Vulviform Blossoms

[imomus]

Alice Smits begins an essay she wrote to accompany an art show called Avoiding Objects with the following classification of animals, read by Borges in a Chinese encyclopaedia and later quoted by Michel Foucault in 'The Order of Things':

Animals are divided into:

a) belonging to the emperor
b) embalmed
c) tame
d) sucking pigs
e) sirens
f) fabulous
g) stray dogs
h) included in the present classification
i) frenzied
j) innumerable
k) drawn with a very fine camel hair
l) etcetera
m) having just broken the water pitcher
n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Smits tells us Foucault roared with laughter on first reading these words: 'It is a laugh that has shaken the foundations of our knowledge since. This is because Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia, while striking us as absurd, only is so if we judge it according to the rules we have drawn up for arranging the things that surround us.



'The poet Lautremont, pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, gave us the image of “the fortuitous encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. It prompted Man Ray to make a sculpture he called the “Enigma of
Isidore Ducasse”. It consists of a sewing machine wrapped in a piece of cloth tied with a string.'

This sewing machine marches, with its cousins, through 20th century art, appearing in Oscar Dominguez's painting Electrosexual Sewing Machine, described by the Guardian's review of Desire Caught By The Tail, the Tate Modern surrealism show in which it appeared in 2001, as 'bare buttocks, vulviform blossoms and phallic funnel, ejaculating blood through the nozzle.' (See another of Dominguez' sewing machine paintings here.)

This month that sewing machine returns, popping up (or rather, wrapped up and quoted) in the new exhibition at White Cube by Gavin Turk.



The art was kept under wraps right up to the opening... and when removed the wraps revelealed more wraps: a bunch of bronze casts of black rubbish bags stuffed with who-knows-what. Someone called Stephen Rowley tells me that White Cube is playing my album Oskar Tennis Champion on a loop over the gallery speakers. I imagine that Turk finds the song Electrosexual Sewing Machine appropriate. The show is called The Golden Thread, and the Guardian tells us that 'Turk has a precise art-historical model: Man Ray's 1920 object called The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, a sewing machine wrapped inside a tightly bound package.'



Here's Alice Smits again on Man Ray's enigmatic object:

'On it is a card on which is written in three languages “Do not disturb”. But what is it we are not supposed to disturb? What is the secret that lurks beneath this cloth? ...To escape our clutches, these objects cloak themselves in new guises that we might call their poetic power. Man Ray... could only reveal the mystery hidden in an object by concealing it.'

I leave you with the words of Ducasse himself, better known as Lautreamont, as he gives us one possible account of what might be inside Turk's garbage bags:

'Lice of remarkable beauty that crawl like aspiring philosophers from cherished eggs; pubic hairs conversing in a brothel; sharks preparing duck-liver paté and cold soup from victims of drowning; a human-faced toad, as sad as the universe and as beautiful as suicide; covetous fingers prodding the lobes of innocent brains in order to smilingly prepare an effective unguent for the eyes; how Man. applauded by the crablouse and the adder, shits on the Creator's uplifted face for three days; devouring your mother's arms with gusto while she is still alive by tearing them off and cutting them into snippets...!'

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The Alice Smits essay made me feel slightly queasy. I'm not sure exactly why, but I do have some idea. It's yucky to see Launtreamont and some of those others subjected to gallary-ese, rather than being kept under a blanket where they belong. The parts you pulled out of it were nice, though. Electrosexual Sewing Machine is a nice song ... there seems to be an idea that Oskar Tennis Champion is somehow a less listenable record then the others. I'm going to put this idea to the test someday soon. Although, as the proud owner of the Super Madrigal Brothers cd, I suspect my judgement will be suspect to those predisposed to dislike Oskar Tennis Champion.

Please keep up the good work on this blog. You've been doing a really splended, first rate job as my tastemaker - I am the envy of all my peers. If you keep it up I may reward you with some crispy American dollars, convertable to German Marks courtesy of Paypal.

While I'm on the subject of renumeration, I find it amusing to inform you that I'm going to burn a copy of Ping Pong for an ex-girlfriend. While this may seem like piracy, it's important to remember that she is too poor to purchase a copy anyway, and she has friends, you know.

Seriously - all the best. You're one of the good ones.

Clay

[(Anonymous)]

of course by 'German Marks" I meant "European Euros". It's a big ocean, you know.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Clay, I know what you mean about the Smits essay. I think what might be disturbing about it is its relativism -- it says mad systems of classification are just as good as sane ones, and in fact better, because the mad ones make us aware of mystery and poetry. It also says that language is an untrustworthy straightjacket, and yet says it in language.

What I liked about it, though, is its attention to the otherness of objects. If this were applied to people, of course, there would be all sorts of accusations of 'orientalism','exoticism' and 'essentialism'. There can be no objection to an 'exoticisation of objects' -- unless perhaps the fact that it might tie in too easily with the museum gift shop, with marketing and 'added value'. We add mystery to obects by fancy-wrapping them, tying them up. (Again, if this were tied-up people -- as in the photos of Araki -- some would decry it.) I'm inclined to be lenient even to this accusation of commodification, though. Because when commodification is taken this far, it comes out the other side of the tunnel, becomes something else. It's silly to be cynical about something which is creating new, semi-religious forms of respect. Japan, for instance, is a place where wrapping becomes an almost religious activity, and where the strange otherness of saleable objects is most recognised.

I find this respect for the oddness and otherness of objects, for their mystery, intriguing and healthy. I am not against fetishisation when it is a form of respect, and especially not when the alternative is disrespect, mere pragmatism, or cynicism. In fact, I'm prepared to argue this case even when we shift to talking about adding value to 'the human other'. But that's another essay!

[(Anonymous)]

Nick, I see your point. I think the root of the matter for me was a reflexive mistrust, a fear that the pristine madness of anarchic categorization would be somehow neutralized upon entry into the gallery. As Smits says:

"All that poetic objects want is simply to be there and their presence can
be disturbing. But we have to ask whether they really can do that.The fact
that they are art works in a gallery means that even the most disturbing
object becomes coded under the category of art. Everything that might
rebuff our gaze is thus immediately made transparent again."

It occurs to me one might ask if this state of affairs is really so absolutely different from what happens when unfettered relativism is encoded in a book - say, for example, "The Lays of Maldoror" - particularly as the book comes to be replicated and distributed complete with nice glossy cover and Penguin logo along all the usual channels. One might also point out that while ontological anarchy is appealing from a suitable distance, it can be terrifying close up and unmediated, thus the imperative to pacify it somewhat in books, gallaries, or psychiatric wards. I think my unease with the essay was in reaction to a violation, through his naked, uncovered exposition in a gallery space, of my own fetishization of Launtreamont.

On the basis of these observations, I am tempted to write my unease off as the bias of the bookish. Smits also says:

"In a world in which our relation to objects is dominated by a
commodity economy and our experiences mediated by media imagery, direct
experience is declared fiction. We do not feel the gaze of things as they
stare at us, nor do we hear their voices. But Man Ray’s wooden box sees it
all. “Enough Rope” means that humans employ their freedom only for their
own destruction. This box offers us a ready-made suicide kit. But a better
alternative is, with Borges, to convert our perplexity into an attitude towards the world,
remaining open for the irrational and the unexpected."

I can see how books and exhibits could be equally successful on those terms. I think it's funny that the attitude of mine that's been most shifted is my attitude towards the potential of the gallery itself, although I still think it would be more exciting to see the chair in a McDonalds, or the baby powder tombstone in a cemetery. I know, exposure.

Clay

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who staged an art show in a Burger King once! I don't know if the art became less mysterious, or the burgers more.