aesthetic context.

The second moment of interest was upon discovering that the Dover publication of Beardsley’s illustrations, which provided my access to this work, was heavily censored. Researching the artist more broadly I was introduced to the sexually explicit and grotesque dimensions of Beardsley’s art. The most explicit details had been cropped out or selectively excluded from the Dover publication I was familiar

2 Aubrey Beardsley, The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Dover, 1967).

with. Having already identified a range of contradictory operations in Beardsley’s works, discovering this aspect of the work added another element of interest, and suggested another series of contradictions. The delicate and highly refined illustrative technique and attention to form in Beardsley’s work appear in conjunction with its not simply figurative, but bodily engagement that I associated with more recent critical (and particularly feminist) practices. By bodily I refer to those representations that conflict with the closed body associated with Classicism, and which have in feminist theory been associated with the monstrous feminine and the abject that I discuss in Chapter Three. Its occurrence in Beardsley’s practice seemed to demonstrate a strange but compelling convergence of different traditions and operations.

In examining writings on Beardsley’s practice, there seemed to be an absence of discussion on what this convergence amounted to and its conceptual significance. Despite the renewed art historical interest in Beardsley’s work in the last ten to fifteen years (prompted by the centenary of the artist’s death), the majority of discussions of Beardsley’s practice seemed rarely to interrogate the contradictory nature of his art. There was also a lack of discussion of Beardsley’s relevance for contemporary practice.

In the first place, the bulk of Beardsley scholarship concerns itself with the documentation of and commentary on the artist’s fraught life: from the impact of his consumptive illness, to that of his early death and speculation regarding his sexual orientation and relationships. For the literature that focuses on Beardsley’s work, this speculation is rarely far from view. But even when rejecting Beardsley’s pathologisation, or accusations of ‘perversity’ that dominated the early reception of his work, the majority of discussions of his practice tend to emphasise its Aestheticism, its Decadence, and its engagement with the aesthetic practices and social codes of late Victorian society and culture. This limited treatment is evidenced everywhere, even where Beardsley is located as an artist who actively subverted the morals and aesthetic ideals of his time.

This is not to say that existing criticism – both historical and contemporary – does not implicitly acknowledge a contradictory operation within Beardsley’s illustrations,

nor that this narrow critical field is without exception. In surveying even the earliest accounts of Beardsley’s work it is clear that responses have frequently pointed to, though not necessarily interrogated, the convergence of what are considered opposing tendencies within the artist’s work.

In the first place, it is rare to find a discussion of Beardsley’s art that does not dwell on his formal technique, or the work’s “intricacy and inimitable craft”3. Beardsley’s elegance of line, aptitude for mimetism, and highly decorative sensibility are frequently remarked on in accounts of his work. It is these formal and technical qualities that have been crucial in establishing the work’s consistency with the Aestheticism of Beardsley’s age and its ‘art for art’s sake’ basis. In the earliest discussions of Beardsley’s practice it is this aspect of the work that is mobilised in justifying its value. Even in more recent criticism it appears that this issue is still over-determined in most discussions of his work. As I discuss in Chapter Three, for example, the insistence that the “ultimate importance” of even Beardsley’s pornographic work lay “not in the represented, but rather the representing”4, suggests something of the over-emphasis on formal qualities common to many evaluations of Beardsley’s art.

But it is not simply the work’s stylistic elegance that is frequently noted in Beardsley’s practice. Just as frequently, his technique and aesthetic refinement – clearly positioned as what is beautiful about the artist’s practice – is counter-posed with what is said to be the work’s socially challenging content. For Arthur Symons, perhaps Beardsley’s most sympathetic peer and contemporary, the contradiction at the centre of the work was its visualising of “sin first transfigured by beauty, and then disclosed by beauty; sin conscious of itself, of its inability to escape itself, and showing in its ugliness, the law it has broken”5. For Henry Strong similarly, beneath Beardsley’s “elegance and refinement” was “that same expression of vice… from which Beardsley so seldom succeeded in escaping”6. In 1975 critic Robin Ironside

3 Robert Langenfeld, “Beardsley in Time”, Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Robert Langenfeld (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989) 5. 4 Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 74. 5 Arthur Symons quoted in Christopher Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 38. 6 Henry Strong in Snodgrass, Aubrey 285.

identifies in Beardsley’s images an “impeccable delicacy of form with gross indelicacy of feeling”7. And in a more contemporary context, John Reed notes the extent to which Beardsley’s “graceful ornamentations describe abortions”.8

In each case, beautiful and specifically decorative form – usually claimed to be present with reference to the objective properties of beauty in the tradition of Classicism – is said to operate in proximity to a form, content and subject matter that conflicts with the proper operation of aesthetic pleasure. As I will discuss in Chapter One, beautiful form is frequently treated as that which seduces Beardsley’s audience, such that “the mellifluous style of Beardsley’s drawings” has produced the repeated “misreading or overlooking altogether [of] their outrageous details”9. In these accounts beautiful form is said to veil, disguise and for certain critics, even negate the work’s more ‘difficult’ form and content.

Figured as sin, vice and indecency in reactionary accounts of the work, this content that conflicts with the beautiful is treated in more recent criticism as evidence of the political dimension of Beardsley’s practice. In this critical redress of the artist’s work the scandal produced by Beardsley’s illustrations is attributed to their discernable attack on the moral and social codes of the artist’s time. Beardsley’s critique is said to be enacted through a deforming of aesthetic standards, particularly with regards to the representation of the body. For Linda Gertner Zatlin, for example, Beardsley’s bodily representations actively critique Victorian culture’s over-investment in idealised, hetero-normative representations. Both Beardsley’s grotesque depictions and his forays into the sexually explicit are for Zatlin evidence of his political (and specifically feminist) agenda. So too in the writings of Christopher Snodgrass, who locates in Beardsley’s images a move towards grotesque and erotic representations that disrupt Victorian norms and ideals, as well as their metaphysical supports and ideological basis. It is Beardsley’s disruption of beautiful form through the representation of the carnal body that signals for these writers the critical and political dimensions of his art. On this basis, both writers seek to recuperate Beardsley’s practice as relevant to contemporary issues and debates in art history.

7 Robin Ironside, “Aubrey Beardsley”, Apollo 101 (1975): 211. 8 John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985) 159. 9 Snodgrass, Aubrey 27.

In fact, Snodgrass’s study Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque has been indispensable for the formulation of my project insofar as he not only notes the nature of Beardsley’s contradictory approach, but places contradiction, heterogeneity and ambivalence at the centre of the artist’s practice and its critical re-evaluation. For Snodgrass it is insofar as Beardsley’s presentation of a world “that is inescapably ‘de-formed’ even in its elegance, a world whose meaning is not univocal but slides or oscillates precariously among unstable alternatives, even opposing poles” that elevates its critical contribution. Flaunting their indeterminacy and contradiction, Beardsley’s illustrations are said to “oscillate ceaselessly among indeterminate alternatives, even polarities”10. And it is by means of this oscillation that Beardsley is understood to attack univocal meaning, logocentric thought, and the centred subject such thought is said to affirm.

But what is also apparent in Snodgrass’s study, and what distinguishes his project from my own, is his own maintenance of opposing poles and a binary logic which I will argue limits an understanding of the broader operation of Beardsley’s art. Central to Snodgrass’s thesis is the claim that Beardsley’s work both challenges and recuperates Victorian norms and ideals, and this back and forth movement between critique and complicity takes place as a movement between deformation and “aesthetic elegance”11. Where Beardsley’s work maintains its aesthetic integrity is where his practice is revealed to be “persistently ideological”: where his critique of univocal meaning “serves to slip metaphysical authority in through the back door”12. For Snodgrass, “while many of the individual objects and figures in his drawings may be grotesque and jarring by Classical standards, their impact is strangely mitigated by the forcefully centralising harmony and beauty of his countervailing design”13. Thus where ‘style’ and aesthetic devices are left to triumph they act as recuperative forces that undermine the anti-metaphysical critique Beardsley elsewhere enacts.

10 Snodgrass, Aubrey 295. 11 Snodgrass, Aubrey 293. 12 Snodgrass, Aubrey 293. 13 Snodgrass, Aubrey 293

I agree here with Snodgrass’s contention that Beardsley moves between Classical ideals of beauty and their undermining. Nor would I disagree with the notion that in Beardsley’s work such a movement represents an unresolved paradox. But where Snodgrass recognises in Beardsley’s practice a suspension of binary logic – a logic of non-reversible and non-reciprocal pairings where “[o]ne of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically etc.), or has the upper hand”14 – I would argue that his criticism adheres to a binary of its own. Reducing the beautiful dimension of Beardsley’s art to Classical formal ideals alone and assigning it a purely mitigating ideological role, he sustains a split between the work’s aesthetic and critical aims in a manner akin to the scholarship on Beardsley more broadly. To this extent, something of the manner in which Beardsley makes his critique of reigning norms in and through beautiful and decorative form is missed.

As I will argue in Chapters One and Four, Snodgrass’s criticism is symptomatic of a wider critical context: a context shaped by the de-legitimisation of aesthetic discourse and the claims it represents. Despite the various ways in which aesthetic experience has been conceived, beauty, particularly in anti-aesthetic criticism, is equated with an idealism, a depoliticised art object and a model of subjectivity that renders it, in Hal Foster’s words, complicit in “metaphysical thought, empirical science and capitalist logic” alike15. As I will discuss in Chapter Four, the anti- aesthetic represents a cultural position tied to Postmodernism, which questions the aesthetic as a “network of ideas” that promotes a “privileged aesthetic realm”16. Said to betray vested ideological interests, this treatment of aesthetics will be examined as furthering a polarity between beauty as an attempt to conceal political affiliations, and cultural forms explicitly engaged in political concerns. Alternatively, I shall argue that practices such as Beardsley’s challenge this logic precisely through a paradoxical movement between beauty and a more challenging imagery associated with a painful affect. I aim to show that a “historical split between the aesthetic’s focus on visual affect or pleasure and the critical political aims of the anti-

14 Jacques Derrida in Fred Orton “On B#e#i#n#g Bent ‘Blue’ (Second State): An Introduction to Jacques Derrida/ A Footnote on Jasper Johns,” Oxford Art Journal 12.1 (1989): 36. 15 Foster, “Preface” x.

16 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) xv.

aesthetic”17, which maintains a polarity between the beautiful and criticality, limits the understanding of Beardsley’s practice and its critical strategies of categorical suspension in which beauty plays an important part.

It is this same polarity that I will argue has limited understanding of the second practice I examine here: that of contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker. While emerging from a different historical and cultural context, my inclusion of Walker in this project represents an attempt to find a contemporary instance of the same contradictory representative logic that is present in Beardsley’s work. While Walker’s practice, like Beardsley’s, is highly referential, even appropriative of the codes, conventions and representations of her given context, the nature of its engagement exceeds this context in a manner comparable to Beardsley’s. The criticism on Walker’s art suggests an inversion of the situation afflicting Beardsley’s scholarship insofar as her art’s political and critical content is fore-grounded at the expense of its formal dimensions. Regardless of this inversion, such criticism also seems largely determined by the binary logic of the literature on Beardsley previously discussed.

Best known for her installations of panoramic friezes of cut paper silhouettes, Walker’s practice has been the subject of considerable criticism and acclaim, since its initial appearance in the mid nineties. In particular her work has played a prominent role in debates concerning the use or abuse of “the visual resources of racial stereotyping”18. Walker has been represented in major exhibitions and collections, both in the U.S. and internationally, and has been the recipient of several major awards. Yet, she has also been the target of letter writing campaigns, boycotts and other activist interventions by those who take exception to both her work and its institutional acceptance or support.

As Robert Reid-Pharr notes, “[w]here Walker’s supporters and detractors converge is in the manner in which they consistently seek to frame her work in relation to an

17 James Myer and Toni Ross, “Aesthetic/ Anti- Aesthetic: An Introduction,” Art Journal (Summer 2004): 20. 18 Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs, “Reading Black Through White in the Work of Kara Walker,” Art History 26 (June 2003): 423.

ongoing appraisal of racist imagery within American culture”19. In this sense the literature that has proliferated around Walker is as politically focused as it is voluminous. Framed within questions of the political and ethical efficacy of a practice that engages stereotypical or caricaturised representations of racial identities, the figure of Walker, and the shadowy figures that promulgate her tableaux, have been interrogated within a largely univocal field of debate.

In reversal of the critical situation marking the majority of criticism on Beardsley’s work, what occurs in the writing on Walker is a tendency to either defend or reject her art on the basis of the political issue of race. And this has occurred at the expense of an engagement with how this political issue is made manifest within her art and its specific aesthetic strategies. As Darby English suggests: Walker’s work, while deriving from an imaginative re-projection of disagreeable images and themes drawn from the American South during the antebellum period and incriminating onlookers without regard for their peculiar relationship to this moment, has for many had the misleading effect of a return of the repressed (for which we all agree no one is ready). While respectable, this response is problematic, as the critics for whom this effect is most powerful have a way of falling back on a response that can suggest a voluntary blindness to the specificity of Walker’s practice20.

In noting this blindness, English represents an exception to much of the criticism surrounding Walker’s practice.

In a context where those who support Walker’s art are potentially judged as complicit with the racism deemed present within her work, it is not surprising that critics should feel the need to over-emphasise the political subject matter of her practice, or to articulate a political position at the expense of other concerns. In such a climate, ‘voluntary blindness’ to the consideration of aesthetic means is not surprising, though it does seem to be a disappointing omission in the case of Walker’s practice. Disappointing, because much of her work’s power can, I will argue, be attributed to the aesthetic forms and materials by which such issues are broached. Just as is evidenced in the work of Beardsley, it may be in part Walker’s

19 Robert F. Reid-Pharr, “Black Girl Lost,” Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time, ed., Annette Dixon (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Museum of Art and D.A.P, 2002) 27. 20 Darby English, “This is Not About the Past,” Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, eds., Ian Berry et al. (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003) 142.

specific mode of representation that granted her such critical attention in the first place.

Again, as is the case in the practice of Beardsley, I will argue that this specific mode of representation is marked by a convergence of seemingly contradictory operations, a convergence where the work’s beautiful and highly decorative form plays as great a part as its gruesome bodily content. And as was the case in the criticism on Beardsley, the notion of this convergence has been frequently pointed to but rarely interrogated in the bulk of existing criticism on Walker. In noting the manner in which “Walker’s figures, transcribed by fluid line, combine sublime beauty and disturbing content”21 or participate in a “blurring [of] common sense notions of the distinction between the ugliness of slavery and the prettiness of the silhouette”22, commentators have pointed to the importance of beautiful form in Walker’s practice. As is the case in relation to Beardsley’s work, Walker’s attention to form and visual affect where acknowledged has been treated as seducing and ensnaring its viewers. In the context of her art’s politicised reception, it is seen to provide a difficult pleasure and one that is hard to admit.

Part of this difficulty is admitted by the gallerist Halley Harrisburg, in a statement that I return to throughout this thesis. Harrisburg suggests: The most destructive aspect (of Walker’s work) is that the viewer is seduced by the eloquence of the silhouettes. They are very enticing. Once you’re in, you respond to the very grotesque imagery. How can I be enjoying sodomy or whatever (the viewer wonders)? That kind of question is not often provoked by art.23

Where Harrisburg’s comments are particularly useful for my project is in their notation of the dynamic interplay between that which grants aesthetic pleasure in Walker’s work and that which shocks, challenges, and prompts a more uncomfortable affect. This double operation, I will argue, is as crucial to Walker’s work as it is to Beardsley’s. For it acknowledges that what is at the centre of these artists’ work is the negotiation of an immoderate pleasure. Despite the abundance of practices within the Modernist and Postmodern tradition that might be similarly

21 Annette Dixon, “A Negress Speaks Out: The art of Kara Walker,” Kara Walker:Pictures 12. 22 Reid-Pharr 28. 23 Halley Harrisburg in Kelefa Sanneh, “The Debate Continues: Much Ado,” International Review of African American Art 15.2 (1998): 46. Words in parentheses appear in cited source.

productive of an immoderate pleasure, something of its appearance in Walker’s practice is deemed significant, and for Harrisburg prompts a question ‘not often provoked by art’. Harrisburg’s statement places aesthetic eloquence, grotesque imagery and a sexual content more difficult to name at the centre of Walker’s practice. It is by these terms that Harrisburg inadvertently recognises a convergence of normally opposed operations in Walker’s practice. This thesis examines each term (eloquence, grotesquery and ‘sodomy’) in Harrisburg’s statement and attempts to address the nature of enjoyment that is at the centre of both Walker and Beardsley’s art.

Chapters One to Three – on the decorative, the grotesque and the sexually explicit – treat each category as it applies to both the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic dimensions of Beardsley and Walker’s art. But while I hope to demonstrate the co-presence of these seemingly opposed categories in both artists’ work, I also seek to demonstrate how each category contains within it the possibility of its opposite. For in my treatment of the decorative, the grotesque and the explicit each category includes the possibility of its own categorical dissolution. In opposition to the polarity identified in existing criticism, I wish to attend to both the aesthetic and political dimensions of each category as mobilised in the work of both artists.

I begin with an examination of those qualities said to lure, seduce and provide aesthetic pleasure in the work of Walker and Beardsley, in acknowledgment of their practices’ specifically decorative aesthetic. I examine the ways the decorative and ornamental have been defined in the tradition of Classicism and in Modern accounts of aesthetic experience such as the orthodox reading of Kantian aesthetics. I suggest that in both accounts, the decorative has been treated as an instance of beauty that is both complicit in ideals of form and capable of undermining these ideals. The decorative, I will argue, is consistently positioned in aesthetic discourse at the interstice of form and matter. My attention then is to a specific tradition of the decorative, to which I claim Beardsley and Walker’s practices are aligned, which exploits this interstitial position. Utilising a particular reading of Kantian beauty as ‘free form’ I align the pleasures of the decorative in this tradition to what is nominated as beauty’s conceptual opacity and suspension of the usual hierarchical and oppositional categories of experience. Here as elsewhere my intention is not to

oppose beauty to a critical content but to suggest both its availability for subversive content, and its potential as a critical device in its own right.

Where Chapter One explores Beardsley and Walker’s work’s apparent beauty, Chapter Two explores the first of two terms that have been mobilised as evidence of the anti-aesthetic dimension of Walker and Beardsley’s practices. As a tradition that in fact originates within that of the decorative, the grotesque in its contemporary usage has come to be equated with the monstrous and the abject. What is consistent in both applications is the grotesque’s use in relation to aberrant and unsettling representations of the body, made available through a play on the capacities of form. This dimension I will argue is consistently engaged in the work of both Beardsley and Walker. And while the grotesque’s imagery and affect is regularly opposed to the aesthetic in contemporary literature, I will argue that its earlier historical moment and its mobilisation in the practices of Beardsley and Walker demonstrate the possibility of its appearance in and through aestheticised form. As a category well suited to contradiction, paradox and categorical confusion the grotesque is recognised as a particularly apt term for understanding a convergence of contradictory tendencies present in both artists’ work.

Chapter Three focuses on Walker and Beardsley’s engagement with the sexually explicit. Here I locate in their art a particular model of sexuality and a visualisation of sex acts that can be theorised in relation to the pornographic. Like the representations that constitute the contemporary grotesque, the pornographic is often conceived as ‘other’ to the aesthetic of beauty on the basis of its carnal representation and sexually gratifying affect. Here as elsewhere I wish to suggest that the practices of Walker and Beardsley make such distinctions problematic. I will argue that while their works engage the codes and tropes of the pornographic, this engagement again takes place through a decorative aesthetic.

One way in which the convergence of normally divergent operations in Beardsley and Walker’s work might be posed is as consisting in an imagery and content both sublimated and desublimated. Chapter Four examines the appropriateness of this terminology for the formal and conceptual strategies apparent in both artists’ work. Here I discuss the way the term sublimation has been applied in anti-aesthetic

discourse, in particular the manner in which it has been conflated with aesthetics understood as a process of idealisation. I argue that this particular application of Freud’s theory has overlooked the concept of sublimation’s more interesting insights, particularly in lieu of the revisions made to the concept by Jacques Lacan. In Lacan’s theory of sublimation the binary logic that has kept beauty and a political or critical content opposed is displaced. More complex than the definition that the anti-aesthetic position expounds, Lacan’s revision of the concept of sublimation lays the groundwork for a notion of artistic production that does not maintain a wholly antithetical relation between an aesthetics conceived of as idealism and a materialist criticality. This final chapter presents this alternative interpretation of sublimation, and connects it to the critical strategies that I identify in the art of Beardsley and Walker.

1. The Decorative

At the height of the controversy surrounding the work of Kara Walker, Halley Harrisburg, director of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, made a statement defending her work: The most destructive aspect (of Walker’s work) is that the viewer is seduced by the eloquence of the silhouettes. They are very enticing. Once you’re in, you respond to the very grotesque imagery. How can I be enjoying sodomy or whatever (the viewer wonders)? That kind of question is not often provoked by art1.

Despite the personal and conservative bias grounding this statement, the identification of Walker’s practice as seductive, or as “luring [the viewer] into a kind of emotionally fraught intellectual play” is illuminating2. Here the notion of lure pertains not only to the reductive though enduring logic of the stereotype that Walker is accused of endlessly recycling. The charge of seduction is also directed towards that which foregrounds the stereotype’s reading – i.e. that which entices, or as Darby English has noted of Walker’s work, that which invites the viewer’s ‘incrimination’3.

These comments suggest that Walker’s work is not merely the re-presentation of types familiar to fictions of the Antebellum South, but their rendering within an alluring aesthetic. Pitched elsewhere as a tension “between the ‘ugliness’ of slavery and the ‘prettiness’ of the silhouette”4, observations such as these point to a co- presence of opposed elements in the artist’s practice. As Walker herself has insisted, her work aims at “keeping a sort of balance… so that if some of the actions are ugly or ambiguous or not in keeping with a progressive view of ourselves, then at least… the gesture [is] beautiful, and ultimately the form is beautiful”5. In this chapter I address what appears to be the formal component of this balance: that which has

1 Halley Harrisburg in Kelefa Sanneh, “The Debate Continues: Much Ado” International Review of African American Art 15.2 (1998): 46. Words in parentheses appear in cited source. 2 Mark Reinhardt, “The Art of Racial Profiling”, Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, ed. Ian Berry et al. (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003) 111. 3 Darby English, “This is not about the past” Kara Walker: Narratives 142. 4 Robert Reid-Pharr, “Black Girl Lost,” Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time, ed. Annette Dixon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002) 28. 5 Kara Walker & Thelma Golden, “Dialogue: An Interview with Kara Walker”, Kara Walker: Pictures 45.

been seized upon by both Walker and her critics as beautiful and pleasurable, but is elsewhere described as inviting incrimination.

Statements such as Harrisburg’s (and even Walker’s) imply a certain separation of pleasurable form from the work’s grotesque and explicitly sexual imagery. They suggest the presence of an apparently superficial formal additive: one that foregrounds and presumably covers its more subversive operations. This additive, understood to bring beauty and facilitate aesthetic pleasure, is resonant with definitions of the decorative: as a formal device of embellishment capable of making pleasurable and possibly aesthetic any ground/object/representation that it adorns.

It is in utilising the decorative as a medium of aesthetic pleasure that I wish to situate Walker’s practice, and that of the historically dislocated but similarly engaged late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley. For where the decorative might be seen as consistent with the ideals of beauty marked out in the discourse of Classicism, it is also a terrain whereby such ideals are potentially challenged and undone. Involving a collusion between the terms of aesthetic pleasure and a content deemed dangerously subversive, the decorative is a field where accusations of inappropriate beautification find their most fervent expression. As such it is apt for dealing with the co-presence of operations that I argue are at the centre of Walker and Beardsley’s work.

I begin by articulating the ways in which the decorative has been historically defined as a medium of aesthetic beauty in both art historical writing and aesthetic philosophy. My attention is first to the decorative’s figuring in Classical accounts of beauty, and then in relation to Kant’s treatment of aesthetic experience. I then turn to a counter-tradition of the decorative in which I situate Walker and Beardsley’s specific use of the decorative. I wish to illustrate that the historical reception of the decorative’s forms and materials suggest a repetition of the very question referred to in Harrisburg’s statement: how we might be led to enjoy what is otherwise deemed unpalatable.

1.1 The Decorative and Ornamental: An Introduction

On the stucco are monsters rather than definite representations taken from definite things. Instead of columns there rise up stalks; instead of gables, striped panels with curled leaves and volutes. Candelabra uphold picture shrines, and above the summit of these, clusters of thin stalks rise from their roots in tendrils with little figures seated upon them at random, or slender stalks with heads of men and animals attached to half the body… Such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been… Yet when people view these falsehoods, they approve rather than condemn.

Vitruvius, On Architecture, c. 40 B.C6.

[If there is an art that] more than all others gives free reign to fantasy and caprice, it is decorative art. All of the illusions that figurative imagination enjoys playing with are employed in decoration.

Paul Souriau, La Suggestion Dans L’Art, 18037.

In the history of Western art and culture, the decorative and ornamental have maintained a precarious status. As Rae Beth Gordon notes, while a great many definitions “connote the inessential, the superfluous, or the superficial, the ‘merely’ decorative” their appearance has endured, as have fervent commentaries regarding their appropriate application or misuse8. Sometimes seen to share art’s essential principles and credited as exemplary of civilised culture, decoration and ornament’s history also aligns them with the contrary – that is, with degeneracy and excess. Not just contested as a visual phenomenon but also as a marker of morality, their history is complex and the forms, practices and materials of their traditions diverse.

In terms of their etymological origins, decoration (from the Latin decorare, meaning “to embellish, beautify, adorn”) and ornament (from the Latin ornatus: “to provide with necessaries, to equip but also to adorn and decorate”) are distinct though deeply imbricated terms. It is perhaps for this reason that their historical usage suggests a confused terrain9. As Jenny Anger notes, their usage is by “no means consistent in

6 Vitruvius quoted in E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979) 20. 7 Souriau quoted in Rae Beth Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 17. 8 Gordon, Ornament 3. 9 Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (New York: Cambridge Press, 2003) 16.

Western art history” and historical accounts exhibit a slippage among the terms of ornament, ornamental, decoration, and decorative10. This is particularly evident in Pre-Modern accounts of decoration and ornament, theorised not just in relation to the visual arts but also in the fields of rhetoric and speech. The difficulty in making a general claim in the fine arts and architecture for the category of decoration as inclusive of ornament, is that in a contemporary context ornament has come to be understood as exclusive of the more general term. The basis of this distinction I will soon discuss.

Where treated as distinct in the visual arts, the formal properties of ornament have been noted as “symmetry, repetition, flattening, [and] the dramatic simplification or complication of organic forms in defiance of nature”11. Any attempt to describe the visual appearance of the phenomenon, however, usually falls short. Seen to bear a closer relationship to abstraction than to mimesis, though not exclusively without mimetic elements, the ‘ornamental’ names a broad terrain. And while persistent attempts to categorise ornament’s motifs exist (such as “geometric, botanical, zoomorphic, mythological and figurative, marine and military”12), such categorisations are by no means exhaustive or historically consistent. Each historical attempt to reduce ornament to a catalogue of forms tends to specify its own series of terms and visual syntax, and a great deal of literature is devoted to the articulation of rules for their appropriate application. As Riegl’s concise definition of ornament as “a pattern on a surface” suggests, any definition must take stock of a deeply varied range of forms, in a multitude of styles and contexts13.

To speak then of a decorative aesthetic is more problematic still, as it is “by no means an easily delimited field… notorious for its unexpected mutations and mobility”14. Given that decoration has been interpreted as any form, material or figure applied to any representation, object or ground in the interest of embellishment, identifying the formal properties of the decorative is a task that must

10 Anger 16. 11 Gordon, Ornament 23. 12 Gordon, Ornament 23. 13 Alois Riegel quoted in Markus Brüdelin, ed. Ornament and Abstraction: The Dialogue Between Non-Western, Modern and Contemporary Art (New Haven: Fondation Beyeler and Yale University Press, 2001) 20. 14 Anger 6.

take account of an even broader range of practices. As Gordon notes, in Ruskin’s reckoning, “the only thing that distinguishes decorative art from other art is the fact that it is suited to a fixed place”15. While this statement does little to point to formal or material markers of what the decorative might consist of, it does highlight the degree to which the decorative is always defined with reference to its placement. Gombrich’s emphasis on decorative functions such as filling, framing and linking16 similarly subjugates the decorative to the place it adorns, but also points to a logic of decorative form as that which covers. When transposed to mediums such as painting or the graphic arts, a decorative aesthetic might be at least understood in terms of a profuse application of motifs and materials usually occurring in the decorative arts. Though given the breath of the term of decoration, this again threatens to miss what is in each instance common to the decorative.

As is evident, it is difficult to define the decorative and ornamental without making reference to their function. Where the decorative and ornamental are deemed provisionally consistent is in their hedonistic function: seen to bring that which facilitates pleasure to the objects, representations, or grounds they adorn. By and large the nature of this pleasure is understood to be aesthetic. In Pre-Modern aesthetic philosophy decoration and ornament are treated as enhancing the beauty of an object, or bringing beauty to an object that would otherwise be without. In the Modern period, the granting of properly aesthetic pleasure is attributed to ornament alone. As I will discuss, this distinction is justified by reference to Immanuel Kant’s writing on aesthetic experience, and a formalist framing of ornament divorced from its additive function and situated as autonomous form. In the discourse of Classicism, however, this split has not yet been articulated. So, in the first part of the following discussion I treat the terms of decorative and ornament as interchangeable. For what I seek to illustrate with reference to both is the treatment of the decorative function as one of aesthetic value. In judging their operation as making beautiful in this tradition both terms have been subject to the same prescriptions for use.

15 Gordon, Ornament ii. 16 These are the functional effects attributed to the decorative arts by E.H Gombrich, The Sense.

1.2 The Decorative in Classical Aesthetics

In Classical treatises, beauty is a quality attributed to properties discernable in the object. So where the decorative is granted aesthetic value it is insofar as it contributes to such properties. In the Platonic tradition, for example, beauty is the product of qualities such as proportion, symmetry and measure (or perfection, due proportion and clarity as appears in the writings of Thomas Aquinas17). Aristotle similarly notes “order, symmetry, definiteness” as the “chief forms of beauty”18. In each instance, beauty consists in the harmonious arrangement of parts, subsumed to an organic and ordered whole.

In the Platonic tradition, a distinction is made between the material and ‘relative’ instances of beauty that occur in the sensible realm, and an ideal, unchanging and hence absolute Beauty located in a primary and higher world of Forms. In Plato’s theory the world of Forms is a higher, fundamental and universal reality, located outside the transient world of material. The material real is its mere shadow. Hence, Plato’s theory of beauty distinguishes between an ideal of Beauty and its sensible and imitative appearance, on this basis. While disputing the metaphysical basis of Plato’s treatment, Aristotle similarly situates form as a primary and active force by which secondary brute matter is shaped. And, in both traditions, beauty stands as the phenomenal appearance of formal perfection: the product of an agency or “philosophical instinct in [the] human mind which imposes upon the crude data of life in general a logical framework”19. As a theoretical notion – and one that can be tied to the divine insofar as proportion and symmetry are its defining characteristics – Beauty in its highest form is treated as fixed and eternal. But its phenomenal appearance in art demonstrates the triumph of the faculty of reason to discern such ideals, and to shape matter according to its central principles.

In this sense, the beauty of art stands in tribute to the ordering or totalising capacities of the human mind. Its discernment is assumed to foster an appreciation both of that capacity and the pure form or thought it operates in semblance of (i.e. the Divine). It

17 See Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1995) 91. 18 Aristotle in John S Marshall, “Art and Aesthetic in Aristotle,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 12.2 (Dec, 1953): 229. 19 H. L. Tracy, “Aristotle on Aesthetic Pleasure,” Classical Philology, 41.1 (Jan., 1946): 45.

is for this reason that aesthetic pleasure is figured as a ‘higher’ pleasure in Classical discourse. Distinguished from the satisfaction of appetite, or what merely pleases the senses, beauty is capable of leading the subject beyond the merely sensual, the merely material and beyond the pleasures of sensuous excess to the moderating pleasures of thought. The pleasure derived from the beautiful is figured as intellectual, pure and, according to Plato, unmixed. Both in expression of higher principles and semblant of the order they contribute to, beauty is situated in relation to an ideal, and it is to this that its properties are attributed.

Again, if the decorative can be said to be beautiful and to convey a properly aesthetic pleasure in this tradition, it must meet the objective criteria of beauty, and be an expression of the ideals it is said to promote. But as those Classical accounts that deal with decoration suggest, the decorative’s operation in relation to such ideals has been by no means assured. Insofar as the decorative is situated as applied, mobile or superficial, and as a part secondary to a work’s totality, classical accounts have placed considerable emphasis on conditions for its use. As E.H. Gombrich suggests in The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, “a deliberate rejection of ornamental” (and decorative) “profusion has always been a sign of classical influence”20. But such a rejection is not outright. Instead, even the earliest discussions of the decorative since Classical antiquity (such as that by Cicero in the field of speech and rhetoric) have expressed objections towards its unchecked usage, and suggested means by which it might be utilised to proper effect.

What governs the prescriptions for the decorative’s proper use are notions of appropriacy and necessity. Such conditions were originally circumscribed in Classical antiquity with reference to the principle of decorum: a doctrine that, as Gombrich notes “lays down conditions under which display is admissible”. Here, the appropriateness of the decorative’s addition is judged with reference not just to the properties of beauty, but also to convention, fitness to purpose and placement21. And just as beauty is, in the Classical tradition, situated as a means of moderating excess and establishing order in the individual, so too does decorum seek to moderate excess and establish order in the social environment. As Kohane and Hill suggest, decorum,

20 Gombrich 18. 21 Gombrich 19.

at least as treated in architecture, demonstrates an attention to ornament and decoration as both embellishment and expression, and as a “manner of performance shaped by (and shaping) social order”22. Not simply ordaining the use of the decorative as enhancing a building’s aesthetic appearance, decorum also seeks to prescribe its usage according to status and social class: such as in the proscription of appropriate housing ornamentation according to socio-economic grades of individuals who would inhabit them23.

This claim to order enlists beauty as its most poignant expression, and again, beauty here is figured as reducible to objective criteria that privilege a coherent and harmonious whole. As Leon Battista Alberti insisted in his fifteenth-century treatise On the Art of Building in Ten Books, beauty is “that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse” whereas “ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty”24. Again, where beauty is the template, the decorative is material instance, and the medium for the expression of a higher order. So too in the architectural writings of Sebastian Serlio. Like Alberti, Serlio argues for the proper application of the decorative with reference to a higher order, and with analogy to a body of properly aligned parts. Serlio states, “[a]ll things have their place… Order can mean many things but in architecture in particular it denotes a concept, or a composition of a variety of proportionate and corresponding parts attached together; these are the pedestals, the columns and the ornaments above. Thus everything together is the entire order, like the body, with its parts and limbs”25. In the creation of this ordered body of building, city and state, the embellishing and expressive role of the decorative plays an essential part.

What is suggested by treatments such as Alberti’s and Serlio’s is the notion of decoration as the material instance of perfected and hence beautiful form. When applied in observance with objective criteria, the decorative is figured as that which is commensurate with ideals both aesthetic and social. In aesthetic Classicism what

22 Peter Kohane and Michael Hill, “The Eclipse of a Commonplace Idea: Decorum in Architectural Theory,” Architectural Review Quarterly, 5.1 (2001): 66. Words in parentheses mine. 23 Kohane 68. 24 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. N. Leach, J. Rykwert & R. Tavenor (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988) 420. 25 Sebastiano Serlio in Kohane 69.

generates concern regarding decoration’s misuse is not simply the failure of the decorative to foster an appreciation of such ideals, but its capacity to actively undermine them. It is not simply that the decorative is capable of undoing the operation of beauty by contributing a part disruptive of the beautiful whole. The decorative, as a mobile and pleasurable phenomenon, is also associated with a revelry in the sensuous and material, that when unleavened by moral purpose is antagonistic to the order that its operation as beautiful might have secured. Further to this, in certain Classical accounts, decoration is figured not simply as available to misuse but as apt for disguising and making pleasurable a subversive content. As Gombrich insists, throughout the decorative’s history is the repeated “transition… from the conviction that [the decorative’s] charms can be used for a base purpose, to the suspicion that a profusion of such charms are likely to conceal a base purpose”26. I return to this notion of the decorative’s aptness for subversive effects later. Here I wish simply to emphasise that at the centre of such suspicion is the notion of the decorative as a particularly seductive mode of address.

This charge of unseemly seduction dominates the decorative’s reception from antiquity to the present. From the proclamations against decoration’s promotion of falsehood cited by Vitruvius in the quotation that opens this chapter, to the warning in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, decoration is persistently positioned as that “guiled shore to a most dangerous sea”27. What renders it dangerous, as Gombrich notes, is its ability to “dazzle us… tempt[ing] the mind to submit without proper reflection”28. In this instance it is aligned not with the faculty of reason, but with the anarchy of the senses. Positioned as superficial lure the decorative is situated as that which promotes the false pleasure of the material over the inherent value of form. No longer operating in the service or under the guide of reason, moderation and morality, the decorative in this instance becomes merely sensuous, immoderate and immoral.

Here the decorative’s apparently assured production of pleasure reveals its threatening aspect. But if both positions on the decorative within Classical treatises

26 Gombrich 17. 27 Gombrich 17. 28 Gombrich 17.

are taken into account, the “lure and threat”29 of the decorative might be of a more complex nature. Its ability to either operate in the service of ideals, or undermine them, suggests something of its location at the interstice of form and matter, as essential and inessential, and as aesthetically pleasurable but potentially excessive in these accounts. Rather than being situated on one side of the binary between form and matter, reason and sense, or beauty and excess, the decorative appears as that which traverses this binary. It is this traversing that Classical theses on beauty regularly attempt to negotiate.

1.3 The Decorative in Modern Accounts: Ornament as ‘Pure Form’

As I have suggested, the problem raised by the decorative in the Pre-Modern period is its position as either ideal form or merely material, and either aesthetically pleasurable or merely sensuous. The Modern period finds its solution in a definitional split between decoration and ornament (and decorative and ornamental). As noted earlier, decoration might be conceived as any form applied to any object or ground in the interest of embellishment. Recent definitions of ornament, however, distinguish it as purely calliphoric: as an instance of ‘autonomous’ form and that exclusively aesthetic dimension of the decorative tradition30. As James Trilling insists, where decoration might be situated as anything added for the sake of embellishment, “[o]rnament is decoration in which the visual pleasure of form… significantly outweighs the communicative value of content”31. So too in the definition by historian Oleg Grabar, whose study The Mediation of Ornament defines ornament as “that aspect of decoration which appears not to have another purpose but to enhance its carrier”32. This distinction is not simply one where decoration is detached from an illustrative, symbolic or communicative function (such as in Bernard Berenson’s dichotomy between “decorative and illustrative” aspects of a work of art33). What is suggested is the notion of ornament as a specific and distinct component of decoration, whereby visual pleasure outweighs all content or purpose.

29 Anger 16. 30 As Oleg Grabar suggests, “Ornament is, to coin a word . . . calliphoric: it carries beauty with it.” Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) 26. 31 James Trilling, Ornament: A Modern Perspective (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2003) 23. 32 Grabar 5. 33 Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1968)

What is suggested by these contemporary (though characteristically Modern) definitions is the association of ornament with ‘pure’ form. This association is well demonstrated, and begins to appear consistently in the late nineteenth century. In particular it appears in relation to abstraction, and theory that seeks to establish a formalist lineage in visual art (mainly with regard to the medium of painting). In 1883, for example, Jules Bourgoin’s attempts to nominate ornament as evidence of a “power of invention and creation beyond the necessary and utilitarian form”34. On this basis, he insists, it is “purely and solely art”35. In his 1893 treatise Stilfragan, Alois Riegl (whose definition of ornament as ‘pattern on surface’ I noted earlier) charts the origin and development of non-referential form in the hope of establishing the notion of “a purely artistic essence… independent of function”36.

What is consistent in these Modern accounts, and the contemporary treatment as per Grabar and Trilling, is the evaluation of ornament on the basis of its abstract, non- referential and purely formal nature. Also apparent is that in justifying this distinction between ornament and decoration, it is not Classical treatises on form that are used in support, but the Kantian theory of aesthetic experience. Couched in the language of Kant’s treatment of beauty in the Critique of Judgement definitions such as Grabar and Trilling’s cast ornament as motivated by a pleasure in form exclusive of content, in a manner that has become commonplace in contemporary treatments of the ornamental. Annexed from the expressive function ornament and decoration are assigned in Classical treatises, the motifs and forms of ornament are situated not merely as aesthetic embellishment, but as properly aesthetic in their own right.

Where in Classical accounts aesthetic pleasure is attributed to properties discernable in the object, Kant’s writing of aesthetic experience relates the judgement of an object as beautiful to a particular mental and sensory activity that the beautiful object generates. On this basis, ornament is situated as beautiful insofar as it is seen to be productive of a ‘disinterested’ pleasure, and operates “apart from concepts...as the

34 Bourgoin in Gordon, Ornament 4. 35 Bourgoin in Gordon, Ornament 4. 36 Riegl quoted in Brüdelin 204.

object of universal satisfaction”37. Seen to prompt the ‘free play’ of cognitive and sensory capabilities, its pleasure is associated with a harmony of faculties (i.e. imagination and understanding). As Margaret Iversen notes, “the object of aesthetic judgement in Kant is the focus of an opaque, if suggestive, sensory experience. And it is this opacity that stimulates the free play of imagination and understanding. In concert these two faculties search for and find analogies, associations, formal lines and rhythms”38.

Again, the pleasure ornament affords as beautiful might be distinguished from other pleasures, this time on the basis that it is ‘free of interest’ in terms of appetite or utility. Not offering sensuous gratification, or filling a need, ornament might then be situated as pleasurable in itself, meeting the criteria of “purposiveness without purpose”39, as its contemporary definitions seem to suggest. As Iversen suggests, aesthetic experience here “is pleasurable in itself because it satisfies the mind’s demand for coherence, but without subsuming the sensuous particular under any definite concept and so bringing the activity to an end. Here both our ordering, rational capacity and our receptivity to sensuous impressions are engaged”40.

This framing of ornament as properly aesthetic is encouraged by the fact that Kant in fact sites ornamental form in the Critique of Judgement as an example of ‘free’ (rather than adherent) beauty, stating that “designs a la grecque, the foliage on frames or on wallpapers, etc., mean nothing on their own; they represent nothing, no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties”41. But where Iversen’s comments point to Kant’s treatment of beauty as suggestive of an autonomous experience, where both rational capacities and sensuous impressions are engaged, most prevailing accounts of ornament seize upon a particular reading of Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience that instead foregrounds autonomous form. In framing ornament as an instance of ‘free beauty’ and as meeting the criteria of ‘purposiveness without purpose’ this notion is crucial. In the spate of recent exhibitions that take ornament as

37 Kant quoted in Donald W. Crawford, “Kant,” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2002) 58. 38 Margaret Iversen, "Readymade, Found Object, Photograph," Art Journal 63. 2 (Summer, 2004): 46. 39 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Haffner1951) §10. 40 Iversen, “Readymade” 46. 41 Kant quoted in Anger 8.

their focus, the positioning of ornament as facilitating a properly aesthetic pleasure on the basis of its ‘autonomous form’ is key.

Perhaps the most ambitious exhibition with such an agenda was the exhibition Ornament and Abstraction, curated by Markus Brüdelin at the Fondation Beyeler in 2001. The historical scope of this exhibition ranged from Rococo as concerning ornament as pictorial object, to the reframing of work by Sol Lewitt and Frank Stella as consisting of an “ornamentalisation of serial art and Minimalism”42. In the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition is the same assertion that ornament be “freed of its merely decorative function” in a securing of its placement in a lineage of abstract, self-referential and purely formal art.

For those who have sought to redress the decorative as a neglected and undervalued term in art history, such projects, and the orthodox reading of Kant that supports them, are evidence of a philosophical bias. Seen to underlie both Classical theses on beauty and Kant’s writing of aesthetic experience, this bias continues that binary logic where form is privileged over matter, mind over body, and reason over sense. Again, the decorative is associated with the debased term in each paring. Kant’s notion of aesthetic experience as contemplative is typically understood to echo a Classical emphasis on reason or intellect and a re-centring of the rational subject. Furthermore Kant’s notion of aesthetic pleasure as ‘disinterested’ is collapsed with the Classical treatises framing the aesthetic as a pleasure purified of the sensuous.

It is this bias that is said to motivate another contemporary rereading of the decorative as the excess of ornament: a kind of material and content-burdened surplus sustained within the category of embellishment. Negatively associated with connotations of materiality, decadence and excess, the decorative is excluded from the recuperative projects that seek to secure ornament a legitimate place in the canon of formalist art. As those such as Jenny Anger have remarked, and my discussion of the charge of seduction in Classicism implied, such connotations have haunted the decorative and the ornamental’s reception since their initial appearance. But it is the decorative that emerges as that “cheap, repeatable, imitative and consumer oriented”

42 Brüdelin 204.

end of this tradition. And it is the decorative that is written as marginal in both a formal and social sense43. As Anger remarks (after Soulliou), the decorative has been associated with – and at times treated as surrogate for – three ‘peripheral’ cultural groups “the illegitimate strata of European society, women and exotic peoples”.44 From the equation of ornament and primitive drives in Adolph Loos’s Ornament and Crime, to Alberti’s analogy between a profusely decorated building and a woman whose makeup “excites numerous lustful men” the decorative and ornamental have been persistently equated with the base, the brute, and the sensuous disruption of order, both subjective and social45. It is this negative attitude to the decorative that more recent champions of ornament have sought to ameliorate. Though as Anger notes this recuperation of ornament has not meant a wholehearted embrace of the decorative as a wider category46.

For Anger, whose study concerns a decorative sensibility in the work of Paul Klee, what is missed in the revaluation of ornament at the expense of the decorative is some of the wider category’s most interesting insights. As noted in my summation of the treatment of the decorative in the Classical tradition, if acknowledged as lying at the interstice of form and matter, as additive and essential, and not simply capable of meeting aesthetic ideals, but also actively undermining them, the pleasures afforded by the decorative might prompt an alternative understanding of aesthetic experience47. The need for this revision becomes particularly apparent in relation to practices that seem to actively take up the potential of the decorative as a locus of structural ambiguity, where the usual binaries between form and matter, and aesthetic

43 Brüdelin 15. 44 Anger 15. 45 See Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatrice Columbia (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) 355. Further to this, as Gordon notes, in periods of aesthetic reform where a profusion of the decorative is evident, it has even been explicitly linked to ‘non normative’ sexuality. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Raffaelli railed against “the spread of sodomy encouraged by liberty fabrics” and Dr Gautian de Clérambaut’s insists on the frequency of cases in which women are pathologically aroused by decorative silks. In a period marked by the curious interstice of aesthetic theory and perceptual psychology, art, literature, philosophy and medicine makes links between decorative form and both mild and pathological synesthesia. Gordon, Ornament 229-230. 46 Anger notes, for example, the exclusion of decorative arts practices and feminist art practices that take the decorative and its association with femininity and domesticity as their focus from the Ornament and Abstraction exhibition. Anger 3. 47 For Anger, this is at least provisionally apparent in Kant’s treatment of the decorative frame as parergon: as that which vacillates between world of matter and form (though Anger’s position is largely aligned with that Jacques Derrida who foregrounds the same binary logic in Kant as that orthodox reading noted earlier).

pleasure and a subversive content, are exploited to full effect. This is the project of Rae Beth Gordon, who documents a counter-tradition in relation to nineteenth- century Naturalist and Decadent French literature and painting practices48. It is this counter-tradition and what it implies for an understanding of aesthetic experience that I now wish to outline by way of introduction to a discussion of the decorative in the practices of Kara Walker and Aubrey Beardsley.

1.4 A Decorative Counter-Tradition

Apparent in this counter-tradition (that Gordon suggests is evident in the practices of artists such as Gustave Moreau and Stéphane Mallarmé) is a mobilisation of the decorative that seizes on its operation as a mobile and ambivalent form: one not simply attached to a subversive content but also apt for its articulation. In other words, this tradition warrants the recognition that the decorative’s persistent association with a critical content, antagonistic to reigning social norms or ideals, is not simply incidental. Instead it points to the means by which the decorative might be in its very form and structure potentially critical and subversive.

As Gordon highlights, such practices do in fact often combine decorative and ornamental forms and materials with a content opposed to the norms and ideals of the culture in which they occur. This bears on the kind of engagements with the bodily and explicit that I will elaborate in Chapters Two and Three. In this regard, such practices often make special use of the decorative’s additive function, exploiting its peripheral status to speak of that which might otherwise be excluded from the area of central focus. But it is not simply this operation at the margins that defines such practices. It is also their creative use of the very principles that constitute the decorative as a formal and material device.

With regard to the formal structure of the decorative, those definitional properties noted earlier – such as its capacity to fill, frame and link, and its structure as that which covers a surface or ground – are mobilised in means that are not simply consistent with the objective properties of classical beauty, but also actively

48 See Gordon, Ornament and Rae Beth Gordon, “Aboli Bibelot? The Influence of the Decorative Arts on Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Moureau,” Art Journal 45. 2 (Summer, 1985): 105-112.

undermine those properties. Where ornament might be figured to complete an object or ground, and might consist in properties such as symmetry, clarity, proportion etc, in the practices within this tradition, such motifs are applied to confuse and create a dissymmetry, adding a sense of ambiguity disruptive of visual cohesion.

In this disruption, the properties that define decoration and ornament and circumscribe the prescriptions for their proper usage reverse their operations. Where one might identify a language of decorative and ornamental motifs, in this tradition such motifs are applied outside of the rules of the classically specified syntax. No longer operative as peripheral, the decorative becomes central and articulative in such works. Rather than operating as flat veil applied to surface, decorative surfaces operate as a trompe l’oeil “that always threaten to overwhelm the distinction between figure and ground, presence and void”49. Similarly, within such practices, decorative elements no longer simply adorn the ‘illustrative’ aspects of the image in the interest of embellishment, but instead, in their profuse and precise usage, interrupt that which illustrates. Not restricted to the purely abstract and not confined to a purely mimetic function, the decorative plays between both operations: moving between figuration and abstraction, perspectival depth and flatness of surface.

As the French art historian H. Mayeux noted of the decorative in 1885, decorative forms tend to operate around voids of space. “[I]n architecture as well as in furniture, painting or bronze” suggests Mayeux, “a given assemblage of decorative accessories, an ornate frame covered with figures, chimera, garlands, all… serve to valorise an empty medallion”50 [See for example, Figure 1.1]. In the tradition Gordon articulates the decorative’s operation around voids of space in the context of decorative arts (as in the instance of horror vaccui and empty cartouches) remains determinative even when removed from this context and placed in that of visual arts and literature. Here decorative and ornamental forms highlight the void as much as they cover it: veil as much as they reveal or point to this determinative emptiness.

49 Gordon, “Aboli” 109. 50 Gordon, “Aboli” 109.

So too is the assumed figure-ground relationship of the decorative complicated in such works. As noted in my introduction to the decorative, its forms and materials are presumed to operate as figures, applied to a given ground or object. But as the phenomenon of the counter-change ornament suggests, the decorative can also prompt a figure-ground reversibility. In counter-change ornaments white design sits on black background, though the two forms imperceptibly reverse their roles, oscillating ceaselessly [Fig.1.2]. In the practices Gordon attends to, this complication “where figure no longer enjoys primacy over the ground and the eye is made to consider a field more complex in its interrelations” is taken up to notable effect. As noted in writings on architecture, the potential for figure-ground reversibility can also take place with regard to placement and scale. Here, “what had been previously perceived as a figure or event at a superior scale becomes the background or context of a new figure even lower down the scale”. As Criticos suggests “this shift of perspective might explain why the same object may appear both as ornament and as ornate, and why an ornament of any type can be treated as a centre of interest with its supporting object as background, and as a marginal element, subordinated to a higher centre represented by the same object”51. This exploitation of figure- ground interrelationships is, for Gordon, evident in practices such as Moreau’s paintings whereby heavily ornamented grounds rival the central figures in size and interest. Similarly in Mallarmé’s poems central motifs are “highlighted and surrounded by a myriad of decorative forms in the décor and in the intricate and repetitive sonorities of the poem’s language” that effect the “disappearance” of the central object itself52.

Again what is suggested by Gordon’s study is the notion of decorative forms and materials as mobile and inherently ambiguous in their structure. And within this particular tradition of the decorative’s usage a range of oppositions – such as periphery and centre, flatness and depth, emptiness and that which fills or covers, and again form and matter (as well as form and content) are held in suspension. As both potentially complicit in the properties of Classical beauty, and a site where these properties can be persistently undermined, the pleasures of the decorative are

51 Michaela Criticos, “The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament,” New Europe College Yearbook (2004), 1st July 2008 52 Gordon, “Aboli” 109.

difficult to frame with reference to objective accounts. But rather than negating their status as aesthetic, their indivisibility from the operation of pleasure necessitates an alternative understanding of their functioning.

1.5 The Decorative as ‘Free Form’

As I have discussed in relation to the definitional split between ornament and decoration, the Kantian account of aesthetic experience might be viewed as equally ineffective in accounting for this tradition. Ineffective that is, if it is taken as another instance of a logocentric bias evident in Classical accounts of beauty, governed by a binary logic where matter is permanently subordinated to form. So too if Kant’s treatment of aesthetic pleasure as purely contemplative is reduced to a privileging of reason over sense, understood as a “pleasure purified of its sensuous or corporeal support”53. If Kant’s writing of aesthetic experience is deemed complicit with the aesthetic ideals of Classicism on this basis, the kind of practices I am outlining here that undermine such ideals cannot be said to be productive of a properly aesthetic pleasure. If reduced to a binary logic were “[o]ne of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically etc.), or has the upper hand”54, the notion of the decorative as interstitial or as traversing binaries, cannot be accounted for.

In reapproaching the pleasures of the decorative as an ambivalent form, and as a place where ordinary hierarchies are suspended, an alternative reading of Kant, as informed by Jacques Rancière might be instructive. This reading is also implied by Iversen’s comments on aesthetic experience earlier. Divorcing Kant’s notion of form from that evident in the Classical account, Rancière suggests that Kant’s treatment of form as ‘free’ is distinct. As Rancière insists “the chief property of aesthetic form” as it appears in Kant’s thought “is its unavailability. Aesthetic judgment is referred to a form that is precisely not conceptual form imposing its law on the manifold of sensation. The beautiful is beautiful as such to the extent that it is neither an object of cognition, subjecting sensation to the law of understanding, nor an object of desire,

53 Joan Copjec, “Pure Pleasure,” Umbra: A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1999): 5. 54 Jacques Derrida in Fred Orton, “On B#e#i#n#g Bent ‘Blue’ (Second State): An Introduction to Jacques Derrida/ A Footnote on Jasper Johns,” Oxford Art Journal 12.1 (1989): 36.

subjecting reason to the anarchy of sensations”55. In this sense aesthetic experience is not purely cognitive, and hence divorced from sensation, but is a place where the binary that opposes such categories collapses. As Rancière suggests, it is “this unavailability of the object with respect to any power of cognition or desire [that] allows the subject to feel an experience of autonomy, a ‘free play’ of the faculties”, and not an autonomy of the aesthetic object as is usually assumed and is evident in the orthodox reading of Kant56.

Here, the disinterested pleasure of decorative beauty is produced not by “the effectuation of any concept. But rather… the pure correlative of a gaze that suspends all relations of knowledge or interest in an object”57. Rather than a purely intellectual or idealised pleasure, beauty is “the experience of a specific sensorium cancelling the oppositions of understanding and sensibility, form and matter, activity and passivity”58. By these terms, beauty pertains to an experience where the usual hierarchies that structure everyday experience are suspended. It is in lieu of this ‘unavailability’ that beauty’s pleasure is distinct from everyday utilitarian pleasures, satisfactions of human need or a desire that would simply appropriate the aesthetic object. It is also on this basis that Kant’s notion of aesthetic pleasure may be distinguished from that attributed to beauty in the tradition of Classicism.

Insofar as what produces this pleasure is ambiguity of form or conceptual opacity and a suspension of binaries, this treatment of the aesthetic is apt for making sense of the kind of pleasures found in the alternative thinking of the decorative just discussed. I will return to the notion of the aesthetic as engaging a certain ‘unavailability’ of form in Chapter 4. Presently I wish to return to the practice of Walker to situate her specific use of the decorative, and the pleasures it facilitates in relation to the debates I have outlined.

55 Jacques Ranciére, “The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two Readings of Kant and Their Political Significance,” Radical Philosophy 126 (July/ August, 2004): 9. 56 Ranciére, “The Sublime” 9. 57 Rancière quoted in Solange Guénoun, James H. Kavanagh, Roxanne Lapidus, “Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement,” SubStance 29.2, Issue 92 (2000): 21. 58 Rancière, “The Sublime” 12.

1.6 Kara Walker: Aestheticising the Unworthy

The work of Walker is no stranger to accusations of seduction or ill intent. Read by an older generation of African-American artists and activists such as Bette Saare, bell hooks and Howerdena Pindel, Walker’s ‘base purpose’ is seen to be her “catering to the bestial fantasies about blacks created by white supremacy and racism”59, fantasies already deemed seductive in that they play to the “consciousness of the dominant class”60. Nowhere in the literature on Walker is it explicitly asserted that it is her use of a decorative sensibility that is hazardous. But insofar as discussions of her practice suggest the misuse of beauty and aesthetic pleasure, detractors find her forms dangerous, and supporters find her work effective by the same terms. To the extent that Walker is understood to utilise a formal mechanism to seduce viewers into complicity or confrontation with the unpalatable she is planted firmly within this tradition.

In many of the critical responses to Walker’s work are the same accusations of the inappropriate aestheticisation of unworthy images, which are familiar from discussions of the decorative in Classical accounts. For those critical of Walker’s practice, there is a sense that her work has transgressed the presumed limits of the aesthetic’s sound usage, granting value to impoverished representations that are undeserving of circulation, let alone beautification. In instances of praise, Walker is viewed as providing a specialised hook for the enticement of her audiences. As Marion Ackerman has noted of Walker’s aesthetic strategy, within her work “form is a snare”61. It seems however that what occurs after this enticement or ensnarement is heavily contested, and discussion of how this ‘snare’ might operate has been largely neglected.

Exactly what is so enticing and confronting about Walker’s work is evident in her major tableau Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life”/ See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from

59 Pindel quoted in Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs, “Reading Black Through White in the Work of Kara Walker,” Art History 26.3 (June 2003) 430. 60 Corris 430. 61 Marion Ackerman, “Snared By Form,” Kara Walker, ed. Ariane Grigoteit and Friedhelm Hütte, trans. Susanne Hofmann and Stephen Richards (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Bank AG, 2002) 72.

black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, and Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause (1997, [Fig. 1.3]). Undertaken as part of her solo show “no place [like home]” at the Walker Centre of Art, Minneapolis in 1997, this large scale work makes reference to two significant historical American paintings. The first is Eastman Johnson’s genre painting Old Kentucky Home of 1859 [Fig. 1.4]. Depicting a harmonious image of antebellum rural life, Eastman’s painting depicts a scene where idle and leisurely slaves relax around their dilapidated quarters. From this work, Walker borrows a number of subjects, such as the mother and child figures dancing, the arrival of a well-groomed hoop skirted lady to the right of the scene, and the two figures perched on a deteriorating eave. Walker’s version of this scene, however, is far less harmonious and idyllic in its content. Constituting what Philip Verge suggests “exposes the other side of (Johnson’s) smoke-and-mirror image”, Walker’s figures on the roof are two young women in a naked brawl, and all around ‘the quarters’ in Walker’s vignette are frenzied activities62. In Walker’s imagining of the ‘Old Home’ a decapitated boy runs with the head of a decapitated chicken, a bongo player plays beside a witch doctor waving bones in the air, a watermelon hatches a baby and an unaware male figure is shown about to be penetrated through a key hole by two hoop skirted women arriving to the right of the scene. In the midst of this activity the dancing mother and child – that in Eastman’s painting added to the sense of homely and joyous slave life – takes on a more sinister tone. Adding to its perverse context, the fact that the mother holds behind her back what appears to be an ice pick, makes it clear that the mood of Walker’s scene deviates considerably from the painting it refers to.

But such subjects are not what are immediately discerned when confronted by this work. The intricacies that unsettle in Walker’s tableaux often unfold upon closer and more concentrated inspection. In the first instance of viewing, what the viewer is confronted with is its peculiar and peculiarly beautiful form. The silhouette as medium of stark reduction and precise delineation is the singular means by which figures are both made recognisable and allusive. In this manner, details of hair and dress, suggestions of landscape indicators of race, and more gruesome elements are given the same treatment. From rich Spanish Moss foliage that frames the figures, to

62 Phillip Vergne, “The Black Saint is the Sinner Lady,” Kara Walker : My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Kara Walker et. al (Walker Art Centre: Minneapolis, 2007) 16.

billowing skirts by which the white ladies are identified, from the partly obscured sickle moon surrounded by cloud that gives the scene a dreamy and romantic quality, to piles of shit and pools of vomit that punctuate her strange landscapes: all are rendered in cut black paper.

That Walker simply reuses the silhouette (to illustrate stereotypes or ignoble scenes) is an idea implicit in much of the literature regarding her practice. Her figures however are not simply descriptive of certain caricatures, types or scenarios, but are fluid and aestheticised, indistinct and evocative in their representation. Here, as elsewhere in Walker’s work, the silhouette form, historically associated with both sentimental portraiture and scientific (specifically physiognomic) illustration, takes a slippery turn. Citing figures and scenes while both exceeding and withholding in their representation, Walker’s silhouettes hover somewhere between the unrecognisable and “sheer recognisability”63. The potential for this use of the silhouette medium lies in its already contradictory position as both lucid in its delineation, and operative around holes in vision. With reference to the terminology apparent in objective accounts of Classical beauty, it might be seen to consist in both clarity and an inherent ambiguity, and this potential is exploited in Walker’s work. As Wagner notes, “in Walker’s hands the very idea of the silhouette portrait begins to leak from its most vital and volatile points… (I)t still keeps alive the metaphorics of clarity and simplicity while being anything but”64. Far from its origins in “prejudicial tasks of description, illustration and identification” Walker exploits its other potentiality, as a form that “speaks of an economical language of substitution and desire” and in the construction of this language a decorative aesthetic plays an essential part65.

Just how significantly Walker’s aesthetic departs from description, documentary illustration and the American cultural references she is typically reduced to is evident in relation to her second reference point in this work, the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama (of 1893). Like this, America’s largest painting, Slavery! Slavery! was installed at the Walker Centre within a circular room, with its loose narrative roughly grouped

63 Anne M. Wagner, “Kara Walker: The Black White Relation,” Kara Walker: Narratives 95. 64 Wagner 95. 65 Wagner 94.

around three central vignettes, broken only by the room’s entrance [Fig. 1.5]. Walker’s elaborate titling of Slavery! Slavery! also makes reference to the Panorama: those large scale works popular in the nineteenth-century, that like the cyclorama were designed to provide an all-encompassing and immersive view of a notable historical subject or event. But where both the cyclorama and the panorama suggest a ‘view all’ (that bespeaks the term panorama’s etymological origins), Walker’s panoramic ‘journey’ eschews the illusionism to which panoramas sought to construct. Figural and abstracted, beautiful and disturbing, Walker’s panoramic scene is more difficult to locate oneself in relation to, and again, decorative form is at the centre of this effect.

Consistent with the potential of the silhouette medium, but also in excess of its descriptive function, Walker’s work involves “the flattening, [and] the dramatic simplification or complication of organic forms in defiance of nature” familiar from my earlier definition of ornament. Curlicues, volutes and arabesque type motifs make up her repertoire of forms. So too do abstracted versions of natural/ plant details and suggestions of fabric directed to decorative as well as illustrative ends. Just as Gordon foregrounds in her discussion of decorative practices, in Walker’s imagery, emptiness is the determinative structure around which decorative and ornamental detail turns. By these terms her silhouetted figures are structurally akin to the empty medallions noted earlier by Mayeux.

There is also a strong figure-ground ambiguity in Walker’s work. In installation her flat and abstracted figures float amidst extensive wall space. Where some landscape details construct the illusion of depth (such as the scale and placement of distant townships or estates around a horizon point in Slavery! Slavery!), others (such as the large areas of Spanish moss or looming moon in the same work) undo a clear sense of perspective. Large areas of stark white empty space also flatten out her scenes. As Ackerman notes, “there are no horizontals to stabilize the composition, nor verticals to anchor the figures down”66. In denser areas it is difficult to distinguish figure from ground, as the negative space surrounding figures is activated. And in such areas her

66 Ackermann, 71-72.

installations work in a manner that resembles a counter-change ornamental structure with their encouragement of perceptual play.

Apparent in Walker’s work is a mobility and ambiguity of form made available by her specific use of the silhouette, and echoed in her installation’s compositions. Her tableaux make use of a grammar of ornamental and decorative forms within or against the Neo-Classical and Modern space of the galleries in which she exhibits. In this sense they are both decorative and ornamental in their individuated form, and operate as decoration and ornament in relation to gallery walls they are applied to. Making a certain correlation between a critical site specificity and the decorative as determined by its fixed place, Walker’s work brings a decorative aesthetic together with the legacy of radical conceptual practices usually associated with an anti- aesthetic stance. As Philippe Vergne noted recently, however, this conceptual and site-specific practice does not occur in Walker’s practice at the expense of visual pleasure67.

In the works The Emancipation Approximation at the Carnegie International (1999- 2000 [Fig.1.6]) and the later remix of this project An Abbreviated Emancipation (from The Emancipation Approximation), at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbour (2002 [Fig.1.7]), Walker’s cut paper forms float within spaces punctuated by the columns and fixtures of the gallery space. The work’s title and subject matter concerns the provisional, approximate and incomplete nature of emancipation promised by Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ of 1862 and 1863. Consisting of black and white figures upon grey backgrounds, Walker represents a scene in which symbols from African-American folk tales (such as the rabbit and fox from the Uncle Rebus tales), and symbols from Colonial and Classical mythology (such the laurel wreath, cupids and swans from the myth of Leda) are resituated amidst scenes of sex, murder and scatology. Again, Walker’s affront to such symbolism is not simply by way of content (that I will discuss in further detail in Chapter Two). Counter posing a decorative profusion with the Classical architecture of the gallery space, Walker’s weightless and conspicuous Rorschach

67 See Vergne.

forms stage an attack on both “the grand (Neo-Classical) architecture of antebellum Southern plantations”68 and the hypocrisy of “Classical ideals” of the “eighteenth-century American civilization” that were housed therein69.

What is suggested by Walker’s use of the decorative is what can be said of the practices outlined by Gordon. For here, the decorative similarly appears as a mobile and ambiguous form. As per the suspicions the decorative has generated historically, in Walker’s practice, decorative form appears in proximity to a content clearly in conflict with the ideals of Classicism. In Walker’s mobilisation of the decorative, niceties cannot be separated from the nastier of details (as I discuss further in relation to the grotesque and explicit in Chapter Two and Three). Flourishes may be of gruesome or grotesque content – such as the blood pouring from the neck of a suited male figure in World’s Exposition’s (1997 [Fig. 1.8]) or the slashed wrists of a leaping figure in the work Cut (1998, [Fig. 1.9]). In the fountain vignette that appears in Slavery! Slavery! multiple bodily excretions such as breast milk, piss, spit or vomit are featured, but they are aestheticised curlicue versions of excretions all the same. Appropriate to the statement noted in my introduction by Halley Harrisburg, decorative forms may be at the service of images representing a master sodomising a slave, but they continue to be remarked as beautiful and as granting an aesthetic pleasure all the same.

To simply separate decorative form from such grotesque and explicit imagery, (or to speak of its use of the ‘purely formal’ mechanism, simply appended to what is essential to the work) makes a distinction inappropriate to the way in which the decorative operates in Walker’s practice. No longer peripheral additive, the decorative form is not so readily distinguished from its object, subject matter, content or material application. Each skin is its own object, and the importance of negative space in her installations make even the gallery walls as much a part of the work as the individual silhouette’s. Not merely serving as adornment to the grittier, narrative driven content, the decorative is essential, central and constitutive in this work. It is the very means by which Walker’s content is made visible, and is not something retrospectively applied to it to make it easier for its audience to consume and enjoy.

68 Annette Dixon “Introduction,” Kara Walker: Pictures 11. 69 Dixon 19.

In this sense, the decorative in Walker’s work, as in the practices marked by Gordon, plays an articulative function. Visually pleasurable, seductive or alluring, but far from consisting in a purity of aesthetic form, Walker’s work also consists in a difficult and disruptive rendering of excess: bodily, sexual and pertaining to an unassimilable image of racial identity (as I will discuss in Chapters Two and Three).

In its mobilisation of decorative devices in conjunction with a sexually explicit and grotesque content, Walker’s work involves a very specific use of a decorative aesthetic, that cannot be accounted for by way of American historical references that her practice is typically discussed in relation to. It is by these terms that I wish to argue the work be read in relation to another practitioner, and another tradition to that in which it is usually situated. Walker’s deployment of a specific kind of decorative beauty, pivoting on the basis of an ambiguity of form, and in the service of a difficult and destabilizing content, aligns her with the figure of Aubrey Beardsley. Insofar as Beardsley is consistently positioned as an exemplar of Decadent Art, this returns my discussion to the historically specific ‘counter-tradition’ outlined by Gordon. While dislocated in terms of cultural and historical context, this aspect of Walker’s work has much in common with that of the fin-de-siecle illustrator, who might be similarly understood to engage the decorative in the rendering of subversive, and to his contemporaries, scandalous images.

1.7 Aubrey Beardsley: Decadent Aesthetics

As noted, Beardsley has been identified as the figure most representative of Victorian Decadence, though “[t]he exact nature of both the mentality and the representativeness… has remained, like so much of Decadence, rather more categorized than explicated”70. In relation to the decorative, it is precisely those qualities that I have outlined in Gordon’s counter-tradition that are understood to define a Decadent aesthetic. Signalled in part by a profusion of decoration and ornament, Decadent artists are understood to either exploit the decorative’s peripheral status to speak of that which would otherwise be repressed, or move its devices from margin to centre. As John Reed notes, Decadence inverts the

70 Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) v.

decorative’s traditional function as seemingly ‘inconsequential’ so that “what first appears merely ornament proves to be substantial to the image in much more significant ways”71. Similarly understood to exploit a conjunction of the decorative and a subversive content – such as exoticism and non-normative representations of gender and sexuality – Decadence has been consistently associated with the indulging of perverse pleasures. Often collapsed with the term ‘degeneracy’, Decadence is associated with a revelling in the very excesses and ambiguities that the Classical tradition nominated as the decorative’s potential vices.

The use of decoration to carry an otherwise excluded meaning or content in beautiful though ambiguous form is evident in Beardsley’s first large scale illustrative project, J.M. Dent’s publication of Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century text Morte Darthur (1893-1894). Beardsley is reported to have made up to 350 designs for this collection of Arthurian legends, though it was his borders, headpieces and illustrations that were used in the final publication. Each design was undertaken in stark black and white so as to better resemble woodcuts, despite the photomechanical printing process that was to be utilized to bring the costs of the publication down.

The significance of this project for Beardsley in cementing his reputation, and delineating his stance in relation to contemporary British art practices, was paramount. This was a favoured text of the Pre-Raphelite artists that Beardsley had admired. Its significance for artists such as William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones was its medieval ideals that might have been translated into its aesthetic treatment. Malory’s tales of knighthood, its treatment of the codes of chivalry and practice of courtly love provided for these artists the representation of ideals capable of urging humans “on to higher and nobler thoughts”72. For Burne-Jones, Malory’s text was, for this reason, “the book [that] was to mean more to him than any other”73.

If the potential for this project’s undertaking was to align Beardsley with the Pre- Raphelite Brotherhood, the completed project did quite the reverse. As Christopher Snodgrass has suggested, inherent in Beardsley’s approach to both illustrating and

71 John Reed, Decadent Style (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985) 222. 72 G.F Watts quoted in Snodgrass, Aubrey 250. 73 Penelope Fitzgerald quoted in Snodgrass, Aubrey 250.

decorating this text was an undermining of the work’s narrative, and the artistic and social ideals the book represented. This antagonism takes place on a number of fronts, all of which are of relevance to Beardsley’s particular use of a decorative aesthetic. The first concerns the decorative component’s relation to the text that it should have merely adorned.

As Snodgrass has noted, Beardsley rejected the Pre-Raphelite and specifically Morrisian principle of book design as a ‘total work’, by merely tacking designs onto the typography of the existing design74. As Morris wrote in The Ideal Book, “ornament… should form part of the page, should be part of the whole scheme of the book” and “in order to succeed, and to be ornament, it must submit to certain limitations” such as “fitness for use” 75. Here Morris’s views are consistent with Classical proscriptions for ornament and decoration’s use. Far from adding to the harmony and coherence of the book as a whole, however, Beardsley’s designs contained elements that contradicted aspects of text and disrupted its textual unity (such as the scandalous suggestion of sexual relationships between the knights, as I will elaborate in Chapter Three). And in terms of the formal qualities of the designs, where Beardsley utilised Morrisian aesthetic conventions, he also persistently undermined them.

As the title page headpiece in Morte Darthur illustrates, and Snodgrass has observed, Beardsley’s approach to book ornaments exhibit a horror vaccui approach to design that is largely indebted to Morris76 [Fig. 1.10]. Beardsley’s ornament complies, at least in part, with Morris’s recommendation that ornamental design exhibit “clearness of form and firmness of structure with the mystery which comes of abundance and a richness of detail”, and the repetition of elements that “prevent the eye wearing of repetition”77. But where Morris prescribed the use of elementary forms such as leafage, flowers, beasts and birds, Beardsley’s motifs in this publication also include a range of misshapen and ambiguous forms such as satyrs,

74 Snodgrass, Aubrey 250. 75 William Morris, “The Ideal Book,” The William Morris Internet Archive 10th Sept, 2008. 76 Christopher Snodgrass, “Bearsdley’s Oscillating Spaces: Play, Paradox, and the Grotesque,” Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Robert Langenfeld (Ann Arbour: UMI Research Press: 1989). 77 William Morris, “Textiles,” The William Morris Internet Archive 10 Sept, 2008

serpents and foliage that are part plant, part body (see for example the ‘pear’ border on La Beale Isoud at Joyous Guard (c. 1893 [Fig. 1.11]). In the title page headpiece, instead of delicate foliage and a harmonious interplay between natural forms evident in Morris’s book ornaments, in Beardsley’s hands, foliage becomes sharp, tangled and indefinable bramble.

Again, far from contributing to the book’s whole scheme, ornamental borders often usurp attention away from, and undermine, aspects of Malory’s text. In the title headpiece, the inclusion of knight figures within the ornamental design might have reaffirmed the notion of masculine strength, conquest, and chivalry, had the figures been shown either in harmony or in mastery of the natural ornamental elements. Instead Beardsley presents these figures as contorted: their limbs forced into uncomfortable and dislocating positions by the curvilinear though largely disorderly ornamental forms. Two knights in the centre are knock-kneed. These figures are stuck, overwhelmed, and broken by ornamental form. As Snodgrass suggests, such designs consist in an embellishment on “Morrisian and Burne-Jonesian conventions to a degree that makes them grotesque… displacing the entire recuperative effect of the conventions themselves”78. By these means Beardsley compromises the aesthetic and social ideals that the text represented for the Pre-Raphelites and late Victorian English dominant culture.

As I will discuss further in Chapters Two and Three, in Beardsley’s practice, just as is evident in Walker’s, there is a persistent engagement with both the grotesque and the sexually explicit. And again, the decorative provides a means, not simply of disguising or making pleasurable such content, it provides a structural means of articulating it. Again, this might be seen as a disruption of the usual opposition of decorative and illustrative or abstracted and mimetic elements apparent in definitions of the decorative and ornamental. This is made particularly evident in Beardsley’s

78 Snodgrass, Aubrey 253.

illustration for the Justin Huntly McCarthy poem At a Distance printed in The Daily Chronicle in 1895 [Fig. 1.12.]. Presented under the guise of “A Suggested Reform in Ballet Costume”79 the illustration features a figure, presumably a dancer, though she is immobile in her pose. In fact, the only part of the figure’s body that is available for view is her face, surrounded by a particularly ornate series of decorative details, mainly flower and foliage forms. Such forms both cover and delineate what appears to be a cloak veiling the figure beneath. It becomes apparent on closer inspection, however, that such details form not only a clothed feminine figure, but also a giant phallus, heavily decorated, but surprising and no doubt obscene to the readership of The Daily Chronicle all the same. Again, as discussed in relation to Walker, there is a difficulty in distinguishing between mimetic components, and those that simply decorate in this work. For example, where ivy leaves and small rosettes adorn the cloak from its base to its tip, specifically placed clusters articulate a foreskin. Elsewhere, rosettes around an empty black medallion double as a means of marking out a scrotum on the cloak’s base. The interchange of woman and phallus is not uncommon in Beardsley’s work (see for example the illustrations The Peacock Skirt for Salome, 1893 [Fig. 1. 13] and How Sir Tristam Drank of the Love Drink, c.1893 [Fig. 1.14]). What is remarkable about this work is the extent to which Beardsley succeeds in partly disguising a form for public distribution that is less phallic than penile, less symbolic than bodily.

Again, as I have argued in relation to Walker, the decorative here does not merely function as an inconsequential addition or adornment to the prurient form, so much as provide the means for its articulation. Beardsley’s work, much like Walker’s seizes on the structural potential of decorative form for ambiguity. Like Walker’s, Beardsley’s practice consists in modulations between decorative detail and stark voids, though his work shows a more dramatic oscillation between the logic of the empty medallion and rich horror vaccui at different points in his career. Evident in his individual illustrations is a similar movement between flatness and depth or abstracted weightless floating forms, and suggestions of perspective. In every sense, Beardsley’s imagery operates on the basis of a formal treatment that pivots on the

79 Snodgrass, Aubrey 70.

same kind of ambivalence and suspension of binaries that I have already discussed in relation to Walker.

As noted in my introduction Walker’s work consists in the negotiation of – in her words – a balance between seemingly opposed operations, in a singular space of representation. Beardsley’s images can, and have been persistently framed, as negotiating that same balance, operating “between explicitness and suggestion, between harmony and discord, between tradition and innovation, between story and image”80 and between the beautiful and something ‘ugly or ambiguous’. Like Walker’s practice, Beardsley’s work has been described as participating in a duplicitous seduction, with the understanding that “the mellifluous style of Beardsley’s drawings has seduced countless viewers into misreading or overlooking altogether their outrageous details”81. Precisely what is so outrageous in terms of their thematic engagement will be discussed further in Chapters Two and Three.

Again, it is the decorative as a seductive and mobile aesthetic device, deployed to articulate a subversive content, that is at the centre of such a strategy. Both Walker and Beardsley utilise a decorative aesthetic – beautiful, and affording an aesthetic pleasure – to critical ends. While it might be appropriate to name this aesthetic dimension by way of its consistency with Classical ideals, as per objective accounts of beauty, or a purity of form (as Walker herself seems to), both practices persistently undermine such ideals and complicate the notion of pure form. On this basis, the work necessitates a revision of the way the pleasures of aesthetic experience are typically conceived. As evidenced in both artists’ work, and the counter-tradition I have situated them in relation to, the decorative as aesthetic device suggests a much more dynamic operation, and one that might instead be understood in terms of ‘free form’ evident in Rancière’s reading of Kant.

As the first instance of what we enjoy in Walker’s practice, the decorative as free form is apt to bring enjoyment of a more immoderate nature. And it is the other side of this immoderate enjoyment, that is, that associated with a destabilising affect, that I will now discuss.

80 Snodgrass, Aubrey 17. 81 Snodgrass, Aubrey 27.

2. The Grotesque

In the previous chapter my attention was on that part of Walker and Beardsley’s practices understood to grant aesthetic pleasure. In this chapter I will begin to examine the form and content of their work that is associated with a more difficult and destabilising affect. I am specifically concerned with that which, in the existing literature on both artists’ practices, has been named by the term ‘grotesque’.

In its contemporary manifestation, the grotesque is associated with one extreme of experience: that of horror or disgust, and opposed to the aesthetic of beauty on this basis1. More broadly, however, the grotesque emerges as a heterogenous category whose historical catalogue of forms – marked by contradiction and paradox – suggest more than this one sided operation. Rather than being opposed to the decorative tradition marked out in the previous chapter, the term emerges within this tradition as a sub-category of ornamental form. Here and beyond, the grotesque, like the decorative, emerges as a site of co-presence of “the normative, fully formed, ‘high’ ideal, and the abnormal, unformed, degenerate, ‘low’ or material’”2. As such it provides another term of reference for accounting for what is elsewhere posed as exclusive poles within both artists’ work.

In illustrating this notion I will discuss two central discourses of the grotesque: firstly the ornamental grotesque that I will examine primarily in relation to Beardsley’s work; and secondly, the grotesque as ‘carnivalesque’ and ‘abject’ that accounts for its contemporary resonance and is of relevance to Walker’s practice. My intention in explicating both discourses is not simply to highlight the changing meaning of the term ‘grotesque’ in the visual arts, but also to establish what is consistent in both instances. As I will argue, both moments of the grotesque consist in a play on the capacities of form in the representation of a challenging and destabilising image of the body.

1 In Kant’s writing on aesthetic experience,“(t)hat which excites disgust, cannot be represented without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction”. While this treatment of disgust is often absent from discussions of the grotesque, it often informs their claims. Immanuel Kant quoted in Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago, Illinois: Open Court, 2003) 80. 2 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982) 9.

2.1 The Grotesque: An Introduction

“Beardsley views with vague affright/Frankensteins in black and white” Anonymous author in weekly newspaper verse, 18943

“[People are] mostly grotesque, and I represent them as I see them” Aubrey Beardsley4

“I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing” Aubrey Beardsley to The Idler, March 18975

As most commentators on the life and work of Aubrey Beardsley note, the importance of the grotesque in his oeuvre finds evidential support not just in his illustrations, but also in the artist’s own statements. As most accounts have seized upon, Beardsley claimed an interest in the grotesque as a mode by which he represented the world, but he also invoked the term with reference to his self-image, as indicated by the above quote from The Idler of 1897. Much has been made of the latter, producing endless speculations on the notion of Beardsley as “frail, all skin and bone, dreamer”6, preoccupied with his own mortality and the physical signs of suffering that afflicted him until his early death at age twenty-six. Certainly, Beardsley’s sickly life of tuberculosis has been a preoccupation for historians, many of whom dwell on the notion of the artist as acutely aware of his own immanence: made manifest in images of sickness, deformity and the shadow of death7.

3 Anonymous author quoted in Linda Gertner Zatlin, Bearsdley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 175. 4 Beardsley in Zatlin, Beardsley 175. 5 Beardsley quoted in Christopher Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 161. 6 Richard Whittington-Egan, “Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (Review),” Contemporary Review Aug (1998): 107. 7 Current in much of the material on the artist is an attempt to collapse the artist’s somewhat tragic and largely paradoxical life of scandal and his work. I would argue that much of the literature suggests a kind of feminisation of Beardsley, made by appeal to the artists immanence and bodily deterioration. Similarly, speculations on the artists sexuality and sexual relationships (i.e. as to whether Beardsley was heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual, or even having a sexual relationship with his sister Mabel) have contributed to a reading of his work foregrounded by the artists pathology of an unsatisfactory body of excess. What is suggested in a great deal of literature on the artists practice is the notion of the artist as ‘wound’.

In this regard the photographic portrait taken by Frederick Evans in 1895, in which Beardsley is understood to have posed as a gargoyle, stands as the iconic image of the artist, highlighting his distinctive profile, prominent nose, and sallow face and frame [Fig. 2.1]. His caricatured self-portraits similarly provide persuasive visual counterparts to the notion of Beardsley as grotesque dandy of an exaggerated or degenerate physicality, or what Beardsley scholar Chris Snodgrass has termed a “Dandy of the Grotesque” [See Fig. 2.2 & Fig. 2.3].8

When identifying the appearance of the grotesque in Beardsley’s illustrations accounts have focused on the recurrence of figures such as hermaphrodites, androgens, satyrs, Pierrots and a curious, repeated foetus figure. Reference is also made to the more general appearance of exaggerated, distorted or deformed forms throughout his body of work. In this regard, particular series such as Beardsley’s illustrations for the mini anthology of eighteenth-century wit Bon-Mots (1893 and 1894) are important examples9. As I will return to, however, examples of grotesquery abound everywhere in Beardsley’s art.

As noted in my introduction and in the previous chapter, such examples have been used in support of the notion that there are two opposing modes working within this artist’s practice: one granting an aesthetically pleasurable form, and the other closer to an ugly or unpalatable form and content. Seen to combine imagery belonging to a tradition of the beautiful, Beardsley’s work is also figured in relation to a destabilising content and form considered visually (and, at times, morally) abhorrent and potentially productive of disgust.

In a contemporary context, it is the second of these modes – i.e. that which destabilises and is seen to be opposed to the aesthetic experience of beauty – that is resonant with the word grotesque. As Robert Storr sought to address in the exhibition Disparities & Deformations: Our Grotesque (SITE Santa-Fe, 2005), in a contemporary context “we use the term [grotesque] carelessly… From a noun with a past it has become an adjective for whatever strikes someone in the moment as

8 Snodgrass, Aubrey 9 Illustrating Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan’s Bon Mots (London: JM Dent) published in 1893 and republished in1894.

aberrant or offensive”10. As Mary Russo notes, this usage is a product of the Modern period. During this time it became possible to speak not just of grotesque forms, but also of the grotesque as a “rather vague and mysterious category of ‘experience’”11. In a great deal of contemporary art criticism ‘the grotesque’ has come to signify the horrific and monstrous, and is opposed to the operation of beauty on this basis. As I will later discuss, in this sense, it is used to connote one extreme of representation, and as David Summer notes, an experience less vague and mysterious than “absolute”12.

As I wish to illustrate here, however – both in regard to Beardsley’s practice and beyond – the grotesque’s history composes a much more diverse field. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham examines in his historical study On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Literature and Art, in the visual and literary arts the term is better understood to name representations that are a site of contradiction13. Where a great deal of existing criticism on Beardsley often poses the grotesque as one pole in a paradoxical image, paradox is not something peculiar to Beardsley’s mobilisation of grotesquery. According to Harpham, paradox is the consistent feature understood to determine and define the grotesque’s various historical appearances. Historically the word has been applied to a bastardry, irregularity and confusion of categories, in which this trajectory of the anti-aesthetic or the anti beautiful is only one dimension14.

As Harpham notes, a survey of the forms of this tradition and their affect might lead to the conclusion that “grotesques have no consistent properties other than their own

10 Robert Storr, Disparities & Deformations: Our grotesque: The Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial : July 18, 2004-January 9, 2005 (Santa Fe, N.M: SITE Santa Fe, 2004) 12. 11 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Carnival and Theory (New York: Routledge Press, 1994) 7. 12 As David Summers notes in his Archeology of the Modern Grotesque, this application of ‘grotesque’, foregrounds the “hideous, frightful, revolting, monstrous or bone chilling” and the grotesque’s “atavistic ability to evoke feelings of naked terror or repugnance in us”. While resonant with its contemporary use, such applications bear little relation to the words origins insofar as they “connote (an) absoluteness of experience.” David Summers, “The Archeology of the Modern Grotesque,” Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S.Connelly (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003) 20. 13 Harpham.

14 I use the term anti-aesthetic here to signal practices and a critical position said to consists in a “critique of Western representation(s)”, and one which places "the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas… in question", as discussed further in chapter four. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) xv.

grotesqueness”, so diverse is the range of practices marked by the term15. And in this sense “the word”, insists Harpham, “designates a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language”16. Its very usage might be understood as a “defence against silence”17, or a categorical paralysis in the event of an overcrowded, contradictory or simply unexplainable image or text otherwise without stable categorisation. As a category it concerns a falling between categories, determined (as is the case in Beardsley’s grotesques) by contradictions, hybridity and indeterminacy.

Perhaps for this reason, many who have come to interrogate the grotesque as a (non) category have come to depend on a description of its affect. This means identifying the grotesque in terms of what it does to those who encounter it rather what it is. The key term applied to the grotesque’s unique affect is ambivalence. While placed on a continuum between the comic and fearful, any given grotesque is understood to engage both modes to a certain degree.

As Ruskin noted of its earliest examples, “the grotesque is, in almost all cases, composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful…[but] there are hardly any examples which do not in some degree combine both elements”18. On the one hand, grotesque forms are understood to afford a pleasure by way of that which compels, invokes curiosity, and dazzles. On the other they are seen to prompt a painful response to the monstrous, the sinister, the nightmarish and the demonic. As Wolfgang Kayser dramatically states in his discussion of the historical grotesque, in the latter instance of its affect, the grotesque is a site of collapse “of realms which we know to be separated”, signalled by “the abolition of the law of statics, the loss of identity, the distortion of ‘natural’ size and shape”19. For Kayser, the effect of the grotesque is great, threatening “the destruction of personality, and the fragmentation of the historical order”20. But in almost all other historical cases, the grotesque is the site where the comic and nightmarish, the pleasurable and painful combine or collude: where laughter becomes satanic (Baudelaire) and the ugly lures and compels

15 Harpham 3. 16 Harpham 3 17 Harpham 8-9. 18 John Ruskin Harpham 37. 19 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Trans. by Ulrich Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) 185 20 Kayser 185.

(Vitruvius, Ruskin and Hugo). As Harpham claims, the field of the grotesque is the site of a “civil war of attraction and repulsion”21.

It is precisely because the grotesque is said to be marked by a paradoxical “affinity/ antagonism… of the normative, fully formed, ‘high’ ideal, and the abnormal, unformed, degenerate, ‘low’ or material’”22 that its affect is deemed to be ambivalence. Again, like the tradition outlined in the previous chapter, it might be seen as a site where the usual hierarchies (such as that between ideal form and a material ‘low’) or boundary distinctions are suspended. And in this sense the grotesque might be similarly judged by the terms of an unavailability: being ‘just outside the reach of language’, as noted by Harpham earlier. In this regard its pleasures and its destabilising content might be viewed in relation to the free form articulated in relation to the decorative counter tradition that I have previously discussed.

In fact, the term originates within the decorative tradition as a sub-category of ornamental form. In this tradition as elsewhere, it is, as Frances Connelly suggests, as though “the grotesque is defined by what it does to boundaries, transgressing, merging, overflowing, and destabilising them”23. It is in relation to the representation of the body, however, that this destabilising of boundaries takes place. Each moment of the grotesque seems to depend upon a certain play on the capacities of form in the representation of a difficult or transgressive body. It is in relation to the ornamental grotesque that this play becomes first evident. And it is this tradition and its relevance to the work of Beardsley’s practice that I will now discuss.

2.2 The Ornamental Grotesque: Impossible Bodies in Aestheticised Form

The term ‘grotesque’ was first coined to name and categorise the imagery found in fresco’s excavated in the 1500s that were later identified to be part of the Emperor Nero’s palace, the Domus Aurea [Fig.2. 4]. By way of a misconception, la grottesca/

21 Harpham 9. 22 Harpham 9. 23 Frances Connelly “Introduction,” Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003) 4.

grotessco was used to denote the curious though reasonably innocuous decorative forms that covered what was first understood as a ‘grotto’ (or cave) due to its sunken positioning below ground level. As Harpham notes, such a misnomer has come to be conceived as “a mistake pregnant with truth”24. For while the designs were not made to be underground as such, their naming (from the Latin word grotta, and bearing a relationship to the Latin crupta or ‘crypt’) connotes ideas of the “underground, …burial, and secrecy”, which grotesque forms in both discourses I will discuss here have been understood in relation to25.

With the development of grotteschi and other ornamental styles both indebted to and independent of this style, the term was gradually expanded to accommodate diverse decorative and ornamental practices such as German scrollwork in the Gothic period, and the detailing of Raphael’s Vatican Loggias design in the Renaissance [Fig. 2.5]. It was also used to retrospectively name and make sense of designs of an emblematic nature found on artefacts from various periods that seemed to exhibit a comparable fluidity and hybridity of form. The term was then applied to all kinds of exotic decorative patterns from those of Turkish textiles to chinoiserie. In this sense it was used to name traditions of image making whose forms of representation were initially unassimilable to a European audience. These latter examples of grotesquery are distinct insofar as they are in many cases entirely abstract. They were named grotesque because of their perceived deformation of European standards of culture and representation.

The designation of the grotesque as that which is ‘foreign’, as was the case in these latter instances, is not altogether misleading. Certainly within European/Western modes of grotesquery, the familiar made foreign or strange is a legitimate phrase of reference. But, as noted earlier, what is at the centre of this estrangement (in all cases other than ‘ethnic grotesques’) is the representation of a foreign or difficult to name body. As I have suggested, the grotesque more broadly can be conceived as consisting in a play on the capacities of form to represent a body of excess. In

24 Harpham 27. 25 Harpham 27.

instances of the ornamental grotesque this engagement takes place within the forms, materials and techniques of the decorative outlined in Chapter One.

Whether combinatory or simply aberrant, ornamental grotesques demonstrate a persistent engagement with bodies difficult to name26. Often, as in the ornamental grotesques of Signorelli, or Agostino Veneziano or Raphael’s Vatican Loggia, dense and complex compositions designed to fill blank grounds underscore the estranging effect of such form. Crowded compositions, where it is difficult to discern any given part amidst a complex overall design, are common to a great many ornamental instances named grotesque.

Even without such crowded display, however, the forms or figures of the ornamental grotesque present strange and estranging configurations. While there are countless examples of combinatory grotesques within this tradition, the engravings of Christoph Jamnitzer demonstrate the peculiar nature of such conflations of parts, outside the context of a given decorative context. In fact Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch series of 1610 is understood as a highpoint of the “autonomy of the

26 Connelly notes three modes of the grotesque: combinatory, that is “combin(ing) unlike things in order to challenge established realities or construct new ones”, aberrant, that “deform or decompose things”, and metamorphic, “morphing from one thing to another’. I have not discussed the third of these modes as it seems difficult to distinguish a combinatory logic from a metaphoric one in the static illustrations of Beardsley or the visual arts more broadly. The term ‘metamorphic’ seems more apt to the literature or time based arts. Connelly 2.

ornamental motif of the grotesque”27. Hybridising plant, animal, human and ornamental detail Jamnizter’s grotesques are placed in landscapes and scenes suggestive of narrative, in way akin to Beardsley’s placement of grotesques in his illustrations.

In the untitled ornamental engraving Figure 2.6 (1610), two figures face each other in apparent dialogue. Both consisting of bodies made of ornamental scrolls, the figure on the right has a human head and arms. The figure on the left is composed of a more monstrous assembly of parts. The figure’s ‘jaw’ is both dog and boar-like – its elongated nose and mouth forming a snout with tusks. Above this snout, a second, more human, face can be discerned. Its spectacles and moustache sit atop its animal- like lower half. At the top of its head its crown extends, worm-like, echoing the curve of the figure’s body and adorned with curlicues and wings. Below, its scrolled trunk stretches to form a curvilinear tail. Upon this tail another rat-like figure sits. At the tail’s tip is a hairy, unnameable form that vaguely resembles another face. The creature stands on a cloven foot, and a crutch also supports the top half of its body. The creature also sports a lobster claw that juts out from its abdomen. In the claw is a

27 Rainald Franz, “The Picture Becomes Ornament,” Ornament and Abstraction: The Dialogue Between Non-Western, Modern and Contemporary Art, ed. Marcus Brüdelin (New Haven: Fondation Beyeler and Yale University Press, 2001) 198.

fish or eel creature, blowing smoke or spitting liquid that winds backwards to a receding point.

Jamnitzer’s engravings feature baffling bodies often made entirely of decorative motifs. In other grotesque ornamental engravings of the same period – such as that by Lucas Kilian (1630) [Fig. 2.7]) or Jan Lutma the Elder’s Auricular style (1610 [Fig. 2.8] – this process is inverted. Here the scrollwork of cartouches becomes thick, fleshy and organic enough to suggest a bodily dimension to the ornament itself. In both instances ornament becomes figurative, though it consists in a figure that is difficult to identify or name. In its ornamental instance, the “strange kind of shapely shapelessness” that signals the grotesque’s appearance seems to consist in this play in and around the figurative potential of form and its limits28.

It is the blend of the fantastic with a “technique of the most scrupulous illusionistic accuracy”29, or a certain play between figuration and abstraction, that is said to be this early grotesque’s technical, and, I would argue, conceptual innovation. And it is the compelling nature of this play on creation and mimesis that has drawn the grotesque’s fiercest criticism, particularly in the discourse of Classicism. As noted in the previous chapter, in Classical discourse it is a scepticism towards something so seductive or sensuous that it is capable of disrupting reason and order that generates suspicion of the decorative: testimony to its position as interstitial between form and matter. Historical responses to the ornamental grotesque demonstrate an anxiety towards this potential with particular ferocity. The criticisms cited in the previous chapter by Vitruvius were in fact directed at the designs in Nero’s palace that bespeak the grotesque’s origins. Here Vitruvius accuses such work of revelling in ‘falsehoods’ in its hybridisation of animal, plant, human and other things that ‘could never be’.

In Vitruvius’s tirade, such ornamental grotesques are dangerous to the extent that they pose a fantastic though compelling configuration as though it might be possible in reality. Again there is a sense that their particular assembly of parts outside of the proscribed syntax of decorative and ornamental forms is in conflict with the notion of

28 Bernard of Clairvaux in Harpham 39. 29 Harpham 30.

a coherent, united and ordered whole. Its threat is not simply gauged in relation to an aesthetic ideal, but also a social one. Insofar as this tradition has marked out the criteria of beauty with analogous reference to a body whose parts “resemble one another” and whose “order, harmony, proportion, i.e., unity [is] produced by the resemblance”, it is not difficult to see how the ornamental grotesque deviates from the Classical and in that context is perceived as threatening.

2.3 Aubrey Beardsley: Grotesque Dandy or Dandy of the Grotesque30

It is in relation to this tradition and its threatening aspect that I now wish to return to the work of Beardsley. For just as in these examples of the ornamental grotesque, Beardsley’s art presents a similar affront to the Classical body, but one made in and through decorative and ornamental form. I will begin with what constitutes for most writers on his work, Beardsley’s most explicitly grotesque illustrations noted earlier: his illustrations for the mini anthology of eighteenth-century wit Bon-Mots (1893 and 1894).

Commissioned by J.M. Dent and undertaken at the same time that Beardsley produced Dent’s Morte Darthur project (discussed in the previous chapter), this calligraphic series of illustrations includes a host of characters of misshapen physicality that is certainly at home in the tradition of the grotesque. Beardsley is reported to have completed sixty of these illustrations in just ten days. For Brian Reade they stand as a “juvenile” and “burlesque” strand of Beardsley’s practice31. Their minimal line and style represent a freer approach to working than the dense and carefully laboured Morte Darthur illustrations that were undertaken at the same time. As noted in the previous chapter, however, the Morte Darthur illustrations similarly include misshapen and ambiguous body forms, so there are certainly crossovers with regard to both series’ grotesque content.

30 Snodgrass, Aubrey. 31 Brian Reade, “Beardsley Remounted,” Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Robert Langenfeld (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989) 114.

The nature of Beardsley’s more gestural, but equally unsettling, approach to representation in these illustrations is apparent in the vignette appearing on page twenty-six of the 1893 Bon Mots [Fig. 2.9]. In this drawing Beardsley depicts a droopy-eyed figure of indeterminate gender holding a patched Frankenstein-like foetal figure with clawed feet and a partially developed tail. The aged and monstrous foetus – paradoxically suggestive of both vital life and decay – appears frequently in Beardsley’s illustrations. In the above mentioned vignette it is being presented for scrutiny to a wizened, hairy and menacing figure with a bandaged head. In the vignette featured on page 148, a similarly monstrous figure, whose head is covered in boil and breast-like protrusions appears (c1894, [Fig. 2.10]32. Also sporting breasts on its chest, the figure is of indeterminate gender and species. Its spine curves to suggest an animal-like lower half with a dog-like curled tail. Its use of a walking stick and pensive demeanour, however, also suggest a cultured gentleman. Snodgrass argues that this figure is an ironic representation of a dandy, a representation that came to frequent Beardsley’s work.

While the Bon Mot illustrations bring such figures to the fore, significantly these figures also appear in a range of works in a more peripheral position, sometimes in direct contrast to their surrounds. This applies to both their accompanying texts and in respect to the aesthetic conventions to which they refer. In a design for St Pauls, for example, the foetus figure appears again, seated with outstretched arms and legs under a glass specimen case33 (1894 [Fig. 2.11]). It is being observed by an elegant woman whose face suggests delight at scrutinising this strange and prematurely aged creature. Seated in repose and undertaken in an elegant Japonesque style, this feminine figure recalls the Pre-Raphelite ‘stunner’, popular in the work of artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Noted for her long web of hair, her striking and slightly androgynous features, and a distant, enigmatic gaze, the ‘stunner’ was for the Pre-Raphelites an ideal of femininity. It represented an innocent and transcendent beauty deemed lost in the Modern age. While enigmatic and aloof, in Beardsley’s image the stunner’s facial expression – of cunning, or twisted delight

32 Where the previous two illustrations discussed appear in the 1893 publication of the Bon Mots, this illustration occurs in its 1894 edition. 33 This illustration appears in St Pauls 1.1 (1894)

– and the foetus whose gaze she returns, disrupts the idyllic scene of “soulful yearning” which her appearance in Pre-Raphelite works was intended to facilitate34.

What unites the Bon Mot figures is what is common to the grotesque tradition outlined above: bodily deformation and hybridisation. While resembling the characters of stories they are situated in, or the iconographic conventions they reference, Beardsley’s figures are made foreign through combinatory form and bodily aberration. Such figures, like those of Jamnitzer noted earlier, concern a familiar body made foreign. Beardsley’s grotesques are, however, also discussed in relation to objects, landscapes, and again, decorative elements made bodily. As I discuss further in Chapter Three, Beardsley’s work frequently involves an eroticisation applied to all manner of figures, objects and details within otherwise mimetic representations. In The Toilet of Helen (for Under the Hill, 1896 [Fig. 2.12]) for example, a dressing table leg sports breasts and hooves. In other works, such as the Chapter Sixteen heading illustration for Malory’s Le Morte Darthur [Fig. 2.13]), entire landscapes are configured as reproductive organs, though often of indeterminate gender. Again, a suitable reference point from the tradition of the ornamental grotesque might be the Auricular scroll work of Kilian or Jan Lutma the Elder discussed previously.

Representing the more complex and disjunctive style of Beardsley’s later work is The Cave of Spleen, an illustration for Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock. This image provides an important example of the techniques and content typical of Beardsley’s grotesque practice [Fig. 2.14]. Here the artist illustrates and embellishes on Pope’s description of the Goddess Spleen’s dwelling in reference to a scene from the poem’s fourth Canto. While illustrating Pope’s description of the

34 In works, such as The Kiss of Judas, Beardsley again makes antagonistic reference to this ideal. Accompanying a story about the murderous offspring of Judas who appear in changeling form, Beardsley depicts a scene that is perhaps in reference to the stories mention of a Madonna like changeling. In a visualisation largely unsupported by the text this Madonna appears alongside a dwarf figure similar to his aged foetus form recently discussed. As Snodgrass notes, the illustrations composition echoes Rossetti’s La Pia de’ Tolomei. But where Rossetti’s figure has her head bowed in sadness Beardsley’s is pictured as a body slumped: as though killed by the dwarf figure who kneels beside her. Aligning Rosetti’s ideal of femininity with a figure of ambiguous deceptive evil, the image has been viewed as another affront to the practices and ideals of the Pre- Raphelite brotherhood. Snodgrass, Aubrey 186.

“unnumber’d throngs” of mystical inhabitants of the cave, the work is also populated by many previously mentioned figures from the stock of Beardsley’s grotesquery.

Dominating the image is the dense line technique used to delineate tresses of hair but also applied in the rendering of clothing, drapery and floor coverings. Rendered in pen and ink, this fine and narrowly spaced line modulates between ruled horizontals and verticals that mark out the floor and walls of the dwelling, and rich curvilinear sections of hair, feathers, garments and a detailing more difficult to name. The proliferation of such line makes it difficult to discern where one part of the environment, a single garment or body begins and where another ends. Misshapen and at times gruesome heads and limbs of figures appear to be detached or floating amidst dense and excessive decorative detailing. The horror vaccui of line and detailing works to both bind the scene and break each individual figure or object apart. The sense of depth or perspective is disrupted even where the horizontal and vertical lines suggest it. Despite the precision of the line and detail, the work presents a discordant space where weightless jumbled pieces add up to a dense and confused whole.

In the mid-right of the image is Beardsley’s representation of Pope himself, disdainful in expression, and femininely attired as one of the goddess’s throng. At the goddess’s feet is the character Affectation, rendered here as a plump, oversized baby though with fully developed female breasts. Below the seated goddess is one of the stranger figures in the illustration – a winged feminine creature whose stoic face is framed by an elaborate coiffure. Her face sits upon a twisted neck and distorted body, cut into by the horizontal line marking the floor, as though drastically corseted at her waist. Her full hips, thighs and buttocks taper not to calves and feet, but into abstract arabesque designs. Weightless and armless, she leans or floats over two miniature men in the right bottom corner of the drawing, one of whom is imprisoned within a jar. To the left of the image are Pope’s “living teapots” and two men who echo teapots in their shapes. These men are pregnant, carrying punctiform foetuses in their plump bodies – one in the stomach and the other in the thigh.

While some of these characters refer directly to Pope’s text, others are pure creations of Beardsley’s that appear without this textual reference point. The character of Umbria, poised in the left of the frame, for example, is less “dusky, melancholy sprite”, as outlined in the poem, than shapely androgyne whose curved hips and thighs become animal-like, bent forward at the knee like those of a horse. Amidst the dense line and decorative excess of this work Beardsley presents individual figures and forms of gender dysphoria, hybridity and bodily confusion. This figuratively saturated composition exhibits what Snodgrass notes is a kind of “overstuffing” of imagery familiar to Beardsley’s later work35. Again, as suggested earlier, this overstuffing is at home in the tradition of the ornamental grotesque that I have just discussed.

Beardsley’s line technique suggests the indivisibility of the Spleen cave’s setting from its inhabitants. No figure is properly distinguished or closed off from another and every object and character can be conflated to a mass of difficult to identify pieces. Bodies carry other bodies inside of them, limbs float and detach, figures bulge in unexpected places. Such deformations and aberrations suggest a leaning within the work that might be described in terms of the monstrous and abject. Although, the proliferous use of decorative form would seem to contradict this description of the work. Contradict it, that is, if the decorative is taken as that which grants aesthetic pleasure on the basis of its consistency with either Classical ideals of beauty, or a primacy of abstract form as figured in the orthodox reading of Kant (discussed in the previous chapter). And if the monstrous and abject is treated as opposed in content and affect to a properly aesthetic operation.

But this is perhaps where the tradition of the ornamental grotesque, which I have argued Beardsley be situated in relation to, is most instructive. Even where articulated in and through decorative and ornamental form, this tradition demonstrates not the incompatability of the monstrous body and beautiful form, but the possibility of their co-presence. This is made apparent in works such as Cave of Spleen.

35 Snodgrass, Aubrey 169.

Framing the ornamental grotesque’s manipulation of mimetic representation and the fantastic as monstrous might seem strange in a contemporary context. Particularly in comparison to practices gathered under the banner of the carnivalesque and abject that constitute the second and more contemporary discourse of the grotesque that I will now discuss. In a context where the monstrous is conceptualised not merely in terms of unfamiliar bodies, but in relation to what is perceived as a kind of ‘unmediated’ representation of the bodily, the designation of ornamental grotesques as generative of disgust might be difficult to reckon. If we accept the historicist position whereby the monster is that which is generated by the culture it finds itself in – as the projection of historically specific anxieties – then this historical response is easier to understand. Though this historicisation of the grotesque would mean an abandonment of the term as meaningless beyond the context of its application. It would also lead us to conclude, as David Summers does, that the word seems to bear “so little relation to the (its) origins” that it is as though we were dealing with an entirely foreign body of forms36.

But insofar as the ornamental grotesque operates at the boundaries of mimetic, creative and decorative form, in the representation of a foreign, unnameable or unassimilable body, there is an argument for treating both the historical and contemporary manifestations of the grotesque as consistent. Like the ornamental grotesque that combines and creates aberrant bodies and is said to provoke an ambivalent affect, the second discourse of the grotesque – as ‘carnivalesque’ and ‘abject’ – similarly takes the grotesque body as its focus. It too operates around the notion of bodily excess. But, where the ornamental grotesque concerns a play on the limit of decorative and aesthetic form, the grotesque as abject art portends to consist in a wholesale breakdown of mimetic forms. In the literature that surrounds this more contemporary application of the term is the notion of grotesque bodily representations whose reference point is a materiality deemed beyond representation itself. It is to this second discourse of the grotesque that I will now discuss.

36 Summers 20.

2.4 The Grotesque as Carnivalesque: The Grotesque as “Material Bodily Principle”37

In the discourse of the grotesque as ‘carnivalesque’, and that of the ‘abject’ developed from it, the representation of a body of excess is made central. Instigated by Michel Bakhtin’s reading of the textual strategies of François Rabelais, the carnivalesque centres on the notion of the grotesque body as a body in process: transgressive and transformative in its implications. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais’s work exemplified the carnivalesque’s ‘material bodily principle’. This bodily principle arose from the imagery of European folk culture, and acknowledged the body “contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed”38. Again defined in relation to a norm it exceeds, this time grotesque representations are explicitly situated in opposition to the Renaissance representation of the body. Like the body of Classicism more broadly, the Renaissance body is defined as closed, coherent, self- contained and static.

In contrast, the representatives of Bakhtin’s grotesque are “[o]pen, and blended with the world, with animals (and) with objects” 39. They actively incorporate degeneration and decay as well as regeneration and rebirth: taking in and excreting, pregnant and protruding with liquids and fleshy form. As Mary Russo notes, “the grotesque body”, in Bakhtin’s reckoning, is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing”40. Associated with comic affect and the transformative action of laughter, the grotesque body is in Bakhtin’s schema, a celebration of the body in all stages of life, death and everything in between. Perhaps best articulated in his descriptive example of ‘pregnant senile hags’, this body of excess is again related to ambivalence. As Bahktin puts it, it is “pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in these bodies… They combine senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life conceived, but as yet unformed”41.

37 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984) 19. 38 Bakhtin in Russo 8. 39 Russo 8. 40 Russo 8. 41 Russo 63.

Like Aubrey Beardsley’s foetus forms, the grotesque in this sense involves the collapse of stages of life: embryonic origin, infancy and mortal demise, all within a single figurative representation. However, where many critics speaking of these representations in Beardsley’s practice have largely dwelled on the notion of Beardsley’s own estrangement, decay and alienation, in Bakhtin’s reading such grotesque figures have a different resonance, closer to Zatlin and Snodgrass’s account of the grotesque as critique. In Bakhtin’s schema, representations of the grotesque body are associated with the low, grass roots culture of the carnival as a celebratory mode, emblematic of those aspects of the social body resistant to dominant or official culture. The materiality of the grotesque for Bakhtin is a site of social mobilisation and revolutionary political change. Disruptive or destabilising to dominant ideology, it is granted a critical socio-cultural status.

In this sense, Bakhtin’s study demonstrates a positivisation of the grotesque as bodily. While operating around the familiar term of ‘ambivalence’, there is no mistaking his association of the grotesque body with celebration, laughter and positive transformation. It is this same trajectory of the excessive body, however, that places the grotesque in proximity with the notion of the traumatic. Though still associated with transgression and a destabilising of socio-cultural norms, the grotesque is in this figuring associated with a return of the repressed that is essentially painful to the subject, and at the limits of the tolerable for subject and social body alike.

2.5 The Grotesque as Abject: Trauma and the Return of the Repressed

The notion of the grotesque body as ‘abject’ is indebted to the psychoanalytic writings of Julia Kristeva. The conception of abject art was made prominent in discussion of art in the 1990s within practices understood under the rubric of a “return to the body”42. That Kristeva’s theory of abjection develops Bakhtin’s central ideas in a psychoanalytic context is evident in the manner in which she similarly

42 Ewa Lajer- Burcharth, “Real Bodies: Video in the 1990’s,” Art History 20.2 (1997): 185-213.

engages the destabilising potential of representations of the fluid, penetrable and volatile body. In Kristeva’s reckoning, however, such representations occupy the very extreme of experience, producing the affect of disgust and repulsion, rather than a celebratory revelling.

Insofar as Kristeva’s notion of abjection, and the criticism that makes reference to it, develop a psychoanalytic and specifically Lacanian thesis, it warrants an introduction here to some of Jacques Lacan’s core ideas. I will return to Lacan’s theories regarding art and representation in more detail in Chapter Four. Here I wish simply to flag some of the preliminary ideas that are utilised in writings on the abject in contemporary art, and are of relevance to Kara Walker’s practice.

Lacan’s theory posits three orders that form a triadic structure of inter-psychic realms. These orders situate subjectivity, and determine the subject’s relations with the external world. They are formative, but continue to exert an influence on the subject throughout their life. More correctly, they ensure the continued constitution of subjectivity well beyond the early formative stages. As Bowie suggests “The symbolic, the imaginary and the real are not mental forces, personifiable on the model-builder’s inner stage, but orders, each of which serves to position the individual within a force-field that traverses him”43. Thus while determining the subject, and organizing the psyche, they also serve to mediate intersubjective relations, and find their correlative in external structures such as art and representation.

The imaginary order concerns the specular image of the subject: a product of that first encounter in the ‘mirror stage’ of development where the child discerns an external image of itself as a coherent and stable whole. As we will see, there is some connection between the imaginary image as Lacan describes it and that classical model of beauty discussed previously. Both depend upon a notion of coherence, stability and unity, said to foster identification. In the mirror stage to which the imaginary corresponds, the disempowered child is understood to identify with an external image modelled upon a unified, empowered form, as a kind of visual

43 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991) 91.

impetus for the ego. In the imaginary order, those forces that bring the ego into being and allow the subject to differentiate ‘you’ from ‘I’ are repeatedly engaged, acting as a mediating force between an individual and their external world. The imaginary order, then, is associated with the maintenance of the illusory integrity of the domain of vision, and the ego’s identifications that are largely dependent on this integrity.

The symbolic order is the realm of language and of symbols. It is the determining order of the subject insofar as it constitutes the means by which the subject is organised: structuring both conscious and unconscious thought. The subject’s entry to the symbolic (or entry to language) both allows the subject to speak, and effectively alienates them as ‘spoken’. As Lacan claims, the child “speaks… but it is always because the symbol has made him”44. Where the imaginary seeks to gloss over otherness in a “desperate and delusional attempt to be and remain ‘what one is’ by gathering to oneself ever more instances of sameness, resemblance and self replication”, in the symbolic, such otherness is determinate and cannot be mastered. It is the movement and heterogeneity of the symbolic however, that enables it to register the third order Lacan speaks of: that of the real45.

Lacan’s third order, the real, is, as Malcolm Bowie suggests, “a ‘third locus’ that cannot be assimilated to either of the others, [and] is postulated as a permanent agent of disharmony between them”46. The real might be conceived of as that which falls outside of the symbolic and imaginary, insofar as nothing falls outside the symbolic and imaginary. The real is that which “resists symbolisation absolutely”47, lying outside of language and symbolic process. It is its status as ‘impossibility’ that gives it a traumatic dimension – repeating on the subject as a repressed content in a symptomatic fashion (as signifier or automaton), or returning in the symbolic as the unknown or tuché. The real is an internal fissure in the symbolic and imaginary. It can, however, be understood as that which throws awry any symbolic regime that

44 Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956) 39. 45 Bowie 92. 46 Bowie 94. 47 Lacan quoted in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Brunner- Routledge, 1996) 159.

claims an ontological grounding in truth. In every instance it emerges as the unknown within the known.

All representations operate in effect of the three orders, thus all engage with the real as that which cannot be represented or exceeds given representations. Lacan’s discussion of the real in art is developed around the notion of ‘the gaze’. Not located in the subject, nor implying the mastery of he who surveys, the gaze is in Lacan’s treatment located in the object or representation, “at the point of light, the point at which everything looks at me is situated”48. Lacan’s examples of the gaze locate it both in familiar objects (as in the example of a sardine can shining in the sun and omitting a blinding light) and in canonical works of art (such as Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors that features an anamorphic skull within the picture plane). In both instances, the gaze is theorised as a void, blindspot or stain in vision: a point where signifiers of lack, death, castration and subjective division gaze back at the subject.

As Hal Foster has argued “the conventions of art, the schemata of representation, the codes of visual culture… mediate the object-gaze for the subject” but also “protect the subject from this object- gaze”49. This is the function of what Foster, after Lacan, terms the ‘image-screen’. And for Foster, aesthetic practices normally attempt “a taming of the gaze”. Certain contemporary practices, however, refuse “this age-old mandate to pacify the gaze, to unite the imaginary and the symbolic against the real… as if this art wanted the gaze to shine, the object to stand, the real to exist in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire”50. It is precisely this project that Foster equates with abject art that is framed in his discussion of certain practices in his book Return of the Real as a “turn to the grotesque”51.

The abject concerns the real of the body: conceived by Kristeva as that dimension of the pre-symbolic (or semiotic) mother-child dyad that must be left behind by the subject in order to be a subject. Abject art consists in the visualisation of those bodily processes or sites that are abjected in this developmental phase, but continue to threaten the borders of identity with dissolution. Excrement, bodily fluids, openings

48 Lacan quoted in Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996) 139. 49 Foster, Return 140. 50 Foster, Return 140 51 Foster, Return 148.

and fragmentation, “that seem( ) to emanate from an exorbitant outside and/or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” return in such imagery52. For Kristeva, the process of abjection is ambiguous. It never succeeds in cutting “the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger”53. The abject’s return “beseeches, worries, fascinates desire... Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects”54. But that the subject might see fit to represent it, or to engage its return, suggests the extent to which it continues to compel the subject, even where it prompts reactions of disgust.

As noted earlier, consistent in all modes of the grotesque in the visual arts is a play on the capacities of form to represent a difficult, destabilising and ‘foreign’ body. In the discourse of the grotesque as abject it is the representation of a bodily dimension so foreign it is unassimilable – a site of “(non) being… as neither subject nor object”55 – that is said to be engaged. Largely, the grotesque as abject depends upon a mimetic approach to representation, or a certain truth to materials in mimicry of excremental and bodily substance. Its approach is again posed against the representation of the body prescribed in Classical aesthetics. And it is similarly posed as antithetical to the operation of beauty. In Kristeva’s account, the beautiful body is associated with the coherence of ego identifications in the order of the Imaginary: “the more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognise myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman is relaxed”56. The abject body and ‘abject art’ are situated as a challenge to this coherence. Rather than positing the body as a site of stable identification it resurfaces here as a site of “dis-identification and subjective volatility”57.

Contemporary art practices situated under the banner of abject art have tended to treat the unformed real of the body as something that can be accessed in its sheer or unmediated materiality. And, as Rosalind Krauss has noted they have tended to be thoroughly gendered in their imagery. As Krauss suggests, in Kristeva’s writing, the

52 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 1. 53 Kristeva 9. 54 Kristeva 9. 55 Foster, Return 149. 56 Kristeva 12. 57 Lajer- Burcharth 187.

abject is posited as “undifferentiatable maternal lining – a kind of feminine sublime, albeit composed of the infinite unspeakableness of bodily disgust”58. It is as persistently feminised that the real body commonly returns in abject art. For Krauss, this mode “is ultimately cast, within the theorisation of abject art, as multiple forms of the wound”, a wound with which woman is necessarily equated59.

For feminist artists such as Kiki Smith and Cindy Sherman who took up such representations in the nineties, abject imagery seemed to provide a means of strategically undermining the stability of the patriarchal/ paternal symbolic and its imaginary identifications. It is by these same terms that feminist critics such as Mary Russo have come to theorise the notion of a female grotesque. Here the grotesque body is equated with a strategic and destabilising representation of the feminine. For Russo it is by these means that the contemporary grotesque can be re-positioned in relation to its etymological origins of cave/grotto or crypt. In this instance, the cave is conceived of as the maternal body, and its materiality is positioned as socially transgressive and transformative.

There is a fundamental difficulty with practices understood to engage the real in this manner, and, I would argue, with their critical framing as, in Foster’s words, “rupturing the screen of representation”60. Firstly, such practices and the criticism that champion them are problematic insofar as they entertain the notion that the real is an accessible beyond that can be represented in its sheer materiality, or actuality. As previously noted, for Foster “[i]t is as if this art wanted the gaze to shine… the real to exist”61. Such an approach then denies the fact that the real can only be indexed as interior to the symbolic and as inaccessible directly. As Lacan frequently insists, the real is not a beyond of representation, but a product of there being no beyond of representation. As such it can only be registered through symbolic means in the form of blindspots, fissures, contradictions, that is by “impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself”62

58 Rosalind Krauss, “‘Informe’ without Conclusion,” October 78 (Autumn,1996): 92. 59 Krauss 92. 60 See Foster, Return. 61 Foster, Return 140. 62 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) 27.

Where treated as accessible and representable, the real of the body is subject to Imaginary formations. As Kristeva herself suggests, abjection operates as a means by which the subject and the social body seek to expel that which threatens imaginary coherence and the confirmation of social ideals. This is evident in ‘rituals of defilement’, the maintenance of taboo, and the Modern art practices that Kristeva initially attended to. As Foster himself notes, in miming the abject, these grotesque abject practices might simply “confirm a given abjection”, or be complicit in what they seek to critique. Abject art may simply be an extension of that regulatory operation served by the process of abjection. In particular, it might be productive of little but the reinstatement of woman in the position of wound, or the abjected social group in the position of debased Other. Insofar as “left and right may agree on the social representatives of the abject”, abject art, may, like the process it seeks to critically mimic, support “the normativity of the image-screen and symbolic order” that it attempts to tear asunder63. For Foster, representations in this order, then, raise a series of questions: “Is the abject… disruptive of subjective and social orders or foundational to them, a crisis in these orders or a confirmation of them? If subjectivity and society seek to abject the alien within, is abjection not a regulatory operation?”64.

These questions concern the political efficacy of the contemporary grotesque. As such they provide a framework for addressing the debates concerning the political efficacy of Kara Walker’s practice that I will now turn to. For what the existing criticism on Walker exhibits are similar questions regarding the ‘regulatory operation’ of her grotesque representations. And of issue is not just the question of how representations of the abject impact on the process of identification in general, but how they impact the notion of racial identification that is at the heart of Walker’s art.

63 Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (Autumn, 1996): 116. 64 Foster 116.

2.6 Kara Walker and ‘The Regulatory Operation of Abjection’

Consistent with the discourse of the grotesque body, as articulated by Bakhtin and developed by Kristeva, Kara Walker’s silhouetted bodies are bodies of excess. Her figures show little closure or self-containment. They are shown in constant confrontation with their ‘exorbitant inside and/or outside’. Even in their radically reductive rendering – that is as skins of cut paper applied to a wall – Walker’s figures are broken, fragmented and teeming with both life and decay. In an encounter with her work in installation, her figures announce their fragility and materiality as they fold and curl on the wall, an ephemerality not particularly well evidenced in the work’s photo documentation. Walker’s figures, while familiar to an audience well versed in American cinematic, literary and pop culture, present bodily departures from their references. They ingest and spit out parts of both others and themselves, including excreta of various kinds. They take in, or are invaded by foreign objects and animals, and are engaged in scenes of sex and violence where bodily penetration, dismemberment and abasement occur by any number of means.

There are countless examples of scenes and scenarios within Walker’s work in which inter-bodily transactions and transgressions occur. As noted in the previous chapter, Walker frequently and unabashedly presents bodies pissing, shitting, eating dung, vomiting, violently birthing (sometimes as though shitting) and undertaking other unspeakable and unnameable acts, as the many discussions of her work underscore65. As Joan Copjec has noted, “Walker’s silhouettes are filled with figures violently merging with and protruding from each other. They swallow and secrete, tear at and torture each other”66. As aberrations, hybridisations and deformations they restage the catalogue of forms of the grotesque I have discussed thus far.

That an experience of Walker’s work has already been framed in terms of the grotesque, then, comes as no surprise67. As noted in the previous chapter, reactions to her work have run the gamut of extremes of awe, horror, and disgust that fits with both the contemporary sense of the grotesque as a painful and destabilising psychic

65 See, for example, Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 66 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002) 83. 67 Walker was, for example, included in Storrs’s Santa Fe biennale Our Grotesque noted earlier.

affect, as well as the terms of arrest and ambivalence familiar to the ornamental tradition outlined previously. But as Walker’s critics are quick to point out, if her figures are grotesque, they are not merely so. They refer to, or, for those critical of her work, engage in a ‘racial grotesque’: a mode of representation instrumental to racism and institutionalised objectification, both in the antebellum period and beyond.

As Leonard Cassuto suggests in The Inhuman Race, a ‘racial grotesque’, as the cultural embodiment of societal anxieties concerning racial difference, has played an operative mode in American culture68. From freak shows to the very slavery narratives that are Walker’s stock in trade, a racial grotesque (like the ethnosexualisation discussed in my next chapter) has been instrumental in the justification of the enslavement and debasement of African-American people. Characters such as the ‘Sambo’ became the cultural means of justifying the continuation of slavery, segregation and other forms of institutionalised racism. Thus, while Walker self- consciously exploits this mode of grotesquery, questions are necessarily raised as to how her racial grotesque differs from those that have already negatively impacted on African-American people.

If merely participating in the construction of a ‘racial grotesque’ to which blacks have historically already been ascribed and have sought to strategically counter, Walker might be seen to be guilty of simply reinstating African-American people as an abjected social group, as wound and wounded. If merely one more prompt for the enactment of the regulatory operation of abjection, Walker’s representations might be similarly accused of sustaining “the normativity of the image-screen and symbolic order alike”69.

But Walker’s figures are not merely recyclings of racist identifications, nor simple equations of African-American people with the condition of the abject. As Joan Copjec has noted, Walker’s characters are not racist stereotypes but “are on the contrary an erotic disassembling of them, a mad and vital tussle to break away from

68 Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 69 Foster, “Obscene” 116.

their stale scent and heavy burden”70. Ironically, in this ‘disassembling’, abject imagery does play a role. Walker’s figures are perpetually engaged with a dimension which cannot be properly assimilated. But where this dimension is often figured as bodily, it is not merely so.

As Copjec insists, the trauma of the ‘unspeakable’ that Walker’s work depicts is double. It does not simply involve the return of the unassimilable bodily dimension, but also, the repetition of an unassimilable dimension of history that challenges the sedimentations of African-American consciousness and identification. Walker’s practice demonstrates a consistent refusal of the imagery of ennobled origins that generations of activists have sought to project in the hope of countering a history of institutionalised racism. But Walker’s leaky figures demonstrate a failure not simply to assimilate idealised images of black ennoblement, but any imagery that might facilitate a full racial identification.

What their grotesque figuring implies is alienation in relation to their own bodies as well as their alienation in relation to a particular ‘unassimilable’ historical event of the colonial and antebellum periods. As Copjec insists, Walker’s practice pivots on a distancing of her figures (and herself) from the racial group that they and Walker might otherwise be “guaranteed membership of”. This takes place by indexing that “impossible-to-experience event that keeps tearing (her figures) from themselves”: the historical rupture that cannot be “metabolised” that is the real of history, a notion that I return to in Chapter Four. Of relevance to my discussion of Walker’s practice as grotesque is the fact that, as Copjec notes, this impossible to experience event “keeps depositing itself in those little pieces of shit that turn up everywhere in the Walker silhouettes”71.

Again, this recurrence of ‘shit’ lends itself well to the discourse of the abject. But Walker’s work also deviates considerably from those representations normally associated with Abject Art that portend to access the real by means of a pure materiality or actuality. Until now I have aligned Walker with that contemporary moment of the grotesque associated with a destabilising of the coherent subject of the

70 Copjec, Imagine 107. 71 Copjec, Imagine 107.

imaginary order by accessing the real of the body. And as noted, this destabilising is posed as antagonistic to the project of aesthetics on the basis that beauty is deemed complicit in such imaginary formations and ego identifications. But as my discussion of Walker’s practice in relation to the decorative implied, Walker’s ‘little pieces of shit’ do not take place merely in opposition to the aesthetic and beauty, but are made apparent in and through aestheticised form. It is on this basis that they resonate with that earlier moment of the historical grotesque defined in relation to paradox. And it is here that they seem better suited to the tradition of the ornamental grotesque, and the grotesque evident in Aubrey Beardsley’s work that launched my discussion in this chapter.

In tracing this shift from the abject to ornamental grotesque in Walker’s work, it seems appropriate to move from the recurrence of ‘shit’, to that which the artist herself terms ‘muck’. As Walker recently stated: “One of the themes in my work is the idea that a black subject in the present tense is a container for specific pathologies of the past and is continually growing and feeding off those maladies. Racist pathology is the muck”72. The term ‘muck’ (as opposed to ‘shit’) seems particularly suited for addressing her excremental images insofar as it suggests something of an indefinable material or substance, reliant on an ambiguity of form.

Again, this muck might be viewed as that bodily ‘exorbitant outside and or inside’ that ‘turns up everywhere’ in Walker’s work. In a great many of her tableaux, this muck punctuates her landscapes and marks out her ignoble scenes. In The Emancipation Approximation introduced in the previous chapter, figures are covered and almost obliterated by muck, rendered as cartoon-like viscous blobs (1999-2000 [Fig 1.6]). In World’s Exposition, it falls from a figure in a tree (1997 [Fig. 1.8]. In The End of Uncle Tom (1995 [Fig. 2.15]) a child leaves muck trailing across an otherwise picturesque landscape. In this work and many others (such as Untitled (Milk and Bread), 1998 [Fig. 2.16]) and Slavery! Slavery! (1997, [Fig. 1.3]) her figures play with their muck as they go. Flat, monochromatic and distinguished from the other figures and objects by its loose or wobbly delineation, this muck’s context

72 Kara Walker quoted in Phillip Vergne, “The Black Saint is the Sinner Lady,” Kara Walker : My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Kara Walker et. al (Walker Art Centre: Minneapolis, 2007) 8.

gives it meaning. It is difficult to pin down as any given material, however, because of its silhouetted form.

As noted earlier, much of the work considered to engage the abject depends upon a certain mimetism and truth to materials in its representation of a fragmented, broken and leaking body of fluids and openings. And it is in pushing such mimetism to its limit or endpoint that it has been theorised as a mode of representation that attempts to breach what Lacan terms the ‘image-screen’. In Walker’s representations, this muck withdraws from the mimetic insofar as it is operative between mimetic form and ‘formlessness’. I wish to suggest that this operation makes apparent the wider operation in her practice. While all of Walker’s figures depend upon a certain engagement of the Lacanian void or stain, owing to the silhouetted technique by which she represents her scenes, these details of muck literalise the function of stain or blind spot that is central to Walker’s practice.

While representing a distance from the abject body insofar as they both articulate excreta and veil its appearance in flat black form, these blind spots do not suggest a backing away from the real, but a means of its indexation in the form of tuché. These holes, stains or blind spots in vision are resonant with Lacan’s theory of the real as gaze. For Lacan the gaze is “how the tuché is represented in visual apprehension” and it is “at the level I call the stain that the tychic point in the scopic function is found”73. Available in those stains, blind spots and incoherencies in the visual field, the gaze, as an index of the real, occur in these forms of unrepresentable nothings in Walker’s tableaux.

It is in these blobs of muck, as the very crux between figuration and abstraction, mimesis and creation, or form and formlessness, in the rendering of her excessive bodies that Walker’s particular grotesque can be observed in action. Just as I have observed in the grotesque more broadly, such stains play on limits between discernable and unnameable bodies or bodily forms. But again, in Walker’s work, just as in Beardsley’s, this engagement takes place within beautiful, and as established in the previous chapter, free form. Walker’s little holes – sometimes of

73 Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton & Company, 1981) 77.

blood, sometimes of shit, sometimes of more benevolent material, but always hard to discern – are moments of the grotesque insofar as they are moments of paradox. Just as can be said of Walker’s tableaux more broadly, these little details are both aestheticised form and bodily excreta, beautiful and disgusting, visually pleasurable and difficult to view.

As argued in relation to the work of Beardsley, who similarly mobilised aesthetic means in the production of fragmented, deformed and excessive representations of the body, this contradictory operation is not antithetical to the work’s reading as grotesque, but is the very mark of grotesquery. What might be said of Walker’s little piles of muck or holes in vision can similarly be said of those details noted in Beardsley’s work. In Beardsley’s Cave of Spleen, body becomes cave becomes indistinguishable decorative detail, all through the mediation of a carefully choreographed line technique. This difficult and destabilising image of an open and foreign body is no less unsettling when it comes about through a play in and around the limits of beautiful form.

Apparent in both artists’ work is a body that exceeds that of the closed, semblant and Ideal body linked to Classicism. It is a body that in its difficult or unsettling nature resonates with the notion of the real of the body articulated in the contemporary discourse of the grotesque. But where this discourse posits the real as disruptive of the imaginary coherence of the body by way of a rupture of the ‘image-screen’, in Walker and Beardsley’s work this real is indexed through a play on forms and motifs of the screen itself. This is the potential of the grotesque as a site of paradox and contradiction: where an excessive body is made available in combinatory and aberrant forms and figures. And this is the potential that Walker and Beardsley take up in their grotesque practices.

3. The Explicit

The purpose of this chapter is to address the much discussed thematic of sex and sexuality in the silhouette works of Walker and the illustrations of Beardsley, and to interrogate the extent to which their practices might be understood in relation to an ‘aesthetics of the explicit’1. Here I am particularly interested in bringing Walker and Beardsley’s work in relation to the pornographic’s “frenzy of the visible”2. But I also wish to examine how the practices combine the sexually explicit with an aesthetic veiling. I will argue that where Walker and Beardsley’s work is explicit in its representation of sex, it also employs decorative form and an obscuring of vision that works in opposition to pornographic ‘realism’. On this basis, both artists’ work problematises the treatment of the aesthetic and pornographic as incompatible operations. My purpose is to address how these practices are situated at the interstice of the pornographic and the aesthetic, and to assess what a recognition of this affords in the understanding of their work and its critical dimensions. I will begin with a discussion of Walker’s recent video work Testimony and then move to discuss sex as a general theme in Walker’s work, before situating its very specific representation of sex and sexuality in relation to debates concerning the pornographic. I will conclude with a discussion of the sexually explicit in the work of Beardsley.

3.1 Testimony

Included in the 2005 ‘Quartet’ series at the Walker Centre of Art in Minneapolis was a video work by Kara Walker entitled Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004 [Fig 3.1]). Just under nine minutes in length and made up of silhouettes manipulated in the style of shadow puppetry with projected backgrounds, the work develops a narrative conceptually and aesthetically consistent with Walker’s installation and painting-based practice so far discussed. The film’s protagonists are the same stock of characters drawn from the stories of the antebellum period that populate her work elsewhere – plantation master, slave, aunty,

1 The term ‘aesthetics of the explicit’ is borrowed from Alenka Zupancic, “The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan,” Umbra: A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1999): 39. I am using it here to acknowledge a mode of representation that broaches both the pornographic visualising of sex and the body, and the aesthetic form as a means of engaging this visualisation. 2 From Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

negress – though this time there is specific reference to the literary and sociological genre of the ‘Slave Testimony’. Like these autobiographical narratives that came to prominence during the antebellum period, Testimony’s narrative is relayed as though it is a first-hand account of slave life. The characters are represented by means of the same flat and empty black silhouettes that figure in Walker’s tableau works. In Testimony, however, these silhouetted characters move for the first time in her practice: clumsily and awkwardly from frame to frame by means of shadow puppetry. At times silhouettes appear in the same space as the artist’s hands that animate them, severing any illusion of their independent movement, or at least reminding the viewer of their status as manipulated flattened forms [see Fig. 3.2].

With its silhouetted scenes interspersed with frames of white text on black backgrounds, the work’s format resembles silent films as well as invoking the historical (antebellum) period. Presenting a familiar tale where slavery leads to miscegenation and debasement, and a flight to freedom turns to violent retaliation, Walker’s testimony, surprisingly, is marked by a radical reversal in relation to its historical sources. In Walker’s narrative, “the whites longing for fulfilment” have “sold their bodies” to their slave women, reversing the usual system of exploitation, or at the very least its expected racial roles. When the women refuse to “revert to the old order” – refusing to return the whites to their positions of power – the subordinates rebel and escape. From here the narrative turns to one of pursuit and punishment, with the rounding up of the enslaved whites, their lynching, their subsequent capture and their torture through violent, sometimes sexual abuse.

The central protagonists of Walker’s tale are a ‘white’-master-turned-slave, and his ‘negress’-slave-turned-mistress, whose text narration relays events from a curiously detached perspective. Culminating in a series of explicitly violent and sexually graphic scenes the work documents the struggle for power between two groups, but centres on the competing passions of master and slave. Roles are blurred both by the system in which the characters find themselves, and by their sexual and emotional involvement.

Perhaps its most shocking scene comes at the video’s end. Here the negress/mistress protagonist both punishes and pleasures her recaptured white slave/lover. She is pictured performing fellatio on the white slave’s hanged body: who, while apparently dead, displays a visibly erect penis. Testimony concludes with a ‘money shot’ – with the image of the Mistress being doused in a thick fluid obviously representative of semen. Dousing the open-lipped facial profile of the woman, this fluid oozes as an obscuring stain over the image, operating as a visual breach within the work’s silhouetted imagery.

Testimony directly engages an aesthetic of the explicit, though such explicitness is not new or foreign to Walker’s practice as a whole. The sexual exploits of Walker’s stock of characters – particularly those of the protagonist ‘negress’ – are well documented and frequently noted within commentaries on her work. The repeated occurrence of sex acts in which her figures partake have hardly gone unnoticed. Much of the controversy surrounding her work, some of which I have already noted, has been directed at this aspect of her art. As Eleanor Heartney has observed “[e]ven more than the adoption of racial stereotypes, the aspect that draws particular censure is the sexual, and often deliberately obscene nature of so much of her imagery”3. The question begs, why does Walker make the graphic depiction of sex central to her practice? And by what means does this explicitness constitute ‘obscenity’, as Heartney and others have observed?

3.2 Ethnosexualisation: Walker and the Thematic of Sex

That Walker’s art as engaged with representations of race and racial identity might make the construction of sex and sexuality a central thematic is not surprising. Sex and sexuality are central in the construction, situation and negotiation of race and ethnicity in any given context: fundamental in the ways by which ethnic and racial boundaries are maintained. The image of an exotic though sexually dangerous ‘Other’, for example, has been central in justifying the exploitation and subjugation of non-Europeans since colonialism. Pertinent to the focus of Walker’s practice and

3 Eleanor Heartney, “The Long Shadows of Slavery,” Art in America (October, 2007): 226.

named by the term ‘hypersexualisation’, the association of African racial identity with primitive and animalistic sexual excess is observable in a great many historical accounts of American race relations and cultural texts.

As Anne McClintock argues, in the centuries preceding the institution of slavery “the uncertain continents – Africa, the Americas, Asia – were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticised. Traveller’s tales abounded with the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes”4. In this manner “Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno tropics for the European imagination – a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears”5. In the construction of non-Europeans as ‘primitive’ people defined negatively against their ‘civilised’ colonisers, the appeal to an over abundant sexuality – excessive and destructive – was crucial.

In the legitimisation of slavery as an economic system such constructions were continually called upon to justify the brutal treatment of African people. It provided an image of dangerous sexuality to be used in support of denying the enslaved the moral and social rights afforded to white citizens. The hypersexualisation of black women assisted in their marketing, as well as providing a moral basis or social rationale for justifying what would otherwise constitute horrific acts of rape and persistent abuse by those who had purchased full access to their bodies6. With the introduction of laws regarding the ‘breeding’ of slaves to ensure their increase, sex was instrumentalised as a means of sustaining the system, and the construction of an overabundant black sexuality assisted in this task. Where black men and women could be identified as insatiable and animalistic, racist policies could be justified. Sex could be used as a means to solve the problem of economic sustainability through policies of breeding. The regulation of miscegenation could also be applied as an insidious form of social engineering.

4 Anne McClintock cited in Joanne Nagel, Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 91. 5 Nagel 93. 6 See Nagel.

As Nagel has suggested, within much traditional scholarship the role of sex in the workings of slavery has been systematically neglected “as a relatively unimportant aspect of a terrible chapter in US history”7. Walker confronts this wilful neglect by bringing the workings of sex in imagery concerning the antebellum period to the fore. Her practice demonstrates a pointed investigation not just into the role of sex in historical discourse pertaining to this period, but also the persistence of such constructions throughout American cultural texts. If sex is the repressed of traditional scholarship on slavery, it is in the cultural texts that this repressed content appears to return. Walker bridges this inconsistency by bringing these two moments and their conflicting positions on the subject of sex and slavery together.

This project is made explicit by the visual essay Chronology of Black Suffering included in the recently published catalogue for her retrospective Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love8 (2007 [Fig. 3.3]). This essay appropriates images from various advertising, print media and art historical sources alongside images and ephemera of Walker’s own making, and demonstrates the artist’s interest in the persistent alignment of black women’s bodies with the exotic and the primitive, and the co-optation of black women’s sexual agency. Making visual analogies between sources as diverse as Deep South landscapes, soft pornography, tourism advertising, Modernist primitivism and exoticism, the essay encourages a consideration of the ongoing social construction of ethnosexualisation in a variety of contexts.

Walker’s tableaux continue this project, insofar as “hyper-sexualised” figures appear in silhouetted form frequently, in various guises. The work Grub for Sharks: A Concession to the Negro Populace, for example, features a ‘Hottentot Venus’ character identifiable by her exaggerated buttocks (2004 [Fig. 3.4]). Walker here makes reference to the tragic reality of a Khoisan women from South Africa, Saartje

7 Nagel 97. 8 Kara Elizabeth Walker, “Chronology of Black Suffering: Images and Notes, 1992- 2007,” Kara Walker: My Complement.

Baartman, whose steatopygia9 prompted the touring exhibition of her living body in the 1800s, as well as the exhibition of her dismembered genitals after her death. In Grub for Sharks she appears drinking from a vaporous dream cloud that hovers above her. Her buttocks rise to a peak to echo the amorphous form of the cloud itself, as though part of the dream from which she drinks. Other works feature the reappearance of a Josephine Baker character sometimes dancing, sometimes otherwise engaged. She appears in the banana skirt that made her an icon of exoticism in Modern European culture in the 1920s and 30’s.

Images pertaining to the social construction of ethnosexualisation appear everywhere in Walker’s practice. But while the tableaux extend this engagement, it should also be recognised that Walker exceeds this practice of critical appropriation by making her own interventions into the visualising of ethnosexualisation. It is the specifics of this intervention that I wish to address. As noted earlier, what has become central to the discussion of Walker’s practice is less the appearance of such figures than the range of acts that they are depicted as engaging in, and the extent to which they might represent the “deliberately obscene”. In Consume, for example, the Baker- esque figure is not merely pictured, but represented sucking her own breast while a small child sucks one of the bananas on her skirt (1998 [Fig. 3.5]). The banana now reads as both breast and phallus. This image is one of countless instances where Walker visualizes sexual pleasure in taboo scenes and circumstances. And it is this visualization of such acts that Walker’s critics have seized upon.

As Heartney observes, Walker’s images feature a catalogue of social perversions: “child abuse, bestiality, onanism, erotically charged breast feeding and the promiscuous discharge of bodily fluids”, all of which confirm that “unnatural, taboo and degrading sex acts are at the centre of [the artist’s] vision of racism”10. Constituting an unbounded, destructive and polymorphous force, sex pervades Walker’s imagery in ways that both reference and exceed its historical antebellum

9 Steatopygia is the term used to name a physical and presumably racial characteristic of unusually high fat deposits in the gluteal regions. In women it is sometimes accompanied by an elongated labia minora. It appears in a number of peoples from African regions, but was deemed common (and, in fact a genetic trait) amongst the Khoisan people, of which Baartman was one. 10 Heartney 226.

source material. It is Walker’s agenda or intent in the use of such imagery that represents the biggest issue for her critics. As Robert Reid-Pharr insists “there is a strong sense among some of Walker’s detractors that her use of such images is nothing less than child pornography dressed up in the guise of high art”11. Given that the hypersexualisation of African-Americans has long pervaded cultural texts, the sensitivity of this issue is not surprising. In a sense, the issues surrounding Walker’s construction of ethnosexuality echo those that surrounded her use of a racial grotesque. Again, the political efficacy of her practice seems to depend on whether she recycles existing constructions that support a racist agenda or takes a stand against them. In assessing Walker’s work as critical or merely complicit in the construction of ethnosexuality, everything depends upon whether her visualization of race and sex is merely a complicitous return to the ‘porno-tropics’ described by McClintock, or if it refers to this porno-tropics from a critical distance.

In the debate concerning the question of whether Walker’s work is pornographic, Testimony contributes a further point of interest. For what is remarkable about this work is the manner in which it makes reference not simply to the historical scene of porno-tropics, but also to the cultural product of pornography: a genre which in no way claims innocence in its manipulation of sexual arousal and gratification. Certainly, the climax of Testimony refers to one of the most significant and recurrent features of hard core pornographic video as defined by Linda Williams in her text Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible: “the reliance on visible penile ejaculations as proof of pleasure”12. What is evident in this work, but also in Walker’s tableaux more broadly, is the artist’s engagement with sex that in some ways conforms to a ‘frenzy of the visible’, and a model of uncontained sexual drive said to be the mainstay of pornographic representations.

Before elaborating on Walker’s very specific engagement with the pornographic, I wish to discuss some of the ways the pornographic has been defined in relation to a total visibility of sex and a visualisation of sexual pleasure. I also wish to discuss the means by which the pornographic has been situated as another instance of ‘otherness’

11 Robert F. Reid-Pharr, “Black Girl Lost” Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time, ed. Annette Dixon (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002) 35. 12 Reid- Pharr 8.

to the aesthetic. Here, as in relation to the grotesque, the pornographic is treated as opposed to the operation of beauty on the basis of its bodily affect and revelry in corporeal materiality. As discussed previously, aesthetic experience when tied to either an ideal, or a privileging of form, is seen to be incompatible with the kind of matter and content that the pornographic consists of.

I wish to assess the ways in which Walker’s practice both engages the pornographic and backs away from its central hallmarks, and to situate this usage in relation to that of Aubrey Beardsley, whose illustrations demonstrate a similar intersection of the pornographic, grotesque, and decorative outlined in the previous two chapters. Again, what is evident in both artists’ work is the coexistence of apparently contradictory operations. Again, their work becomes a sight where the usual binaries of experience are held in suspension. As another instance of intersection whereby operations deemed mutually exclusive are combined, Walker and Beardsley’s ‘aesthetics of the explicit’, is productive of an immoderate pleasure, both satisfying and destabilizing.

3.3 Pornography and the Pornographic: ‘Other’ to the Aesthetic?

As a distinct cultural category, ‘pornography’ names a diverse group of sexually explicit representations grouped by their apparently singular intention to arouse or stimulate sexually. The designation of material as pornographic is historically and culturally specific, dependent as much upon moral and legal demarcations as representative codes. For this reason, some writers have concluded that pornography’s definition – judged in conjunction with the term ‘obscene’ – is continuous only insofar as it concerns the ideology of a dominant class and what it designates as taboo13. In any case to treat it as a static and entirely independent cultural category is problematic. As Lynda Nead has argued, “[a]t any particular moment there is no unified category of the pornographic but rather a struggle between several competing definitions of decency and indecency” 14.

13 Walter Kendrick, for example, suggests that the only valid definition of pornography is one that recognises that “pornography is simply what ever representations a particular dominant class or group does not want in the hands of the other, less dominant class of group”. Kendrick quoted in Williams 12. 14 Linda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art and Sexuality,” Signs 15.2 (Winter 1990): 324.

As Pasi Falk argues, one of the most interesting aspects of pornography as it stands in the context of cultural production is its position as ‘other’: “Pornography is always defined in negative terms as something which, according to a certain code of representation – be it moral or aesthetic – must be excluded”15. The primary way by which pornography has been defined is in relation to other forms of cultural production, some of which might also involve an engagement with sex, and its graphic depiction. Pornography’s most commonplace opposing term is art. Defined negatively, pornography has consistently been positioned as the other of art, morally, legally and culturally.

Since Modernism, however, it has become possible to identify the pornographic as a representative mode within given art practices. Here the term is used to denote the presence of tropes and codes adopted in the visualizing of the body and sex: appropriated from or referencing pornography, but with a different intent. While in this sense, the opposition between art and pornography has been redrawn, the opposition between the pornographic and the aesthetic is still determinative. As Falk suggests, the pornographic has been conceived of as the “paradigmatic case of the anti-aesthetic, the obscene part of what Karl Rosenkranz in the mid-nineteenth century called ‘the aesthetics of the ugly’”16. Insofar as the pornographic is understood to “subjugat[e…] the representation to the body’s interests”17 it is understood to provoke an entirely sensuous response in the viewer. On this basis it is deemed to be in conflict with the aesthetic experience as it is typically conceived, and as outlined in my previous chapters.

Where the grotesque was situated in opposition to the aesthetic in its generation of disgust, the pornographic is similarly opposed on the basis of its bodily provocation: this time by way of its affect of sexual arousal and gratification. Again, the pornographic’s action on the senses is judged to be in conflict with the palliative pleasure associated with beauty in both the Classical and Kantian accounts. In

15 Pasi Falk, “The Representation of Presence: Outlining the Anti-aesthetics of Pornography,” Theory, Culture and Society 10 (1993): 5. 16 Falk 2. 17 Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 3.

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“exciting the passions of the beholder”18, the pornographic is said to destroy the reflective distance on which aesthetic experience is understood to depend.

The notion of pornography as a more direct mode of representation is shared both by those who have condemned pornography’s damaging social impact, and those who have argued that for its value as socially transgressive. Anti-pornography feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon and Susan Griffin perhaps best exemplify the former position. These activists have defined the pornographic in relation to ideological (i.e. patriarchal) interests and situate its affect as instrumental in the maintenance of “man’s will to sexual power”19. So affective is the depiction of violent and sadistic sex acts, and so close are viewer and representation, argue such writers, that pornography’s very consumption comprises a misogynist act. Similarly situating the pornographic in relation to the abolition of any reflective distance, those such as Griffin have insisted on the pornographic’s “transformation from image to act and act to image”20. Here, the pornographic is less representation than direct ‘presentation’, so raw and affective is the pornographic means of visualization.

But where anti-pornography feminists have viewed the abolition of reflective distance as pornography’s greatest danger, other writers have located this as its greatest asset. As was the case with the framing of the grotesque’s affect of disgust, the pornographic’s action on the senses is treated as another eruption of the corporeal or material. And as was the case in relation to the grotesque, this eruption has in certain instances been similarly framed as a resource for socio-cultural critique.

The efforts of Susan Sontag in this area are crucial. While not arguing for the embrace of pornography en masse, Sontag’s attempts to identify a form of ‘elite’ pornography “to which inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain” represents an important moment in the pornographic’s reconsideration21. With reference to the

18 Schopenhaur quoted in Falk 8. 19 “Male power”, suggests Dworkin, “is the raison d’etre of pornography; the degradation of the female is the means of achieving this power”, quoted in Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987): 721. 20Griffin quoted in Gubar 719. 19 Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) 205.

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work of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade, Sontag argues for a consideration of certain pornographic works as consistent with the Modernist literary aims of “disorientation” and “psychic dislocation”22. For Sontag, all art engages states of consciousness. What makes the pornographic literature she attends to valuable is the extent to which it engages an “extreme form of consciousness”23: one that “transcend[s] social personality” and represents an assault on established conventions of art and reigning norms of society24.

For Sontag, what assures the pornographic its status as part of the history of art rather than trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon that ‘deranged consciousness’ of the erotically obsessed. Rather it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.25

In arguing for this originality and authenticity Sontag’s treatment of the pornographic involves the positivisation of the qualities that are elsewhere used to de-legitimise it as a valid genre of art.

While largely historically contingent, the qualities that make up the pornographic and are said to prompt its destructive or destabilising affect are usually framed in terms of an acute visibility of sex and the body, and a particular visualisation of sexual pleasure. Whether treated as an instance of ‘graphic realism’ or as a highly codified framing of reality, all accounts of the pornographic seize upon this aspect of extreme visibility. As Allison Pease suggests, the development of contemporary pornography might be viewed in terms of an “intimacy between obscenity and graphic realism”26. For Linda Williams, as noted in relation to Testimony, features such as the ‘cum shot’ of hard-core film are treated as evidence of a “frenzy of the visible” enacted at the level of sex and the body. For those such as Baudrillard, the pornographic’s “vividness of anatomical detail” is equated with a spectacle of visibility where each part of the body in its ‘exposure’ is reduced to a ‘visible sign’27.

22 Sontag 214. 23 Sontag 205. 24 Sontag 212. 25 Sontag 214. 26 Pease 170. 27 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990) 34.

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In each case, the pornographic with its sheer visibility of sex and the body is always judged to be at the expense of something else. For Baudrillard, for example, the result of pornography’s anatomical visibility is a depersonalisation of its sexual ‘actors’ as “[t]he erotic models are faceless, the actors neither beautiful, ugly, expressive; functional nudity effaces everything in the ‘spectacularity of sex’… [and] even the body disappears, dispersed amongst oversized, partial objects”28. This recognition of the depersonalisation of individuals in the pornographic is common to many discussions of its operation. Individuals are seen as mere “outlines or blueprints, diagrams or directions”29 and interactions, combinations of human parts: props in elaborate “sexual ballets” indifferent to character individuation30. Rather than relationships in pornography, we are said to be presented with the “juxtapositions of human bodies, parts of bodies, limbs, and organs”31. What is prioritised is the notion of infinite sexual combinations in the name of unlimited display.

In the field of literature it is conventions such as narrative, attention to language (outside a purely instrumental role) and character development that are said to be neglected or abandoned in the construction of the pornographic. In the visual arts it is a concern with form itself that is deemed lacking, and that again places the pornographic as the ‘other’ to art and the aesthetic. Overladen with details of the body in pieces, and with sexual events that occur within the shakiest of plotting premises, the pornographic is said to over-emphasise sexual parts at the expense of the work’s whole.

As Slavoj Zizek has argued, and those such as Williams and Baudrillard imply, the greatest irony of pornography is that in its elaborate staging of the real, or attempt to show the truth of sex, it is one of the most codified of all representations32. Less the raw or unmediated presentation suggested by anti-pornography literature, the

28 Baudrillard 34. 29 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London: Corgi Books, 1969) 280. 30 Marcus 277. 31 Marcus 277. 32 See Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997).

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pornographic stands here as a rigorously determined representation of sex acts and the body.

For Zizek, what governs the pornographic’s ‘realism’ is a staving off of the order of the (Lacanian) real – as traumatic dimension of sex and representation. For Hal Foster similarly, the pornographic stands in opposition to those ‘critical’ practices discussed in the previous chapter in its stance against the real and its maintenance of the ‘image-screen’s’ integrity. For Foster, where abject art is obscene insofar as “the object without a scene, comes too close to the viewer”, the pornographic is a representation “where the object is staged for the viewer who is thus distanced enough to be its voyeur”33. Despite the pornographic’s proximity to the body in its provocation of the senses (that is framed elsewhere as an elimination of reflective distance), for Foster, the pornographic is dependent on another kind of distance: that distance from the disruptive order of the real.

For Foster in particular, pornographic realism is a kind of ‘superrealism’, associated with an “anxious move to smooth over the real” or “a tricking of the eye… as a taming of the gaze”34. Its attempt to show all or present a truth of sex represents a denial of any unrepresentable and destabilising dimension of experience. And as such, its repression of the real, suggests Foster, does little to disrupt the surface of signs nor image screen, thereby providing “little disturbance of capitalist spectacle”35 or reigning norms or ideals. Consistent with superrealism, pornography in Foster’s treatment is not altogether opposed to the aesthetic. In its taming of the gaze the pornographic instead demonstrates a complicity with the aesthetic in this regard.

Divorced from the intent to arouse alone, to reference the pornographic as a series of tropes and codes might be to engage this model of superrealist representation marked by an acute visibility of sex and the body. But as Zizek’s own discussions on the pornographic suggest, and Sontag’s discussion of Bataille and de Sade imply, there might be a way of broaching the pornographic that does indeed destabilise the ‘image-screen’ of reigning norms and ideals. This approach would also be consistent

33 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996) 153. 34 Foster, Return 144. 35 Foster, Return 145.

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with Sontag’s view of the pornographic as an ‘extreme of consciousness’, and as a decentring force. It is in relation to these potentials that I now return to the practice of Kara Walker.

3.4 Walker’s ‘Porntopia’

To what extent might Walker’s work be judged pornographic? As her critics have indicated and as Testimony affirms, her practice does display the visibility of sex acts. And this work, like Walker’s silhouette tableaux, does seem to present an endless series of sexual combinations that figure their individual characters as “props in elaborate ‘sexual ballets’” as evidenced in the pornographic elsewhere. If we concede that Walker’s tableaux engage ‘types’ or racial stereotypes, they might also appear to echo the pornographic’s “indifferen[ce] to character individuation” 36. In this regard, Walker’s work might also be viewed as akin to Stephen Marcus’s seminal writing on the pornographic’s “contained universe” that he names ‘Porntopia’. As Marcus suggests, Porntopia is marked by scenes of “infinite… potency [where] all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both… [a]nd everyone is always ready for anything”37.

Certainly Walker’s works at times choreograph this excessive bodily fecundity. But while they may display a revelry in the sexual, it is a far cry from any utopian vision of sexual possibility where pleasure, simplistically conceived, is the only outcome. As Testimony’s narrative demonstrates, in Walker’s work sex is often indivisible from aggression (and death), pleasure is indivisible from pain, and the complicity and agency of any given character in any given scenario difficult to ascertain. Where in the genre of hardcore pornography, (phallic) sexual pleasure of the protagonists is made transparent and quantifiable through the ejaculatory scene, in Walker’s work, it is a site of ambivalence.

In Testimony, Walker’s cum shot comes after a narrative figure is reduced to zero, debased, and hanged. The question of his complicity (since the introductory text that suggests the male protagonist “sold himself, longing for fulfilment”) is in question at

36 Marcus 276- 277. 37 Marcus 276.

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every moment of the video’s narrative. Appearing after the character’s escape, return to capture, and torture, Walker’s ‘cum shot’ cannot be read as a simply transparent indicator of this character’s pleasure. And given the brutal events that unfold, nor can it be gauged as a simple indicator of Walker’s intent to arouse her spectator, nor as a point of simple gratification for the viewers themselves.

What is evident in Testimony as elsewhere in Walker’s work is the extent to which sex in Walker’s imagery is indivisible from the grotesque, bodily and painful elements noted in the previous chapter. Walker’s articulation of sexuality is much more disruptive, unbinding, and destructive than the kind of generalised definition of the pornographic outlined previously. In Walker’s representation of sex, the pleasures depicted are of an excessive and immoderate kind. They bear a relationship not so much to ‘eros’ but to ‘thanatos’ or the death drive. I refer here to Freud’s concept of the dissimilatory death drive as that “urge inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of things” articulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle38. In contrast to the drive towards coherence, unity and self-preservation, the death drive is that unbinding force associated with a movement towards destruction, aggression, and inertia/ death. Its operation in violation of the pleasure principle is associated with a compulsion to repeat and to re-enact trauma. Its registration in Walker’s work is suggestive of a destructive model of sexuality that has dominated recent attempts to define the pornographic in opposition to the ‘erotic’.

Walker’s work might therefore be appropriately placed amidst the tradition of the pornographic that Sontag elaborates with reference to de Sade and Bataille, which figures sexuality as a disruptive force of psychic disorientation and dislocation. Certainly in Walker’s tableaux, sex constitutes a dislocating and disruptive force. As Heartney has noted “(i)n Walker’s work sex serves as an agent of mixing, disrupting order and creating impurities through a wilful breach of established boundaries”39 within any given scene. Staged within narratives of historical and cultural significance Walker posits sex – and it is through her usage of the pornographic that this takes place – as that which destabilises given readings of historical events. So

38 Sigmund Freud, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton and Company, 1961) 43. 39 Heartney 226.

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too does it disrupt the acquisition of viewing pleasure taken in such scenes or narratives. As I have argued in relation to the decorative and grotesque, Walker’s work is both seductive and disturbing, and her particular framing of explicit sex is certainly one means by which her images disturb us.

The notion of sex as a disruptive force in relation to romance and a romantic, idealised notion of American history is represented in one of Walker’s earliest large scale tableaux, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994, [Fig. 3.6]). Here as elsewhere, the artist combines official and unofficial accounts of American history, inflecting the former with the fantasies and anxieties of ethnosexuality that came to dominate the latter and their appeal. As her title suggests, Walker revisits one of the most significant events in American history – The Civil War. This revisitation, however, takes place through the lens of pulp romance novels and the film industry, with its title Gone referencing one of the most successful films in American history, i.e. Gone With the Wind. It also occurs through the filter of what Walker has termed her “over-zealous imagination” in the “collusion of historical fact and fiction”40. As the title suggests, Gone imagines the Civil War as though it occurred within locations of the artist’s own body and erotic investments: i.e. between her ‘dusky thighs’ and her ‘heart’.

In this work, silhouetted landscape details that flank the tableau’s action establish the scene as one of the Deep South; with trees dripping with Spanish Moss resonant with steamy fictional accounts of plantation life. To the left of the tableau stand a white couple: the male figure, gallantly attired with sword in his belt, and his hoop-skirted partner. Both with hands clasped they lean to kiss under the moonlight. The scene is idyllic and familiar, reminiscent of a Disney corporation fairy tale, but for a second pair of legs that emerge from below the female figure’s billowed skirt, this time facing in the opposite direction. This second female lover beneath the romantic heroine’s skirt appears to engage in a ‘kiss’ of her own that disrupts the scene as one

40 Walker has noted this incursion of personalized fictions as central to her practice. Walker states, “I am too aware of the role of my overzealous imagination interfering with the basic facts of history, so in a way my work is about the sincere attempt to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and winding up with Mandingo instead. A collusion of fact and fiction that has informed me since day one.” Kara Walker quoted in Reid-Pharr 32.

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of a heterosexual romantic ideal. So too does the entire scenario unfolding immediately to the right of the couple. Here, an African-American child with tiny horns protruding from his head holds up a dead duck to another figure, whose long legs stretch out before her, and form a strange canoe-like vessel upon which she floats. As the child leans forward his buttocks meet the tip of the male figure’s sword, suggesting the possibility of a violent penetration of the child at any moment. In the tableau’s centrepiece, a much more explicit representation of child sexuality is taking place, where a black girl performs fellatio on a child her junior. In the sky above these figures another black boy is carried away by his large inflated genitals that have ballooned to the size of an independent body.

To the right of the centrepiece, a ‘negress’ character births infants, as if cocking her leg in a dance. Her young fall from between her legs, head first, to a bloody end below. Completing the tableau to the far right is another couple echoing the couple on the left. This time a ‘negress’ character, like her hoop-skirted counterpart, seems to ‘hold’ a second pair of legs. On this occasion, however, the female figure is propped upon the male figure below her, and the top half of his body is swallowed between her thighs. Like their romantic counterparts to the left of frame they are flanked by lush vegetation, but their union is far from the delicate rituals of romance, as one figure literally devours the other in a perverse embrace.

What is suggested in this work, and many of Walker’s tableaux, is a historical scene where sex has corrupted or perverted events, as each character is carried away by their desires, like the child whose ballooned penis transports him into the air. As in Testimony, the agency of each figure, engaged in their polymorphous and violent sexual acts is difficult to discern. And the difficulty in ascertaining complicity, or failing to simplistically identify with any given character in any given scene, might be what so many critics have found difficult to swallow in judging the work. While a form of corruption is certainly always taking place in Walker’s tableaux, it is impossible to discern if sex has been corrupted by the workings of slavery or if the operation of slavery as an economic system has been corrupted by a darker sexual force. And just as the individual complicity of Walker’s players is difficult to discern, so too is the degree of complicity of the viewer who is compelled to engage with the work, and to admit to a pleasure in this engagement with perversity.

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The previous discussion of Gone has emphasised pornographic elements of Walker’s work. But as discussed in relation to the grotesque and the decorative, her work, for all its acute visibility and graphic sex acts, also depends on a withdrawal from the visually explicit that works in counter-distinction to the pornographic as it is typically conceived. In the background behind and between the figures, distant islands, wisps of clouds and more obscure or unnameable landscape details provide strange keys to the nameable figures within the scene and their explicit sexual activities. Rendered in flat, reductive and aesthetically refined form, Walker’s images do not promise to ‘tell all’ of the sexual, and this is part of what compels or what is seductive about her work. The silhouette form guarantees that a great many details – anatomic or otherwise – are difficult to precisely identify. If the pornographic as thoroughly coded consists in a denial of the real (as the traumatic and unrepresentable) it must be remembered that Walker’s images also amplify blind spots and anamorphic forms via the format of the silhouette. These unassimilable details index the real within representation.

For all their depiction of sexual revelry, Walker’s tableaux also consist in an arrest of form, a stasis and an aesthetic veiling that come closer to an erotics of viewing that circles around voids of space. As suggested in my discussion of the function of shit in the earlier chapter, it is not merely that her work brings together motifs of delicacy and disgust, but also that particular forms engage in both aesthetic veiling and anti- aesthetic revulsion in the same space of articulation. In Gone for example, infants cascade from between their mother’s legs to their death – an image that while gruesome in its implications is made tolerable by the elegant abbreviated form by which this gory miscarriage takes place. Everything is rendered in flat black paper. And everywhere, in the very place where the most graphic (in the sense of violent and sexual) of scenes is outlined, is the space for the projection of something both more obscene or more appealing than that which can be discerned or named.

As I have noted, a great deal of the literature surrounding Walker’s graphic depictions debates whether her work’s visualisation of sex and sexuality merely appropriates a pornographic obscenity (that is the subtext of historico-cultural texts), or is itself obscene. As Walker’s pointed investigation into the social construction of ethnosexuality demonstrates, and her own interventions imply, her practice does

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both. It is obscene in its visualisation of sex and violence, though this visualisation is in the service of a critique of social constructions, rather than an assertion of their positive value. Certainly Walker presents a disturbing and destabilising image of sex and sexuality that erupts within any given scene to make its simple enjoyment problematic. In works such as Gone and Testimony it is the idealised account of American history as a narrative of innocent and noble historical subjects that is disrupted, a gesture observable in all of Walker’s tableaux.

As I have argued elsewhere, it is insofar as Walker presents a vision both aesthetically pleasing and destabilising that is significant, and here her use of the pornographic is one of the means by which this operation takes place. Walker’s sexually explicit works are both pornographic and more than this, if the pornographic is merely conceived as a series of codes or tropes that aim towards a sheer visibility of sex and sexual pleasure. A similar intersection of decorative form and the representation of the sexually explicit acts also occurs in the work of Aubrey Beardsley. And despite the different historical context from which the work emerges, it too can be seen to combine the categorically opposed operations of the pornographic and aesthetic to similar effect. Beardsley’s work, like Walker’s, also articulates explicit representations of non-normative sexuality, made in and through aestheticised form. Just as in Walker’s work, in Beardsley’s practice sex consistently erupts as a disruptive force.

3.5 Aubrey Beardsley and the Production of Victorian Pornography

Relative to imagery of Walker’s practice, the majority of Beardsley’s work may not seem so obscene. In a sense, treating Beardsley’s work as pornographic illustrates the thesis of pornography and obscenity as historically contingent. It is worth remarking that during Beardsley’s lifetime he achieved great scandal as a pornographer, aligning himself with publishers that openly trafficked in obscene material (as evidenced by his long-standing relationship with the publisher Leonard Smithers). Thus, while as Allison Pease has suggested, Beardsley might be credited with being one of the first Modern artists to bring “sexually explicit images and tropes that until

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(his) time could only be found in pornography”41 to a fine art context, it should also be recognised that he directed his efforts towards the production of material that was to be received as pornography.

Beardsley’s own statements testify to his awareness of this. Despite renouncing “all obscene drawings”42 such as his Lysistrata works (of 1896), and making a plea for their destruction in the last moments of his life, his correspondences until this point suggest a great pleasure derived from this part of his practice. The fact remains that scholars and censors for many years following his death considered Beardsley to be a producer of pornography. In Australia, as late as 1969, those selling his imagery (such as the Third World Bookshop in Sydney and the Red and Black Bookstore in Brisbane) were prosecuted for the possession and distribution of Lysistrata illustrations, under the legal premise that this material was considered obscene.

What was deemed obscene within Beardsley’s practice, and still constitutes its sexual explicitness for contemporary critics is its detailing and visibility with regard to the anatomical and sexual. Where the figures of Beardsley’s illustrations are not gender ambiguous (as noted in the previous chapter) they wear the marks of their sexual difference with little subtlety. Beardsley’s illustrations of the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata exemplify this. These images provide visual keys to the narrative in which the Athenian Lysistrata exhorts the women of Athens and neighbouring regions to join with her in a strategic pact of sexual abstinence, in order to bring about the end of the Peloponnesian War. The illustration Cinesias Entreating Myrrhina to Coitus represents, as the title suggests, a comic scene of coital postponement in which one of the women undertaking the pact, Myrrhina, is confronted by her husband, Cinesias [Fig. 3.7]. Appropriate to the text, Cinesias, having been some time without his wife, is depicted in his “permanently rigid” state43, attempting to grasp at his partly de- robed wife as she evades him. While in the play’s original staging, the male characters would have sported leather phalli, in Beardsley’s illustration, Cinesias’s

41 Pease 73. 42 From Beardsley’s ‘Deathbed Letter’, quoted in Christopher Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 157. 43 Line 865, Aristophanes “Lysistrata,” Lysistrata and Other Plays, trans. with an introduction and notes by Alan H. Sommerstein (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) 175.

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burgeoning erection is rendered with the same delicacy of line and dot work as is evident in his rendering of fabric, frills and coiffure (both on the head and in pubic regions). In stark contrast to the black ground on which the figures float, garments and adornments are densely rendered in a variety of graphic techniques, framing and enveloping the figures’ exposed body parts.

This same level of exaggerated genital display and decorative detail is evident in The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors [Fig 3.8]. In this work, three figures, nude but for their elaborate hairstyles, stand in contemptuous protest at their unsatiated erections. Like the little boy in Walker’s drawing, the dwarfed figure carries his penis that has grown to grotesque proportions, now presumably larger than his pelvis alone can support. This disproportioned figure with his gruesome, almost demonic face and elaborate bejewelled and feathered headpiece represents an obvious point at which decorative, grotesque and pornographic elements culminate. This image (like the other Lysistrata images) might also be seen as a clear indicator of the influence of Japanese genre Shunga44 on Beardsley’s work. In its investment in decorative detail, its framing of the explicit content with heavily ornamented garment, and its oversized genitals, positioned as the “second face” of the figures, the Lysistrata illustrations demonstrate a parallel engagement with this tradition of erotica. Certainly the rendering of folds with looped lines demonstrates Beardsley’s interest in the rendering of garments in Ukiyo-e more broadly.

Other drawings such as Athenian Women In Distress [Fig. 3.9] and Lysistrata Shielding Her Coynte [Fig. 3.10] feature women in the mode of explicit display. Interestingly, such images have recently been reclaimed by feminist literature as less pornographic than ‘erotic’ on the basis that they (unlike Walker’s work) suggest a model of sexuality said to indicate a “vision… of non exploitive sexuality for both sexes”, in their allusion to “sexual choices” for women (in defiance of the social

44 Part of the Ukiyo-e tradition, Shunga is known for its “ornamentation, elaborate costuming, grotesque homunculi, and sexual themes” in conjunction with a “delicate linearity, flatness, asymmetry, vertical format, and minimalism”. Collette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 126.

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norms of their historical appearance45). Such an allusion can be read in both of these works. Athenian Women In Distress for example, supposedly illustrating the moment in which the women of Athens are driven to a desperate state by the sexual abstinence in its title, presents a more ambiguous situation than the word ‘distress’ suggests. Where one woman, with her back to the viewer, slides down a rope, another stands facing her, but with one hand on her crotch and another ambiguously placed behind her. This suggestion of masturbation is framed by a swallow (a symbol of love and fidelity) that the figure squashes beneath her foot. Another woman’s arm extends from the top of the frame downwards as if to assist her. What is suggested is that the women are far from being in distress at having been without their male partners. Instead, Beardsley implies a scene of erotic self-sufficiency within the walls of the Acropolis.

So too in the illustration Lysistrata Shielding Her Coynte [Fig. 3.10]. Standing to the right of a Priapus (or idol of procreation recognisble by its permanently erect phallus) and to the left of a giant and statuesque penis upon which she leans, Lysistrata, if under threat of rape as the title and narrative suggests, appears curiously unaffected. While her hand covers her pudenda, its placement suggests less a shielding than a masturbatory pose. Her droopy eyelids and curious smile again suggest that she is pleasurably engaged rather than in distress or discomfort.

From the prominent display of engorged sexual organs evident in these drawings to the thinly veiled appearance of sexual detailing in his Salome illustrations, Beardsley’s work abounds with moments of anatomical display. So often do such details appear in his drawings, sometimes even worked into domestic objects (as in the candlesticks of Enter Herodias, 1894 [Fig. 3.11], or the chair legs in Toilet of Helen for Under The Hill, 1896 [Fig. 2.12]) that, as Collette Colligan suggests, “after a while, one searches for concealed male and female organs in all of the illustrations”46. For Pease, Beardsley’s usage of the pornographic went beyond the visibility of sexual organs, to the appropriation of pornographic tropes, all of which would have been recognisable to a Victorian audience. These tropes include the

45 Linda Gertner Zatlin, “Félicien Rops and Aubrey Beardsley: The Naked and the Nude,” Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Robert Langenfeld (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989) 184. 46 Colligan 134.

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persistent use of voyeur figures, scenes of masturbation and flagellation (as an instance of sado-masochism), an implied bestiality (echoing a contemporaneous trend of aligning women with animal imagery), homoerotic imagery and the persistent use of the exotic Other.

As discussed in previous chapters, such tropes often appear antagonistic to the scenes, conventions and contexts they are situated within. In the Morte Darthur series discussed in Chapter One, for example, the illustration How King Mark Found Sir Tristram brings a blatantly homoerotic content to an otherwise largely asexual narrative [Fig. 3.12]. Here, two of Malory’s knights are depicted in especially androgynous guise. Tristram is depicted naked with long flowing hair, elegant limbs and particularly ambiguous genitals, while Mark is similarly feminised. As the title suggests, the composition features Mark’s ‘finding’ Tristram, though his posture and placement suggests that it is Tristram’s genitals and not his face that are his most compelling discovery. His raised hand and bent body suggest he is lowering himself to perform oral sex. Here, as elsewhere, Beardsley uses an explicit eroticism to disrupt an otherwise idealised scene. As Snodgrass suggests this illustration consists in a “heretical transformation of the conventional dream-entranced Pre-Raphelite ideal beauty”47. As discussed previously, this attack on the Pre-Raphelite ideal occurs frequently in Beardsley’s work, and here it is made through pointed use of pornographic codes.

But again, inasmuch as such illustration series present a visibility that might point to pornographic realism, and a visualisation of taboo acts familiar to pornography, they, like the images of Walker, also activate processes of abstraction, a play on flatness and an attention to ornamental detail that do not fit comfortably within this genre (aligning them to traditions such as Ukiyo-e and Modernist painting to come). Just as in Walker’s work, in Beardsley’s imagery the sexually explicit is articulated via means of stark reduction in the flattening out of form, and decorative display.

47 Snodgrass, Aubrey 253.

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As already noted in relation to the Lysistrata illustrations, Beardsley’s representations alternate between a simplicity of line and a flat though rich rendering of fabric and stylised hair detail. As discussed in Chapter One, this might be described as something akin to an empty medallion where proliferous decorative form circulates around a void of empty space. As evident in Lysistrata Shielding Her Coynte, bodily and figurative elements are interspersed with large sections of empty space, and an asymmetrical cropping that is disruptive of perspective as is the void upon which figures float. An over-investment or over-emphasis on oversized part objects of the body that upsets visual coherence is not foreign to the pornographic. But here as elsewhere, an equivalence in the graphic rendering of hair and fabric, dotted folds and dotted genital detail makes for a consistency in rendered form – explicit and otherwise – that is peculiar to Beardsley’s pornographic vision.

As a constellation of his explicit representative mode, Beardsley’s cover for Ernest Dowson’s Verses is instructive, consisting in vulval form articulated by three curvilinear lines, each ending in small ornamental scrolls. Here is a representation of the female body pared back to its most minimal trace [Fig. 3.13]. As Beardsley’s ultimate dirty joke this reductive rendering was the means of ensuring the publication of sexual content while evading action from censors. Passing for a purely formal and abstract design, this work emphasises the graphic (in the sense of graphic arts) alongside a sexually graphic depiction. This practice has led those such as Colligan to suggest that Beardsley’s work might best be viewed in relation to an erotics of line itself: in Colligan’s words, a “libidinal line”. As Colligan suggests, this libidinal line might again be partly attributable to Beardsley’s interest in the tradition of Shunga, insofar as it represents an “erotics of medium”, as well as pornographic exposure48.

What is suggested in this work – and in Beardsley’s work more generally – is the indivisibility of aestheticised form and sexually explicit representations within Beardsley’s illustrations, much as I have argued in relation to Walker. As Pease notes, so thoroughly linked are Beardsley’s style and the overtly sexual imagery, that the critical reception of his work during his lifetime came to figure his technique as both sign of and a surrogate for sexual perversion. As Pease indicates, within

48 Snodgrass, Aubrey 144.

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Decadence “stylistic tendencies were so associated with sexual perversions that they became visual contractions for these putative crimes”49. Insofar as both were considered as a form of attack upon Victorian social norms or ideals, both formal technique and explicit content were collapsed. This fact is similarly noted by Colligan who cites the commentary of critic D. Tinto in London Figaro in 1893. “[T]he drawings”, suggests Tinto, “are flat blasphemies against art”50. As Colligan notes, “[f]or this reviewer, Beardsley’s two dimensional linearity is offensive: its flatness somehow explains its blasphemy”51.

It is customary for historians to argue that Beardsley merely adapted the pornographic to the aesthetic and in the process negated its operation and affect. Pease asserts, for example, that Beardsley’s very contribution was an aestheticisation of the pornographic elements of the work. For Pease, however, their ultimate importance “was not in the represented, but rather the representing”52. Here, the appropriation of pornographic tropes enacted by Beardsley allows for a distancing from the practice of sexuality that pornography’s consumption is said to constitute. Beardsley then, is figured as an important artist in the tradition of Modernism insofar as he effectively reinstated the distance between the explicit sexual material represented and the subject viewing.

This figuring of Beardsley’s contribution is not new. Arthur Symons, perhaps the most sympathetic commentator on Beardsley’s work during his life, similarly argued that the sensuous and ‘sinful’ was ‘transfigured’ in Beardsley’s representations (as noted in Chapter One). While Pease’s figuring of Beardsley’s aestheticisation of the pornographic is less moralistic in tone, her insistence that Beardsley’s “aesthetic of the obscene” de-emphasises the body still depends upon the insistence of the pornographic’s negation. Where Pease still argues for the consideration of Beardsley’s importance within Modernism, it is insofar as he enacts a “sublimation of mass culture”53. The term sublimation here is used here to denote a transfiguration from the base operation of pornography to a ‘higher’ cultural pursuit. I return to the

49 Pease 149. 50 Colligan 145. 51 Colligan 145. 52 Pease 74. 53 Pease 3.

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relevance of the term ‘sublimation’ to both Beardsley and Walker’s practices in the next chapter.

While criticism such as Pease’s depends on a negation of the pornographic by the aesthetic, I would argue, however, that her comments are instructive insofar as they suggest the coexistence of aesthetic and pornographic elements within Beardsley’s work. Like Walker’s explicit representations, Beardsley’s work also consists in an ‘aesthetics of the explicit’. Far from negating the operation of the pornographic, however, it holds it in tension with other operations of the work.

Just as in Walker’s images, in Beardsley’s illustrations, the sexually explicit appears as a disruptive and destabilising force, this time staged in the context of late Victorian social norms and aesthetic ideals. Pornographic tropes and codes appear in Beardsley’s work within illustrations of classical texts and “the same traditional aesthetic that Victorians (and their forebears) had customarily extolled – organic form, harmonious lines, unified narrative, integrating symmetry”54. While less excessive or unbounded than the model of sexuality present in Walker’s images, Beardsley’s explicit representations similarly consist in a non-normative and ambiguous sexuality that is still challenging to a contemporary audience. The Lysistrata illustrations, even by contemporary standards, still stand as examples of the pornographic’s ‘vividness of anatomical detail’ and ‘spectacle of visibility’ that challenge the gender politics of the narrative they illustrate. The Salome illustrations (such as Enter Heriodas) still provide disturbing configurations of sex and grotesque themes that are as unsettling as they are beautiful. The Morte Darthur illustrations stand as clear attacks on the codes and ideals of masculinity.

Evident in Beardsley’s work as in Walker’s is a particular adaptation of the pornographic. Utilising codes and tropes of pornography, the work of both artists demonstrates a visibility of sex and the body, and a visualisation of pleasure that in one regard represents a move toward the graphic realism with which the pornographic is associated. As I have argued previously in relation to the grotesque, it is not, however, a mobilising of the pornographic that can be reduced to taming of

54 Snodgrass, Aubrey.

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the gaze or a denial of the real, as certain writers have insisted of pornography in its broad cultural applications.

Appearing in conjunction with decorative form and grotesque themes, Walker and Beardsley’s explicit representations involve a complex interplay of contradictory operations. Again, what are ordinarily deemed exclusive poles – aestheticised form, destabilising bodies of excess, and the sexually explicit – operate within a single space of representation. As such, both practices are productive of an immoderate pleasure – both satisfying and destabilising. It is to a figuring of this pleasure, not simply in the terms of aesthetics, but also via those of psychoanalysis that I will now turn in Chapter Four.

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4. Sublimation

As discussed previously in relation to the decorative, grotesque and explicit both Walker’s and Beardsley’s practices engage contradictory modes of representation that suspend certain binaries of aesthetic discourse. Where in their mobilisation of decorative form their practices are seen to be generative of aesthetic pleasure, their revelry in bodily and sexual imagery in the modes of the grotesque and the explicit is associated with a more difficult affect; one seen to be in conflict with aesthetic experience Classically conceived. Another way in which this binary might be posed is as consisting in both sublimated and de-sublimated content and imagery, and it is the appropriateness of this terminology that I wish to address in this final chapter. Coined by Freud in his attempt to name and make sense of the ‘higher’ or ‘finer’ pleasures afforded by artistic production, Freud’s concept of sublimation, as a vicissitude of libidinal drives, provides an alternative means of approaching this division.

Freud’s emphasis on art as a higher pursuit and his framing of art in relation to desexualisation has however been treated with considerable suspicion, particularly by anti-aesthetic theory that has seized upon the suggestion of a decorporealised or purified pleasure that one reading of Freud’s concept at least provisionally supports. My attention is directed first towards this usage of sublimation applied to signal a philosophical consistency with the term ‘aesthetic’, insofar as both are equated with processes of idealisation. In equating sublimation and idealisation, sublimation is posited as an aggrandisement of the art object through dematerialisation and is consistently framed in relation to a repression of all that is deemed critical in avant- garde practices from Modernism to the present. In such writing, it is the desublimatory impulse that is granted critical status, hence the opposition between sublimation and desublimation becomes another point whereby the aesthetic’s focus on visual pleasure and the critical impetus of anti-aesthetic practices are rendered incompatible.

This figuring of sublimation, as I will discuss, is dependent upon a particular reading of Freud’s concept of sublimation, and one that I will argue ignores the more

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valuable insights the concept marks out. It is through an explication of Freud’s sublimation as revised by Jacques Lacan that I will then turn to as a means of broaching the productive contradictions of Walker and Beardsley’s work and the criticism that surrounds both. Sublimation is figured as providing a means of approaching these artists’ work that neglects neither its aesthetic operation nor its critical import, and it is this approach that I wish to use to redress the problems that I have identified in the literature on their practices. This final chapter presents a different interpretation of sublimation to prevailing models, and ultimately connects the practices of Beardsley and Walker to this changed vision of artistic sublimation.

4.1 The Anti-Aesthetic Figuring of Sublimation

As Hal Foster suggests in his preface to the 1983 collection of essays by the same name, the term ‘anti-aesthetic’ denotes a critical position said to consist in a “critique of Western representation[s]”, and one which places “the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas… in question”1. As Foster notes, its rejection of the validity of aesthetics is specific. Couched in terms that signal a critique of Kantian aesthetics, Foster argues that it is the notion that “aesthetic experience exists apart, without ‘purpose’, all but beyond history” and that “art can now effect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal” that anti-aesthetic theory and practice directs its scepticism towards2.

In particular, aesthetic philosophy’s presumed investment in the notion of an autonomous and depoliticised art object is negated insofar as it is deemed complicit in a humanist and bourgeois project whose claims to reason, order and truth are now obsolete. Further to this, the pleasures of aesthetic experience as contingent on the art object’s “idealised unity and harmony”3 is tied to a mode of viewing seen to affirm the notion of a centred, sovereign and disembodied subject. Elsewhere noted by Foster as a discourse that “separates subject and object”, aesthetic philosophy and the practices that support it is to said to posit the subject as “transcendental” and the

1 Hal Foster “Postmodernism: A Preface,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) xv. 2 Foster xv. 3 Alexander Alberro “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Art Journal 63.2 (2004) 37.

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object “inert”4. This affirmation of the subject and depoliticisation of the art object is treated as though consistent in both Classical and Kantian aesthetics. For the proponents of the anti-aesthetic, both are complicit with “metaphysical thought, empirical science and capitalist logic all at once”5.

According to Foster, the anti-aesthetic consists in a recognition that the aesthetic moment has been eclipsed insofar as its claims are now recognised as “largely illusory (and so instrumental)”6. Employing the language of psychoanalysis, Foster will argue that the subject of aesthetics is not merely ‘illusory’ but in fact imaginary: maintaining and supporting something akin to an egoic function where object and subject are aggrandised alike. Again, Classical and Kantian aesthetic theory are collapsed in this figuring of aesthetics. Whether in emphasis of the objective qualities of formal perfection (in symmetry, wholeness, harmony and completion) or in its insistence on a particular subjective experience (such as harmony of cognition and imagination) aesthetic thought, whether Classical and Kantian, is understood to figure art’s value in relation to its manifestation of an ideal. Giving art not just an exalted social standing but also a moral inflection, such thought is seen to reaffirm the subject as rational and centred. It is with reference to such ideas that aesthetic philosophy is positioned as endorsing a process of idealisation, that is, a process by which “the object’s qualities are elevated to the point of perfection” and in the service of the ego’s defence7. Viewed in these terms as the construction of an idealised object aesthetics is a defensive means of recovering a state of (narcissistic) wholeness, reliant upon the repression of that which might otherwise destabilise the subject and culture at large.

It is this link between aesthetics and an autonomous subject mirrored by its autonomous object that Foster’s critical practice is committed to demystifying. He documents anti-aesthetic tendencies within canonical Modernism that are said to undermine this notion of art as ideal and its metaphysical support. In his 1996 text Return of The Real, for example, Foster attempts to trace the eruption of a ‘traumatic

4 Hal Foster, “Preface,” Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) x. 5 Foster, “Preface” x. 6 Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic xv. 7 J. Laplanche & J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (New York: Norton & Company Inc, 1973) 202.

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realism’ and ‘illusionism’ within Modern and contemporary practices said to emerge in conflict with “the last vestige(s) of the old order of idealist composition” such as that evidenced in Modernist painting8. Locating the subversive tendencies of Surrealism and Dada re-enacted in avant-garde practices of the present, Foster seizes upon contemporary art that engages “the materialist low more than the Idealist high”9. Here, the materialist low destabilises the subject, while the idealist high simply reaffirms its imaginary stability.

In his discussion of abject art this equation of aesthetics and idealism is consistently developed with reference to sublimation as for Foster the most transgressive of practices can be seen as refusing “any sublimation of the object-gaze”10. Foster refers here to Lacan’s notion of the gaze as that which is not located in the subject, but gazes back from the object or representation thus indicating the failure of representation to capture all. The gaze is a reminder to the subject that they are not simply at the centre of their field of vision, as discussed in Chapter Two. In endorsing art that refuses to ‘sublimate’ or repress such a gaze, Foster implies a refusal to consent to the illusion of a centred subject. In Surrealism (here conceived as a moment where “desublimatory impulses confront sublimatory imperatives”11), Foster attends to practices that stage traumatic returns within the ‘image-screen’, or insist on the very ‘screen’s’ dismantling. As noted in Chapter Two, Foster is reliant on a Lacanian figuring of representation, as what is deemed traumatic in these practices is the eruption of the order of the real within representation, pitched against those same illusory devices, associated with the order of the imaginary, noted earlier. In general, suggests Foster, (critical) contemporary art demonstrates a consistent discontent with the “refinements of sublimation”12, and it is in abject art that this moment is most explicitly played out.

Here Foster dwells on the Freudian notion of “civilized man” as “overcome by sight” and as renouncing anal eroticism in favour of “genital pronouncement”13. He counter poses this development with contemporary art practices that revel in materiality and

8 Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996) 127. 9 Foster, Return 144. 10 Foster, Return 152. 11 Foster, Return 157. 12 Foster, Return 159. 13 Foster, Return 160.

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the bodily. Such practices suggests Foster, might be seen to constitute a “symbolic reversal” of this developmental passage marked in Freud by its culmination in the “phallic visuality of the erect body”14. Refusing the ‘renunciation’ noted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, Foster interrogates the critical efficacy of practices that stand in “double defiance of visual sublimation and vertical form”, in a tradition that Foster suggests, “might be subtitled ‘Visuality and Its Discontents’”15.

It is by these means that Foster equates the path of sublimation with idealisation. For Foster, sublimation is evident in ‘idealist composition’ (both realist or illusionary), ‘phallic visuality’ and a moment of elevation and veiling that equates to repression. In each instance, sublimation is associated with that process “whereby the subject sets out to recover the supposedly omnipotent state of infantile narcissicism”16. Alternatively, the desublimatory impulse involves a ‘symbolic reversal’ of this process.

This application of sublimation is also evident in the writings of Rosalind Krauss. Again, Krauss’s insistence on a desublimatory moment in Modernism is allied to an elsewhere repressed ‘optical unconscious’, which refutes the ‘opticality’ that has come to dominate the hegemonic writing of Modernist formalism. Krauss is explicit in rejecting both Greenberg’s general notion of painting as sublimation (that in its formalism transcends matter) and his attempts to sublimate individual artistic personas such as that of Jackson Pollock. Identifying Greenberg’s description of Pollock as “a very respectable gentleman” as a sublimating gesture, Krauss attempts to resituate Pollock in his “dissolute squat, in his James Dean dungarees and black t- shirt, slouched over his paintings in the disarray of his studio”17. Here Krauss, in keeping widespread assumptions about sublimation, equates the term with a subjective adjustment to dominant, conservative socio- cultural values and expectations. Krauss also resituates Pollock’s practice in the tradition of materiality that she believes is its critical contribution to Modern art. Like Foster, Krauss equates sublimation with an “abstract, purified language” and a move away from “the

14 Foster, Return 161. 15 Foster, Return 161. 16 Laplanche & Pontalis 202. 17 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) 244.

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material, the tactile (and) the objective”18 that practices such as Pollock’s are positioned in relation to. Again, Krauss locates such a move towards the materialist side of this equation as part of the legacy of Surrealism, specifically Bataille’s writing on the informe.

Krauss’s positing of sublimation then is like Foster’s insofar as sublimation is conflated with the aesthetic in general, and both are posited as idealisations in their apparently mutual insistence on opticality, verticality, purification, rationalisation and a renunciation of material-embodied subjectivity. As forms of attack on models of viewing both illusory and imaginary and as returns of a repressed materiality, Krauss’s optical unconscious and Foster’s abject art are opposed to sublimation understood as the elevation of a subject deemed complicit in humanism and false consciousness alike. Rather than situating this psychoanalytic concept as a means of questioning the binary opposition of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic practices, Foster and Krauss view sublimation in wholly negative terms. The desublimated, insist Krauss and Foster, consists in a content and imagery which refuses the idealising and sublimating impulses of the aesthetic, staging the return of that which sublimation as idealisation actively represses. Using the notion of desublimation as a critical means of revaluing one side of the idealist/materialist equation, their writing endorses the polarised categories of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic experience.

Insofar as Freud’s own writing does figure sublimation as a redirection of the libidinal drives away from a sexual aim, and posits art’s pleasures as “higher” and “finer” than those corresponding to the baser sexual drives of the subject, Foster and Krauss’s reading of sublimation is not altogether unfounded. As Joan Copjec has noted, Freud’s definition of sublimation as “a process that concerns object – libido and consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than and remote from sexual satisfaction”19 is easily (mis)identified as reducing art to a “pleasure purified of its sensuous and corporeal support”20. In this sense Freud places the concept in the same line of fire as that directed at “disinterested pleasure” foregrounded in the orthodox critique of Kant. As Copjec insists, the notion of

18 Krauss 247. 19 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library 11 (London: Penguin Books, 1991) 88. 20 Joan Copjec, “Pure Pleasure,” Umbra: A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1999): 5.

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sublimation as purification is particularly problematic in a (post- Holocaust) context where ‘purification’ retains its politically sinister resonances. And here, Freud’s aesthetics attract a similar scepticism to that of Kant insofar as both appear to depend upon a notion of art as predicated on and defined by the delivery of a disinterested, and critically disengaged pleasure and a notion of the aesthetic as “a completely autonomous realm beyond politics and history which has no other purpose than that of maintaining its own tradition”.21 Even in Freud’s time the suggestion of art contributing a “transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs” and the pains of everyday experience seemed wilfully ignorant of the Modern art practices that had by then come to the fore22. In light of the kind of Modern and Postmodern critical practices championed by Foster et al, Freud’s other discussions of art as facilitating a withdrawal from the everyday sufferings of life does seem questionable.

It is important to note however that on closer reading Freud’s writing of sublimation is explicitly defined as a path distinct from that of idealisation. In fact, Freud was to mark the path of sublimation as one outside of defensive mechanisms, and so distinguished it from processes of psychic or social repression that Foster and Krauss emphasise. It is to Freud’s definition, as informed by the revisions of sublimation made by Lacan, that I wish now to turn. More complex than the definition that the anti-aesthetic position expounds, Freud’s concept will lay the groundwork for a notion of artistic production that does not maintain a wholly antithetical relation between an aesthetics conceived of as idealism and materialist criticality, nor simply elevate the previously degraded term of this binary.

4.2 Sublimation: The Freudian Account

As Parveen Adams and others have noted, there is no one essay where Freud articulates his concept of sublimation. He instead produces a “number of loosely woven strands developed to varying degrees”23. Sometimes privileged by Freud as distinct, sublimation is elsewhere threatened in his writings by collapse into a number of associated concepts, presenting a complex and at times contradictory

21 Copjec, “Pure” 5. 22 Freud quoted in Copjec, “Pure” 5. 23 Parveen Adams, “Preface: Way beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams (New York: Other Press, 2003) xii.

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concept. Making an appearance in Freud’s psycho-biographical studies of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, and in his discussions of culture more broadly in papers such as Civilization and Its Discontents, sublimation is articulated most significantly in Freud’s writings on metapsychology, where it is figured as one of the vicissitudes available to the Trieb (or instinctual/libidinal drives). Not only pertaining to art, but any socially valorised undertaking, the term represents Freud’s attempt to reckon with the abandonment of self-interested sexual pleasure in the creation of cultural product; be it art, science or any other pursuit characteristic of civilisation.

To understand Freud’s conception of sublimation is to understand the workings of the drives, that is the fragmentary and fragmenting libidinal drives around which Freud structured his conceptualisation of sexuality. Differentiated from biological need, but corresponding to the sites of the body upon which they are ‘propped’, the drives in Freud’s writing are “numerous, [and] emanat[ing] from a great variety of organic sources”24. Always directed towards the aim of satisfaction, the drives are usually directed towards objects or sites that may be external to or part of the subject’s own body. In ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ the drives, Freud suggests, ideally or normatively “achieve a more or less complete synthesis at a later stage… (of sexual development, at the) service of reproductive function”25. Such a fate however is in no way assured. The drives may undergo a number of vicissitudes by way of the ego’s defences (such as repression or idealisation) and continue to determine the subject’s sexual and non-sexual activities throughout life.

In a move which Elizabeth Grosz suggests undermines the notion of artistic genius that Freud elsewhere holds to, it is to these drives that Freud attaches the genesis of artistic activity, more specifically to the drive’s inherent plasticity or fundamental displaceability. Able to achieve their satisfaction through deflection, diversion and interchangeability, the drives, says Freud, are “distinguished by possessing the capacity to act vicariously for one another to a wide extent and by being able to change their objects readily”26. It is, as Freud suggests, “[i]n consequence of the

24 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” On Metapsychology 122. 25 Freud, “Instincts” 122. 26 Freud, “Instincts” 124

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latter properties that they are capable of functions which are removed from their original purposive actions- capable, that is of sublimation”27.

Not limited to an interchanging of object and aim in the field of sexual satisfaction, the drives, Freud insists, are capable even of achieving satisfaction in a process of desexualisation; gaining pleasurable satisfaction in a renunciation of (sexual) pleasure as such28. Sublimation, Freud seems to suggest here, is the very instance of this desexualisation as it “consists in the instinct directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction”29.

As a process of ‘deflection’ from the obtainment of sexual pleasure, sublimation, Freud insists, involves “the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual”30. Here what was once sexual moves into the realm of what “must be described as social”31, and thus “finer and higher”32 than the self-interested procurement of sexual pleasure which is their base origin. Operative in the service of fending off suffering via the displacement of libidinal cathexis, sublimation is said to consist in the movement away from a ‘brute’ object alleged to satisfy some basic drive to an “elevated, ‘cultivated’ form of satisfaction”33. As a ‘way out’ for the subject, sublimation, suggests Freud, operates as a palliative measure for gaining satisfaction.

Again, it is the susceptibility of Freud’s concept to a collapse into desexualisation, and his emphasis on a movement from the brute to the cultivated that has been seized upon by those expounding the anti-aesthetic position. If desexualisation is to be gleaned as a movement away from the ‘raw’ body, as Freud’s comments on the failure of the genitals to ever be acknowledged as “beautiful” imply, then

27 Freud, “Instincts” 124 28 Elizabeth Grosz, The Strange Detours of Sublimation: Psychoanalysis, Homosexuality and Art (Sydney: Artspace Publications, 1997) 29 Freud, “On Narcissism” 88. Emphasis mine. 30 Freud quoted in Grosz 5. 31 Grosz 5. 32 Sigmund Freud “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library 12 (Harmondsworth, Misslesex: Penguin, 1991) 79. 33 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991) 83.

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sublimation does appear to align art’s pleasure with a process of decorporealisation. But it should be noted here that Freud insists this ‘way out’ is determined by a process in which “[the] demands [of the ego] can be met without involving repression”34. Not simply a form of glossing over a repressed content, sublimation stands in Freud’s writing as a special process distinct from idealisation and the other defences that exalt an object by denying what would otherwise destabilise the subject by acknowledging its internal conflict. It is this special function that Lacan attends to, and it is the Lacanian definition that I wish to discuss now.

4.3 Sublimation: The Lacanian Revision

In Lacan’s definition of sublimation, as Copjec notes, everything depends on what the satisfaction afforded by sublimation is purified or palliated of. And while Lacan retains the notion of sublimation indebted to the drives, his answer corresponds not to the elevation of a raw or unmediated corporeality or sexual instinct, as in Lacan’s writing, any possibility of such a body or drive is “killed by the letter”35 or precluded by the subject’s unconditional entry to the symbolic. In fact sublimation as ‘the proper destiny of the drives’ consists in forming a different relationship to that which is lost or impossible as a result being a speaking subject: i.e. that lack which the drives circulate around but can never touch directly. Corresponding not to the Ideal (that glosses over this loss or impossibility), sublimation consists in forming a different relationship to the Real. Not conceived as a beyond of representation, that, as some anti-aesthetic literature suggest, can be reached by way of traumatic rupture, the real is figured as that which can only be indexed in the symbolic, and sublimation stands as the very means by which this index is staged. Rather than maintaining a binary relation between the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic operations that I have suggested are co-present in Walker and Beardsley’s practice, the Lacanian writing of sublimation will figure this contradictory operation as a means of indexing the real, but one that is satisfying and critically enabling for the subject and society at large.

34 Freud, “On Narcissism” 89. 35 Lacan in Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1995) 24.

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I will begin my discussion of Lacan’s theory of sublimation by outlining his treatment of the drives. In this discussion, and in framing the material that follows it, I rely considerably on the writings of Joan Copjec, particularly her essay ‘The Tomb of Perseverance’ published most recently in the book Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation36.

Just as in Freud’s writing, in Lacan’s figuring of the concept, sublimation is attributed to the workings of the drives, and the drive’s potential for gaining satisfaction in objects whose appearance signals an inhibition of the drive’s aim. But rather than this satisfaction being figured as a substitute for sexual pleasure, in Lacan’s writing this inhibition constitutes the positive and proper activity of the drives themselves. In this writing of sublimation, the notion of sublimation’s libidinal path as one consisting in a desexualisation is no longer the relevant distinction. For where sublimation still stands in Lacan’s definition as a process that redirects sexual drives to the production of cultural objects, this process does not depend upon a renunciation of the sexual object per se. Far from an inhibition of body or of sex, sublimation as inhibition of the drive’s aim can be a means where the body (as written by the signifier) can be released from what symptomatic inhibition would otherwise restrict. As Lacan’s example of the poetry of courtly love demonstrates, sublimation can be the very means by which the sexual object “comes to light”37.

In Lacan’s writing (in elaboration of Freud) all drives find their origin in the singular and primary death drive: that destructive will towards a prior but mythical state of unity between mother and child. As discussed in Chapter Three the death drive in Freud’s writing is understood as an unbinding force or “urge inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of things”38. Rather than being a drive towards external objects, this drive represents a direction backwards and inwards to a state prior to the

36 “The Tomb of Perseverance” appears in both Copjec’s Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002) and in Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, ed. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (London: Verso, 1999) As Copjec attends to different aspects of sublimation in both versions of this essay, I refer to and cite both versions of this essay throughout this chapter. The first is cited as “Copjec, Imagine”, the second as “Copjec, “The Tomb’”. 37 Alenka Zupancic, “The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan,” Umbra: A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1999): 39. 38 Sigmund Freud, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton and Company, 1961) 43.

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acquisition of language and symbolisation, when there was no subjective division or pain, but also no subject as such.

Copjec, drawing on Lacan’s thinking, develops a particular interpretation of the relation between this death drive, directed towards an original plenum of united mother and child, and creative sublimation. In Lacanian discourse while this place of unified being or jouissance, the site in Freud of das Ding, may motivate the desire of the subject, its original loss or absence is unavoidable for two reasons. The first, as previously noted, pertains to the subject’s division in language, and the second relates, as Jean Laplanche has emphasised, to the mother’s own internal division as a split subject with an unconscious. As Copjec maintains, because of these structural impediments a brake is placed on the destructive path of death drive, diverting the drive’s erotic attention to the creation of substitute ‘objects’ in the place where unified being or jouissance is lacking39. Lacan equates this process with creative sublimation. He describes these objects, which operate in the unconscious as signifiers, as ‘partial objects’ or ‘objects of lack’ from which the subject is able to “grasp hold of some non-being, some jouissance, or satisfaction.”40 Importantly, these partial objects do not act as a means for directly attaining some ‘noumenal’ beyond (of representation) where the mother-Thing is fantasised to reside41. Rather, as Copjec stresses, Lacan argues that the subject gains satisfaction from these objects of lack because they incarnate an internal bi-partitioning of themselves and the order of representation more generally42.

To these partial objects that act as obstacles to the death drive’s destructive goal, Lacan gives the name Objets a, and to individual drives he designates particular ‘objects’ named by the ‘gaze, voice, breast, phallus’ etc. According to Copjec, their designation as organs acknowledges the sites by which the (m)other’s demand was impressed or overlayed upon the subject’s body. But while bodily in this sense, objets a are signifiers without signifieds. They represent part of the body now lost to the subject and their effect is a splitting of the subject from itself, and from the possibility of any direct or unmediated encounter with the external world. As Copjec

39 Copjec, Imagine 36. 40 Copjec, Imagine 36. 41 Copjec, Imagine 37. 42 Copjec, Imagine 38-39.

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suggests, objets a continue to filter the subject’s experience of all external objects, mediating subject and object.

The effect of objets a – the object cause of desire – is double, being both an index of loss (or evidence of a split in subject and object), and a trace of absolute pleasure or jouissance that the maternal Thing is fantasised as having provided. As such the pleasure afforded by these pure signifiers, and the external objects that will ‘coincide’ with them, is distinct from the pleasures provided by other objects or goods of consumption. As Copjec suggests, they represent one side of a split in enjoyment, with those corresponding to objets a pertaining to an excessive pleasure of an ‘unmasterable kind’. Copjec writes: “In contrast to the ordinary pleasure that everyday objects bring, jouissance …is a painful, immoderate pleasure”43, and it is this immoderate pleasure that objets a afford a glimpse of.

It is this same immoderate pleasure that creative sublimations will produce, insofar as sublimation’s objects will (through the sublimatory act by which the subject adds something to them) come to coincide with objet a. Sublimations will operate to create a space of freedom or freeplay that objets a’s existence opens for the subject and culture alike. What will change is not the inherent qualities of the object itself, but how it is figured and manipulated by the subject to mobilise objet a effects. Not signalled by a change in the drive’s aim (which is always death) this change is figured as one concerning the object to which the drive is necessarily directed. What occurs in sublimation is a manipulation where certain objects come to occupy a different position in the structure of fantasy.

Accounting for a range of avant-garde practices that Freud’s discussions would seem to have excluded, in Lacan’s theory of sublimation the object might be plain or even ugly if taken for what it is44. In fact, Lacan’s theory of sublimation accommodates those practices that have been treated as evidence of desublimation discussed previously. What is significant, and what points to the object’s status as sublimated is its installation of a double affect, indexing loss/lack and as a trace of jouissance. In instances of sublimation, as Copjec suggests, it is as if that which is most precious to

43 Copjec, “The Tomb” 253. 44 Zupancic 39.

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the subject, “the absolute condition of her being, her object a, had suddenly become figurable as an ordinary object”45. What makes sublimation’s objects fascinating and satisfying is not then their formal qualities (of harmony, proportion, completion etc) but their relation to this something else: this object cause of desire, as a trace of ‘The Thing’, this unsymbolisable dimension which is activated within representation, rather than beyond it. As Lacan notes in relation to the medium of painting, its “original end… is to project a reality that is not that of the object represented”46. Instead, its relationship is to the object gaze that shines or gazes back within painting’s surface, a relationship that as noted in Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster’s writing is associated with practices deemed desublimatory.

It is with reference to the double operation of objet a (as loss and satisfaction, death and the product of sublimated drive) that Lacan conceives of the aesthetic: not with reference to an ideal of perfection located in the object, but in the object’s and subject’s negotiation of proximity and distance from the real as void of the maternal Thing. One dimension of sublimation, suggests Lacan, is the ‘raising of the object to the dignity of das Ding’. And the aesthetic –as an effect – is a means of performing this raising in a way that “stops us from encountering directly the central field of desire (the Thing)” but also “points [us] in the direction of the field of destruction” that the Thing also represents47. By these means, beauty, according to Lacan, is figured as a kind of shield or veil – that tempers, suspends or disarms desire, as an alternative to pursuing that destructive path that would signal desire’s end. But insofar as it shields against the death drive, its structure also points to its origin in this drive: by pointing to the lack and loss that the death drive represents. As Lacan’s examples of the beautiful (such as the figure of Antigone) illustrate, creative sublimations retain their proximity to the destructive death drive: a proximity that both “attracts and startles us”48. While artistic sublimations may veil what is psychically conflicting for the subject they also engage these dimensions.

45 Copjec, “The Tomb” 260. 46 Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacque Alain Miller, trans. and notes Dennis Porter (New York: Norton & Company, 1997) 141. 47 Lacan, Book VII 216. 48 Lacan, Book VII 247.

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Again, beauty in this sense concerns that immoderate pleasure associated with objet a – that is both fascinating and disturbing in its registration of the death drive and the real. But it also consists in the maintenance of a distance from it: in the space afforded by the visual, aural opacity of objet a. Pointing to the already unstable register of the imaginary, the beautiful in Lacan’s discussion, as Margaret Iversen notes, is “one step away from horror”, not antithetical to nor simply synonymous with it49. In this sense, beauty and sublimations that mobilise its effect might be seen to consist in an engagement with the very thing that the anti-aesthetic proponents oppose to beauty – that is, that which destabilises the subject and refuses the possibility of narcissistic identification with an objective mirror of subjective unification, and self-immanence.

While all representations bear some relation to the real, those that are critically enabling neither deny its existence (glossing over the lack it implies) nor posit the real as a beyond of all symbolisation that can be directly touched. It is in treating and registering the real as “both immanent and inaccessible”50, or as an “opening or tension…disturbance or dislocation”51 in any given structure that grants certain representations a critical, and in Lacan’s writing, an ethical status. While Lacan’s theory of sublimation also admits the potential of practices that engage the operation of disgust, such practices have no greater purchase on, nor are they more direct ways of representing the real than those of aesthetic beauty. Every encounter with the real, states Lacan, “is essentially the missed encounter”52. The possibility of an engagement with the real or Thing in its ‘dumb reality’ is precluded by the subject’s entry to the symbolic and the subsequent arrival of objets a as filtering the relation between subjects and the external world. As Bruce Fink suggests, this real is not that which can be reached as a beyond of the symbolic. Access to this ‘first order real’ of ‘the Thing’ is structurally impossible. But the real may be registered in the excesses, contradictions, splits and the doubling of representation itself. This real “characterised by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the

49 Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007) 11. 50 Zupancic 41. 51 Copjec, Imagine p97. 52 Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacque- Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton & Company, 1981) 55.

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elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), is generated by the symbolic”53, and is engaged therein. It is this real that creative sublimation in Lacan’s sense engages with. And it is to ‘aesthetic phenomena’ as “a space of freedom” doubly operative – as index of lack and as affording a trace of jouissance – that Lacan accords a special privilege54.

Again, in contrast to the way in which sublimation has been treated in anti-aesthetic discourse, it is important to note that objects of sublimation evidence a process in art that is not simply distinct from, but also alternative to, the process of idealisation. While sublimation concerns a raising of the object, placing it in proximity to Freud’s definition of idealisation already cited, where “that object without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandised and exalted in the subject’s mind”, this raising consists in a different treatment of the object and its encounter. Like the idealised object, the object of sublimation is not approached as though it satisfies a need. Its position in the structure of fantasy is distinct from that of the everyday object insofar as, as Copjec notes, there is the erection of a barrier to its ‘consumption’55. In this sense, like the idealised object, the subject does bear a disinterested (in Kantian terms) or detached relationship to objects of sublimation. But unlike the process of idealisation, the detachment afforded by sublimation offers the subject a means of detaching itself from prevailing models of social identification.

As Copjec suggests, only the sublimated object can be de-idealised56. No attachment to an inherent perfection is required, and no imaginary identification is facilitated by an encounter with the object. Only in sublimation is the split within the subject and its objects acknowledged. It is this very split that renders narcissistic identification problematic and it is the very treatment of the object in sublimation that might be seen as a means of enabling the subject’s detachment from society’s and the subject’s superegoic directives. The objects of sublimation are not objects that promote a narcissistic subjective identification, as imaginary attempts to grasp at “sameness, resemblance, self replication”57. This is why, as Copjec suggests, the objects of

53 Fink 27. 54 Lacan, Book VII 261. 55 Copjec, “Tomb” 261. 56 Copjec, “Tomb” 261. 57 Malcom Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991) 92.

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creative sublimation might be “insignificant in themselves” or “replaceable”58: they refer to, and operate in effect of a pleasure that is not the product of their formal perfection.

As Renata Salecl suggests, where in idealisation “we use the object as stopper, which, by its fascinating and éblouissant presence, renders invisible the lack in the Other… Sublimation circles around the object, never touching its core”59. This is the critical potential of creative sublimation, a potential that Lacan grants to the aesthetic: as that which not only circulates around the lack in subject and the lack of the Other, but as that which renders this lack visible. Sublimation, then, stands as a means by which subject and culture can register the Thing that resists symbolisation without denying its existence (as in idealisation and other forms of symptomatic repression), and without surrendering satisfaction or pursuing it by destructive means.

Rather than a means of merely facilitating narcissistic identification or prolonging superegoic ideals as both interiorised by the subject and commensurable with the reigning norms of capitalist society, sublimation is situated as a mode of engagement that can challenge or exceed such ideals on both a subjective and social level. Where, in anti-aesthetic criticism this challenge is granted to the destabilising potential of practices that disrupt aesthetic idealism by engaging a material ‘beyond’, in Lacan’s writing, aesthetic practices, critical and sublimated, engage the real as an impossibility in and through the impasses and contradictions in the symbolic order itself. In Lacan’s terms, registration of the real in the symbolic order occurs as tuché – as that chance encounter of the unknown within the known. Mobilising the gaps, the stain, the paradoxes within any given object or representation, creative sublimations register this unknown within the known. Operating in the space afforded by objet a, creative sublimations admit the failure of the symbolic to say

58 Copjec, “Tomb”261. 59 Renata Salecl, “I Can’t Love You Unless I Give You Up,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 192- 193.

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and know all but also “allow the symbolic to grasp hold of some excess, some surplus existence over sense, over what it signifies”60.

In registration of that which is ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, creative sublimations operate in excess of the obstacles to jouissance that the agency of the superego installs and maintains. It is by these means that the pleasures of creative sublimation and of the aesthetic are reconceived. Redrawing the distinction between the pleasures afforded by art as opposed to those of ordinary goods of consumption or utility, the pleasures of the aesthetic are situated as “purified” not of the body but of the “senseless, destructive, purely oppressive” morality of the superego61. As Copjec notes, “in answer to the question ‘of what is aesthetic pleasure purified?’ Lacan will nominate ‘fear and pity’, because these are the emotions that facilitate our subservience to the superego and to the imaginary ideals it sets up in order to berate us”62. By these terms creative sublimation is a means of erecting a barrier against superegoic moralism. And, far from being merely instrumental in reigning norms of thought or logic, as suggested by Foster, sublimation can be a means of creating values that exceed reigning norms, and of pursuing a more ethical position in relation to one’s status as a split or de-centred subject. As Copjec suggests, “[i]n resisting the superego, … we insist on separating ourselves from, rather than surrendering to, th[e] incomprehensible part of being: we insist, in other words, on prolonging the conflict with ourselves”. This is why artistic sublimation is treated in Lacan’s writing as corresponding to the field of ethics, insofar as it is consistent with the “sole maxim of psychoanalysis…: do not surrender your internal conflict, your division”63.

Where I have suggested the maintenance of a binary between aesthetic and anti- aesthetic operations – between the terms of aesthetic pleasure and a destabilising criticality – in Lacan’s writings on creative sublimation, no such binary is evident. Rather such binaries or “two sided relations” are themselves evidence of a logic

60 Again, as Copjec notes, “(t)his excess” as produced by the symbolic “is not to be confused with a true beyond, since the actual existence of this excess is not posited. It is simply an opening, or tension”. Copjec, Imagine 97. 61 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,1994) 92. 62 Copjec, “Pure” 8. 63 Copjec, Read 92.

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“stamped with the style of the imaginary”64 (which is why Lacan favours triadic structures such as imaginary, symbolic and real). Operating in a space of free play in excess of symptomatic repetition or compulsion, sublimation is not a process of aesthetic idealism, but is means of loosening the pressures of superegoic ideality. This is, as Lacan suggests, sublimation’s contradictory relationship to history or historical contingency. For Lacan “(t)he relation of the artist to the time in which he appears is always a contradictory one”65. It is by way of sublimation that the artist is for Lacan, both a product of their historical circumstances, and manages to exceed the prevailing norms of this circumstance or context. As Lacan notes, “it is against the current of reigning norms that art attempts to operate its miracle once more”66.

4.4 Rethinking Sublimation in the Art of Walker and Beardsley

With this in mind I now wish to return to those two historically disparate but similarly engaged practices of Kara Walker and Aubrey Beardsley. For as it should now be apparent, the Lacanian theory of creative sublimation provides a means of acknowledging the co-presence of beauty and that which destabilises in both artists’ work. Lacan’s treatment of sublimation allows for a consideration of their work by means that neither negate nor overvalue neither their works’ beauty, nor its criticality. Returning to that quandary raised by Halley Harrisburg that framed my discussion of Kara Walker’s art in Chapter One, the central issue seen to be engaged by Walker’s practice has been posed as one concerning how something might be enjoyed that is so close to the operation of trauma67. In answer to this question, the Lacanian theory of sublimation is instructive.

As I have noted, and Harrisburg’s question dwells upon, Walker’s work while ‘enjoyed’ does not correspond to a simple pleasure. As both “seductively graphic”

64 Lacan quoted in Bowie 93. 65 Lacan, Book VII 141. 66 Lacan, Book VII 141. 67 To repeat Harrisburg’s statement quoted in Chapter One: “The most destructive aspect (of Walker’s work) is that the viewer is seduced by the eloquence of the silhouettes. They are very enticing. Once you’re in, you respond to the very grotesque imagery. How can I be enjoying sodomy or whatever (the viewer wonders)? That kind of question is not often provoked by art”. Halley Harrisburg quoted in Kelefa Sanneh, “The Debate Continues: Much Ado” International Review of African American Art 15.2, (1998): 46. Words in parentheses appear in cited source.

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and “confounding and offensive”68 an encounter with the work involves both enjoyment and recoil – or an awareness that a simple enjoyment in formal finesse cannot take place. By these terms the work’s engagement with the modes of the decorative, the grotesque and explicit are resonant with Lacan’s notion of the sublimation that I have just discussed. What is deemed ultimately remarkable about Walker’s practice is the degree to which it both ‘attracts and startles’, a quality that Lacan associates with that immoderate pleasure of the aesthetic. So too in the instance of Beardsley’s work. Whether dismissed as ‘flat blasphemies’ or celebrated as aestheticising the obscene, criticism similarly points to the operation of attraction and something unsettling: a pleasure that destabilises in any given work.

The reasons for such an affect should now be familiar. Whatever the content of work by both artists (and it is often implied that this content should be deemed separate), its aesthetic treatment is frequently remarked as highly skilled and refined in its formal manipulation. Exacting in their flat and reductive form, both practices are rich with decorative detail. At first glance, Walker’s tableaux and Beardsley’s illustrations suggest a harmony of form, a kind of visual order, a symmetry articulated through an elegance of line and a careful treatment of composition that is frequently figured as seductive. It is only on closer inspection, most commentators note, that a breakdown of these qualities normally associated with the objective properties of the beautiful becomes apparent. Harmony is always threatened in the work by unsettling or unassimilable parts that destroy the coherence of the work’s wholes. Order and proportion is undermined by moments of excess and aberration. Finally, the clarity of form in the works is undermined by a consistent play on the ambiguity of forms and their spatial arrangement.

Where Walker’s forms exploit the silhouette as interstice between precise delineation and holes in vision, Beardsley’s illustrations depend upon a similar modulation. Moving between densely built areas of fine line and decorative dot work, and stark fields of blank space, Beardsley’s practice overall oscillates between the horror vaccui of over-crowded display and dramatic interplay of empty areas of stark black or white.

68 Halbreich, “Foreword,” Kara Walker : My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Kara Walker et al. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre, 2007) 1.

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Both artists’ practices, for all their decorative detail, involve a dramatic reduction of form. While detailed, they are also flat, devoid of modelling, and devoid of most indicators of perspectival space. Where their rendering of figures is clear and distinct, such clarity is often complicated by their activation of negative space. Adding to what are already strange forms, there is considerable interplay between figure and ground, as figures are left to float. In their foregrounding of stark voids, the practices might be seen to enact a literalisation of what Lacan notes of creative sublimations generally, namely that “emptiness is determinative”69.

There is a sense in the literature on both practices that both involve a play between familiarity and something strange or foreign, and this play resides not simply in their treatment of form as operating between mimesis and abstraction. Both practices are highly referential and reflexive. They refer to literary texts, canonical works of art and styles and conventions of representation. Both practices are thoroughly coded. Where Walker appropriates racial ‘types’ from filmic, literary and pop culture sources and historical genres, Beardsley’s illustrations whether in tribute or antagonism, borrow extensively from canonical moments in art, making particular reference to the Pre-Raphelite artists of the preceding period of English art. Whether mimicking styles (such as Morris’s medievalism or the contemporaneous ‘Japonesque’), or appropriating object details, to sometimes lifting entire compositions from other artists’ works, Beardsley’s illustrations make frequent and transparent references to other artists’ work.

But as much as Walker and Beardsley’s work exploits historical and contemporary traditions of representation, they also depend on considerable deviations from the familiar. For this reason both practices have been identified as ‘parodic’: “as that which recalls a previous text in order to undermine or counter it”70. Everywhere in Walker’s work silhouetted ‘types’ separate themselves from their more familiar image of themselves. Whether deriving from pretty storybook, literary or soft porn scenes, they wreak havoc upon themselves, each other and their environments. They

69 Lacan, Book VII 130. 70 Christopher Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 244.

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pursue the darkest of acts, engage the most perverse practices, and are driven to destruction within their shadowy form. These figures make themselves unfamiliar in their actions but also in their shadowy appearance as holes within representation. To restate that which Joan Copjec has noted of Walker’s work, her figures are not simply stereotypes but “are on the contrary an erotic disassembling of them, a mad and vital tussle to break away from their stale scent and heavy burden”71.

As noted, Beardsley’s figures similarly disengage themselves from their sources, and again this takes place through a grotesque and sexually explicit reconfiguration of the codes and conventions he makes reference to. This is made particularly evident in relation to his appropriation and undoing of the Pre-Raphelite ‘stunner’ or feminine ideal, but is not limited to the reconfiguring of this figure alone. In the work of artists such as Burne-Jones or Rossetti this figure, recognised by its androgynous features and its pose suggestive of introspection, was intended as a figure of asexual transcendent perfection. In Beardsley’s imagery this figure is often sexualised and pictured in scenarios that suggest a complicity in something obscene. Where the asexual woman or feminised male or ephebe was figured as an inaccessible, and spiritual ideal, in Beardsley’s illustrations it is reconfigured as embodied and ambivalent in its sexuality and agency. As I will soon discuss, rather than representing an erasure of sexual difference, in Beardsley’s figuring of this ideal difference returns in an unsettling manifestation.

Insofar as both Walker and Beardsley’s deviations or reconfigurations are made at the level of the figured body, their practices and the critical problems they stage are consistently treated as a matter concerning identification, and it is their contribution to, or better their deviation from the field of identity politics, with reference to the Lacanian notion of creative sublimation, that I want to suggest is their contribution. As I have outlined, the notion that Walker’s work concerns the problematic of racist identifications is at the centre of debates concerning her practice. For those who have dismissed her work, it is insofar as it makes seductive or pleasurable demeaning caricatures of ethnicity that are aesthetically rendered. As the flipside of this equation, it is customary for those arguing for the value of Walker’s practice to insist

71 Copjec, Imagine 107.

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that she is acknowledging the wide scope of images or imaginings of race with which one might identify.

Robert Reid-Pharr for example has argued that Walker’s work, in its abandonment of the image of ennobled black people (important to an earlier generation of activists) gestures towards the wider range of identifications that continue to exert their influence in a contemporary cultural context. By these means he situates Walker’s engagement as one consisting of a recognition that African-American people are “lost, confused, perhaps as likely to succumb to American Racism as to rise above it”72. Similarly, Halbreich says of Walker’s imaging of race that it suggests a constant state of “becoming” amidst a rapid succession of images of black identity competing for any given subject’s attention73.

Both writers acknowledge that an instability of identification is at play in Walker’s work and to this extent I would agree. As Reid-Pharr suggests, Walker asks “[h]ow it is possible for us to maintain the assumption that there is a clear and constant connection between current generations of Black Americans and enslaved Africans, or between white Americans and the enslavers of Africans… how one might tease out the ‘real history’ of ethnic and racial identity… from the constant media fabrications”74. But I would also argue (a point that Copjec has made in relation to Walker’s art and its engagement with race and history) that at the heart of Walker’s practice, in her specific figuring of race, is the suggestion of a failure to fully identify and a refusal to participate in the production of images with which imaginary identification can fully take place. As Copjec notes, Walker’s practice shows a consistent disengagement with existing images of racial identity as forms of ideality and maintains the gaps between those of the past and her individual present. Walker’s is not a practice that suggests a desire to identify herself with African- American figures from the antebellum South, but to acknowledge a more complex means of approaching subjectivity.

72 Reid Pharr, “Black Girl Lost”, Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time, ed. Annette Dixon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002) 28. 73 Halbreich 2. 74 Reid-Pharr 32.

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In maintaining this gap, Walker asks not how one group (i.e. blacks) differs from others but “how given the differences among them, its members can be counted as belonging to the same group”75. Walker’s art does not approach racial identity from the perspective of some shared and signifiable historical experience or essence that lies outside of history. Instead she reapproaches racial identity by engaging that which cannot be shared or even signified: the traumatic and unsymbolisable event of slavery. By these means Walker’s practice, through a certain registration of this unsignifiable thing that disrupts identification, consists in an “aesthetic enquiry… [that] approaches the problem of identity in a way contrary to the standard one”76. Rejecting the standard model of stable selfhood made with reference to shared traits, a common history or racial “roots”, Walker approaches identity as polyvalent and subjectivity as disengaged from these positive characteristics. For Copjec, Walker’s practice bears a relationship to Freud’s project in Moses and Monotheism. Here, suggests Copjec, “Walker and Freud are alike… in eschewing identification with the traits of empirical (and, one hopes, noble) ancestors as the basis of racial identity” 77. Both “begin their inquiry by wondering how the differences separating them from others of their race fails to disqualify them automatically from membership in it”78. For Copjec, both practices investigate what survives of racial identity when what is shared is subject to a process of erasure.

What is ‘shared’ is not a given relationship to past events or an essential trait. It is the experience of the unsignifiable trauma of slavery that repeats through constructions of race, both positive and negative. In engaging this real of history and its representation Walker distances herself from any stable or essential model of racial subjectivity. Her practice works against the stability of the category of race as it is usually invoked whether in racist identifications, or celebratory or ennobling invocations. It is by these means that her work represents a challenge to the centred subject and an antagonism to forms of ideality. This is its contribution to identity politics, or rather, the means by which she separates her practice from this discourse’s usual claims.

75 Copjec, Imagine 84. 76 Copjec, Imagine 84. 77 Copjec, Imagine 92. 78 Copjec, Imagine 92.

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I would suggest that a similar disruption of forms of ideality is evident in Aubrey Beardsley’s work. Like Walker’s tableaux, Beardsley’s illustrations seem to present an enquiry into what can be identified with (and what is inassimilable) in the succession of images of gender and sexuality that defined his age. Many critics (such as Zatlin) have suggested that Beardsley produced counter-identifications of gender and sexuality in a period of intense changes in the field of sexual politics. At a time marked by polarised images of Victorian femininity – that is, between the domesticated asexual image of mother or virgin and the fallen woman – Beardsley’s images stage parodic interventions into such constructions. His subversive treatment of sex and gender outside of hegemonic standards is evident in many of his recurring characterisations. That Beardsley’s images went against the norms of Victorian social mores and ideals of gender and sexuality is more than apparent.

But little attention has been granted to the fact that Beardsley’s works also demonstrate a separation from that figuring of sex and gender that was developed in opposition to these mores, or developed as part of a critique. Again, the logic behind this intervention might be seen in relation to Beardsley’s specific figuring of the androgyne. In a period where “the concept of androgyne began to assume ‘alarming proportions’” in avant-garde cultural production, Beardsley’s take on this figure is unique79. In Decadent artistic practice, the androgynous male figure took on special significance in the redefinition of masculinity and in tribute to homo-social and homosexual culture. But what Beardsley seems to recognise and disrupt in his specific rendering of this figure (even in its counter-cultural manifestation) is its function as identificatory ideal. Even where the androgyne appeared as an “ideologically based counteroffensive”80 to bourgeois values in Decadent artistic production, its figuring as ideal can be associated with a version of imaginary ‘sameness’. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has demonstrated in relation to the ephebe in eighteenth-century French painting, the effeminised male can figure as evidence of a “utopian, if unconscious, desire that the pains and perils of sexual difference be safely contained, if not banished, in a reassuring reflection of the intact male self”81.

79 Bram Dijkstra, “The Androgyne in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature,” Comparative Literature 26.1 (Winter, 1974): 62. 80 Dijkstra 62 81 Abigail Solomon- Godeau, “The Other Side of Vertu: Alternative Masculinities in the Crucible of Revolution,” Art Journal 56.2 (Summer, 1997): 59.

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What is apparent in Beardsley’s usage of this figure (and the frequently appearing hermaphroditic forms) is not an erasure, recuperation or containment of sexual difference, but its re-emergence. As evidenced in Beardsley’s Morte Darthur illustrations such as How Sir Mark Found Sir Tristram, the ephebe appears in homoerotic scenes that disrupt and undermine the narrowly prescribed codes for homosocial conduct that its narrative context promotes. And as discussed in the Cave of Spleen and the Bon Mots grotesques, sexual difference frequently emerges as another unsettling aberration or element in a combinatory bodily scheme. In both instances, Beardsley treats difference as a challenge to an image of semblance or ‘reassuring reflection’.

Again, what is evident in Beardsley’s work, just as in Walker’s, is an engagement with self-difference, made apparent in its disruption of forms of ideality upon which narcissistic identifications might be facilitated. What is consistent in Beardsley’s treatment of both normative and avant-garde cultural constructions and Walker’s treatment of racial construction similarly is this disruption. Again, with reference to Lacan’s framing of creative sublimation, its disruptive force can be attributed to means of separation from “subservience to the superego and to the imaginary ideals it sets up in order to berate us”82.

What disrupts the function of narcissistic ideals in Beardsley’s illustrations, Walker’s tableaux, and the products of sublimation in general is the registration of the real – not as a beyond or as sheer materiality, but as an unsymbolisable dimension “characterised by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself”83 or splitting in the order of appearances. Insofar as both Beardsley and Walker’s practices are highly reflexive, making use of existing codes and conventions, but also consist in a “leech[ing of] familiarity from the familiar”84, they utilise the symbolic’s capacity to disrupt Imaginary formations by way of this index. Contrary to the means by which this disruption has been posed in anti-aesthetic literature, it is not opposed to the work’s aesthetic operation, but is made in and through the aesthetic as that form of representation that registers the

82 Copjec, “Pure” 8. 83 Fink 27. 84 Copjec, Imagine 97.

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unknown within the known. And it is by these terms that we can reconcile the double operation of both pleasure and criticality in the artist’s practices. I wish to situate their critical contribution to this non-ontological figuring of identity and both artists’ acknowledgement of the de-centred subject by aesthetic means. Far from suggesting a subject of ‘idealised unity and harmony’, or one complicit in ‘metaphysical thought, empirical science and capitalist logic’, Walker’s and Beardsley’s practices as creative sublimations acknowledge the complex workings of the subject in excess of the reigning norms of the historical context in which they appear.

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Conclusion

In Art Journal’s special issue addressing the polarity between aesthetic and anti- aesthetic positions in contemporary criticism Alexander Alberro notes the tendency in the past decade “to return our attention to the subject of beauty and in particular to the experience of the beautiful in contemporary art”1. Citing the efforts of Arthur Danto, David Hickey, Elaine Scarry and Wendy Steiner, Alberro locates in such projects an attempt to “hypostatise the beautiful as the sole, undisputed, and universal bearer of a better society”2. For Alberro these projects are “deeply antipolitical” and “antimodernist” and are symptomatic of a deeper cultural situation. Seen to recuperate “a sense of transcendental meaning and harmony” and the “centrality of the human subject”3, these reclamations of beauty’s validity – in appeal to humanist aesthetics – are understood to “restrain the politics of (post) modernism” and the radical dismantling of humanist claims to truth and social harmony that Postmodern theory represents.

If contemporary art’s challenge is to acknowledge of the power of the aesthetic without recuperating Enlightenment notions of identity and universal subjectivity, Beardsley and Walker’s practices make a significant contribution to this task. It is not simply that both artists’ work involves an explicitly political or critical content and subject matter. Although, as I have demonstrated, this is certainly one dimension of the work’s contribution. As I have suggested at the heart of both Walker and Beardsley’s art is a dismantling of constructions of race and gender based on the notion of universal subjectivity. As I have argued throughout this thesis, however, this challenge is made in and through a particular representative mode that places beauty at the centre of its critical strategy. This mobilisation of the beautiful should not be overlooked. According to Thelma Golden, Walker is one of “the most significant artists consistently concerned with the notion of beauty… and repositioning what might be a more radical approach to its use”4. It is, however, not

1 Alexander Alberro, “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Art Journal (Summer, 2004): 37. 2 Alberro 39. 3 Alberro 38. 4 Thelma Golden and Kara Walker, “A Dialogue,” Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time, ed. Annette Dixon (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002) 45.

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simply insofar as Walker like Beardsley repositions beauty in relation to a content normally seen to oppose it. More than this, both artists’ work represents a call to reconsider beauty itself.

As suggested in Chapter One, the evaluation of beauty as a device that is itself potentially critical is available in Kant’s thesis on aesthetic beauty. This much is suggested by recent revisions of Kant’s discussions of beauty by those such as Jacques Rancière and Margaret Iversen. This treatment of the beautiful as marked by an unavailability to conceptualisation and as an experience where the usual hierarchical and oppositional categories of experience are suspended, promotes an understanding of the beautiful divorced from Classical ideals of form. It represents a departure from the emphasis on rationality and de-corporealisation often said to discredit aesthetic discourse. The beautiful as an instance of conceptual opacity becomes a place where binary distinctions such as form and matter, cognition and sense are displaced. And here the kinds of decorative practices I have attended to, of which Beardsley and Walker are a case in point, demonstrate how this categorical dissolution is made manifest.

So too does the category of the grotesque make room for a revised engagement with an ambivalent or challenging representation of the body that is not opposed to aesthetic engagement but potentially located therein. Where the grotesque as abject is associated in contemporary theory with a revelry in materiality and a breach of form, its ornamental instance demonstrates an operation at the cusp of a series of representational binaries that play within the capacities of beautiful form. As I have suggested, what unites instances of the grotesque are, in Lacanian terms, their registration of the order of the real. Detached from any notion of a real as a material beyond of representation, this registration can be recognised as taking place in and through aestheticised form. It is this tychic registration that I have argued is present in Walker and Beardsley’s grotesquery. Beardsley’s deformations in a decorative context and Walker’s recurring muck forms suggest an un-assimilable dimension that need not be conceived as external to representation, but a play within the symbolic order itself.

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This same point is illustrated by Walker and Beardsley’s forays into the pornographic or sexually explicit. No longer conceived as the place where the aesthetic breaks down in proximity to the body or in the generation of a purely sensuous affect, pornographic representations can be reconceived as a series of representational devices, tropes and codes. Beardsley and Walker adopt many of these devices. But here as elsewhere in their specific adoption, it is their indexing of the Lacanian real that distinguishes the practice’s explicit dimension. And as illustrated in relation to the grotesque, Beardsley and Walker’s explicit works are no less aesthetically engaged, nor less critical for their sexual content. Again the specificity of their engagement demonstrates the beautiful’s accommodation of another category that is usually deemed its ‘other’.

Here as elsewhere Beardsley and Walker’s art suggests the convergence of operations that suspend the usual categories of aesthetic experience and dismantle the binary logic that deems beauty and criticality as mutually exclusive terms. Where existing criticism has failed to grasp this confrontation, the Lacanian theory of artistic production is instructive. In Lacan’s theory, critical distinctions such as that between the maintenance of form’s integrity and a sensuous or carnal engagement said to prompt form’s dissolution are displaced. What makes the practices critical is their status as creative sublimations, which stage an internal bi-partitioning of the order of representation5. It is this recognition that I have argued is central to the formal and conception strategies of both artists’ work. In registration of the ‘The Thing’, and in effect of objet a, both practices register an unsymbolisable dimension that is activated within representation. In doing so, they demonstrate not the failure of beauty to index this dimension, but its critical potential to do so.

Detached from an ideal of perfection located in the object, the aesthetic is conceived in Lacanian theory as an effect of the object’s and subject’s negotiation of proximity and distance from the real as void of the maternal Thing. As I have argued, in utilising the decorative, the grotesque and the explicit, Beardsley and Walker’s sublimations “stops us from encountering directly the central field of desire [the Thing]” but also “point [us] in the direction of the field of destruction” that the Thing

5 Copjec, Imagine 38-39.

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also represents6. In this manner, the practices both veil and point to what is psychically conflicting for the subject. It is through highly decorative form that this negotiation of proximity and distance from the real takes place. It is by these means that their practices challenge ‘a sense of transcendental meaning and harmony’ and the ‘centrality of the human subject’ that Alberro directs his scepticism towards. And it is by these means both practices readdress the critical potential of beauty.

6 Lacan, Book VII 216.

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Appendix 1: Back and Forth

I have demonstrated in the main body of this thesis that a contradictory representational logic is at work in the art of both Aubrey Beardsley and Kara Walker. Making prominent use of decorative form, this mode engages both aesthetic pleasure and a destabilising affect. As I have argued, what is evident in this mode is the co-existence of seemingly contradictory operations, the crux of which renders any stable polarity between aesthetic beauty and criticality untenable. Describing this conjunction of beautiful form and that, which exceeds or undermines it as ‘critical beauty,’ I have suggested that its value be located in its simultaneous retraction and registration of the real as tuché, as formulated by Jacques Lacan. The purpose of this appendix is to outline how this representative mode operates in my own art.

Here I will speak both in general terms about the work undertaken during my PhD candidature, and the specific works exhibited in my assessment exhibition Back and Forth, staged at Milani Gallery in February 2008. I will begin by outlining the work in general terms as an appropriation based practice whose starting point comprises specific traditions of Japanese and Western print media. Consistent with my thesis more broadly, such traditions might be understood as sites where the decorative, the grotesque and the sexually explicit converge, and it is to these qualities that I will speak. I will then discuss the practical means by which my work is constructed before discussing individual series undertaken during my candidature and the specific body of work shown in the Back and Forth exhibition.

Sources and Beginnings: Ukiyo-e and Bijin-ga

The majority of work undertaken during the candidature period develops a longer term project of art making. At its initial stages this work took as its starting point specific traditions of art where an emphasis on the decorative qualities of the image seemed to overwhelm the representation of recognisable figures, or at least called the formal integrity of the figures into question. Just as has been of interest in the theoretical component of this project, what I was drawn to in such works was to do with their contradictory logic of representation. My practice has worked both

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acknowledging how this contradictory logic is present in these existing traditions of art, and has attempted to make the logic in these traditions more explicit. For, as I have argued elsewhere, I locate in this contradictory mode of representation a critical strategy that is of value to contemporary culture. Its grotesque figuration and decorative aesthetic provides a seductive and engaging means of challenging normative representations of the body, which, as I have suggested in the main body of my thesis, are associated with a particular model of thought. The unsettling but highly ornate representations of figures that are common to these traditions operate as a means of indexing the Lacanian real. Their challenging dimension passes by way of this indexation. It is this challenge that my own practice seeks to participate in, and to develop further in its imagery.

As noted in the thesis introduction, there are two central traditions that this practice has engaged with, both of which constitute the central sources for my appropriation- based practice. One is the Western tradition of Japonisme, specifically the work of Aubrey Beardsley that I have already discussed in detail. The second of these traditions is that of Japanese Ukiyo-e. As I do not discuss the this tradition within my study of the art of Beardsely and Walker, its historical context and general qualities warrant some introduction here.

Ukiyo-e, most commonly translated as “pictures of the floating world”1, is a genre associated with Japanese wood block printing, but it also includes painting and book illustration practices. In orthodox accounts of this tradition its ‘golden age’ is considered to have taken place in the period from 1780 to 1800. After this time the genre is often said to exhibit signs of decline, the markers of which I will soon discuss. The term Ukiyo-e finds its origins in the Buddhist term Ukiyo, denoting the transience of life. In the Edo period, the term, as Jenkins suggests, came to take on more social connotations, designating the “(transient) world of pleasures”2. Ukiyo-e came to represent all that pertained to this period of ‘extravagant’ urban living.

1 Donald Jenkins, The Floating World Revisited, assist. Lynn Jacobsen- Katsumoto (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press and Portland Art Museum, 1993) 2 Jenkins 4.

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There are a number of themes under which the works of Ukiyo-e are grouped, including sites and events of historical significance, kabuki and Bijin-ga (portraits of feminine beauty). It is Bijin-ga that have been the main source for my imagery to date, though other parts of the tradition of Ukiyo-e continue to influence my practice. My specific interest has been directed towards this genre’s representation of garment and the body. As noted in my introduction, this representation seems to pivot on a dynamic interplay between decorative abstraction and mimetic elements, between dense detailing and stark voids, and between a graphic flatness and suggestions of three-dimensionality. What is apparent in the rendering of garment by these means is the suggestion of an ambiguous body, whose contours disguise rather than articulate the figure, and whose aberrant forms demonstrate many of the qualities said to define the grotesque. As is common to the tradition of the ornamental grotesque, this grotesque figuration, in excess with the harmonious figure of Classicism, is articulated through decorative and aestheticised form.

This conjunction of grotesque figuration and decorative form is particularly evident in Bijin-ga from Ukiyo-e’s later ‘Decadent period’, often reduced in art historical scholarship to evidence of Ukiyo-e’s “decline”3. Such works have come to dominate as sources for my most recent work. The very markers of ‘decline’ here, point to their relevance for my practice, rendering them consistent with the contradictory logic of representation I have identified as of critical value throughout my thesis.

In Bester’s account, the work of Decadent Ukiyo-e artists is marked by “a contorted, almost violent quality... and an interest in novel peripheral effects in both subject matter and technique”4. As Oka suggests “for all but a few people the term ‘late Ukiyo-e’ calls to mind a particular type of cloying, decadent, and vulgar print- the garishly coloured stereotyped actor portraits, the grisly murder scenes and the

3 As Bester suggests, such prints from around the middle of 19th century (or early Meiji period) are frequently posed as either indicative of Ukiyo-e’s “decline” or its “last flowering”. The ‘Decadent’ Ukiyo-e tradition includes the work of artists such as Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, Eisen, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi and Yoshitoshi. Interestingly, until very recently Western scholarship was largely ignorant to such work, so there is limited critical discussion of the relevance or value of such artists outside of Japan. John Bester, “ Translator’s Preface,” The Decadents Juzo Suzuki & Isaburo (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969) 7. 4 Bester 7.

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stylised, contorted pictures of women”5. Just as I have discussed in relation to a Western art historical tradition of ‘Decadence’, Decadent Ukiyo-e is said to consist in a preoccupation with the peripheral detail over central theme (or part over whole) and an over-proliferation of decorative qualities. As Oka suggests One of the marked characteristics of the age is... an increasing preoccupation with technical brilliance for its own sake, and the artistic decline that has led some people to dismiss the late Ukiyo-e as no more than a decorative art set in on a large scale (sic.).6

Again, it is at the level of the body and mimetic figuration that this proliferation of the decorative is said to affect. Where earlier Bijin-ga is identified by its elegant poses, Decadent Ukiyo-e is marked by “almost hunch-backed figures, sagging at the knees”7. Where previously associated with qualities such as harmony and proportion – the qualities in Western scholarship associated with the objective properties of Classical beauty – figures in these later works are frequently judged as contorted, awkward and aberrant.

More broadly in Decadent Ukiyo-e, frequently violent and bloody scenes (particularly in the work of the artists Kuniyoshi and Yoshitoshi) and Shinto-based grotesquery (involving hybrid figures of part animal, part human, or of all kinds of bodily deformation) become central rather than peripheral themes. Again, such thematic shifts might be seen in terms of an incursion of the grotesque. Even where not used as sources for my art works, the most violent and monstrous Decadent works have been influential for my practice. This is because they exemplify a conjunction of beautiful and unsettling forms that is at the centre of my project and sphere of interest. My decision to render hair and blood as a means of signalling a bodily dimension in my paintings is in lieu of this influence. More generally, the aberrant and monstrous forms of the grotesque have played a key part in guiding the nature of forms in my own work.

5 Isaburo Oka,, “The End of an Era,” The Decadents Juzo Suzuki & Isaburo (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969) 9. 6 My emphasis. Oka 12. 7 Oka 10

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A parallel influence is felt with regards to the tradition of Shunga or “images of spring”8. Shunga, a subset of Ukiyo-e, is a tradition of erotic art that involves the graphic depiction of sexual acts.9 While my work represents a departure from the explicit display of genitals for which Shunga is renowned, Shunga’s representation of body and garment has likewise been an important reference in my paintings of decorative and grotesque forms. Again, what constitutes Shunga’s interest for me, is its highly ornate rendering of fragmented, broken and at times aberrant bodies that also characterise the Bijin-ga discussed above. The consistency in the rendering of bodily detail and that of decorative fabric, and the apparent equivalence between folds of fabric and folds of flesh is something I have sought to replicate in my practice. Of particular influence are the monster forms of a branch of grotesque Shunga by artist’s such as Shunsho, Seiken and Yoshitoshi. In such works individual body parts – usually penis and phallic forms – are enlarged and personified as caricaturised bodies. Shunsho’s One Hundred Love Stories (Hyaku Bobogatari, 1771) for example is in an album of erotic prints of characters whose heads are genitals.

Like the sexually explicit, and elsewhere implicitly erotic works of Aubrey Beardsley, I locate in these genres of Ukiyo-e a conjunction of the decorative, the grotesque and the sexually explicit. It is insofar as such work combines seemingly contradictory operations, challenging the usual categories of representation that determine their influence for my practice. As noted, my practice, in essence, attempts to make these contradictory operations more overt. For as I have argued elsewhere it is this combination of beauty and an unsettling dimension that represents for me a critical strategy. And it is this strategy that I have sought to develop in the making of my art. I will now discuss the practical means by which this takes place.

8 Marco Fagioli, Shunga: The Erotic Art of Japan (New York: Universe Publishing, 1997) 7. 9 Shunga is a distinct subset of the Ukiyo-e tradition though most established Ukiyo-e artists undertook Shunga as part of their practice. The focus of such works was the depiction of sexual possibilities in the contemporary urban environment. Not restricted to heterosexual practices its visualizations include varied scenario’s, some of which involve the fantastic and grotesque. Its characters were mainstay of prints elsewhere: Chonin, courtesans, kabuki actors and Samuri, but also combined the Shinto based grotesqueries.

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Means of making

As I have suggested, the process of making my work consists in both identifying a mixed representative logic in individual images and finding ways of making this logic more explicit through the use of digital and painting media. The practice is first and foremost appropriative. Images are sourced via printed publications. These images are scanned and then manipulated via digital means (using Adobe Photoshop). At this stage two main approaches to manipulating the images and constructing compositions for paintings are adopted. Both are motivated by a desire to make the logic of an ambivalent body, articulated through decorative form, more explicit. Both provide a means of playing with binaries such as that between flatness and depth, graphic design and painted surface, abstraction and mimetic form.

The first approach involves leaving the original scanned composition largely in tact, and selectively ‘paint-bucketing’ around the pieces of garment or figure that are of interest. The ‘paint-bucket’ tool that I use is a Photoshop function that allows for the selective filling of areas with a single colour, like pouring paint in a digital medium. Again, it is mainly unclothed limbs that are ‘removed’ in this process, leaving a fragmented and incomplete ‘figure’. This approach allows for the abstraction of figures, but facilitates the delineation of architectural elements that provide a partial context and narrative in which the abstracted figures can be read. The partial, contorted and fragmented bodies float on what are largely flat voids of colour. Remaining traces of architectural details, however, allow for the suggestion of perspectival depth, elsewhere disrupted by the detailing of the figures and their placement.

The large scale triptychs Kiyonaga Triptych (2004) and Untitled (Eisen triptych) (2005) were both composed in this manner. While the Kiyonaga Triptych finds its origin in an earlier Ukiyo-e print – Ushiwaka, at the Gate of Yahagi no Choja Palace Serenades the Princess Joruri on His Flute (c. 1785), both works attempt to foreground the qualities associated with the Decadent moment of Ukiyo-e. Both involve the exaggeration of contorted postures of bodies and high key colour combinations with which this moment of Ukiyo-e is associated. Both images attempt

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to highlight the movement between billowing and rigid fabric or the sculptural quality of the figures’ silhouettes that are inherent to the original works.

The second means of composing images involves the creation of a new digital file in the form of a coloured field. Here pieces are ‘cut and pasted’ from the source via means of digital collage. This technique allows for a more controlled fragmentation and reconfiguration of the source images. As a means of deconstructing and reconstructing the body in parts, it might be seen as a method, as one curator suggests, which enacts a kind ‘violence’ upon the original figures10. In cutting the figures to pieces and reassembling their parts, this process relates to earlier sculptural work that enacts a similar violence or aggression upon the body. Here the work of artists such as Hans Bellmer, Rona Pondick and Louise Bourgeois is an important frame of reference. Like the work of these artists, my method of working might similarly suggest a “turn to the drives”11. As Mignon Nixon suggests this means of representing the body can be read in relation to a ‘part object logic’, representing the fragmentations of a pre-symbolic or infantile body. In Lacanian terms this means of breaking the body apart might be viewed as asserting the unbinding force of the death drive, just as I have argued in relation to Walker and Beardsley’s practices.

As argued in relation to Beardsley and Walker’s art, what is of interest to me here is the representation of an ambiguous and aberrant body in counter-distinction to the closed, semblant body of Classicism where every part is subsumed within a harmonious whole. As discussed in Chapter Two, the grotesque body I have represented – of openings and fragments, of deformation and decay – is associated in some literature with a registration of the Lacanian real. But again, where the work of artists such as Bellmer relies on a sculptural mimetism, my painting practice is distinct insofar as it attempts to represent this body through decorative and aestheticised form. While the practice attempts to index the real, it is the real as gaze through which this indexation takes place. Conceived as an internal fissure in the symbolic and imaginary, the real as gaze is associated neither with a mimetism nor base materiality, but with a void or blind spot within vision. As Lacan suggests, the gaze is located in representation, “at the point of light, the point at which everything

10 See Sally Brand, A Formula For Figures (Sydney: Sally Brand and First Draft Gallery, 2005). 11 Mignon Nixon “Bad Enough Mother”, October 71 (Winter 1995) 71-92.

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looks at me is situated”12, and as noted it is a point where signifiers of lack, death, castration and subjective division gaze back at the subject.

In recognition of the Lacanian notion of beauty as a means of both pointing to and veiling the real as gaze, and as potentially de-centring the subject, my work attempts to make this index in and through the decorative form of garment and pattern. Here fragments of existing images and motifs are reconfigured, and sometimes repeated over and over in the articulation of unfamiliar and sometimes unnameable forms and figures. As I have suggested, my interest is in a tychic registration of the Real, or the suggestion of an un-assimilable dimension via a play within the symbolic order itself. Decorative form is mobilised as that which covers and veils, but also enables this registration.

Where my earlier paintings were geared towards locating and highlighting this peculiar figuration in its original context, recent painting work has attempted to actively construct new figures according to the contradictory logic outlined above. For this reason, my recent work has tended towards the second process of making I have outlined here. This process allows for greater freedom in suggesting grotesque figures through decorative form alone. Here as elsewhere my motivation is in creating both beautiful and unsettling images that suggest something in excess of the usual binary categories of representation. I will now discuss how this central objective is made manifest in individual series of works: Little Birds (2006), Back and Forth (2008) and For and From My Father (2007-08).

Little Birds

The works in the series Little Birds (exhibited at Neon Parc in 2006) represents the first series to enact a more self-conscious approach to creating aberrant ‘bodies’ in the manner outlined above. The title comes from an erotic short story by the author Anais Nin. The story concerns an impotent painter Manuel, who lives opposite a schoolyard and becomes obsessed with the flittering schoolgirls who play outside his terrace. In order to capture their attention and lure them to his apartment he adorns

12 Lacan quoted in Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996) 139.

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his terrace that faces the schoolyard with tropical birds. In the story’s final scene, Manuel succeeds in drawing the little girls to his apartment. When they arrive he dons a kimono “that could easily slip open, by accident”: The birds were performing quite beautifully, bickering and kissing and quarrelling. Manuel stood behind the girls. Suddenly the kimono opened, and when he found himself touching long blond hair, he lost his head. Instead of wrapping his kimono, he opened it wider, and as the girls turned they all saw him standing there in a trance, his big penis erect, pointing at them. They all took fright, like little birds, and ran away.13

Each work in the series Little Birds responds in some way to this scene and earlier moments in the narrative: the description of the girls in the schoolyard as “an orgy of legs and very short skirts” that flutter to reveal “white panties”, Manuel’s description of the girl’s “tiny new breasts… beginning to show in their plumpness”, and the final scene in which Manuel’s erection points at the girls through his gaping Kimono. Nin’s description suggested to me something akin to both Shunga and Beardsley’s Lysistrata illustrations discussed in Chapter Three. In all three instances, the sexually explicit appears amidst carefully described decorative and exoticised form: fabric, colours, and feathers and kimonos.

The titles of works in the Little Birds series, and their sometimes phallic and breast- like form, make reference to this treatment of the sexually explicit peeking or gazing back through decorative form. Works such as Double Lumps, Upright, Slap and Tickly and Tweek (all 2006) make humorous reference to moments in Nin’s story. These works are the first in a self-conscious attempt to start utilising titles to suit the work’s goals of making conjunctions between decorative form and the grotesque, or a sexual dimension more explicit. Prior to this, most of my works were untitled, denoting only the artist of the source image. Where titling is also useful is in imparting a sense of narrative to the works. It provides a textual context in which highly abstracted bodies might still be read anthropomorphically. Regardless of how aberrant and unfamiliar they were, and despite being constructed out of decorative form alone, titling seemed to better facilitate this reading and to interrupt the purely formal reading that my previous works were often subject to. (For example, Robert

13 Anais Nin “Little Birds,” Little Birds: Erotica by Anais Nin, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanonich, 1979.

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Nelson has on two occasions read the work as “purely decor”)14. This was particularly important in this series of works since they were in a sense more abstract than previous paintings, undergoing greater mediation from their original compositions.

Like the triptych’s mentioned previously, the works in this series, all of which were sourced from Meiji period Ukiyo-e, develop higher key colour combinations and the more rigorous patterning for which Decadence is renowned. With regards to the compositional qualities of the images, I was also interested in making the digital manipulation of the source images more explicit. Here I was interested in developing and traversing an opposition between the graphic precision of the decorative and ornamental patterns and motifs, and more gestural digital marks. As another means of playing on the flatness and the graphic quality of the images, such details set up and traverse another binary – that between figuration and digital abstraction.

Despite this digital element, this series, like all of my paintings, was undertaken with the intention of maintaining a refined and seductive aesthetic within painting media. Here as elsewhere, the craft of oil painting, as a medium of surface was a central concern and every attempt was made to render a delicacy of line and accuracy of ornamental detail. My intention with the Little Birds series was, as noted of all of the work in this project more generally, to attempt to articulate grotesque bodily forms through decorative form. And while more visually dynamic, more abstracted and lighter in tone than the work I will now discuss, it is part of that enquiry into the mode of representation marked by a contradictory logic that similarly guided its production.

14 See for example, Robert Nelson “2004: Australian Culture,” The Age, June 23, 2004.

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Back and Forth15

The works in the Back and Forth exhibition were a culmination of my research into the decorative, the grotesque and the explicit and were another attempt to build forms and compositions according to a contradictory logic. The works in this exhibition were undertaken and selected on the basis that they best demonstrate the notion of an aberrant body through decorative form. Utilising Beardsley sources and Decadent Ukiyo-e practices, this work enacts processes of making previously discussed. More than ever, such works were shaped by the impetus to produce paintings that were both seductively beautiful and unsettling at the same time. Each represents an affront to the body of classicism, insofar as it presents a body of openings, fragments, and part-objects. Each was an attempt to suggest this non-Classical body almost entirely through decorative detail.

The title of the show has a number of points of reference. It was chosen in part as a reaction to some of the existing criticism on the practice of Beardsley. As noted in my introduction, the writing of Christopher Snodgrass has been crucial in formulating an argument regarding Beardsley’s practice. And here, the title makes reference to Snodgrass’ suggestion that Beardsley’s illustrations “oscillate ceaselessly” or move back and forth between opposing poles of meaning and representation. This might be seen as a movement between ideals and conventions, and their affront, or between seductive means of representation, and an explicit flaunting of sexual and grotesque themes and images. As I have suggested, both Walker and Beardsley’s practices move back and forth between the beautiful and a destabilising affect so fast as to constitute a shimmer. As I have suggested, this movement is something I have become increasingly interested in creating in my own work.

It is this co-implication of contradictory effects that I was attempting to stage in the painting the exhibition is named after. But here there is also a second reference that

15 While the Back and Forth exhibition included large-scale oil paintings (in the downstairs space at Milani gallery) and works on paper (in the upstairs gallery) I have distinguished between these series in my discussion of the work. The works on paper are an extension of the For and From My Father project discussed in the following section. As such they are excluded from my discussion in this subsection Back and Forth.

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intersects with the first. In the painting Back and Forth (2007-08) there is something of a narrative between two figures. The forms, built from folds of garment sourced from Beardsley’s work, are semblant of bodily openings- the first at the top of the frame, the second mirrored at the painting’s base. In the sketch illustration Sarah’s Work (2007) from the For and From My Father series, the suggestion of an opening is made more explicit by a spray of delicate dots that squirts from one of the figures. This squirted fluid moves from one form to the other, and in the painting overall there is a suggestion of an exchange from one form to the other: back and forth.

My initial reference for each of these works was drawn from popular culture – the Miranda July film You and Me and Everone We Know. I refer here to the scene that has come to dominate many discussions of the film since its release. Two boys – one around age 13, the other around age 4 – chat on a website with an older woman who is unaware that she is speaking to children. When the chat turns explicit and the boys are prompted to say something, the younger boy insists that his older brother transcribe what he wishes to say to the anonymous chat companion. He presses his older brother to write his desire “to poop back and forth”: “I'll poop in your butt hole...and then you will poop it back...into my butt.… And we will keep doing it. With the same poop. Back… and forth…Forever”16.

There is something in the comedy of this scene, where a small child’s understanding of sex as a scatological exchange, expressed in the romantic language of ‘forever’ that seemed appropriate for the kind of logic apparent in my translation of bodily forms from late Victorian decorative form. This scene also seemed to mark the same movement Snodgrass notes of Beardsley’s work – between pre Raphelite ideals, exemplified by the romance of courtly love, and their disruption through abject or bodily imagery.

A similar humour is evident in the work Flaccid Lake (2007-08). The title refers to the horror-comedy film Placid Lake: about a tourist location threatened by a monstrous man-eating crocodile that lurks in its scenic waters. Transplanting undergarments and hats from a Beardsley image of two women, the painting features

16 You and Me and Everyone We Know, dir. Miranda July, perf. John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff, Carlie Westerman, Natasha Slayton, IFC, 2005.

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two monsters of its own. The figure on the left and its mirror on the right resemble penile forms. Like the other large scale paintings in the Back and Forth exhibition, the forms were made to a scale that heightened their reading as figures approximate to the viewer. Larger than the viewer who stands in front of them, these giant phallic forms stand as monsters – both in the sense of their Frankenstein-like combinatory forms, and in their stature. The work then extends the ‘dirty joke’ evident in many of Beardsley’s works where female figures appear in phallic guise. The decorative form suggests pomp, ceremony and excess, but it also articulates flaccid, drooping members.

Victorian Explosion (2007-08) is made up of the same forms as those that appear in the Back and Forth painting. Here however, they are repeated endlessly as though having exploded onto the canvas. The title alludes to both orgasm as a corporeal explosion, but also a terrible accident where a body is blown apart or to pieces. The structure of the composition – as a repetition of the same form, growing from the centre outwards – suggests openings and masses of limbs that add up to nothing but a vaporous cloud of dots, lines and bows.

Where Back and Forth, Flaccid Lake and Victorian Explosion are reconfigurations of Beardsley illustrations, Guts (2007-08) and Hewhorebleed (2006) use Ukiyo-e images as sources. Again, it is the later period of ‘Decadent Ukiyo-e’ that was the starting point for these images, and my attraction to them was on the basis of their high key combinations, rigorous patterning and the distinct nature of the figures, their posture, and their garments. The source of Hewhorebleed depicts a woman brushing her hair. In the original image, there was already something unsettling about this long, sculptural and almost detachable cascade. In attempting to highlight this dimension, the image is composed so that the figure floats horizontally, ghost-like. The decision to make the figure bleed highlights a sense of unease.

Guts finds its origin in the image of a bridal procession. I was particularly interested in the rendering of the bride’s veil, as a stiff sculptural form that covers the figure, and again represents the figure as a kind of veiled phallus. The painting’s composition of repeated elements was intended to evoke an intestinal form, where the folds of densely patterned fabric resembled the convolutions of internal organs.

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Its bleeding aspect was both a development of the theme inherent in the HeWhoreBleed image, but by this time it had a secondary personal reference that guides the next series of work I will discuss. It, like HeWhoreBleed was composed in a manner that attempted to highlight and suspend the figure’s eerie silhouette.

Each large-scale painting in this exhibition was guided by a desire to produce paintings whose surfaces and compositions were beautiful and seductive, but also suggest something in excess of their surfaces alone. Again my interest was in representing an ambivalent and challenging representation of the body, something of the unknown and unassimilable, but within the capacities of beautiful form. Here as elsewhere I have attempted to make work that works towards the convergence of operations that suspend the usual categories of aesthetic experience and dismantle the binary logic that deems beauty and criticality as mutually exclusive terms. In suggesting an unsymbolisable dimension, the paintings attempt to both veil and point to what is psychically conflicting for the subject.

For and From My Father

In terms of approach, means of construction and thematic engagement, this series of work represents a departure from the paintings previously discussed. Insofar as they still attempt to engage an unsymbolisable dimension through decorative and aestheticised form, they are consistent with previous work. It is for this reason that I see them as part of the research project as a whole.

The works in the For and From My Father series are highly personal in impetus. The first were undertaken during the period between my father’s cancer diagnosis and death. Many were made in his hospital room as a means of killing time, and the rest were made in the limited hours away from the hospital at my family’s temporary accommodation. The work’s initial impetus was at my father’s request to make works for his hospital room, so that he might focus on “something positive growing inside his gut, rather than the cancer”. In this sense they were not necessarily intended for public exhibition. Instead, they were firstly an attempt to render these ‘positive’ forms for my father’s viewing. As they developed however they began to

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serve more as a means of coping with and reflecting on what was a very difficult situation for me personally.

The means, resources and materials utilised in the making of these works were specifically suited to working in this difficult environment away from my regular studio space. Adapting to this environment meant a break from digital media, the use of quicker drying painting mediums of ink and acrylic paint, and a downsizing of the scale on which I usually worked. Instead of composing images in Adobe Photoshop, images were built up more spontaneously on sheets of paper. While still relying on images sourced from printed publications, such sources were traced and then graphically rendered as individual layers. To this degree they involved a much more hands on approach to making at the composition stage.

Given the aggressive nature of my father’s cancer, and the extremely difficult experience of watching his body fail, the imagery often fell short of the positivity that he requested, or they were at the very least ambivalent in their content. Often responding to the news or events of each hospital day, they trace the morbid progression of my father’s sickness, deterioration and eventual death (just three months after his diagnosis). Some works mark an oscillation between his and the family’s attempts at optimism and the repeated shock of seeing his illness progress. This oscillation for me defined the experience of being with someone undergoing treatment for cancer. Most consistently, however, the works index the sense of loss I was reckoning with. They constitute a process of mourning, even at the early stage where the loss itself was notional. In retrospect I have come to understand the work as indexing that part of my father’s life and death that could not be spoken of, and could only be registered in the making of these works. Again, I have come to see this thing that cannot be spoken of in terms of the Lacanian real.

While responding to, and in a sense marking brutal and traumatic moments of viewing bodily deterioration, it is mainly through decorative and aestheticised form that this response takes place. Utilising the source material I had on hand, I began first to adapt fauna motifs from Japanese ornamental traditions. It is the chrysanthemum, the flower of death, and the hydrangea, a flower that has a symbolic reference for my family, which most frequently appear in these works. Both made of

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individual petal units, these forms could be endlessly repeated, and appended to any other form. The process of rendering these individual units over and over again was largely a soothing activity, but also seemed significant insofar as it echoed the theme of growth recurring in the work.

Consistent with the research undertaken at the time of making this work, grotesque characters from Decadent Ukiyo-e artists such as Hokusai, Yoshitoshi, Kyosai also made their way into the work. The skeleton forms of Kyosai appear frequently [see Piles (2006), Mother Mother (2007), and in the later series of works, Trouble (2008), Me and JB (2008)]. Their appeal was as a fairly transparent symbol of sickness and death. The highly stylised tiger, horse and monster figures from Hokusai’s manga also appear (Kick and Bleed, Six Arms Have I, Kickers, all 2007). In the later works made after my father’s death in extension of this project, I also used animals from seventeen and eighteenth-century illustrations and etchings (see The Saddest Thing I Ever Saw, Better In Than Out, Pile of Squirm, Big Pink Pit and 2nd Crustacean, all 2008). These ‘creatures’, such as the crustacean at the centre of 2nd Crustacean, always make reference to memories or experiences of or with my father. But they were also chosen for their peculiarly rendered form. Consistent with my interest in the grotesque more broadly these forms combine seemingly contradictory operations of delicacy and disgust in their elegant though aberrant depictions of ‘creatures’. As such they seemed appropriate symbols for the situation I was reckoning with, as a movement between sentimental feeling and horror at what was occurring.

Another recurring image or motif is the magnified cell structure. This imagery came from a book sourced by my younger brother for the purposes of contributing to my work. The appeal of the cells was again in response to the knowledge of the cancer as an independent life form growing inside my father’s body. It is this structure alone that occupies the work 24th March (2007) undertaken the day before, and the day of my father’s death. Here it marks the success of this ‘life form’ at the expense of my father’s own cells.

The works also utilise abstractions from existing painting works (as seen in Kick and Bleed, Double Lumps, Terrible Sadness Bedtime Scene ii and Cellar Door, all 2007). Each abstraction, ‘source’ or motif was chosen as a sign in the construction of a

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language, which as noted earlier served the purpose of speaking something of the painful experience of losing my father that could not otherwise be grasped. So too in the instance of the text works that are part of this series, documenting scenes from dreams that I had during this period (see Freeze Dried Seagulls Expanding in Water (2007) Cracked Eggs in the Calves of Giant Cats (2008), etc). Each phrase attempts to grasp the peculiar nature of the imagery that such dreams consisted in. Again, such scenes seemed to capture something otherwise unspeakable and traumatic of the experience of watching my father’s health deteriorate. Such text, along with the other sources outlined above form a catalogue of personal signs and symbols.

The first and definitive work made at my father’s initial request is entitled Ali Boba (2007, named as a pun on my father’s nick name, Bob, and the source image that was the work’s starting point). This work adapts the central figure from Beardsley’s Ali Baba illustration, with its distinctive, pared back and elegant line work. In the centre of the picture (in the figure’s abdomen) sits a mass of forms from the catalogue of imagery outlined above. The structure of this mass, developed from the technique of building forms by hand, is what I have come to identify as a kind of tumour form. Often ‘growing’ out of the repetition of ornamental elements, these tumour forms reappear frequently in this series of work. Here it consists of ornamental flower and foliage forms, a tiger figure (which refers to another nickname of my father’s), and outstretched skeletons that emerge from this ornamental mass, regurgitating its delicate forms. When embarking on this work I had intended for it to be an entirely benevolent, ornate and beautiful illustration. Here as elsewhere however it came to be inflected with the signs of bodily deterioration such as vomiting and other indications that my father’s body was failing, and that he was already lost to me. As a result it did not make it to his wall. Instead, it functioned as a means of registering the less than benevolent experience of his rapid decline.

The process of repeating and adapting individual ornamental units to build figures is not unlike my broader painting practice outlined above. Again, these works might be seen as decorative and grotesque conflations. Utilising a catalogue or language of decorative forms, these works, like those outlined previously, also consist in the formation of bodies in conflict with the closed and idealised body of Classicism. Decorative forms sometimes articulate body parts (as in phallic forms in End,

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Ol’Bitey and Kick and Bleed, 2007). Elsewhere they combine to resemble entirely unidentifiable figures (as in x, 2007). As elsewhere in my practice such bodies are bodies of openings, fragments and fluids. They shit, piss, bleed and grow hair, the images are highly decorative and at times beautiful, even in their aberrant figuration.

Like the other series of works discussed here, these most recent works on paper involve an attempt to index something unspeakable or unassimilatable (this time, the traumatic dimension of my father’s death). Here, as elsewhere in my art, this takes place through a decorative and aestheticised language of form. Like the work discussed more broadly I see this series as registering the real of representation: that de-centering dimension that eludes direct representation, but which may be indexed in the form of the gaze. Here as elsewhere, this registration takes place through the convergence of contradictory operations.

The importance of this registration in the For and From My Father was (at least initially) largely personal – engaging this dimension in order to fully process the significance of the event of my father’s death. The impetus behind my practice more broadly however is driven by the conviction that such a registration is of critical value to contemporary culture. It is insofar as this registration compels and de- centres, that I locate its value. Acknowledging the internal bipartition of representation and the foundational lack of subjective division, its means of representing operates in antagonism to the notion of the centred subject. Its engagement with the real presents a challenge to normative representations of the body associated with affirmations of unity, harmony, and the centrality of the human subject. In this sense the work stages a challenge to a representational logic that, as argued elsewhere, is deemed complicit in “metaphysical thought, empirical science and capitalist (and patriarchal) logic all at once”17.

This is the critical content of the work. And it is this engagement that renders the work consistent with those explicitly socio-political practices named under the term ‘anti-aesthetic’. In my practice, however, like the art of Beardsley and Walker

17 Hal Foster “Postmodernism: A Preface,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) x. See chapter 4.

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discussed, this critical challenge is made by means of a decorative aesthetic. It is the co-implication of formal beauty and a critical content that the work seeks to enact.

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Appendix 2: List of Visual Documentation

Images are arranged according to the subheadings that appear in Appendix 1 and correspond to folders in the accompanying CD “Visual Documentation”. Some work included is not directly discussed in the appendix but constitute part of the broader series under discussion.

Means of Making (Early Body of Work)

Eisen (Blue), oil on canvas, 1.6 x 1.2 metres, 2005 Eisen Triptich, oil on canvas, 2 x 4 metres, 2005. Kiyonaga Triptych, oil on canvas, 2 x 4 metres, 2004. Two Sisters, oil on linen, 2 x 3 metres, 2006.

Little Birds

Double Lumps , oil on linen, 110 x 150cm, 2006. Slap and Tickly, oil on linen, 120 x 174cm, 2006. Slippery Nipple, oil on linen, 50.5 x 40.5cm, 2006. Tweek, oil on linen, 100 x 154cm, 2006. Upright, oil on linen, 115 x 90 cm, 2006. Upright and the Error, oil on linen, 92 x 152, 2007.

Back and Forth

Back and Forth, oil on linen, 2 x 2 metres, 2008. Flaccid Lake, oil on linen, 2 x 3 metres, 2007- 2008. Guts, oil on linen, oil on linen, 98 x 120cm, 2008. Hewhorebleed, oil on linen, 120 x 164cm, 2006. Sloppy Victorians, oil on linen, 150 x 180cm, 2007. Victorian Explosion, oil on linen, 180 x 240cm metres, 2007- 2008.

For and From My Father

Original Series 24th of March (1), 36 x 26cm and 29.7 x 21cm, acrylic on paper, 2007 24th March (2), 36 x 26cm and 29.7 x 21cm, acrylic on paper, 2007.

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Ali Boba’s Belly, 48 x 36cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007. Cellar Door, 26 x 36cm, ink and pin pricks on paper, 2007. End, 24 x 18cm, acrylic on paper, 2006. Figures and Cells, 26 x 36cm, acrylic, pencil and pin pricks on paper, 2007. Freeze Dried Seagulls Expanding in Water, 21 x 29.7cm, acrylic on paper, 2007. Kick and Bleed, 48 x 36cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007. Kickers A, 29.7 x 21cm and 21 x 14.8cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007. Kickers B, 29.7 x 21cm and 21 x 14.8cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007. Landscape With Witches, 36 x 48cm, acrylic on paper, 2007. Made in collaboration with Craig Dermody. Lumps (Worse), 21 x 29.7cm, acrylic and pencil on paper, 2007. Mother Mother, 48 x 36cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2006-07. Ol’ Bitey, 48 x 36 cm, acrylic, ink and pin pricks on paper, 2006. Piles, 36 x 48cm, ink and acrylic on paper, 2006. Sarah’s Work, 29.7 x 21 cm, ink on paper, 2007. Six Arms, I Have, 26 x 36cm, acrylic, ink and pin pricks on paper, 2006. Terrible Sadness Bedtime Scene ii, 48 x 36cm, acrylic on canvas, 2007. Untitled Monster Painting, 29.7 x 21cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007. Made in collaboration with Craig Dermody. x, 29.7 x 21cm, acrylic on paper, 2007.

Second Series 2nd Crustacean, 36 x 26cm, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007 2nd X-mas Day, 21 x 14.7cm, ink on paper, 2007 Better In Than Out, 21 x 14.7cm, ink on paper, 2007 Bigger Cluster, acrylic, ink and posca pen on paper, 29.7, 21cm, 2007 Big Pink Pit, 36 x 26cm, acrylic and pin pricks on paper, 2007 Cracked Eggs in the Calves of Giant Cats, 26 x 36cm, acrylic on paper, 2007 Death and the Tiger, 21 x 29.7cm, acrylic on paper, 2007 I Just Spent Six Months in a Leaky Boat, acrylic on paper, 2007 KB (CD), 14.7 x 21, ink on paper, 2007 Kicker Net, 36 x 26cm, acrylic, ink and pin pricks on paper, 2007 Killem Boogie Dead, ink on silk screen print, 2006-08 Hairy Cells, acrylic and ink on paper, 2007

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Me and JB, 24 x 18cm, ink on paper, 2007 Minor Explosion, 14.7 x 21cm, acrylic on paper, 2007 On A Quest For Questness, 21 x 29.7, 2007. Pile of Squirm, 29.7 x 42cm, ink on paper, 2007 Pissing dream, 19.8 x 28cm, acrylic on paper, 2007 Psychedelic Triptych, 3 x 21 x 14.7cm, ink on paper, 2007 Saddest Thing I Ever Saw, 18 x 24cm, ink and acrylic on paper, 2007 The Slimiest Knot, 14.7 x 21cm, ink on paper, 2007 Trouble, 24 x 18cm, ink on paper, 2007

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